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Cognitive Biases and Modern Pterosaurs

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By Jonathan Whitcomb

With all the potential of the human mind, we’re still hampered by many cognitive biases. Hardly any adult is free from this kind of weakness in thinking. In fact, the more fervently we would insist we’re immune the more likely we are to fall into at least one of them.

Let’s begin with two reevaluations I’ve recently made regarding my research on eyewitness reports of modern pterosaurs.

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I reevaluated how many people have seen a “pterodactyl”

In 2019, I wrote the blog post “How many people see living pterodactyls?” Here is a key point, my opinion at that time:

[About] 37,500 Americans have told somebody something to the effect that they saw a flying creature that appeared more like a pterosaur than a bird or a bat . . .

But looking back on the 19 years of my investigation in this branch of cryptozoology, I should have received more emails from eyewitnesses, if more than 20,000 Americans fit the above. I now believe it’s more like this: 15,000 living Americans have reported such an encounter to another person.

Important to note is this: The vast majority of persons who received these shocking reports were not cryptozoologists or paranormal investigators but friends and family members of the eyewitnesses.

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I reevaluated the general number of modern living pterosaurs

I don’t have a number or a range for how many “pterodactyls” live on this planet or even just in the United States. But I now believe that these flying creatures are rare, not just uncommon. The scarcity of convincing photos and video clips helps make this point.

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Cognitive biases and living pterosaurs

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People can choose how to think and act

For some time, I thought that confirmation bias may have been the most significant of the cognitive biases regarding living-pterosaur investigations during the past two or three decades. I was aware of some of the factors of another bias but did not know it had a name: “availability cascade”.

It refers to “a self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of collective beliefs” (Wikipedia). This explains why so many Westerners react the way they do when they first encounter a report of a person seeing a living “pterodactyl”.

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Availability cascade

This is  a self-reinforcing activity whereby a belief, in people of a culture or community, gains more and more popularity through repetition. How does this relate to sightings of apparent living pterosaurs in the United States? It’s in extinction indoctrination.

Of all the various types of cognitive biases, availability cascade now seems to have had the greatest negative influence on American thinking, regarding modern pterosaurs, from around the late 19th century to the present.

Critics of these investigations in cryptozoology seem to constantly fall into the availability cascade bias constantly without knowing it. Even before the beginning of the 19th century, when Benjamin Franklin was still living, the idea of pterosaur extinction was hatched. The problem grew throughout that century and was amplified during the 20th century.

Fortunately, the news about pterosaur sightings has been presented to the public since the beginning of the 21st century, because of the internet. On the downside, attacks against the investigations have also increased.

The truth, however, will prevail in the end.

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Confirmation bias and living pterosaurs

As an adult, you have preexisting assumptions on various matters. We all do. When we encounter a new idea seemingly related to something we already have an opinion on, we might fall into a confirmation bias.

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How many persons have seen a living pterosaur?

Some years ago, I estimated the total number of persons living worldwide who had some kind of encounter with a living pterosaur, yet we need to keep in mind that most of those persons had just vague encounters at night, with no clear view of any form or features of the animals: between 7 million and 128 million humans who had mostly brief shadowy encounters.

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Living pterosaurs

How did scientists miss living pterosaurs? Get the answers here, hidden secrets about how these amazing flying creatures of the night have gone mostly unreported . . . [book about modern pterodactyls]

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Common Cognitive Biases

Why do these biases happen? Attention is a limited resource. This means we can’t possibly evaluate every possible detail and event ​when forming thoughts and opinions.

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Press release on living pterosaurs

“Two eyewitnesses of strange flying creatures in North America were college professors: One had taught biology; the other, aeronautics. I concluded that each of those two men had, more likely than not, witnessed a flying creature unlike any known bird or bat.

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Civil War pterodactyl photo

For almost any person who reads the CWP online page, it would seem obvious: Ptp came from that episode of Feakylinks in the year 2000. . . . Yet here is the real point: NOBODY can get the entire image of Ptp from the episode Coelacanth This!, yet on the internet you can find complete images of Ptp . . .

