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Preliminary Sketch of Gitmo Pterosaur

Patty Carson just gave me permission to publish this preliminary sketch of what I call the “Gitmo Pterosaur.” Her 1965 sighting, like Eskin Kuhn’s 1971 sighting, was at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She will be making corrections and refinements, some of which are explained below.

preliminary sketch by Patty Carson, of the pterosaur she saw in Cuba in 1965

  1. Head crest does not actually twist as depicted. This just shows the structure that would be visible at another angle. Patty Carson wrote to me, “The end is sort of twisted at an angled to show you that the end was rounded with a kind of concave surface at the end. At the time of the sighting, I was not able to see that until he was flying away.”
  2. The nose was not tipped at exactly this angle (needs correcting).
  3. “His left wing is sticking out of his chest instead of the shoulder.”
  4. “I need to tighten up the angle of the humerus/radius V . . .”
  5. “The teeth are too small” [improved sketch will show larger teeth]
  6. “His ear hole doesn’t show” [ear hole needs to be added]
  7. “His eyes are ended up too dark. They were more or less the same reddish brown color as his skin.”
  8. “His gullet is too far to the left.”
  9. “The wrinkles under his throat don’t show up well enough.”
  10. “I need to do a better job of wing placing and angles.”

This eyewitness sketch of the “Gitmo Pterosaur” suggests it may be related to the flying creatures seen in the summer of 2008, in Georgia.

Two flying creatures were seen within a period of less than two weeks; one was larger than the other, but they were in the same general area. . . . From the drawings the lady sent to me, I am calling this apparent pterosaur “Hammerhead Ropen.”

The head appendage is somewhat similar to that of the creatures seen by Hodgkinson and Hennessy; but the beak and the appendage seem more like one continuous head-structure. The head-appendage has a somewhat curved shape. Both beak and head-appendage are more blunt than is in the sketches of the Hodgkinson-Hennessy creatures.

Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur in South Carolina

The strange creature flew gracefully over the highway, right in front of the car Susan Wooten was driving to Florence, South Carolina. Other drivers stopped their cars on the side of the road (in the general area of Bishopville) but Susan drove on, for she was following a friend and did not want to be separated from her. But what a creature it was!

According to this eyewitness, “It looked as big as any car, and had NO feathers, not like a huge crane or egret. . . . it swooped down over the highway and back up gracefully over the pines.” Years later, she learned of my investigations and reported her sighting. I have since interviewed her several times by email and she has convinced me that she saw basically what she described. I believe it was similar to the ropen of Papua New Guinea: a giant Rhamphornynchoid pterosaur.

Large long-tailed pterosaurs do not seem to be confined to South Carolina, however. I have also interviewed an eyewitness of two similar creatures in Georgia. They appeared to be of the same species, (but not necessarily the same species as the South Carolina pterosaur) seen on different mornings, and both were large, but they were not the same size; that is how the eyewitness concluded that there were two. Contrary to other descriptions of long-tailed pterosaurs, however, these two had rather fat tails and rather fat flanges at the end of their tails.

More about the South Carolina Pterosaur Sighting

More about Pterosaurs in Georgia

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Third edition of "Live Pterosaurs in America"

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Long Beach Child Care Services (California daycare, licensed)

Hammerhead ropen

Kuhn and Whitcomb sketches
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.