Papua New Guinea | Live Pterosaur

November 13, 2020September 11, 2023

An Apparent Living Pterodactyl Reported in Utah

large pterosaur seen by Sandra Paradise in Georgia, USA

Press Release from Jonathan David Whitcomb, originally published as a Facebook “Note” (but FB Notes may eventually become extinct)

MURRAY, UT, April 24, 2020/~~~ The nonfiction author Jonathan Whitcomb, of Murray, Utah, in 2017 and 2018, interviewed four eyewitnesses of an apparent “pterodactyl” in central Utah. He now declares that those reports from Draper, Salt Lake County, help distinguish Utah in a map showing where similar sightings have been reported across the United States.

On April 18, 2020, Whitcomb made public that map and now asks people to contact him if they have seen anything similar, wherever it was. He and his associates look for any kind of support people may give to their research and to their searching for non-bat featherless flying creatures that some persons call “flying dinosaurs.”

From Declaration on Eyewitness Reports of Apparent Living Pterosaurs

Over the past 16 years, hundreds of eyewitnesses have contacted Whitcomb from five continents, and some of those were from 41 states of the USA. Three of those states now stand out in the number of reported sightings of apparent pterosaurs in relation to each state’s human population: Hawaii, Utah and Arkansas, in that order.

Whitcomb admits a few challenges for this branch of cryptozoology: “Bigfoot is a far better known cryptid, yet my associates and I face a bigger problem than competition for attention: generations of Western tradition that insists all species of dinosaurs and pterosaurs became extinct millions of years ago. That controversy has given us negative attention. On top of that is the possibility that in some areas of the world somebody might see a frigate bird and think they had witnessed a non-extinct pterodactyl. Not everything that looks like a pterosaur is one.”

One of those areas is around the Hawaiian Islands, where the great frigate bird may be seen by over a million tourists each year. From a distance, those birds may appear to be featherless to some naive tourists, even though Whitcomb insists that at least some of the reports he receives from Hawaii are clearly not due to any frigate birds being misidentified.

Yet if skeptics eliminate Hawaii from the list of 41 American states with reported pterodactyl sightings, because of frigate birds, where does that leave Utah and Arkansas? Whitcomb loves to point out that problem with the frigate-bird explanation for reports of living pterosaurs in general. He declares, “Oceanic frigate birds do not congregate far from the ocean and surely not in Utah, Arkansas, Oklahoma or Kansas, where pterosaur sighting reports dramatically stand out.”

In the past thirteen months, Whitcomb has uploaded to Youtube 54 videos on sightings of animals he believes are descended from ones closely related to pterosaurs known, by paleontologists, from fossils. Years earlier, he wrote a scientific paper hoping to encourage scientists to take eyewitness sightings from Papua New Guinea seriously: “Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific.” It was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in 2009. In recent years, most eyewitness reports sent to him have been from North America.

Whitcomb led an expedition in Papua New Guinea in 2004, where he searched for the ropen of Umboi Island. Since then, he has written five nonfiction books on modern pterosaurs and has published over a thousand blog posts and other web pages on that branch of cryptozoology. His Youtube channel is “Protect Animal Life.”

The data used to construct the map of sightings in the United States, showing the dominance of Hawaii, Utah, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas, was obtained from the site Declaration on Eyewitness Reports of Apparent Living Pterosaurs and from the 2010 census.

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Hundreds of sightings of modern “pterodactyls” worldwide

Flying dinosaur sightings around the world

“More Pterosaurs Online” (Youtube video)

Online resources for sightings of living pterosaurs

[The tail] “was obviously a part of the body”

Sandra Paradise describes the huge flying creature she saw in Georgia

In this Youtube video, uploaded on May 8, 2020, on the channel Protect Animal Life, discover how shocked Sandra Paradise was to see a living pterosaur just a few miles from her home, just east of Winder, Georgia (United States) in the summer of 2008.

