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.)
(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 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).
AP 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:
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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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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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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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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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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