By nonfiction-cryptozoology author Jonathan Whitcomb
A number of words and phrases come up in eyewitness reports of apparent living pterosaurs. The following are some of them:
- Pterodactyl
- Dinosaur bird
- Ropen
- Prehistoric bird
- Dragon
- Flying dinosaur
I know that pterosaurs are not actually dinosaurs, but people often think of them like that, for in our Western culture those flying creatures are connected with dinosaurs because of assumptions about universal extinctions that were supposed to have occurred many millions of years ago.
Eyewitnesses who know of other eyewitnesses
How many friends, relatives, and acquaintances do you know well enough that you would tell them that you had observed a non-extinct pterodactyl, if you had seen such a flying creature? If you live in the United States, or in another Western country, you might know only a few persons, if any, whom you could trust, feeling that they could trust that you were not having a nervous breakdown. It’s a big problem for Western eyewitnesses of pterosaurs.
Yet during the fifteen years that I have been questioning eyewitnesses I’ve found that a significant number of them, albeit a minority, report to me that they know somebody else who has seen a living pterosaur. These reports keep coming in, mostly through emails. I see only one reasonable explanation, but let’s first look at what is unreasonable:
Take the case that all species of pterosaurs became extinct many millions of years ago. Let’s also suppose that a young lady in training to become a veterinarian’s assistant sees what appears to be a living pterosaur, in daylight, in the city of Raleigh, North Carolina. Also assume that she began telling people, face-to-face, about her apparent encounter and about her belief that it was a non-extinct pterosaur. After a long period of time, she has talked with one hundred persons about it. Under the assumption of universal extinction of such flying creatures, how many persons should we expect would reply to her that they had also seen a living pterosaur? Probably not even one person.
Now let’s get back to reality. In the middle of the year 2018, my associates and I continue to proclaim that not all species of pterosaurs are extinct. We still make up only a tiny part of the American public, yet we stand with many eyewitnesses of these flying creatures. Let’s now take a look at the young lady in Raleigh, North Carolina, for she is in fact a real person, even though she has probably talked face-to-face with only a few persons about her encounter, nothing close to a hundred, at least not in the first few weeks after she saw the strange flying creature.
Cynthia Lee sent me an email on June 1, 2017, the same day that she had her sighting. Here’s sentence number six of that first email that she sent me:
“My mother and uncle saw one too while they were playing outside of my grandma’s house when they were really little.”
Eyewitness Cynthia Lee
I submit that the most reasonable explanation is this: Many more people in North America are observing living pterosaurs than my associates and I imagined fifteen years ago. It’s not just the eyewitnesses who send us sighting reports but the other eyewitnesses that never get in touch with us, and we know that they exist because the reporting eyewitnesses have told us of them. On occasion, one of these other eyewitnesses will come to contact me and report what was seen by them, but those are the exceptions.
More Eyewitnesses who Know Other Eyewitnesses
Setting aside those exceptions, let’s look at a few other cases.
Around 1965, little Patty Carson encountered a “dinosaur” that flew up out of tall grass at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She did not contact any researcher, like a cryptozoologist, about it until she sent me an email in 2011. It seems that it was much later that she learned that her brother Tom also had a sighting, probably of the same species of flying creature (not far from where Patty had her sighting at Guantanamo Bay).
Sketch draw by the eyewitness, Patty Carson
Near Detroit in 2012, a man saw an apparent pterosaur in flight. He reported the encounter to me, mentioning that he had a relative who saw something similar in that general area (both encounters in Canada, near the border).
Late in 2012, I got an email from a man who encountered a “pterodactyl” while the man was driving, a little after sunrise, between Katy and Houston, Texas, about five or six years earlier. Perhaps that was not enough to cause him to contact me, but on December 3, 2012, his wife was talking on the phone with him while looking (I believe through the window of the house) at what seemed to be a “pterodactyl.” That was in a different area in Texas, and that was enough for him to send me an email and report those two sightings.
To the best of my knowledge and memory, that lady never contacted me or any of my associates about her sighting. That seems to be the norm.
Conclusion
Sightings of modern pterosaurs are far more common than cryptozoologists used to think. The vast majority of eyewitnesses have not yet contacted us.
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I have been haunted for close to 20 years by what I saw in the desert. I have never told anyone due to the fact that I was afraid I would be thought nuts . . .
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I interviewed three eyewitnesses in Draper, Utah, two days ago. The sightings were about four miles west of the mountains that are the eastern border of the Salt Lake Valley, near the southern area of the valley.
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The Fiery Flying Serpent of the Bible may have been a long-tailed Rhamphorhynchoid, related to the modern-day ropen.
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How delighted I was, this past March, to receive an eyewitness report of three “dragons” flying over the I-5 freeway in Los Angeles!
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Living pterodactyl in California
On March 18, 2013, I compared eight sighting reports of apparent pterosaurs in Southern California. The most recent sighting had been just fifteen days earlier, between Griffith Park and Glendale. Not one of those sightings was very far from a storm channel or stream bed.
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Living Pterosaur in Ontario, Canada
I was phoning around dawn on a hill on Eglington Ave. across from the Ontario Science Centre when I saw a very smooth brown flying creature about the size of a great blue heron, with an appendage on its tail’s tip, fly northeast from the dense vegetation around the power lines where there was a cliff. I was stunned and shocked as it slowly flapped its wings . . .
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What do these persons have in common: Duane Hodgkinson, Gideon Koro, Susan Wooten, Brian Hennessy, Mesa Augustin, Aaron Tullock? Each has seen a large flying creature that is much more like a pterosaur than anything else.
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Eyewitnesses of modern pterosaurs
In daylight, seven native boys or teenagers climbed up to a crater lake, around 1994, on Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea . . . the giant ropen, flew just over the surface of Lake Pung. All seven boys ran home in terror . . .
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Pterosaur sighting in Raleigh, North Carolina
Jonathan Whitcomb, author of nonfiction cryptozoology books, has suggested that flying creatures reported in Raleigh, North Carolina, over several years, may be related to what Americans in other states have reported to him over the past fourteen years. One kind he has labeled the “American Hammerhead Ropen.”
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