The above sketch she drew and sent to Jonathan Whitcomb. She responded to the suggestion that what she saw was a great blue heron that was carrying a snake in its mouth. Sandra dismissed that speculation, for the flying creature was nothing like any great blue heron.

“Video on Pterosaur Sightings in South Carolina”

A blog post on a Youtube video on the PAL channel (“Protect Animal Life”).

November 9, 2018

“Dinosaur” Book for Children and Teens

"The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur" - a paperback nonfiction book

By the nonfiction cryptozoology author Jonathan Whitcomb

Why would the new book The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur be the best Christmas or birthday gift for many kids and teenagers? It invites them into a new world of adventure in cryptozoology: true stories of encounters with modern living pterosaurs.

I know that those flying creatures are not actually dinosaurs. But when little Patty Carson saw one of them poke its head above the tall grass on a U.S. military base, in 1965, the first thing she probably said to her family was something like this: “I saw a flying dinosaur.”

Even when she soon changed her approach by using a word that was more precise—’pterodactyl’—they still would not believe a six-year-old. . . . at least not until other members of the family started to see similar animals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

I know that sounds like a fiction, something for kids much older than those who delight in Danny and the Dinosaur. (Six million copies of that children’s book have been purchased since 1958, yet it’s not the right gift for most youth from eight to fourteen years old.) The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur is not only what the older ones will enjoy but what they need: a NON-fiction that can inspire youth to look deeper than many adults have looked. It allows them to freely come to their own conclusions, yet the book invites them to consider how eyewitnesses feel when people don’t believe them and how they feel when someone does believe them.

The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur is not confined to the story of one little girl in the 1960’s but compares little Patty’s encounter with those of many other eyewitnesses: in Papua New Guinea and in the United States. Those ordinary persons who have seen extraordinary flying creatures—those eyewitnesses have been not only children but teenagers and adults. Yet important details have come up in their testimonies: long tails on large featherless flying creatures, for example.

Sketch drawn by Patty Carson when she was an adult

More than that, it explains why we need to believe what other persons tell us about what they have seen, at least sometimes. We need to consider that some people might be telling the truth even when it sounds strange:

“With a person who reports observing something, I give this reason for believing what was said: When we believe that person, he or she might tell us more. That can help the other person be happy and it can help us be happy. There’s more: We can learn from each other.

“For that to always work, however, everyone needs to tell the truth all the time. That does not always happen. Not everyone is always nice, so we live in a world that is imperfect. Yet each of us can make the world a little better in small steps.” [from Chapter 7: Why Believe People?]

The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur, however, does not preach but simply invites children and teenagers to consider what only a few scientists had previously thought about: that a wonderful new discovery in biology may soon be made and that science truly can advance in an exciting new way.

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The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur

This book is for readers between the ages of about eight and fourteen. [official home page for this nonfiction]

Some dinosaur bones have been dated to have lived more recently

Since carbon dating became available, in the mid-20th century, many scientists had assumed that the new method for determining ages was inappropriate for dinosaur fossils. They took it for granted that no carbon-14 could be left from those bones, for radiocarbon dating should detect no radioactive carbon from anything that had lived many millions of years ago. [That now seems to not be the case.]

August 23, 2018

Modern Living Pterosaur in a Remote Jungle in Papua New Guinea

natives in a remote village of Papua New Guinea

By living-pterosaur investigator Jonathan D. Whitcomb

News about a non-ropen pterosaur in PNG

Last week, I found a Youtube documentary on an expedition on New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea, in which two Americans, Milt Marcy and Peter Beach, were searching for a living pterosaur. They spent quite a few weeks on that remote tropical island in 2015, but they were rewarded with a sighting of a flying creature that others had previously seen in that area: a non-extinct pterosaur. This was observed in daylight.

