Seven days before Christmas, 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 . . .

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.

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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].

Recent newspaper headlines about living “pterodactyls” . . . well, those are more rare than modern pterosaurs, at least for most of us who read the news in major or minor cities in the United States. Perhaps editors have over-reacted to the nineteenth-century newspaper hoaxes and mid-twentieth-century big-bird stories by avoiding the subject of modern pterosaurs. Modern news professionals do need to protect their reputations, I suppose.

It may enlighten us to review two of those old hoaxes in newspapers, before we review recent newspaper coverage of eyewitness reports, for some of those tall tales, contributing to nineteenth-century subscriptions, may have had a long-term influence. Getting news-media attention to recent pterosaur sightings is as difficult as pulling teeth out of a hungry ropen.

Man-Bat Civilization on the Moon (New York Sun newspaper hoax of 1835)

Understand that Sir John Herschel was an eminent British astronomer of the early nineteenth century and that he did indeed make successful observations with his telescope in South Africa. He just failed, in 1835, to observe bat-winged humanoids on the moon.

The excitement began on the other side of the Atlantic, when readers picked up their copies of the August 25th New York Sun:

“We have just learnt from an eminent publisher in this city that Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope, has made some astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description, by means of an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.

The August 28th edition of the newspaper included:

. . . We counted three parties of these creatures, of twelve, nine and fifteen in each, walking erect towards a small wood… Certainly they were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified… About half of the first party had passed beyond our canvas; but of all the others we had perfectly distinct and deliberate view. They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs from the top of the shoulders to the calves of their legs.”

The circulation of the New York Sun reached over 15,000, perhaps close to 20,000, before the newspaper admitted the hoax, later in 1835. Most newspapers in the United States have strictly avoided hoaxes in recent decades.

The 1856 Hoax of the ”Pterodactyl” From Stone

The British newspaper The Illustrated London News carried this story—less fantastic, more pterosauric—in its February 9, 1856, issue, although I have not yet seen the original.

Pterodactyl Hoax in The Illustrated London News

The French railway-tunnel pterodactyl of 1856 is finally getting its obituary, albeit The Illustrated London News has no such obituary. Not that France is a fairy-tale country or that railway tunnels are figments of the imagination or that all nineteenth-century newspaper articles are always filled with lies; but a pterosaur that survives for ages embedded in rock and then survives . . . [coming] out of that rock . . . well, that pterosaur is fictional.

More Recent Pterosaur Coverage in Newspapers

Sightings in Antwerp, Ohio (Antwerp Bee-Argus weekly newspaper)

. . . two sightings over the Maumee River, Ohio: 2002 and 2003, both in the daylight heat of summer. (More detailed information is in my book Live Pterosaurs in America . . .)

Pterodactyl in Washington State

Witnesses told police he had been driving down Wenatchee Avenue and drifted into the wrong lane, against oncoming traffic. When police asked him what caused the accident, he apparently replied with a single word: “pterodactyl.”

The news was carried by two newspapers in Washington state, on December 31, 2007, and on January 1, 2008.

Purchase your own copy of Live Pterosaurs in America (third edition) and get the full account of the amazing eyewitness encounters with “pterodactyls.”

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How much $ for childcare in Lakewood?

Forgive me for stating the obvious regarding the hoax explanation for pterosaur sightings, but no hoax, no matter what the subject, can prove that everything else of that subject is also a hoax. One boy crying “wolf!” (when he did not really see any wolf) does not prove that wolves do not exist or that all persons who cry “wolf!” are hoaxers. When a malicious hoaxer makes a phone call warning a school official that a bomb has been planted in that school, and careful searches reveal the absence of any bomb, that does not mean that all bombs are fictional or that everybody who makes a phone call is telling a lie.

Likewise, when a newspaper publishes an article, in the nineteenth century, about a living pterosaur, and that story is later declared a hoax, that does not mean that everybody, in whatever century, who cries “pterodactyl!” is a hoaxer. How we need clear thinking!

Evelyn Cheesman was a biologist who searched for insects and small animals in remote areas, including New Guinea, in the 1920′s and 1930′s. In fact, some of her discoveries put her name to some of those creatures, including Lipinia cheesmanae—a skink (lizard), and Litoria cheesmani—a treefrog. To biologists, she is less well known for her observations and writing about strange flying lights on the mainland of what is now Papua New Guinea. Those flying lights now, long after Cheesman’s passing, appear to be related to the ropen lights. Nobody suggests Cheesman ever played a hoax.

I explored Umboi Island in 2004 (many miles east of where Cheesman saw strange lights). I interviewed many eyewitnesses, most of whom saw only the strange flying light that they call “ropen.” No form or features were visible in those many sightings (like Cheesman’s observations).

I myself stayed up on some nights, watching the sky with Luke Paina and Mark Kau. Those two men saw the ropen light once during my stay on Umboi Island, but I was asleep in bed at the time and so have never witnessed a ropen light. During the seven years since my expedition, a few skeptics occasionally label me as a liar; I am grateful it is only occasionally. But why would a hoaxer travel to a faraway tropical island and then come back home to proclaim to the world that he saw nothing?

What I encountered on Umboi Island were many eyewitnesses, of few of whom had encountered the ropen at a much closer distance; those few eyewitnesses describe features that make the ropen stand out as a huge flying creature very unlike any bird or bat. My interviews with most of those few critical eyewitnesses were videotaped and those videos are available on YouTube. Why insinuate a hoax? Examine the words of those skeptics and you will find bulverism.

Are Many Pterosaur Sighting Reports From Hoaxes?

I interviewed Hodgkinson sixty years later, by phone, emails, and mail . . . I continued interviewing him, on occasion, and my associate in cryptozoology, Garth Guessman, also interviewed Hodgkinson. Over a period of eight years, we have found no indication of any hoax. Besides that, Hodgkinson has been a flight instructor for years; he would not risk his reputation by playing a live-pterodactyl hoax for decades.

Feathers – no Hoax

“Did hoaxes play any significant role in these many reports?” That question can be answered decisively: “No.” It comes from careful analysis of the data of ninety-eight sighting reports, compiled in late-2011, and it confirms an earlier analysis.

Gideon Koro, on Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, told the American cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb, “It came down.” He also described the huge flying creature: The tail length Gideon estimated to be seven meters (about 23 feet). It was no fruit bat.