Utah | Live Pterosaur

October 14, 2021

An Individual Ropen is Identified and Named – Precise Location Unknown

By Jonathan Whitcomb, executive director of Animal Discovery

How do I know that a ropen with a thirty-foot wingspan, now hunting house cats and killing chickens in Nevada, is the same animal seen in Draper, Utah, a few years ago? The one in Utah was about that size, or a bit smaller, and was there hunting house cats and killing chickens. Yet one clue pins this individual ropen to chicken murders in southern Salt Lake County : The predator does not eat chickens but stomps them into the ground. We call this pterodactyl the “Draper Ropen” (“DR”).

See the Youtube video “Whitcomb Interviewed”

Remote desert in Nevada

The flying creature seen in 2018 in Draper may have been a bit smaller, according to the rough estimate, than 30 feet in wingspan, but it may have grown during the past three years. The present wingspan estimate of 30 feet is close because of how DR was encountered on October 2, 2021, by the man whose head came to within four feet of one of its wings that night.

As of October 13, 2021, Jonathan Whitcomb does not know for certain whether or not this particular animal is clearly dangerous to humans. He advises great caution should it appear reasonably possible for any person to observe it from less than five hundred yards away.

A reservoir in a remote area of Nevada

Testimony of the Eyewitness in Nevada

“Approximately 9:20 pm Saturday, 02 October, 2021 [in a rural area of Nevada] I experienced something unusual . . . [While on my computer] in the garage, I heard something very heavy land on the tin roof near its edge. . . .”

“. . . the roof rafters creaked, then I heard claws scratch the roof (similar to big claws just resting on the tin roof). But, much heavier and bigger claws and much much louder than any domestic house cat or bobcat claws both in the area, and MUCH louder than a vulture, turkey, peacock, goose, owl, eagle or hawk . . .”

“I turned off the lights. And, quietly, and very carefully I opened the door and went outside. . . . The garage’s roofline measures 26 ft wide. This creature’s wingspan spread wider by about 2 feet on each side and its wingtip flapped within about 4 feet of my head as I opened the door. . . .”

“My best description is its wing appeared nearly light/tan/ brown/sandy on the topside, but more the color of the night sky underneath. As it flapped for takeoff, I saw the underside first, then the topside of the wingtip. I got a very clear and close view of the wingtip and the animal’s silhouette (and I felt the strong wind its wing produced on an otherwise calm night without any wind at that moment). . . .”

“The wingtip didn’t look like feathers, but it looked very much like a gigantic bat’s wing. From almost immediately underneath (at the closest point during its takeoff), it had a long narrow tail longer than its head to base of tail length. . . . It looked amazing and gigantic so close.”

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Missing Children and Pterodactyl Sightings

I suggest that to understand the potential danger that a few of these flying creatures may pose to children, we need to know something about modern “pterodactyls”, including the long-tailed ropen.

Live Pterodactyl

A Youtube playlist highly recommended for those who are new to Youtube videos about sightings of modern pterosaurs like the ropen

Attacks From a Ropen in New Mexico?

I’ve recently been reading the nonfiction Missing 411 – Western United States & Canada, by the former lawman David Paulides. On page 200, the author points out that all six of those missing persons listed in New Mexico disappeared in the Santa Fe National Forest. Why did none of them go missing in any other national forest of New Mexico?

An Apparent Living Pterodactyl Reported in Utah

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.

Ropen (Pterosaur) in Draper, Utah

This morning I interviewed, face-to-face, an eyewitness of an apparent living pterosaur that flew over his backyard in Draper, Utah, on Sunday, November 4, 2018. He seemed perfectly credible to me, and I also talked with his wife and found nothing wrong with her deportment.

May 11, 2021

Pterodactyl Talk in mid-2021

pterodactyl sketch and an old newspaper article on a monster in Utah

By cryptozoology author Jonathan Whitcomb

The following are comments viewers have made on Youtube videos of the channel Protect Animal Life:

Pterodactyl Sightings

(eyewitness interviewed by Whitcomb)

From Poppins:
Wow this is incredible great video !!!

From Mary Land:
Fascinating encounter. Thank you so much for your passionate work, PAL.

From Bandit Quest: [slightly edited for English]
About 3 weeks ago, A friend and I were on my back porch here in Rural Covington, Louisiana when we both saw a huge bird that looked like a Pterodactyl fly over my property at about 200 feet elevation. It had a long beak with a rear ward protruding crest behind its head, the wings were very bat like and I could see two feet extending rearwards behind the bird. I would estimate the wingspan to be approx. 8 to 10 feet across. I could not see any feathers on it. . . .

Pterodactyl Sightings in Utah – an introduction

From Jordan Henrichs:
Wow! Those are the stories that I like when more than one person sees the same pterosaur! I really like it when you do a video interview, you can see the person’s expressions and emotions that help to authenticate the sighting.

