I interviewed Aaron Tullock by email in January of this year. I delayed publishing his account until I had established a firm credibility base for this eyewitness, for part of his description of the apparent pterosaur differs from other accounts: The long-tailed flying creature was mostly colored orange and black.

Late in the afternoon of a day with “only a few clouds,” eight-year-old Aaron was looking around the yard of his grandparents’ home. Something flew over his head (coming from behind him, so he could not have seen it coming) and stopped by hovering eight feet above the ground.

The creature flew away before the boy’s mother entered the yard, and she discounted the encounter as a combination of a bird and a child’s imagination. His young age might seem to count against his credibility, but he reported many details that count against this coming from the imagination of an eight-year-old. A number of factors count against any hoax with this account. The long tail with a Rhamphorhynchoid-like shape at the end, together with absence of feathers—these count against any misidentification involving a bird or bat. What’s left except “Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur?”

I’ll give this more attention before I write the second edition of Live Pterosaurs in America. (The 2nd edition might not be published before early 2011.)

More: Giant Rhamphorhynchoid flies over Lake Pung, Papua New Guinea

Popular Youtube Video

The Youtube video “Ropen-Pterodactyl American Eyewitness” has had over 275,000 views, but far more astonishing is the view that Duane Hodgkinson had of the giant flying creature he saw near the city of Finschhafen, New Guinea, during a lull in fighting with the Japanese military (World War II).

I have interviewed Duane several times since mid-2004. The Youtube video, however, I edited from footage recorded by Garth Guessman (a living-pterosaur investigator associate of mine), who visited the old veteran in Montana in 2005. Many who view the online video are impressed with the credibility of the eyewitness.

Hodgkinson Sighting, in Summary

He and his army buddy had stopped on a trail, just west of the coastal city of Finschhafen, in 1944. Something took off into the air; Hogkinson assumed, at first, it was a bird. But he soon realized that the size was all wrong: about the wingspan of a small private airplane. The tail he later estimated to be at least ten or fifteen feet long. But what caught his attention was an appendage coming out the back of the head; it reminded him of the “pterodactyl” in the Alley Oop newspaper cartoon strip.