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Recent Reports of Non-Extinct Pterosaurs

sketch of a modern pterosaur - by Eskin Kuhn

By modern-pterosaur expert Jonathan Whitcomb

The following two eyewitness reports may have limited relevance to strange missing-persons cases in North America, yet the potential danger of attacks from related flying creatures makes them worthy of note. Each report is given only in part here. I’ve also edited them for punctuation, spelling, etc.

Be aware that “recent” refers to when I received the reports, not when the eyewitnesses encountered the apparent pterosaurs.

Sighting in New Jersey

After communicating with her through emails, I had a long phone conversation with this eyewitness. I concluded that her honesty credibility is very high (this is no hoax). Her sighting was in Long Valley, New Jersey, in about 2016, and she reported it to me in June of 2018.

She wants to be anonymous for now, because of her present employment, yet she told me that she will, when that changes, allow her name to be used in publications on this subject of living pterosaurs.

At about 4:00 a.m., or a little before, she stopped her car at a stop sign. The huge flying creature then hopped over to her car and looked through the glass right into her eyes. She described this animal to me and mentioned that it was bigger than her car.

[It made a] slow gesture . . . when it tilted the head to look inside of the car, it looked at me. I was so taken by that specific move that I was still and frozen into its eyes. I did not want to take my eyes away from what I was seeing. I did not want to check anything else because I did not want to loose that specific moment of who was starring at me.

. . . It made unusual gestures when it opened the leathery wing. It pulled a bit back from the side of the window [and] kind of stretched to get tall and . . . then it stretched the wings. It made three [movements] to open the wings: bat leathery thick wings . . . I realized that this thing was huge . . .

Sighting in Central California

In about 2004, two eyewitnesses saw an apparent pterosaur in Kerman, which is about 15 miles west of Fresno, California. The following is a small portion of an email I received from one of those eyewitnesses. (Both of these persons is anonymous. One of them may have been attempting to steal cable service, from a telephone pole, at the time of the pterosaur sighting.)

. . . the kid on the ground is pointing in the sky and said LOOKOUT. I was still transferring to the other side of the pole, but I was looking and here it came. Funny thing about it is it was very dark out but I could see him and his colors very well. . . . his wings were I’d say 14 feet wingspan. As he was coming down towards me, his wings were wide open kind [like a] parachute.

. . . his wings were very similar to bat wings. He had hands in the middle his wings and a claw on the wings like bats do . . .

I suspect that these two eyewitnesses in central California saw a bioluminescent pterosaur.

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Modern pterosaurs in New Jersey

[The wings had] like black brown smooth skin.

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Pterodactyl in New Jersey

It had huge wings like a bat, it was like a dark brown color. There was no feathers at ALL. The body was black, with short or no hair. It had a very slim body and a small tail.

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Living Pterosaurs in California

For at least the second time in the past nine months, somebody has reported a flying “dragon” in Los Angeles County. I don’t know that they are the same species, but a few similarities deserve attention . . .

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Recent Pterosaurs

Pterosaur Eyewitness Group Support (PEGS)

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Missing Persons and Living Pterosaurs

When a person is alone in a wilderness area in the United States, a large hungry ropen may attack, subduing the human by a mist or vapor that is debilitating when inhaled by prey. This may explain why human victims, when found alive, are asleep or unconscious or in a state that rescuers may describe as “confused” or “disoriented.”

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Pterodactyls alive in California

A 38-year-old woman in a residential neighborhood of Lakewood, California, just northeast of Long Beach, reported a “dragon-pterodactyl” that had no feathers but a long tail with a “dragon” “triangle” at the of that tail.

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Strange missing persons cases and pterosaurs

Some of these cases strongly suggest a small number of ropens in North America may be responsible for a small portion of reports of people going missing. Similarities in certain details stretch across decades, and across many hundreds of miles . . .

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Attack in the Dead of Winter

Remember your worst nightmare? Were you glad to wake up? Be grateful. In the early morning hours of February 23, 2010, a few miles or so southwest of Marfa, Texas, the victims were terrified by what awakened them.

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Attacks in British Columbia

One of the girls in the village was recently attacked by a pterodactyl. She had a campfire burning in her backyard and was attacked in the darkness. . . . She called me up, very upset, as people are laughing at her. [British Columbia, Canada]

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Recently-Reported Sightings of Living Pterosaurs: USA and Philippines

Cuba ropen - "Please report your sighting"

By the modern-pterosaur investigator Jonathan Whitcomb

Some of the eyewitness reports that I receive come from encounters years earlier, sometimes even decades earlier. Let’s now look at four accounts of sightings that were reported to me within the past few weeks, regardless of when the encounter took place.

