hoax | Live Pterosaur

November 15, 2022September 15, 2023

Freakylinks “Civil War” Pterodactyl Photo and Ptp

six men and a large pterodactyl in an old photo

By Jonathan Whitcomb

In recent years, a few skeptics have suggested that the Ptp image originated with the TV show FreakyLinks with “Coelacanth This”, which was the fourth episode of the first season (year 2000). Unfortunately for the skeptical side, they have not provided any direct evidence but rely on second-hand or third-hand accounts and the skeptics’ unverified imagination.

Those critics do not mention any person who worked on any supposed computer model (or physical model) or who worked with supposed actors in the supposed creation of Ptp. In fact, as best as I can tell at present, they have not mentioned even one person who witnessed anyone working on such a supposed digital or physical model, since they seem to imply that there was either a 3D computer model or a physical model.

By the way, the FreakyLinks TV episodes were scary science-fiction supernatural-themed stories on the Fox network, broadcast from October of 2000 until June of 2001. You might call it a series of hoax shows, except that most viewers are aware, or should be, that they are watching fiction.

The complete image that is now called “Ptp”

“Coelacanth This!” FreakyLinks Episode

The story does not begin with a pterodactyl; that comes later. A group of young investigators dive into a mysterious death from something that could have been a monster of some kind. The drama then evolves into a pterodactyl-like flying creature that keeps coming back every few decades, seemingly because of long periods of hibernation.

Near beginning of this TV episode on the Fox Network

A key point in this fictional story is the discovery of an old photo of six “Civil War” soldiers posing beside the body of a huge Pteranodon-like animal. This is not just implied to be a photograph from the American Civil War: That point is clearly made in the communications between investigators.

The image shown several times in that episode appears to be identical to Ptp. With a deeper examination, however, it is clear that the bottom part of the picture is missing in that episode. Yet the complete image can now be found on a number of web sites, apparently none of which are directly related to any of the production companies involved, twenty-two years ago, in the creation of the TV episode in question.

Most of the Ptp image is seen in this TV episode of FreakyLinks

In other words, where did the complete image of Ptp come from? There seems to be no evidence it came from any production company associated with the episode “Coelacanth This!”. It definitely did not come from anyone capturing the image from any portion of the episode itself. Most likely the producers realized that it was in the public domain, because of its age. They then used it in the production, even though they had used a fake photo in the pre-production web page that promoted the episode.

Let’s now get back to the “Civil War” aspect of the case. This must have been written in the script. So why do the men in Ptp have only a superficial resemblance to Civil War soldiers?

More to the point, why do we see an extraordinary apparent pterosaur, with details that include muscle structure in the neck? If this was a physical model or a computer model or a drawing, created by FreakyLinks, why do the soldiers have uniforms and equipment that are so UNLIKE what non-officer Union Civil War soldiers had? Why should the creature be so accurately portrayed while the men look so much like they lived AFTER the Civil War?

And why do five of the six men have right-handed pistol holsters while one has a left-handed holster? That detail is exactly what we could expect if these men were NOT Civil War reenactors or any other kind of actors. Very likely is this: They were photographed between about 1867 and 1880.

Proper ratio of right-handed to left-handed men

And why were those men standing like that, with one of them having a boot resting of some kind of object? Try this answer: Those men were standing around the large flying creature that we see in Ptp. Apparently this is not a hoax-pterodactyl but a genuine recently-deceased flying creature.

By the way, many persons have reported that they saw Ptp in an old book or magazine decades before the end of the 20th century. Of course, memory can play tricks on us, yet those declarations fit perfectly well with the concept that those six men appear very much like they lived before the beginning of the 20th century. And it’s not just their uniforms and equipment: Each has a beard or mustache style that fits that time period and those men have similar body builds, like they had been eating together for a long time or at least under similar conditions. What are the chances that six actors from the year 2000, chosen randomly, would fit together so well?

Addendum

There’s more to the mystery. What about the fake photo used in the pre-production web page? It was very likely intended, before filming, to be the image used in the episode itself. Here is a likely explanation, one that harmonizes with the details seen in the six men of Ptp and the detailed image of an apparent modern pterosaur in Ptp. It’s not the only possibility, just the most likely.