From Static X:
I had a sighting in Oklahoma. I researched to make sure I didn’t see a large crane know in these parts. It was NOTHING close to a bird. It flapped twice though… once to get in the air and once to disappear in the trees. . . .

Pterosaur Sightings in South Carolina

From Stetson Gray: [slightly edited for English]
I got my own story: My dad and I were driving down this back road in SC and we saw these gigantic bird things. Let me add we were like half a mile away, maybe a little further, but they had to be like almost 10 feet tall because it was just so easy to see them from far away. We stopped in the road because we were shocked seeing a bird so huge. We got closer. It was like a greyish brown, and had some blue on its head. Its head was long and its wings were really skinny but it was shaped like a stretched M. It wasn’t flailing them around but just opening and closing the wings. It looked like it was eating something. I vividly remember they were on top of this huge tree, and every time they moved their wings the tree moved . . .

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Are Modern Pterosaurs Dangerous?

The following is not a first-hand account but from a native who contacted me by emails in 2010, and he got the story from the grandson of the native fisherman who died three days after being attacked by a kor.

Dangerous modern pterodactyl

Recent investigations suggest the fiery flying serpent of the Old Testament was not actually a snake but a Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur. Even more recently, “pterodactyl attacks” against humans in Canada have been reported in a nonfiction cryptozoology book, Bird From Hell, by Gerald McIsaac. This author believes that many human deaths may have been caused by attacks from what some Native Americans in British Columbia call the “devil bird.”

Pterodactyl attack in Oklahoma

I was four years old. . . . no clouds . . . early fall. I was walking from the pumphouse/ chicken coop . . . I looked up behind me . . . I know what I saw, because it was less than six feet above me. This thing was huge. I liken his body size to a Volkswagen bug. [It was] covered completely with brown / blackish fur [and had] no feathers. . . . I ducked down just enough, I guess, for it to be a miss for it. I stayed looking up [at it] this entire time. It opened its beak . . . I see teeth and at four I knew that wasn’t right . . .

November 13, 2020September 11, 2023

An Apparent Living Pterodactyl Reported in Utah

large pterosaur seen by Sandra Paradise in Georgia, USA

Press Release from Jonathan David Whitcomb, originally published as a Facebook “Note” (but FB Notes may eventually become extinct)

MURRAY, UT, April 24, 2020/~~~ 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.

On April 18, 2020, Whitcomb made public that map and now asks people to contact him if they have seen anything similar, wherever it was. He and his associates look for any kind of support people may give to their research and to their searching for non-bat featherless flying creatures that some persons call “flying dinosaurs.”

From Declaration on Eyewitness Reports of Apparent Living Pterosaurs

Over the past 16 years, hundreds of eyewitnesses have contacted Whitcomb from five continents, and some of those were from 41 states of the USA. Three of those states now stand out in the number of reported sightings of apparent pterosaurs in relation to each state’s human population: Hawaii, Utah and Arkansas, in that order.

Whitcomb admits a few challenges for this branch of cryptozoology: “Bigfoot is a far better known cryptid, yet my associates and I face a bigger problem than competition for attention: generations of Western tradition that insists all species of dinosaurs and pterosaurs became extinct millions of years ago. That controversy has given us negative attention. On top of that is the possibility that in some areas of the world somebody might see a frigate bird and think they had witnessed a non-extinct pterodactyl. Not everything that looks like a pterosaur is one.”

One of those areas is around the Hawaiian Islands, where the great frigate bird may be seen by over a million tourists each year. From a distance, those birds may appear to be featherless to some naive tourists, even though Whitcomb insists that at least some of the reports he receives from Hawaii are clearly not due to any frigate birds being misidentified.

Yet if skeptics eliminate Hawaii from the list of 41 American states with reported pterodactyl sightings, because of frigate birds, where does that leave Utah and Arkansas? Whitcomb loves to point out that problem with the frigate-bird explanation for reports of living pterosaurs in general. He declares, “Oceanic frigate birds do not congregate far from the ocean and surely not in Utah, Arkansas, Oklahoma or Kansas, where pterosaur sighting reports dramatically stand out.”

In the past thirteen months, Whitcomb has uploaded to Youtube 54 videos on sightings of animals he believes are descended from ones closely related to pterosaurs known, by paleontologists, from fossils. Years earlier, he wrote a scientific paper hoping to encourage scientists to take eyewitness sightings from Papua New Guinea seriously: “Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific.” It was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in 2009. In recent years, most eyewitness reports sent to him have been from North America.

Whitcomb led an expedition in Papua New Guinea in 2004, where he searched for the ropen of Umboi Island. Since then, he has written five nonfiction books on modern pterosaurs and has published over a thousand blog posts and other web pages on that branch of cryptozoology. His Youtube channel is “Protect Animal Life.”

The data used to construct the map of sightings in the United States, showing the dominance of Hawaii, Utah, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas, was obtained from the site Declaration on Eyewitness Reports of Apparent Living Pterosaurs and from the 2010 census.