Since the word “dinosaur” is mentioned in one of these, let’s be clear about it. In a scientific or technical sense, pterosaurs (aka “pterodactyls” by non-scientists) and not dinosaurs. Many people associate them with dinosaurs because of the popular idea that they lived together many millions of years ago. In reality, pterosaurs and dinosaurs are two distinct types of animals, regardless of when people believe that they lived.

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Sighting in California, S.F. Bay area

I got the following in January of 2018, a few days after the sighting:

Fremont, CA – 1/14/2018 – around 10pm PST
I witnessed a pterodactyl from roughly 50-75 feet away. It was gliding steadily, without flapping its wings, seemingly meer [mere] feet above the rooftop of an adjacent building. Wingspan, estimated 12 ft., distinctly visible diamond shape at end of tail. Crown of head tough to make out behind wing at angle of sight.

The eyewitness replied to my questions and indicated the tail was long.

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Sighting in Illinois

In 2007 at around 3 pm
Somewhere between Schaumburg and Elgin IL while driving west on I-90 at 55 mph for 4-6 seconds I saw a flying creature that didn’t make any sense. The animal was black but in the bright sunlight I could make out wrinkles or texture on the surface or the wings. I often take a minute to admire the golden eagles that circle the highway. This creature caught my attention because the size and shape of the wings which looked more like bat wings than bird wings. There were no feathers and the creature had a long spiked tail. I couldn’t place what I was looking at. It was no bird I could identify. I watched this creature travel southeast toward Busse woods.

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Sighting in Southern California

On January 31 2018 at 6:25 pm I watched a very large creature fly from west to east over Eastern Anaheim California. At first I thought this was an airplane of some sort or another. However shortly after sunset any aircraft would have exterior lights and make an engine noise. This was totally silent and gliding on very mild breeze of maybe 4-5 miles an hour. As I sat on my front porch looking west and talking on the phone, I saw this creature in flight it appeared to be off white or a pale green. From my vantage point I could see that the creature was about 400 to 600 feet above the ground and about 25 to 30 foot wingspan. I even thought it could be a remote control until it flapped its wings and then I was sure I was witnessing something very special indeed.

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Sighting in the Philippines

Its already 2018 when I saw this article and im really curious about it when I read that there are sightings in the Philippines (Pagbilao, Quezon). I have a same experience when I was a child (I really dont remember what specific year it is, approximately it is between 1995-1998) and we are having a vacation in my grandfather’s house in San Antonio, Quezon Province, Philippines. I saw a bat-like flying creature in the ceiling of the house in the 2nd floor, no feathers, almost skinny like a bat, not too dark skin color brown as I remember and its beak is so long and have one horn directly opposite to its beak at the back of its head and I really think it is a dinosaur or somehow a surviving remnants of pterodactyl. And maybe I was child back then but I am aware of what is a bat looks like and it is not a bat, also im aware of dinosaurs. My father told me to just ignore it so I really dont know what happened to the creature afterwards because when I look for it, it already flew away. I wont forget about that day because there is an old movie here in the Philippines titled “Anak ng Bulkan” and I believe that it might be true that there are still remnants of the pre-historic creature back then.

Cuba ropen - "Please report your sighting"

If you have seen anything that might have been a living pterosaur, please report it to me.

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Un pterosaurio en Cuba

Dos estadounidenses han visto un pterosaurio vivo en Cuba: Patty Carson y Eskin Kuhn.

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Living pterosaurs in California

A “pterodactyl” or pterosaur has also been reported from other parts of Los Angeles County: San Fernando Valley, Altadena, and twice in the Santa Fe Springs area.

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Another Living Pterosaur in North Carolina

. . . two of my friends saw one at different times in NC, Durham. I was alone driving my car, and looked out my sunroof to see what I think was a pterodactyl.

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Modern pterosaur in Philippines

At least a few eyewitnesses in the Philippines have reported pterosaur sightings to at least one cryptozoologist; I (Jonathan Whitcomb) have received a few reports myself.

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Pterodactyl in California

This report of an encounter in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is found in the second chapter of the book [Live Pterosaurs in America]

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Living pterosaurs and frigatebird misidentification

The great majority of those reports were of flying creatures that could not reasonably be attributed to misidentified frigatebirds, for a number of reasons.