I sometimes refer to this modern pterosaur as the “New Britain Creature.” I don’t know what natives call it, but I believe that many English people of the world would have called this kind of flying creature “dragon” in earlier human history. Let’s consider sightings in the late 20th century, before getting into the encounter in 2015. Keep in mind that all eleven of these sightings were in the same area deep in the interior of New Britain Island, and not one of them appeared to be the same species as the long-tailed ropen observed in other areas of Papua New Guinea.

Around 1965, some of the natives in this general area of New Britain got access to a gun and shot a pterosaur. They then cooked it in three large pots, feeding the village. This event was told to Marcy and Beach by two of the older natives, Fraggie and Hulio, who were boys at the time of the feast. Apparently, however, Marcy and Beach stayed in a different village than the one in which Fraggie and Hulio remembered enjoying that home-cooked meal.

By the way, Peter Beach is a biologist and once taught biology in a small college in the Portland, Oregon, area.

Sighting by Marvin Sconce

His son was a missionary deep in the interior of New Britain Island when Marv Sconce encountered three flying creatures there, in the early afternoon of a spring day in 1989. They were gliding in single file, at a slight downward angle, and he saw them for about a minute or two, starting when they were about three hundred feet above him. The three apparent pterosaurs glided over a river valley that was below the eyewitness, and the last he saw of them they were a little below him, following the course of that valley.

Garth Guessman interviewed Marv in August of 2006, and before the end of that year had given me the detailed eyewitness sighting report. It included the following:

No indication of feathers or hair
No feathers obscured the creatures’ muscular physique
[general] color: dark brown or black
head shape: Had point on back of head with no color difference
neck length: 8-10 inches
wingspan: 10-12 feet
Marvin saw no indication of a tail

Sighting by Harriet Sconce

The wife of Marvin, Harriet, had a sighting of one creature, on May 1, 1990, yet it was a close encounter. The following details were obtained from Guessman interviewing Harriet on October 15, 2006:

The sighting lasted about two minutes
She was about 30 feet away from the apparent pterosaur
It was about 3:00-4:00 p.m., with a clear sky
The animal was gliding at about 3 miles per hour
It’s total length was about five feet
“Smooth skin . . . like a bat wing, did not notice any hair”
Head shape: “Pointed beak, like bird but much bigger, similar to crow”
[head] “Crest? Yes, a pointy crest facing rearward”
The wingspan she estimated to be 9-11 feet
Harriet did not recall anything about a tail

Eight Sightings by Steve Sconce

Guessman interviewed Steve on October 8, 2006, obtaining information that included the following, regarding his eight sightings that occurred over a period of 18 months from 1990 to 1991:

“Number of creatures: two or three in tandem . . . 20 to 30 feet apart”
“Covering: leather, like a bat, not shiny: dull”
“Head shape: pointy straight beak . . . Crests/Comb: about 8 inches”
“Neck length: long . . . (18-24 inches)”
“Sound: . . . like [scratching] a blackboard, but a much lower pitch.”
No report or any indication of a tail

From the Youtube video on the expedition by Beach and Marcy

Sighting on New Britain Island in 2015

Milt Marcy and Peter Beach, both living in the Portland area of Oregon, went on an expedition in Papua New Guinea early in 2015, arriving in a remote village, deep in the interior of New Britain, on March 19th. Six days later, on March 25th, both Americans had their sighting of a pterosaur flying overhead.

I’ll quote from what they said in the Youtube documentary “PNG Expedition 2015 Documentary:”

Milt Marcy:

“We had a pretty momentous occasion.”

Pete Beach:

“I was in my hammock [sick], and I heard ‘big bird, big bird’ . . . I came out; I grabbed a camera that I had . . . and I looked up in the sky . . . It was almost directly above me. It was large, larger than any of the eagles or any of the other birds that we’d seen: leathery, had the claws on the wings . . . I saw the animal; I was stunned . . .

“I got the camera, so I turned the camera on, and I tried to focus in on it, but it was a very bright day [Beach had been indoors, suffering from pneumonia] . . . so I could not get a good view of the thing [with the camera]. I only had an LCD screen to look at . . .”