The pre-production image (“AP”) is on the left; Ptp, on the right

As of mid-November, 2022, I (Jonathan Whitcomb) believe that AP was staged by Haxan Films, and the arrangement of the actors and fake “pterodactyl” was an imitation of what is now called Ptp.

In other words, it is no coincidence that both images have the soldier in front with one boot on the beak or head of an apparent creature. I believe that Ptp existed first and AP was created to imitate it.

Keep in mind that the special effects company that worked with Haxan Films at that time was E=MC² Digital. It is possible that the original image that was transformed into Ptp was obtained by E=MC² Digital and assumed, at first, to be under copyright protection.

In other words, as of mid-November, 2022, I do not know if Ptp, with its discoloration and white blotches and scratch mark, is what E=MC² Digital obtained from some old publication or if that original image was altered by E=MC² Digital to make it appear older before giving it to Haxan Films for that episode of FreakLinks.

Regardless of whether E=MC² Digital altered the original (that became Ptp) or not, I believe that Ptp (or the original of it) became the model for the creation of the AP photo: Ptp existed first. Nobody that I know of has any doubt about AP: It was a hoax created by using actors and a crude model that was supposed to look like a dead pterodactyl. If fact, that crude fake pterodactyl has been owned by a well-known cryptozoologist for some time, kept as part of his collection.

I believe that two things happened before filming began on the episode “Coelacanth This!”:

The AP photo was found to be poor in quality
Ptp (or the original version of it) no longer had a copyright issue

The main problem with #1 was the “pterodactyl”, which looked not only unconvincing as such an animal but was ludicrously so: If nobody told you that it was supposed to be a pterosaur, you might not guess what it represented.

The main solution with #2 may have been this: The production team or teams came to realize that there was no actual copyright issue, at least if they handled it carefully. They could have come to realize that it was now in public domain, because of its age, or they could have managed to alter it and present it in such a way that it would not have any reasonable way allowing anyone to make a copyright claim on it. Yet there is another explanation.

I believe that the most likely possibility is this: The production teams came to realize that the men who were photographed would no longer be living, so release forms would not be needed from them. In addition, there would not be any issue with copyright, for Haxan would make limited use of the Ptp image, and E=MC² Digital could have further manipulated it. This would allow Haxan to invoke “fair use” with Ptp.

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Apparently a real photo of a pterodactyl

If evidence shows that it was a physical object [pterodactyl or hoax], rather than only a digitally created non-real object, then we can look deeper into what that strange-looking thing might have been.

YouTube video on pterosaur eyewitnesses and Ptp

See how eyewitness testimony relates to video footage regarding modern living pterosaurs, a.k.a. “pterodactyls”. Also see the Ptp image whose origin comes not from modern actors or Civil War reenactors but from a photograph AFTER that war but before the beginning of the 20th century.

Missing Persons in USA – Attack from a Ropen?

I was 4 years old . . . I was heading to the house from the chicken house [at] about 8 a.m. when a large flying creature tried to grab me . . . The body (about the size of a Volkswagen bug) was covered in hair. . . . It had a beak with teeth . . .

Cognitive biases and modern pterosaurs

Dr. Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale, has commented on the bias called loss aversion: “We don’t like losing stuff . . .”

The Ptp “Civil War” photograph in context

In 2007, a businessman encountered a gigantic pterosaur as it flew in front of his car in Irvine, California, near the university . . .

Pterodactyl photo Ptp

. . . the image we have: apparent American soldiers, dressed like men of the Union army of the Civil War, at least with uniforms that suggest such to the casual observer of the apparently old photo.

The old flying dinosaur photo

I processed the Ptp image and cropped it to help people avoid distractions. Why did I alter the “Civil War flying-dinosaur photo”? I wanted to present it in a form that would most likely be closer to the original image than what we see in Ptp.

Apparent modern pterosaur in Mexico

I’ve been talking to my mother about the pterodactyl like creature she saw about 15 years ago. . . . in Lázaro Cardenas, Michoacán (Mexico) . . . Small pterodactyl like animal. Leathered. . . . Wingspan, as they weren’t completely open, could be a meter (bit more or less) . . .