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Scott Norman and the “Pterodactyl” Photograph

This coming July will be the ten-year anniversary of Scott Norman’s sighting of an apparent nocturnal Pteranodon in California. Scott passed away, half a year later, from natural causes, yet the large sizes of apparent extant pterosaurs, reported by some eyewitnesses in North America, may be connected to some of the more mysterious missing-persons cases that have never been solved.

The Civil War “Pterodactyl” Photo

I don’t recall talking with Scott about the old photograph, while we sat in my backyard in Long Beach, California, with Garth Guessman in 2005. But he used the word “Pteranodon” in his report of his mid-2007 sighting, and the head of the animal in the Ptp photograph definitely looks like it belongs to a Pteranodon or a similar pterosaur.

Of course many persons who have seen that “pterodactyl” photo will think how dangerous humans can be to wild animals. After all, that dead creature is lying on the ground, surrounded by apparent Civil War soldiers, each of whom is holding a rifle. The apparent pterosaur, however, is so large that it takes little imagination to realize it could be dangerous to people.

Ptp has been called the “Civil War Pterodactyl” photograph

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Skeptics and living-pterosaur critics now have a problem. If they say that Scott Norman’s sighting report is invalid because nobody has a photo of a modern Pteranodon, what about Ptp? And if they say that the Civil War photo of an obvious Pteranodon must be fake because people don’t see those animals, what about Scott Norman?

It seems that skeptics have been mostly silent since the mid-January-2017 announcement by the physicist Clifford Paiva and me (Jonathan Whitcomb): the proclamation that this photo has a genuine image of a real animal, apparently a Pteranodon. Dozens of blog posts and web pages have been published since that proclamation. Where is the response?

In fact, a new nonfiction cryptozoology book has been published on this photo: Modern Pterosaurs, which is surely the latest word on the authenticity of Ptp, and definitely the most thorough examination of it. Why not get your own copy of this cryptozoology book?

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Copyright 2017 Jonathan Whitcomb (“Scott Norman and the ‘Pterodactyl’ Photograph”)

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American Civil War Soldiers and a Monster

What a gruesome head! I don’t recall when I first saw the monster photo, perhaps as long ago as 1968, but that long beak and head appendage made me uneasy.

Pterosaur Sighting by Scott Norman

Let’s consider the sighting by Scott Thomas Norman, as it’s a few days after his birthday (March 15, 1964) and a month after the anniversary of his death (February 29, 2008). His encounter deserves another look, in light of earlier sightings in Papua New Guinea and recent sightings in North America.

Mysterious Missing Persons

This past Monday, April 4, I was interviewed at Bass Lake, south of Yosemite, for a Travel Channel episode of “Mysteries at the National Parks.”

More Evidence for the Civil War Pterodactyl Photograph

Paiva has done a detailed analysis of the image. He found that the shadow under the boot of one soldier (he’s now known as “FS” for front-soldier) is consistent with shadows under and on the animal. Paiva also found details in the head, neck, and shoulder of the animal, details that closely correlate with the anatomy of the Pteranodon. Please be aware that we do not declare that this animal must have been of some species of Pteranodon, but we point out that it appears to be at least similar to that type of pterosaur.

Possible Pteranodon in an old Photograph

On January 14, 2017, Clifford Paiva (a physicist in California) and I spoke by phone and agreed that the following photo has an image of a real animal, with real wings. . . . What we now call “Ptp” has been around for a long time, with some persons reporting that they saw it in a mid-20th-century book, possibly a Ripley’s “Believe it or Not.”

The Pteranodon Photo and Religion

An old photograph has been bouncing around the internet for quite some time, with many persons giving it a careless glance but very few indeed examining it closely and with an open mind. In the first few months of 2017, however, that changed.

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Small nonfiction paperback about modern pterosaurs

Modern Pterosaurs – exciting new discovery of an extant pterosaur in the 19th century

From the Introduction in the book:

This book . . . [has] an analysis of an old photograph of a huge flying creature, with reasons for believing the photo is genuine evidence for a modern pterosaur. Yet eyewitness testimonies have been the heart of our investigations, so you need at least the summaries of some of the more important reports of encounters between ordinary persons and the larger apparent pterosaurs.

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Potential Attacks on Domesticated Animals, by Ropens

old newspaper sketch of a giant dragon in Utah

I recently got a question from a member of a Facebook group: “Living Pterosaurs of the World.” It was in response to a Youtube video of two interviews I had with eyewitnesses last year. These two young men testified that the local farm animals went “crazy” with fright, making a lot of noise, when a very large glowing flying creature flew overhead one night.