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Hundreds of sightings of modern “pterodactyls” worldwide

Flying dinosaur sightings around the world

“More Pterosaurs Online” (Youtube video)

Online resources for sightings of living pterosaurs

[The tail] “was obviously a part of the body”

Sandra Paradise describes the huge flying creature she saw in Georgia

In this Youtube video, uploaded on May 8, 2020, on the channel Protect Animal Life, discover how shocked Sandra Paradise was to see a living pterosaur just a few miles from her home, just east of Winder, Georgia (United States) in the summer of 2008.

The above sketch she drew and sent to Jonathan Whitcomb. She responded to the suggestion that what she saw was a great blue heron that was carrying a snake in its mouth. Sandra dismissed that speculation, for the flying creature was nothing like any great blue heron.

“Video on Pterosaur Sightings in South Carolina”

A blog post on a Youtube video on the PAL channel (“Protect Animal Life”).

April 18, 2020April 22, 2020

Hope in the Face of COVID-19 Death

Reports of pterosaur sightings in the USA, in relation to human population

By the cryptozoology author Jonathan David Whitcomb

This is not about any new treatment for COVID-19 patients, although I have been fervently praying for a medical breakthrough in that scientific area. During the past 17 years, I have been working in a narrow branch of cryptozoology, and for most of those years I have been able to provide comfort to many of the persons whom I have interviewed.

Strange to tell, I interview people who have encountered what some call “flying dinosaurs”. I’ve written several nonfiction books, mainly on what those eyewitnesses have reportedly observed, with sightings worldwide.

Have you ever before seen this sketch?

Pterosaur drawn by the late Patty Carson, from her memory

Some people could think this came from a nightmare; my interviews with hundreds of eyewitnesses of strange flying creatures puts this in a different light. Part of my mission has been to comfort healthy persons who have been troubled with doubts about personal sanity.

Set aside all debates about the extinction or non-extinction of all species of pterosaurs, commonly called “pterodactyls”. For now, consider only the subject of the sanity (or lack thereof) of the majority of eyewitnesses of large featherless flying creatures that clearly are unlike any kind of bat. I declare that the vast majority of the eyewitnesses are of sound mind.

Take eyewitnesses in Utah, for example.

“Pterodactyl” Sightings in Utah

Aside from the American state of Hawaii, Utah is the number one state, per capita, for sighting reports of apparent living pterosaurs, according to the latest analysis of statistics.

This is based upon the most recent updating of the DERALP site (Declaration on Eyewitness Reports of Apparent Living Pterosaurs), which was on April 17, 2020, by me (Jonathan Whitcomb). That online resource also has a list of persons who support further research and publicity for these amazing flying creatures. The latest edition of this page also has a new addition in Europe: a sighting in Rome, Italy.

Notice in the above map that four *states with many sightings in relation to human population *(of the Contiguous states) are centered in the USA, not on any coast. That makes it obvious that misidentifying frigate birds is not the source of sighting reports, at least not as a general interpretation for sightings of live “pterodactyls” in North America. Why would even a small number of frigate birds migrate inland and stay, for years, far away from any oceanic coast? That makes no sense.

Set aside Hawaii for a moment, for many tourists spend time there, and they often stay outdoors and can look around at the scenery for long periods of time. Of the forty-eight Contiguous states, the one with the most sighting reports in relation to human population is Utah. Why is that? It could be that the answer is more complex than simply assuming non-extinct pterosaurs prefer to live in that part of the USA, which seems unlikely. Whatever the total answer, I’ve been fortunate to have been able to interview quite a few of the eyewitnesses in Utah.

The Point

Regardless of the temporary pain and grief because of COVID-19, we can take hope from the continuous life of these wonderful flying creatures. If they can survive, so can the human family.

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Proclamation on Living Pterosaurs

I, Jonathan David Whitcomb, proclaim that not only are not all species of pterosaurs extinct but more than one species is living, and they range in extensive areas of the planet.

“Big Bird” in Draper, Utah

On June 26, 2017, my wife and I met with several eyewitnesses in a neighborhood of Draper, Utah, (in the southern part of the Salt Lake Valley) a few miles west of the Wasatch Mountains. Each of the four persons we talked with lived within about 300 yards of each other and a little south of the Swire Coca Cola complex, which is in northwestern Draper. These four wish to be anonymous, at least for now.

Pterodactyl Sightings in Utah (Youtube video)

Generations of people in Utah have reported large flying creatures, sometimes using a word like “dragon” or “pterodactyl” or “pterosaur. This is a brief introduction to eyewitness sightings of apparent living pterosaurs seen in Utah.

Pterodactyl Bird

This Youtube video includes a brief account of a sighting from aboard and U.S. Navy ship many years ago, somewhere between the southwest Pacific and the Indian Ocean.