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More on living pterosaurs

Late in 2006, Garth Guessman, a living-pterosaur investigator, interviewed three Americans who had worked in or visited a medical mission in Central New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea. The three had separate sightings of what may be Pterodactyloids (short-tailed pterosaurs).

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Bias about living pterosaurs

[Are Biblical creationists biased regarding these apparent living pterosaurs?] Some . . . assume that universal pterosaur extinction cannot be successfully challenged and that those who mention eyewitness sightings are misguided in a severe bias. The problem with that position becomes obvious when we examine the eyewitnesses: Few of them are creationists.

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Bias and pterodactyl sightings

Jonathan Whitcomb confesses that in about 1969 he disbelieved an eyewitness of an apparent “pterodactyl” that a high school student reported had flown up into the mountains north of Altadena and Pasadena, California.

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Report a pterosaur sighting

Communicate with Jonathan Whitcomb by email.

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A Challenge for the Ptp “Civil War” Pterodactyl Photo and an Answer

pterodactyl wings inverted in an old photo

By Jonathan Whitcomb

In September of 2022, I started taking another look into Ptp, an image that appears to show six 19th-century American soldiers posed around a large dead pterosaur. This apparent “Civil War” photograph has had a number of critics over a period of many years, but one particular challenge appears, at least on the surface, to have destroyed all confidence in the idea that an actual modern pterosaur was involved. Nevertheless, Ptp is not, as of September 26th, completely clear regarding its origin.

An online article dated January 9, 2018, appears to prove positively that Ptp was created through two things: 1) modern actors dressed in 19th-century-style uniforms, making them appear to be common Union soldiers during the American Civil War [and] 2) computer digital processing done by the firm E=MC2 Digital, which is declared to have created the “pterodactyl”. I’ll call that article “CWP”, but I won’t link to it, for it has problems that are too off-topic to examine now: We have enough to cover here. Researchers who seriously want to read that article should be able to find it online (the author’s initials are B.D.)

apparently very old photograph of soldiers with a recently deceased pterosaur -The scientist Clifford Paiva has pointed out that the wings are folded, AKA inverted, consistent with pterosaur wings

(The point of the folded-wings concept comes up later)

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Quoting the CWP online article:

“For it turns out — drum roll please — that the mystery of the PTP photo is one that has a verified solution, one which so many of these people struggling to prove it or disprove it overlooked. . . .”

“very few [people] seem to have gone to the trouble to actually watch the episode in question, episode 4, called “Coelacanth This . . .”

After going over key areas of that article, on September, 26, 2022, and examining the episode itself, I made a discovery: Assuming I have not made a serious error, the author of the CWP article himself has not watched that episode with an eye to an important point that he seems to have tried to make in CWP: He assumes that what he saw in that episode was Ptp, but in one critical perspective PTP IS NOT THERE, even though hardly anyone would notice the difference between the image in that TV episode and Ptp.

Please keep in mind that I am not criticizing B.D. for being careless, not at all. It is an extremely easy mistake to make: I myself made that same mistake, and very few persons in the world have spent more time examining Ptp than I have, possibly only one person.

I am not even declaring that Ptp cannot have been created digitally, with no modern pterosaur even having been involved. In other words, at the moment (3:16 p.m., Mountain Time, Sep 26, 2022), I am not completely convinced the original image of Ptp had a real “pterodactyl”, and I can see the possibility that the apparent flying creature was constructed digitally with no original animal image ever having existed. Maybe the foundational idea of the CWP article is correct in that regard; maybe Ptp is 100% hoax.

Yet in the many hours since I made the above statement, I have made a discovery which may be extremely important. Here’s the point now:

The complete image of Ptp, an apparent 19th-century pterodactyl

The complete image Ptp, from top to bottom and left to right: all of it

It may seem trivial at first: The above is ALL of the image Ptp. I gave it this title a few years ago, and this is all of it that I have, at least at present.