Rather than dive into details about this particular sighting (which was in Grantsville, Utah, around the fall of 2001), let’s consider the question on the Facebook group discussion:

Jonathan, have you noted these animal reactions in these type of sightings before?

Let’s begin with dogs. Man’s best friend seems to consider large ropens or pterodactyls to be very dangerous.

Behavior of Dogs

From page 200 of the fourth edition of Searching for Ropens and Finding God:

. . . it scared the hell out of me, also scared my dog so bad that she had her tail between her legs and ran into her dog-house and would not come out for over an hour. The feeling I got was that whatever it was it was really big . . .

From page 242 of that cryptozoology book:

At 11:45 [a.m.] [I was] sitting under my gazebo playing on my computer in Lakewood, CA. My dog started going crazy barking and whining. I started hearing what sounded like him having really deep burps and I got up after 30 seconds or so because I knew the sounds were not coming from my dog . . .

From page 249 of Searching for Ropens and Finding God:

Early on the night of August 3, 2012, according to John, Rex ran out to the back, near the camera, barking wildly. He then made a sound that he rarely makes: a sort of whimper. The dog then ran into the house and did not respond when John called him; that non-response to John’s call is very strange.

From page 35 of the third edition of Live Pterosaurs in America:

She was twelve years old, at most (around 1995), when she walked out into her backyard one morning to check on the dog, for the dog food was untouched. GR found the poor animal cowering around the side of the house, apparently trying to hide behind a banana tree. The girl had no idea what was wrong, at that time, and called the dog, but it would not move. . . .

She turned her head and saw what it was that had terrified the dog. Next door, in the neighbor’s backyard, was what she first thought was a tall man; but he was about as tall as the house, too tall. He was “draped in a long black coat or cape,” facing away from her. “Dracula” came to mind as GR tried to understand what she was looking at. The “man” turned, and revealed a face that terrified the child: It was non-human.

Slowing the creature (revealing itself to be neither human nor bird) unwrapped its bat-like wings, dark leathery wings. The girl had never seen anything remotely like them. . . .

Farm animals and strange flying creatures

From page 88 of Live Pterosaurs in America (3rd edition):

He [David Woetzel] quoted a passage from a book by Marie Trevelyan (1909), who interviewed an old man who remembered “winged serpents” that lived in the mid-1800’s around Penllyne Castle, Glamorgan, Wales. I quote part of Woetzel’s quotation of the book: “The woods around Penllyne Castle, Glamorgan, had . . . . winged serpents . . . An aged inhabitant of Penllyne, who died a few years ago . . . said it was ‘no old story,’ invented to ‘frighten children,’ but a real fact. His father and uncles had killed some of them, for they were ‘as bad as foxes for poultry.’ This old man attributed the extinction of winged serpents to the fact that they were ‘terrors in the farmyards and coverts.’”

Conclusion

The farm animals in Grantsville, Utah, went “crazy” with fright one dark night around the fall of 2001, making lots of noise in their fear. I believe that those farm animals were in real danger from that flying creature, and I believe that the source of that terror was a very large bioluminescent ropen.

Reptile monster flies away with a horse

Old newspaper account of a giant flying creature over Stansbury Island, Utah

Although the newspaper account of a giant flying reptile carrying off a full-grown horse is very likely exaggerated, it seems to relate to the sighting by three boys in Grantsville, Utah, in 2001. Please note that Grantsville is only about eight miles south of Stansbury Island.

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Cryptozoology book about pterodactyls

“Neither my brother or I was prone to being scared . . .  This night was different. . . . the creature was flying just  above the phone lines. It would go one direction, turn, and  swoop back. . . . The wingspan was huge, anywhere from  6-10 feet across.” (Texas)

Ropen pterosaur

American eyewitness of a living pterodactyl

Book on the ropen

It [the nonfiction cryptozoology book Searching for Ropens and Finding God] soars above disputes about religion, revealing why an official discovery of an extraordinary animal has been delayed for so long. Above all, this explores human experience: eyewitnesses and those who interviewed them.

Pterodactyl Attacks in Yosemite?

These weird disappearances are not confined to Yosemite, nor even to the United States. Several factors do seem to tie together cases that are separated by long distances and sometimes separated by decades. To understand what may be happening in Yosemite National Park, we need to see in a broader sense. Look to Canada and to Mexico.

The nocturnal ropen

Eyewitness testimonies suggest that the ropen is a Rhamphorhynchoid (long-tailed) pterosaur. According to the investigators this criteria is based on several consistent patterns such as the featherless appearance, long tail that ends in a flange or diamond shape . . .

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