Marfa Lights and flying predators

What kind of flying creature is the ropen? When eyewitnesses describe the features of this creature, it becomes obvious: The ropen is a large long-tailed pterosaur, AKA “pterodactyl.

The flying creature “ropen”

What do we know about the ropen? It is not confined to Papua New Guinea, which makes sense when we consider that the largest ones have wingspans greater than twenty feet. Flying creatures similar to the ropen of the southwest Pacific have been reported in Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America.

May 24, 2016May 27, 2016

The Ropen and “Hunting Monsters”

Gitmo Pterosaur of Guantanamo Bay Cuba, sighting in 1965

Is the ropen a real animal, a modern living pterosaur? We now look at part of a Kindle book written by Darren Naish: Hunting Monsters – Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths. I’ve not read the whole book, so I’ll review only part of it, from the paragraph that begins with “moving away from tropical Africa” to slightly beyond the paragraph that ends with “how not to do an interview.” I personally deemed this book not worth purchasing, so I have to be content with reviewing only the portion that I can see on the Google-books page. Fortunately for me, much of the book’s content on living pterosaurs and the ropen seems to be available in Google-books.

I believe this portion of Hunting Monsters is in the fifth chapter, “Mokele-Mbembe, Ropen and Other ‘Prehistoric Survivors.’” If it turns out that significant content on living pterosaurs is in another part of the book then consider that my evaluation might need to be updated or modified. At any rate, this is not a standard book review, only an examination of a small part of this nonfiction by Darren Naish.

And yet this post you have just begun reading, long as it may be, is my response to only part of that small portion of the Kindle book by this paleontologist. Other points must be set aside for other blog posts.

Whitcomb vs Naish on Living Pterosaurs

We need to be clear about one point, something Dr. Naish and I (Jonathan Whitcomb) agree upon: that many varieties of pterosaurs known from fossils are extinct. The ones known to paleontologists outnumber the types known from sightings. We disagree completely, however, on the meaning of eyewitness sightings, for he believes that none of them were the result of a non-extinct pterosaur. I believe that some of them were precisely that: modern living pterosaurs.

Even the most optimistic cryptozoologist, after careful research, should come to realize that many species of pterosaur have probably become extinct. Exactly when they became extinct is open to questions that paleontologists like Naish appear unwilling to ask, yet the long tails with Rhamphorhynchoid-like flanges and the pointed head crests dominate too many eyewitness reports to ignore. Because of the great variety of forms known from fossils and the narrow range of descriptions in many reports of modern flying creatures, it seems obvious: Most species of pterosaurs are surely extinct.

We also agree that not all reports of a modern pterosaur come from encounters with living pterosaurs. This has probably often been overlooked, this point of agreement, perhaps overlooked even by Naish himself. I have found that at least a small portion of accounts appear to be one of the following:

Misidentification of a non-pterosaur
Hoax (including some YouTube videos)
Mental health problem of the one reporting the encounter

Yet Naish and I appear to have taken different routes entirely. I dig into the details to get a better understanding of each report. I have spent well over 10,000 hours on the total sightings, including the many cases appearing to be unrelated to the three types shown above. I doubt that Dr. Naish has spent even 1% as much time on pterosaur sightings, for why would a typical paleontologist spend 100 hours objectively researching something that appears to undermine the foundation of his or her beliefs about when such flying creatures lived on this planet?

Yet we agree on some things. Dr. Naish and I agree to some extent on the quality of interviews of eyewitnesses. He mentioned my name but did not go into details about any particular interview that I conducted (he seemed to have been referring to my evaluation of an interview done by one of my associates when he mentioned “Jonathan Whitcomb”). If he had mentioned the details in my interviews with three young men (Gideon, Mesa, and Wesley), he would have been correct in saying that a number of factors were far from ideal.

But to sweep aside two whole expeditions on Umboi Island in 2004, because of perceived imperfections in interviewing technique in some of the interviews—that appears to be too extreme. I don’t expect Dr. Naish to invent a perfect time machine to take scientists millions of years into the past to prove his theories about ancient pterosaurs; my associates and I should not be expected to kidnap all the wildlife photographers in the world to force them to go with us to Umboi Island to get perfect video footage that proves the ropen is a modern pterosaur. So how often has an witness in a court been given perfectly conducted questioning? We need a practical approach, not an extreme dismissal of everything that might appear imperfect and contradicting our previous assumptions. If a particular interview had serious problems then those particular problems in that interview should be discussed. Dr. Naish appears to prefer to avoid bringing any such details to light.