Before getting to the point, please understand this: I have been assuming, for quite some time, that my critics and I have together believed that Ptp appears in the Freakylinks episode Coelacanth This! and the other “Civil War pterodactyl photo” appears only in the Freakylinks promotional web site. I also assumed that Ptp does not appear in that production firm’s web site. (I have never seen Ptp on their online page and have heard nothing to the contrary.)

From now on, I’ll refer to the other photo as AP, named by Karl Shuker (AP stands for Advance Publicity, meaning it was used before the episode was broadcast over the air).

comparing two photos of possible modern pterodactylsAP on the left is fake, without any doubt; but Ptp on the right has been on trial for many years, and it has been extremely controversial

So why do I declare that Ptp is NOT in Coelacanth This!? I have carefully examined the four places where Ptp seems to be shown in that episode, but in EVERY CASE not all of the bottom of Ptp is shown. People could say, “Who cares?” or “What difference does it make?”: After all, the important parts of Ptp are shown in that episode. When we look at what is implied in the CWP article, however, it makes a big difference.

By the way, in CWP itself the complete image of Ptp is not shown: only a cropped version of it. But that may have little relevance except to emphasize the point that B.D. is unaware of the important difference between all of Ptp and part of it.

WHERE DID PTP COME FROM?

For almost any person who reads the CWP online page, it would seem obvious: Ptp came from that episode of Feakylinks in the year 2000. Does B.D. (author of CWP) think that the apparent “Civil War pterodactyl” image in that episode is important in establishing where Ptp came from? Apparently that is the point of his words “drum roll please.”

Yet here is the real point: NOBODY can get the entire image of Ptp from the episode Coelacanth This!, yet on the internet you can find complete images of Ptp, although the smaller cropped images are much more common.

Early on the morning of September 27, 2022, I did a series of Google image searches using an Incognito window to avoid any influence from my previous searches on this topic. Here is the result:

NOT ONE of the complete images of Ptp were from any site or page of Haxan Films or Freakylinks. In addition, if I missed nothing important, NOT ONE of the pages with the complete Ptp image had any link showing that either Haxan Films or Freakylinks ever publicized  or published it.

In other words, the apparent proof (for the origin of Ptp) in CWP has now been shot down, and this complete image now requires a deeper examination.

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One of many evidences for Ptp authenticity

Notice the strange wing structure below:

apparently very old photograph of soldiers with a recently deceased pterosaur -The scientist Clifford Paiva has pointed out that the wings are folded, AKA inverted, consistent with pterosaur wings

At some time between when this animal ended it final flight and the time the photo was recorded, the outer part of both wings became inverted. The apparent top of the outer wing section would actually be the bottom side of the wings during flight. This is hardly the kind of obscure detail that a digital effects company would have thought of and created for a common TV show episode.

In other words, possibly not even one person who viewed that episode of Freakylinks would have noticed this biological detail, so why would any digital effects firm create this and present it to the Freakylinks producers? It would have appeared to them to be too weird in an inappropriate distracting way. Special effects for TV and film are made for the general public, not for a one-in-a-million paleontologist who would have noticed such a detail.

The original Ptp may have had many digital processes done to it, to emphasize the idea that it is an old photo, but the animal shown was NOT created by the digital effects firm that was hired by Haxan Films or Freakylinks.

Indeed, to the best of my knowledge at present, it is possible that those effects that were added to the original image of Ptp were done decades before Freakylinks existed, and their digital effects team imitated those aging effects in AP.

I understand that there may be other factors and that it is still possible that no modern pterosaur was ever photographed with 19th-century American soldiers standing around it, but here it is: The CWP online article has serious problems, only some of which are mentioned here, and there still appears (as of early September 27, 2022) to be a real case that the origin of Ptp may be in a genuine 19th century photograph of a real object, whether it was a recently deceased pterosaur or not.

