The Uninvited Pterosaur
Do expectations cause faulty comprehension, tainting eyewitness testimonies because people expect to see a live pterosaur? What about the uninvited pterosaur? My experience, over the past nine years examining eyewitness reports, shoots down that general hypothesis. With almost no exceptions, eyewitnesses of living pterosaurs had never dreamed of seeing such a creature until they encountered one.
I will not name the prominent cryptozoologist who has offered us the idea that people see what they want to see, for the cases he has investigated might, in some degree, relate to valid cases of such misidentification. I name the sightings that I have investigated, especially those in which an eyewitness has contacted me with a report. Almost nobody ever looks up into the sky expecting to see a “flying dinosaur.”
Brooklyn, New York, 2012
I saw something that I almost couldn’t believe and the pictures of pterodactyls are the only thing that comes close to what I saw last week. . . . Me and my cousin both saw it at 6:30 pm in the clear bright sky . . . We were both in shock.
Franklin, Georgia, USA, 2012
My two sons n I was traveling down Hwy 27 . . . around 8:15 or so in the morning . . . when I looked up n saw a flyin dinosaur . . . I was so shocked at what I was seein I started yelling . . .
Phoenix, Arizona, 2007
It had what looked like really old worn out leather wings and a thing coming out of the back of its head . . . I was stunned I reacted slowly but did run inside and get others to come out . . . but it was gone.
Phoenix, Arizona
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The lady who saw the featherless long-tailed flying creature had never heared about sightings of living pterosaurs, before she had her own encounter. A “pterodactyl” or “dragon” was about the last thing in the world that she would have expected to see in her backyard.
Conclusion
How often an eyewitness tells me of the shock at seeing something that seems impossible to see. The problem lies in the Western dogma of universal extinctions of basic kinds of organisms, not in the eyesight or comprehension capabilities of the eyewitnesses.