Beware of jumping to the careless conclusion that a few pages in Hunting Monsters prove that all the expeditions and interviews and research of living-pterosaur investigators over the past 22 years is worthless. And those few pages in HM do not come close to refuting what is found in four scientific papers (three of them published in peer-reviewed journals), articles that are clearly in defense of modern pterosaurs. I see nothing in Naish’s book that even hints that any of those four scientific papers exist.

An Overview of Book Reviews of Hunting Monsters

Seventeen Amazon customer reviews of this new book, as of May 23, 2016, should give us enough to judge its popularity.

Five Stars: 70%
Four Stars: 12%
Three Stars: 12%
One Star: 6%

Many books on Amazon do worse than getting 70% top ratings from readers. I recommend going over these Amazon customer reviews of Hunting Monsters to learn the details. Before moving on, please be aware that I do not suggest that most potential readers will be disappointed after purchasing this book. Amazon suggests at least 70% will be satisfied with their purchase. But a small part of Hunting Monsters has major weaknesses; I cannot speak for the rest of the book.

Sketch by an eyewitness (sighting in Cuba in 1965)

Quetzalcoatlus and Sightings of Flying Creatures in Texas

Hunting Monsters, in this part of the book, has with a statement about sightings of apparent pterosaurs (ropen or otherwise) in the USA, in particular Texas. But do “most” sightings of apparent pterosaurs actually date to the “1970’s” as Dr. Naish declares? Not necessarily. Closer examination reveals that the actual sightings are spread out over decades.

But what’s so important to Naish about the 1970’s in Texas? It’s the discovery of Quetzalcoatlus fossils, beginning in 1971. The conjecture is hardly new. Other skeptics have also stumbled into this assumption: that news reports either caused or contributed to citizens in Texas believing they had witnessed living pterosaurs when they had actually not. The conjecture fails to include any details about exactly how it takes place, so skeptics can chose which explanation they like:

Foolish Texans see ordinary birds and think they are seeing pterosaurs
Hoaxers want attention, so they give false reports

Naish does not come close to proving either of the above, however, only suggesting that those are proper explanations for pterosaur sightings in Texas soon after the discovery of the Quetzalcoatlus. So where are the details that would give credence to the above two explanations for those sighting reports? Naish gives no detail at all, at least not in this part of his book: No particular sighting report is examined for judging the plausibility of those two explanations. Real science thrives on details and on numbers, but the number of analyzed reports he gives is zero.

Please be aware that I’m not out to make Dr. Naish look foolish. Yet a careless acceptance of his suggestion about reports of flying creatures in Texas—that can make quite a few citizens of Texas appear foolish. I will not use the word fool for anybody, for I have personally qualified for that adjective too many times in my own life. In this case, with eyewitnesses in the southern United States, I take the side of the majority: citizens of Texas versus Darren Naish. But still I prefer avoiding pushing individuals into one of two boxes with labels of fool and non-fool. Let’s just see which point of view is more realistic:

At least some Texas eyewitnesses reported sightings reasonably accurately
No Texan saw a living pterosaur, for Quetzalcoatlus news tainted their thinking

I submit that the first point of view is far better than the second.

At the end of 2012, I compiled a list of sightings: 128 reports, each of which I deemed more likely than not to have been from an encounter with a living pterosaur (worldwide sightings). I never said that it was close to a complete list, but I personally interviewed or questioned the eyewitnesses in close to 74% of these sightings.