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Pterodactyl Caught on Camera

Has a pterodactyl, whether or not a ropen or kongamato, or even called a “flying dinosaur”, ever been photographed or videotaped? Yes indeed. This is an overview of the “Ptp” photo that has been associated with the American Civil War . . .

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Pterosaur sightings in the United States

“My father and I saw a Huge, featherless bird in Arkansas, between Van Buran and Cedarville when I was 16. I’ve been telling people my story since. We were sitting on big rocks at a cliff about 300 foot above the river when it flew out just under us . . . “

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Pterodactyl caught on camera

The biologist Peter Beach, of Portland, Oregon, videotaped a modern pterosaur on New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea, on March 25, 2015, in the presence of Milt Marcy, a businessman . . .

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Americans see living pterodactyls

“. . . the number of Americans who have seen an obvious [non-extinct] pterosaur could not be less than 10,000 . . . “

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Press releases about pterodactyl sightings

“That encounter in Raleigh early in 2018 was not the first time someone in Cynthia’s family had seen an apparent pterosaur. She told Whitcomb about a sighting many years earlier: “My mother and uncle saw one too while they were playing outside of my grandma’s house when they were really little.”

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Sightings of flying dinosaurs

I am a scientist, and I have discovered that the great majority of eyewitness sighting reports of extant pterosaurs are neither misidentifications nor hoaxes . . .

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Pterodactyl sightings in the southern American states

I believe I saw a pterosaur last night in Edmond, Oklahoma, just north of OKC. . . . Today I was trying to look up other recent sightings and was shocked to see that two other people have seen something similar in my state.

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Pterosaur sightings worldwide

Most of the following are from direct eyewitness testimony sent by email to the cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb, who now lives in Murray, Utah. Some of the reports, however, involve more direct communication with the persons encountering the flying creatures: face-to-face interviews and phone conversations.

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An American Soldier saw a Living Pterosaur in World War II

PART ONE

By the living-pterosaurs expert Jonathan Whitcomb

This is a reply to a portion of a huge web page that was written by the living-pterosaur critic Glen Kuban: “Living Pterosaurs (‘Pterodactyls’)”. I recommend avoiding that page, for it is very misleading and biased against the possibility that at least one species of pterosaur may have survived into modern times.

Introduction to the ropen sighting by Duane Hodgkinson

Around mid-1944, on the eastern edge of the island of New Guinea, after the Japanese military had left that area of the southwest Pacific, two American soldiers obtained permission to hike into the jungle interior west of Finschhafen. While in a jungle clearing that was about a hundred feet across, they witnessed a huge flying creature take off into the air. That sighting in clear daylight, with no obstruction to the view of those two men, has in recent years become known, among at least some cryptozoologists, as an important report among many accounts of encounters with living pterosaurs in the 20th century. To the best of what my associates and I can determine, this was an encounter with a gigantic extant Rhamphorhynchoid (long-tailed) pterosaur.

photo of Finschhafen Harbor, Papua New Guinea - photo by Jonathan Whitcomb

Finschhafen Harbor in Papua New Guinea (recorded by Whitcomb)

In the 21st century, the cryptozoologists Garth Guessman and I (Jonathan Whitcomb) interviewed Duane Hodgkinson, one of the two eyewitnesses of that “pterodactyl.” The other soldier, George, we have not been able to interview. Here is part of what was reported by the World War II veteran Duane Hodgkinson:

  • The wingspan of the flying creature was similar to that of a Piper Tri-Pacer airplane (about 29 feet)
  • The long tail was definitely not a misidentification of the feet of the animal
  • The estimated length of the tail was “at least” ten or fifteen feet
  • The “pterodactyl” had a long horn-like appendage coming out the back of its head (This especially caught Hodgkinson’s attention)

Introduction to Guessman and Whitcomb

I communicated with Hodgkinson by telephone and by letters, and he was very open to answering all of my questions. In addition, my associate and friend Garth Guessman visited the World War II veteran in Livingston, Montana, in 2005. Their interview was videotaped and I later edited it and published it online: “Ropen-Pterodactyl American Eyewitness.” Many of the keys points of the interview, but not all of them, can be seen in that Youtube video.

