"Live Pterosaurs in America" by Jonathan Whitcomb

Live Pterosaurs in America (2009, nonfiction) is still more popular on Amazon.com than most of the many nonfiction cryptozoology books. Here is the main text of the title page:

Reports of giant flying “ptero-dactyls” in American skies—these have floated around the internet for years; but they had been mostly devoid of interview details. Until about 2005, even when an eyewitness was named, the interviewer was often anonymous; even when an eyewitness was credible, and the account published in a newspaper, the story was ridiculed, discouraging others who had also seen strange flying creatures. Where could eyewitnesses go? Who would believe them?

Since the two ropen expeditions of 2004, in Papua New Guinea, more Americans have become exposed to the living-pterosaur investigations and the many resulting eyewitness interviews. Many web pages have sprung up, many of them by explorers themselves. But despite other web pages, by scornful critics who never went anywhere and never interviewed anyone, these two expeditions, and those that preceded and followed them, are causing an awakening, the birth of a new perspective about extinction-assumptions regarding pterosaurs.

How are sightings in the United States related to those in the Southwest Pacific? How do some apparent nocturnal pterosaurs pertain to bats (and how are bats irrelevant)? How could modern living pterosaurs have escaped scientific notice? These mysteries have slept in the dark, beyond the knowledge of almost all Americans . . . until now.

Cuba: top -- Georgia, U.S.A.: Bottom

“. . . you don’t have to go to New Guinea. Far as I can tell, you can sit on a hill outside the town where I live in the mornings and see them. One sighting was at 7 in the morning, and one was at 9 am. Both days were overcast . . .”

So stated the eyewitness I interviewed in September of 2008. I interview many eyewitesses of apparent pterosaurs (that’s what I do), but few of them are professional artists. I was fascinated by the sketches this woman sent me, and named the cryptid “Hammerhead ropen.” Although I have not yet obtained permission to publish her sketches, I include a rough imitation here (bottom sketch), based on her sketches of the head, for it bears some resemblance to the head of the creature sketched by Eskin Kuhn (top sketch), another talented artist who witnessed two similar creatures in Cuba. The Hammerhead (bottom sketch) was observed in Georgia, U.S.A.

Why consider that American “ghost lights” relate to live pterosaurs? Consider the ropen light of Papua New Guinea. From them we can learn that at least some living pterosaurs are bioluminescent, in particular the apparent Rhamphorhynchoids of the Southwest Pacific. Now consider how many strange lights are reported across the United States: North Carolina (Brown Mountain Light), South Carolina (Bingham Lights), Arkansas (Dover Lights), Washington state (Yakima Lights)–those are only a sample. Strange lights have appeared across the United States for decades or centuries; apparent pterosaurs have also appeared across the United States for decades or centuries.

A bioluminescent flying creature much larger than a firefly I label “B.F.C.” Of course, not all strange flying lights are BFC, but I will also use this term to refer to ones with reasonable potential, from the perspective of my associates and I (who are convinced that the ropen is a bioluminescent Rhamphorhynchoid).

I took special interest in one of the lights that Mr. Greene described to me. It flew around for over two hours, until the sun was about to come up. At least once, it dived down, at a speed apparently consistant with what I would expect of a B.F.C. that is hunting bats, diving after one bat.

We need to listen with open minds to eyewitnesses who have seen creatures that cannot easily be explained as non-pterosaurs. This will eventually free us to discover and classify modern living pterosaurs.

In the Netherlands, about five kilometers northwest of Amsterdam, a number of years ago, on a hot summer afternoon, a featherless creature flew “coming out of the city and flying to a big canal.” The wingspan was estimated at 2 meters; the length, 1.5. The creature “had little hands on the front of his wings, he was dark elephant grey.”

In Spain, “near los desert del palmas,” at a music festival one summer night in 2007, flying about 30-40 feet over the heads of a few music fans at the edge of the festivities, was a creature that had, instead of feathers, the color and apparent texture of suede. The eyewitness saw that it was unlike a bat for it had a long thin tail. He told me, “I haven’t been able to find any species of fruit bat ANYWHERE that has a long, straight tail . . . I’d recognise a fruitbat if I saw one.”