This was more than just a simple listing, however, for the compilation had details like the following, with many of these involving a yes or no answer:

Definitely no feathers
Only probably no feathers
Long tail
Tail but not long
Head crest
Feet
Teeth
Wingspan
Tail straight
Tail flange
Tail length
Head-crest length
Total length
Clear sky
Cloudy sky
Clear view of creature
Length of sighting in seconds
Number of witnesses
Height flying (when closest to the ground)
Distance from eyewitness to flying creature
Any soaring or gliding
Any slow flapping
Any fast flapping
Near swamp or marsh
Over water
Near water
Any change in direction (of flight)
Year of sighting
Year of interview or year when interviewing began
Daylight
Night
Twilight
Country (if not in USA)
State (if in USA)
Number of creatures
Long neck
Neck length
[plus about a dozen other types of data or questions]

Of those 128 sighting reports, eight were in Texas, with these sighting years:

1976
1976
1976
1982
1983
1986
1995
1995

Please keep in mind that this is hardly a complete listing of sightings in Texas. These are the ones in Texas that attracted my attention and each appeared unlikely to have been from a hoax or misidentification or mental-health issue. Also be aware that I have been involved in sightings worldwide, while the cryptozoologist Ken Gerhard has investigated flying-creature sightings that were mostly in Texas. We’ll soon get to Gerhard’s writings.

Dr. Naish mentions “flaps,” which I interpret as temporary but concentrated interest in a subject of local or regional news. In Hunting Monsters, he says that they usually go away within a few weeks, and this is in the context of sightings of apparent pterosaurs in the state of Texas. But how do news reports of Quetzalcoatlus fossils relate to sighting reports of apparent pterosaurs in Texas? Let’s look at that.

The first fossil discovery of that species of pterosaur was in Texas in 1971. What an excitement that would have caused for paleontologists! Yet not every citizen of Texas is a paleontologist like Dr. Naish. So let’s examine all the pterosaur sighting reports that came out immediately after that exciting fossil discovery . . . well, actually not one sighting report seems to exist for within a few weeks of that discovery, at least not among the reports that I had compiled at the end of 2012.

Yet what if my reports from Texas are too limited? After all, they number only eight. Look at Big Bird – Modern Sightings of Flying Monsters by Ken Gerhard, which was published in 2007. Here are the sighting years for Texas:

1945 to the “present”
Pre-1958
1970
1971 (Harlingen)
1975 (Robstown)
1975 (Rio Grande City)
1975 (San Benito)
1975 (near Los Fresnos)
1976 (five miles south of Harlingen)
1976 (two police officers see “white bird with 15′ wingspan”)
1976 (near Brownsville)
1976 (ranch north of Poteet)
1976 (Raymondville: wingspan=10-12 feet; leathery featherless skin)
1976 (Loredo)
1976 (northeast of Brownsville: resembled “Pteranodon“)
1976 (near Olmito)
1976 (San Benito)
1976 (Del Rio)
Late 1970’s (Brownsville and Edinburg)
1976 (near San Antonio: three eyewitnesses)
1976 (Montalba)
1976 (Bethel)
1981-1983 (Houston)
1983 (east of Los Fresnos)
1983 (Hondo)
1990’s (Rangerville)

Of the above twenty-six Texas sighting reports listed in pages 77-79 of Gerhard’s book, which ones might have been caused by 1971 news reports of the Quetzalcoatlus? Well, maybe one, and that one is questionable. On page 77, it says, “unusual, brown bird.” That sounds like a puny “flap” to me. Why should anybody assume that news of a fossil discovery would cause that one eyewitness to think that an unusual-looking brown bird would be a non-extinct pterosaur? And even if it did, it would not explain the many other sighting reports.

I’m not saying that Dr. Naish is 100% wrong about news reports having a relationship to eyewitness accounts of apparent living pterosaurs, but I see a better suggestion about how it works.

What would citizens of Texas see in those news reports in 1971? Scientists found some fossil bones of a pterodactyl. How could anybody conclude from that news report that such flying creatures might still be alive? Suggesting such a conclusion appears to me to be insulting Texans. Perhaps one person might find a bone somewhere and wonder if it might be from that flying creature in the news, but even that possibility is questionable. To think that a newspaper or television news story would cause a considerable number of Texans to see ordinary birds and think they were “pterodactyls”—that strikes me as ridiculous.