This was not the first eyewitness that Guessman and I had interviewed, during our investigations of sightings of apparent pterosaurs. Both of us explored Umboi Island in 2004, in separate expeditions, and we interviewed a number of native eyewitnesses on that remote tropical island in Papua New Guinea. In addition, Guessman and I have interviewed eyewitnesses in North America and have searched for those flying creatures in the western United States.

To learn more about us and those we have worked with, or in harmony with, see the following page about some of those who have searched for modern living pterosaurs like the ropen:

About us — living-pterosaur investigators

Jonathan Whitcomb, Garth Guessman, David Woetzel, and Paul Nation

Guessman and I are true cryptozoologists, questioning eyewitnesses and searching for the cryptids that we specialize in: apparent extant pterosaurs.

Introduction to Glen Kuban

From his page on Wikipedia, this computer programmer does not appear to have any connection with living-pterosaur investigations, although he is connected with apparent dinosaur footprints. From my experiences in communicating with him, on occasions over a period of many years, I’ve come to see Glen Kuban as an amateur paleontologist. He is certainly not a cryptozoologist, at least not in the usual sense. And in spite of the lack of any indication on Wikipedia, he has been very much involved in reports of apparent living pterosaurs, albeit he was devoted a portion of his life to trying to disprove them.

During the eleven years or so that I have read of his criticisms of living-pterosaur investigations, and from our communications by emails, I have seen no evidence that Glen Kuban has ever interviewed even one eyewitness. He has written an exhaustive web page that appears to be aimed at convincing people that all species of pterosaurs became extinct long ago. His “Living Pterosaurs (Pterodactyls)?” appears to have been written to protect standard models of geology and popular assumptions about Darwinian evolution.

How large is Kuban’s “Living Pterosaurs” online page? It mentions me by name (“Whitcomb”) 493 times, yes four hundred ninety three times in the”5 Dec 2020″ version of “Living Pterosaurs – Pterodactyls”. Many web pages, on whatever subject, do not even have a total word count of over 400. His web page, which tries to discredit the possibility that not all species of pterosaurs are extinct, has 40,676 words. Keep in mind that the whole point of that enormous web page is to support a Western assumption that began to be formulated when Benjamin Franklin was still living, two centuries ago: that every species of pterosaur is extinct. It brings to my mind a phrase in Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much.”

How ironic that Kuban says, “whenever ‘living fossils’ have been found before, scientists have gladly reported and widely celebrated them” but he maintains a web page of 40,676 words that is entirely dedicated to trying to convince people that any report that might seem to support a featherless flying “living fossil” is to be disbelieved. And with all his tens of thousands of words, he actually mentions less than 1% of all the sightings that people around the world have had of these flying creatures. And he still, as of the end of 2020, seems to have interviewed NOT EVEN ONE EYEWITNESS of an apparent modern living pterosaur.

{This  Part One of a post that was originally on the blog Pterosaur Fossils but has been transferred to Live Pterosaur. The original post was deleted on PF because that blog will be discontinued}

Part Two: An American Soldier Sees a Pterodactyl

Part Three: American Soldier Encounters a Gigantic Pterodactyl

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Youtube video “Pterodactyl Sightings . . .”

Two video trailers feature overviews of “Pterodactyl Caught on Camera – Part 2” and “Giant Pterodactyl in California” two out of over 100 videos on modern pterosaurs on this Youtube channel “Protect Animal Life”.

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Pterosaur sighting in World War II

A modern pterosaur!? How could it be? Extraordinary but true, huge flying creatures, with no feathers yet unlike any bat, live among us, although they mostly fly at night.