Beach did obtain video footage of the flying creature, but he was not able to zoom in to it. The video was examined by Wayne A. Hall, and the testimonies of eyewitnesses Peter Beach and Milt Marcy correlate with what is seen in the enhanced, enlarged images from that footage.

From video recorded by biologist Peter Beach

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News of Living Pterosaurs on New Britain Island

The other day, I found a Youtube video about an expedition in Papua New Guinea in 2015, a search for a modern pterosaur on the island of New Britain. What a success it was!

Pterosaur expeditions in Papua New Guinea

The following are expeditions in which at least one American has traveled to Papua New Guinea to search for modern pterosaurs or at least to interview native eyewitnesses of those flying creatures or to make a television show with an apparently similar purpose . . .

Those who explore remote jungles searching for modern pterosaurs

Including Garth Guessman, Jacob Kepas, Paul Nation, Jonathan Whitcomb, and David Woetzel (to name only some of them)

Dinosaurs on New Britain Island

Since the 1990s, a large ‘reptilian’ creature has been sighted occasionally on Ambungi Island in West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Ambungi Island is located on the south coast of West New Britain between Kandrian and Gasmata. . . . When shown the handbook by Hazel Richardson, Dinosaurs And Prehistoric Life . . . Robert identified a picture of a Therizinosaurus as closely matching the animal he observed, with the exception of one feature, i.e. the creature’s head.

Dinosaur birds

The pterosaur is known by several names in the United States: “dinosaur bird,” “flying dinosaur,” and perhaps the most popular “pterodactyl.” In Papua New Guinea, it is known by many names: “ropen,” “duwas,” “indava,” and “kor.” But what shocks many Americans and Europeans are eyewitness reports that these supposedly “ancient” and “extinct” flying creatures are alive and well and even flying over our heads on rare occasions.

Living pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea

Brian Hennessy was one of several men who were in a truck driving down a mountain on Bougainville Island, New Guinea, in 1971. He heard the wing flapping of the flying creature be-fore he saw it. Jonathan Whitcomb, after interviewing Brian, concluded that the Australian had witnessed a ropen, but that conclusion was made more sure after he gave both Hennessy and Duane Hodgkinson a series of silhouette-sketch choices.

Americans saw a living pterosaur during World War II

This is a reply to a portion of a huge web page . . . by the living-pterosaur critic Glen Kuban: “Living Pterosaurs (‘Pterodactyls’)”.

Recent Dragons or Pterosaurs

Once I get into a sighting report or begin to interview an eyewitness, I care little about the label used for a particular flying creature. Common is the word pterodactyl, although some eyewitnesses call it a dinosaur bird or a dragon. I care much more about exactly what the person saw. I suggest using this approach.

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The “Bible of modern pterosaurs” — Searching for Ropens and Finding God

This fourth edition of the nonfiction book is essential for all those who have any serious interest in these extraordinary flying creatures.

Pre-publication image of the back cover of this cryptozoology book

August 10, 2018

Do Reports of Live Pterosaurs Come From Lies?

cryptozoology book, nonfiction, on modern pterosaurs in the USA - "Live Pterosaurs in America"

By the modern-pterosaur expert Jonathan Whitcomb

Soon after I had returned from my expedition on Umboi Island, I saw that somebody had published an online article attacking the possibility of modern dinosaurs and pterosaurs, with a URL containing the words “stupid” and “lies.” The following long sentence appears to have been removed from that site, but it illustrates a point: When a critic writes in anger, mistakes are easily made, not just errors of judgment but errors of fact. The following sentence contains a number of errors of fact, at least in this case, indisputable falsehoods:

“Another claim of an alleged pterosaur sighting is made in Africa where a team of explorers led by John Whittcomb who are sponsored by Carl E. Baugh a staunch creationist and other creationists regard him as a kook, just like Baugh they are kooks themselves.”