I see a better explanation for any correlations that may become apparent between news reports of the Quetzalcoatlus fossil discovery and eyewitness accounts: News professionals are much more likely to publish reports of pterosaur sightings when such flying creatures are, or have recently been, in the news. Its the job of newspaper reporters to get relevant, timely news into their papers, so they are much more likely to publish stories about encounters with possible live pterosaurs when the that kind of flying creature has recently been in the news. In other words, the statistics of those sightings indicate they may happen in any year and in any decade, but they are published and brought into public attention much more when news professionals see timely news and then publish the encounters.

Indeed there may have been more news reports published and presented on television in the mid-1970’s in Texas, regarding the Quetzalcoatlus discoveries, for more fossils were found in 1972 and 1974. As I understand, Douglas A. Lawson published something about these discoveries in the journal Science in 1975. This is perfectly in harmony with the idea that an increased number of living-pterosaur sighting articles in Texas came from an increased awareness by news professionals, not from any increase in the number encounters themselves.

Something else may have completely passed by the attention of Darren Naish. Valid eyewitness encounters with actual living pterosaurs may not have increased after the Quetzalcoatlus fossil discoveries but the eyewitnesses themselves may have been more likely to recognize the significance of what they had seen after they read about those fossils in the newspapers. In other words, actual sightings of non-extinct pterosaurs could have been reported much more frequently when the fossil discoveries were in the news, but the numbers of actual encounters did not change.

Before leaving this examination of sighting reports in Texas, let’s consider a brief Google search that I conducted on May 23, 2016. The following phrase was used: pterosaur sightings in Texas. Of the ten results on the first page, one was for images, but the other nine revealed some interesting facts on the years of reported sightings of living pterosaurs:

Six were in 1976 and eight were in other years, as follows:

1982
1982
1986
2007
2008
2008
2011
2013

In other words, most of the sighting years do not appear to correlate closely with discoveries of Quetzalcoatlus fossils, and even if they did, it could easily be explained by an increased openness of news professionals to publish those sightings when the fossil discoveries of such flying creatures were already being published in newspapers and presented in television news broadcasts.

It may appear, on the surface, that the year 1976 may be significant, with all those reported encounters with apparent pterosaurs in Texas, yet it’s not likely anything close to what Dr. Naish declared in his book: He said that the “flaps” die down after a few weeks. In reality, reports of living pterosaurs in Texas not only do not die down within a few weeks, but they continue for years. In addition, they are seen to have arisen even before the first discovery of a Quetzalcoatlus fossil in 1971, according to Ken Gerhard’s research.

In Defense of the Ropen

One more detail on which Dr. Naish and I agree: The ropen is not a Quetzalcoatlus. In fact, the descriptions of the modern long-tailed flying creature correlate with the features of a Rhamphorhynchoid (“basal”) pterosaur, not a Pterodactyloid short-tailed pterosaur.

From the end-of-2012 compilations of data from the more-credible sighting reports, we learn that the ratio of long-tail to no-long-tail is close to twenty-to-one (41% to 2%). That’s a clearly significant statistical fact, for the 41% is for the entire 128 sightings. So why do so many eyewitnesses, worldwide, report long-tailed pterosaurs when the media and fiction films and television science fiction shows have so many short-tailed pterosaurs? The long-tailed ropen is the dominant type of pterosaur now living on this planet.

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The Long Tail of the Ropen

The Fiery Flying Serpent of the Bible may have been a long-tailed Rhamphorhynchoid, related to the modern-day ropen.

Pterosaur Sightings Data for the USA

This includes the sightings in Texas, but also it has many other states, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, etc.

Fossils are Evidence of Life, not Extinction

The Mesozoic Objection for live pterosaurs and Darren Naish (a paleontologist)

Ropen Sighting

Peter Beach and Milt Marcy, both of the Portland area of Oregon, led an expedition in Papua New Guinea, in March and April of 2015, searching for a living pterosaur . . .

Ropen in Texas and in New Mexico

. . . modern pterosaurs in the United States, in spite of extinction dogma. Marvel at eyewitness accounts in many of the states: California, Texas, New Mexico, Florida, and in other states.

Pterosaur Sighting in South Carolina

Susan Wooten, of Greenville, South Carolina, was driving from home to Florence (about 1989) when she saw a giant creature glide over the highway in front of the car.

Marfa Lights in Texas – a Ropen?