In England, in 1987 or 1988, a ten-year-old girl saw “a glowing object which seemed to open up to what I thought looked like a dragon.” She was shocked and told nobody about it for many years. She told me, “I do still remember what I saw and think that it may have been a pterodactyl that decided to ‘glow.’”

These three eyewitnesses have one thing in common: extreme hesitancy to talk about what they saw. This fear to disclose a sighting may be even greater than a similar fear in the United States.

But the Wikipedia implication includes no hint of just what “area” is involved. It covers at least hundreds of square miles of remote wilderness, mostly far removed from any organized birdwatching activity. The commenter who inserted the sentence about birdwatching fails to see what is needed here. Hundreds of millions of dollars would need to be raised, to bring every birdwatcher in North America and Great Britain together in Africa; night-vision equipment would need to be used for countless weeks. After all that, if there were no living-pterosaurs reported by any birdwatchers, then the commenter could proclaim that no pterosaurs appeared while they were all beating the bushes.

The implication has another problem. Birdwatchers need to be credible (according to traditional interpretations of “credible”), otherwise nobody will pay attention to their reports. And what credibility rating does Wikipedia give to reports of living pterosaurs? The birdwatchers who receive most attention come from Western countries, and reporting (to Westerners) a living pterosaur in Africa (instead of a Red-billed hornbill) gets you medical attention. Birdwatchers could very well be watching living pterosaurs in Africa, but they are more likely to report what they see to knowledgeable natives, not to fellow birdwatchers.

No “pterosaur” category can be found on any birdwatcher’s report form, and no lack of pterosaur sightings by organized birdwatchers counts against the many reported sightings of living pterosaurs. This Wikipedia implication could just as well be used as if evidence against the existence of bats (or against UFO’s or against Fourth-of-July fireworks displays).

Evelyn Cheesman appeared to have no thought about pterosaurs when she observed the strange glowing objects that flew near the top of a mountain ridge. The British entomologist would surely have been interested in the explanation of “large flying animal” if the local villagers had said anything; but they were reluctant to talk about the lights. Nevertheless, Cheeman wrote about the mystery in her book, The Two Roads of Papua (published in 1935). Her observations were a few mountains to the north of Paul Nation’s later observations.

Here is part of R.K.’s account of the Japanese retaliation against the creatures that had attacked them:

” . . . it was the japs [Japanese miliary] on the island who were attacked by the kor.  They [Japanese soldiers] apparently shot several wounding them then followed them to cves [caves] and blew [blew up] the entrances. They called ships fire on the hills and pounded them for several hours.”

R.K. asks an interesting question: “I wonder if there is a record of that somewhere?” Perhaps there is an old Japanese veteran who knows about this or has written about the battle with those creatures. If so, perhaps the word used for those creatures would be “dragons.”

At least one species of Rhamphorhynchoid (long-tailed pterosaur) known from fossils, the Scaphognathus crassirostris, did have a head crest. The presence of a head crest on a ropen (or modern long-tailed pterosaur) is hardly a sign of a hoax; how many potential hoaxers would know about that fossil? (And how many natives on remote tropical islands would know about any fossils?) Westerners who might consider a pterosaur hoax would most likely use what is well-known in Western culture: stubby-tailed pterosaurs, like those depicted often in movie and television sci-fi. Potential native hoaxers would talk about flying humans that transform themselves into snakes; honest native eyewitnesses talk about a long-tailed feather-less creature, and only some native eyewitnesses have had a good-enough viewing angle to allow them to see the head crest (Gideon Koro, of Umboi Island, was honest enough to admit that he did not have a good view of the head of the giant ropen that flew over Lake Pung around 1994).

The consistancy, in eyewitness descriptions from around the world, of the combination of a long tail and a head crest (in a feather-less flying creature) is evidence for a living creature, not a hoax. And why should a modern pterosaur be very much like most pterosaur fossils? Ridicule from skeptics comes from the obvious interpretation of those eyewitess descriptions: a modern living pterosaur. “Unlike pterosaur fossils” is not only inaccurate: It is irrelevant.

Do we believe in living organisms (that they live now) because of recent fossils? No. People believe in presently-living creatures because people have seen them living. The point? People have seen living pterosaurs.

Another problem with the “Mesozoic objection” relates to the assumption that no pterosaurs have lived recently. Circular reasoning is involved here. See: Mesozoic objection.