As best as I recall, that old site also had a sentence declaring that I had led a group of creationists on an expedition, but that is false. Let’s concentrate on the above sentence.

That was on the critic’s web site Stupid Dinosaur Lies, a dot-com, on February 24, 2005, and the following are the most obvious errors, probably made and published because the person jumped into writing before doing reasonable digging to get to the facts:

1. Both my first name and surname were misspelled.
2. Never in my life have I set foot in Africa.
3. Nobody on my expedition was sponsored by Carl Baugh

That critic seems to have become confused in a number of ways. From the above sentence, she (I believe it was a woman; I could be mistaken) appears to have thought that only one alleged sighting was involved and that only one expedition took place. Baugh led a few brief expeditions in the 1990’s, but most expeditions have been in the 21st century, none of which included Baugh. And no ropen expedition was in Africa, only in Papua New Guinea, which is north of Australia.

I see a glimmer of truth in the sentence, for a number of Biblical creationists have been encouraging ropen expeditions in Papua New Guinea. A few weeks after my expedition, the Americans Garth Guessman and David Woetzel, along with the native Baptist minister Jacob Kepas, interviewed natives on Umboi Island. I don’t know of anyone who doubts that Guessman and Woetzel are Biblical creationists, but I’ve never read or heard anything to suggest that some creationists consider such explorers to be “kooks.”

To that critic’s credit, that sentence (beginning with “Another claim of an alleged pterosaur sighting”) was removed from the old site Stupid Dinosaur Lies. In fact the whole site disappeared in 2010 (the old dot-com version). The errors in that sentence, however, show the importance of careful research over a period of time rather than a quick shotgun blast, without any careful aim, at an idea that upsets the skeptical writer. I hope that critic continues to improve in thinking and eventually comes to recognize the truth behind the worldwide sighting reports of these animals.

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Stupid Dinosaur Lies

Within the past few weeks [late 2014], at least two posts have accused me, Jonathan Whitcomb, of deceiving people. The second writer, “idoubtit,” seems to have been convinced by the first one, Dr. Donald Prothero, regarding my online writing behavior. But when Prothero responded to me, he appeared to reveal two sources for his conviction that I have used deception, and the earliest source is the site Stupid Dinosaur Lies . . .

Modern-pterosaur expert

When a non-scientist observes a featherless flying creature that looks like a pterosaur, that eyewitness might say “pterodactyl” rather than use the correct name: pterosaur.

Critic of living pterosaurs

Scientific skepticism can be useful, when a scientist is criticized on a particular point. It can sometimes allow him or her to make a needed correction and improve the original idea. But when extreme bias exists in either that scientist or the one doing the criticism, problems arise.

Bulverism from a critic

Early yesterday morning, November 30, 2010, I posted a short announcement on the “Cryptids on the Wing” forum of Cryptozoology.com [which site has disappeared]. The quick, negative responses were no surprise to me, for I have received similar dismissals, for years, on this forum. The first criticism deserves attention here, as an example of bulverism.

Do pterosaur sightings come from lies?

The following is in response to a statement about me, Jonathan Whitcomb, published on a web forum: “. . . that he lies about in his book . . .”

I believe that the total number of web pages and blog posts that I have written over the past eight years is well over a thousand, with perhaps more than a quarter of a million words related to the concept of modern living pterosaurs. That is in addition to two editions of one nonfiction book, three editions of another, and a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal of science. With hundreds of thousands of words to choose from, why doesn’t at least one of the critics on this forum thread find one or two of my sentences, to quote me? If one of my books includes a lie, why not quote that lie, bringing to light why it is wrong?

Live Pterosaurs in America — third edition of this nonfiction book

Live “pterodactyls?” In the United States? Many scientists have long assumed all pterosaurs died millions of years ago. Now take a whirlwind tour of many years of investigations in cryptozoology, and prepare for a shock: At least two species of pterosaurs have survived . . .