A few American cryptozoologists, including the Californians Jonathan Whitcomb and Garth Guessman, and the Texan Paul Nation, have searched for nocturnal bioluminescent flying creatures described like Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs. . . .

December 26, 2012January 3, 2014

Youtube Eagle Video Hoax

Seven days before Christmas (2012), the video “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” (by “MrNuclearCat”) was uploaded to Youtube. It shows a large bird of prey grabbing a baby off the ground and beginning to carry it up into the air, at least apparently. By Christmas morning, it had received over 36 million views.

(The Youtube name of a video uploader rarely reveals much about the person; “MrNuclearCat” is no exception.)

You’d think small children were no longer safe in city parks. From among those 36 millions viewers, perhaps hundreds of thousands of parents and grandparents became concerned about the safety of toddlers in open areas like that park in the video. It was unfortunate but unnecessary, for the pickup never happened.

How does it relate to live pterosaurs? Skeptics have used the lack of photos and videos of living pterosaurs as if evidence that those flying creatures do not exist. It’s now obvious: A convincing video can fool millions, so why place extreme trust in photos and videos?

The video showing a bird grabbing a baby was a hoax, a convincing imitation of a home video, a convincing portrayal of a large bird of prey, during its flight near the ground, in a park in Montreal, Canada, picking up a human child. Both bird and child were computer animation objects, according to a disclosure from an animation school in Montreal. But I suspect not everything was revealed.

When I first began examining frames of the video, I soon realized that the shadows did not all correspond with each other.

In this frame, shadows fall in very different directions

Of course the apparent left-right orientation of shadows should change gradually as a video camera pans a great deal over a landscape; but the shadows in this video are extreme, with one frame showing both extremes. That means it was not from the camera panning. It could only exist as a result of some kind of extreme manipulation, a combining of landscape images. That extreme tampering made the whole video suspect.

I began creating a Youtube video response, before I learned of the official disclosure of the hoax.

Eagle Snatch or not

This is my video response to the hoax, using humor to help communicate what I discovered about it. It had been a few years since I had created a video for Youtube and it reminded me how greatly videos differ from blog posts: paragraphs of explanation can cover greater ground than a short video; but the truth of a concept is often much easier perceived visually than verbally.

Source of the Original Video

The creators of the animation of the “eagle” snatching the “baby” soon disclosed to the world that it was an animated production. According to Discovery News, it was done by animation students. Apparently Normand Archambault, Loïc Mireault and Félix Marquis-Poulin, students at the computer animation school (Centre NAD), designed both the eagle and the toddler. They are said to have used 3D animation that was placed into the video of a park in Montreal.

The disclosure of the computer-animation source of the video, however does not reveal why the background was tampered with. It seems that there is more to this creative endeavor than just simply inserting two computer 3D objects onto the background of a city park.

Centre NaD, in Montreal, Canada, where the computer animation hoax video was created by undergraduate students (in perhaps hundreds of hours)

Flying Creatures Without Photos or Videos

If many millions of Youtube viewers can be deceived by two computer images of what are so common—human toddlers and large birds—how convincing now would be a photo or video of what Westerners assume is extinct: a pterosaur? Even after we have such visual evidence, the strongest source of credibility for modern living pterosaurs would be the large number of eyewitness reports from around the world. This is assuming, of course, that my associates had not yet captured one of the flying creatures for transport to a zoo.

Child Care Safety

. . . licensed by the state of California, so laws of safety and security are observed and kept.

Reports of Live Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific

Both negative and positive reactions to these living-pterosaur investigations deserve attention. Huge flying pterosaurs, non-extinct, with no photo in a newspaper . . .

December 6, 2012May 29, 2014

Live Pterosaurs and Science

years of sighting reports showing wingspan estimates of living pterosaurs

Skeptics have often suggested two explanations for sightings of pterosaurs: hoaxes and misidentifications. Let’s use scientific reasoning by examining the most recent results of data compilations and analysis, for information obtained from eyewitnesses, in particular regarding the possibility of major hoax involvement.

Wingspan Data

After the addition of data from the many 2012 reports, we have 74 sightings in which wingspan estimates were made numerically. For example, in Hawaii an eyewitness reported “Between 3-4 foot wing span, sharp, long beak, featherless wings more like a bat than a bird.” The wingspan estimate was entered into the database as “3.5” for that sighting in 2008 (reported to me in 2012).