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Pterodactyl seen by Duane Hodgkinson

The kongamato and sightings of modern pterosaurs

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Pterodactyl Sightings – how can they be?

old sketch of a mad man with a knife: chasing a ropen

By the investigative journalist Jonathan Whitcomb

Eyewitness report (Use that link to communicate with Whitcomb about a sighting of an apparent living pterodactyl.)

This answers a skeptic who made a comment on one of my Youtube videos; it’s a rhetorical question:

“Why is it that ever since smart phones came out, people continue to claim they saw this type of flying animal but not one single person has video taped it?”

I don’t say that a person making this kind of statement has a split-personality disorder, but he or she appears to be sitting on a fence, ready to hop off into either of the following positions:

  1. God-like omnipotent knowledge
  2. Puppet-like regurgitating of what others have said

Should that skeptic be challenged, he or she can take the role of #2, and if nobody makes a challenge then role #1 is taken, although omnipotence is never stated: Only a knowledge of something is implied.

In this case, role #1 means that the critic knows about every person who has ever lived on this planet who has ever held a smart phone and the critic knows with god-like certainty that not one of those persons has ever recorded video footage of a modern pterosaur.

Here is part of my response to the rhetorical question:

Let’s take that phrase “people continue” and look at it more deeply. For countless centuries people have continued to talk about flying dragons around the world. These are people from various cultures and various languages and various traditions, yet they report seeing the same, or similar, large featherless flying creatures. In old art, they are often depicted with long tails.

Those sightings have continued into recent decades and recent years and recent months; in other words people have always reported seeing these reptilian-like winged creatures. Yet more recently, especially since around the mid-1800’s, eyewitnesses sometimes use the word “pterodactyl”.

In general, eyewitnesses in Western cultures have smart phones, yet those persons live within those Western cultures: They have been raised with the idea that all dinosaurs and pterosaurs became extinct long ago. That means that when the person sees what appears to be a living pterosaur, he or she stares at the thing, trying to figure out what it is or how it might be something other than a “pterodactyl”. In that state the person remains until the creature flies away. Even if the person had enough time to get out the smart phone and set it up for videotaping, that never entered the mind until it was too late.

Most persons living outside Western cultures do not have smart phones, and rarely have a camera of any kind ready at hand should they witness something strange.

Has Anybody ever Videotaped one with a Smart Phone?

I know of a lady in North Carolina who videotaped, with her smart phone, an apparent modern pterosaur, but that is another subject for another time.

old sketch of a mad man with a knife: chasing a ropen

Thumbnail image for the Youtube video “Pterodactyl Sightings – secret pterosaur FEAR” (on the channel Protect Animal Life)

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Pterodactyl Sightings in North America

A Youtube video on the channel Protect Animal Life

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Strange flying creatures

Nocturnal pterosaurs have always lived among us, but hidden by something. Enter now the realm of a new branch of cryptozoology, a branch overshadowed by the dogma of a “universal extinction.” How did scientists miss living pterosaurs? Get the answers here . . .

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Videos about living pterosaurs

This is the #1 channel on Youtube for videos on these amazing featherless flying creatures, apparent modern pterosaurs.

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Apparent living pterosaurs in the USA

Jonathan Whitcomb, of Murray, Utah, has been receiving emails, and an occasional phone call, over a period of 13 years, from eyewitnesses from five continents, and most reported sightings are in North America.

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The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur

Patty Carson was a child when she witnessed a large flying creature at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in around the year 1965. This Youtube video gives some of the details on that “pterodactyl” sighting.

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Flying creatures without feathers

For the protection of human life, I now publish a portion of the email communications I had with a lady who lives in Long Valley, New Jersey.

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Pterodactyl sightings

The nonfiction author Jonathan Whitcomb, of Murray, Utah, in 2017 and 2018, interviewed four eyewitnesses of an apparent “pterodactyl” in central Utah. He now declares that those reports from Draper, Salt Lake County, help distinguish Utah in a map showing where similar sightings have been reported across the United States.

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