Statistical analysis gives us the following (wingspans in feet):

Minimum: 1.3

First Quartile: 6

Median: 11.5

Third Quartile: 20.5

Maximum: 46

Mean 14.472

SD 10.200

SEM 1.186

N 74

90% CI 12.496 to 16.447

95% CI 12.109 to 16.835

99% CI 11.336 to 17.608

There is no outlier.

I believe the data is similar to the data gathered and analyzed for wingspan estimates one year ago, but I am open to comments from anyone who is qualified in statistical analysis.

Most of us prefer to see a graph of the data, so consider this:

What can we conclude from the evenness of the data on wingspan estimates? No significant number of hoaxes were involved, for expectations regarding pterosaur size would have made one or two peaks; there is no significant peak anywhere that would suggest such a thing. Let’s consider two peaks that would come from a number of hoaxes.

Hoax With Bias Towards Huge Pterosaurs

This would be the most likely result of hoaxes, in my opinion. Hoaxers would probably be influenced by film and television fiction, for example the Jurassic Park movies. If many hoaxers were involved, it would create, in the wingspan graph, either a broad peak or a very high peak, somewhere over twelve feet. This is obviously lacking in the actual graph above.

Hoax With Bias Towards Rhamphorhynchoid-Fossil Size

This needs to be taken in context: Many sightings of apparent pterosaurs include the observation of a long tail. Many of those, in turn, include the observation of a vane or flange at the end of the tail, in other words, a tail like that of a Rhamphorhynchoid (long-tailed) pterosaur. Hoaxers who were attempting to convey precisely-orchestrated lies would give wingspan estimates in keeping with the fossils of that kind of pterosaur, fossils of small pterosaurs, generally less than eight feet in wingspan. If such hoaxes played a major part in the sighting reports, we would see a peak in the graph, somewhere below eight feet or so. That differs greatly from what we see in the graph above.

But what if the construction of the above graph might hide critical information? Let’s look at another graph, made with feet designations by multiples of four feet rather than three:

At the 24-foot mark, the apparent small valley in the first graph becomes a small peak in the second graph. This means that the actual data in this area is rather even. To be precise, here is that portion of the actual data (feet of wingspan): 20, 20, 20, 20, 20.5, 21, 21.5, 22, 24, 25, 25, 25, 25, 27, 29, 30, 30.

Notice the peak in the lower range; this appears to be a genuine peak. But it involves wingspans too large to have come from hoaxers who were influenced by the sizes of Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs. To be precise: 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10.5, 11, 11, 12, 12, 12.5, 13, 13, 13, 13. Those are far too many estimates over seven feet, were such hoaxers to have become involved.

Why so few Giant Pterosaurs?

So why do both graphs show a steady decline in numbers of sightings, as the wingspan increases into the larger-than-birds range? I suggest that in at least one or two species the creatures continue to grow as they get older. The creatures die off for various reasons, leaving fewer and fewer larger ones to continue to grow. Only a very few modern pterosaurs reach a wingspan over thirty feet, but when one of those giant nocturnal pterosaurs has a reason to fly in daylight, it can hardly avoid being observed by a human, within a few hundred yards, who glances in that direction.

I realize that all this analysis and reasoning hardly compares with darting a modern pterosaur and examining the sleeping creature up close, but for now we need to do the best we can do, with what we have, and we have a lot of data.

Scientific Evidence for Modern Pterosaurs

. . . many Americans think of “pterodactyls” as large or gigantic, similar to what we have seen in movies. That would cause a disproportional number of reports to include wingspans over fifteen feet, even greater than twenty-five feet, if many hoaxes were involved. But there is no such preponderance in the data.

No Feathers on Pterosaurs

A hoaxer would have no reason to show doubt about the lack of feathers, for that would be essential to convince somebody that a pterosaur had been observed . . .

Scientific Paper by Jonathan Whitcomb

David Woetzel of New Hampshore and Jonathan Whitcomb of California may be the only writers who have published, in a peer-reviewed journal, scientific papers supporting the idea of modern living pterosaurs [Creation Research Society Quarterly].