Category: Lights, strange

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Pterosaurs and Marfa Lights

Perhaps the case for Marfa Lights being living pterosaurs is somewhat speculative. But how speculative are the criticisms of those who insist that pterosaurs cannot be living! One critic went so far as to suggest that whiskey is the cause for hundreds of eyewitness accounts of strange lights around Marfa, Texas.

Although the case for a group of bioluminescent living pterosaurs flying around Marfa appears tenuous, let’s consider the origin of this idea. This involves both sightings of apparent living pterosaurs and the nature of the more mysterious flying lights of Marfa.

Pterosaurs have been reported north, south, east, and west of Marfa. My book Live Pterosaurs in America goes into details. The apparent lack of such reports close to Marfa does not rule out the possibility of a relationship with neighboring areas.

Some characteristics of at least some of the CE-III mystery lights around Marfa—those characteristics include bright lights that fly at mostly low altitude and appear in various colors: red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. That is how eyewitnesses sometimes describe the ropen light of Papua New Guinea, although natives in various areas of those tropical islands have various local names for what may be the same large nocturnal flying creature. In addition, the speed of flight has sometimes been described in similar ways (for both ropen lights and Marfa Lights): faster than ordinary bird-flight.

But one more significant fact remains: No other explanation (for the CE-III mystery lights around Marfa) comes close to appearing adequate, when compared with the conjecture of large bioluminescent flying predators, and what fits that description better than “ropen.”

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“Marfa Lights Solved” – Is it a Giant Bird?

I reply to a blog post (Houston Press Blogs) by Richard Connelly: “Marfa Lights Solved!! It’s a Giant Bird!!” His brief remarks of December 7th were surely occasioned by the December 6th press release about my hypothesis on Marfa Lights. I don’t mind the brevity of his post, for it was just ridicule. I commented twice, in detail, on his blog, but more detail seems in order here. (By the way, “Giant Bird” is Connelly’s invention; I never used that expression.)

The first problem, appearing to me to need immediate clarification, relates to a misunderstanding about the basic nature of the true ML (James Bunnell’s designation for “Mystery Lights”) around Marfa, Texas. It seems Mr. Connelly needs to read Bunnell’s book, Hunting Marfa Lights, more than he needs to read my book, Live Pterosaurs in America. I quote part of my comment on Connelly’s blog:

. . . the investigation by the Society of Physics Students at the University of Texas at Dallas. It’s brief and easy to read. Note that those two nights of observations were done with the assumption that car headlights were the cause of all the appearances of strange lights. Since they assumed “car headlights,” that is where they looked on those two nights: [towards] Highway 67.

Did those students of the University of Texas at Dallas really solve a controversial mystery? I think not. Ask the right question in the beginning, for it can lead us into enlightenment; asking the wrong question (even if answered correctly) can lead us into ignorance. This appears to be a critical error that doomed those students to failure, for they seemed to have formulated a question like, “Can car headlights near Marfa, Texas, appear mysterious?”

What scientist or investigator doubted the possibility of night mirages of car headlights? None of which I am aware. Perhaps the best that can be said of the student experiment is this: It confirmed that visitors passing through the Marfa area, when they stop at the viewing platform, often see distant car headlights on highway 67 and find their appearance mysterious.

Questions about the true ML near Marfa could include, “Is it biological or geological in origin?” The flat assumption of Richard Connelly, that there are no mysterious flying lights near Marfa—that may have come from his avoiding any critical evaluation of that student experiment and his eagerness to ridicule a strange-sounding interpretation.

“Big Bird” may have been avoided, in favor of “Giant Bird,” for the Sesame-Street-sounding name is the title of a nonfiction cryptozoology book about sightings of strange flying creatures (at least some of which are like pterosaurs), especially sightings in the state of Texas. Indeed Big Bird (the book, not the Sesame Street character) competes with my own nonfiction cryptozoology book, Live Pterosaurs in America.

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Flying Creature in Los Angeles

Flying only about 300 feet above the heads of two astonished humans (the couple had been taking a walk in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles County one night in 2009), the creature appeared to have a wingspan of 10-20 feet. Also astonishing was the faint glow that led one of the eyewitnesses to connect the creature with the ropen of Papua New Guinea.

But it was not the bright flash of the ropen that the Los Angeles creature displayed that night; the glow was faint enough to suggest a possible reflective quality on the wings. It was definitely unlike a bird.

More about the Flying Creature in San Fernando Valley, Southern California

Addendum #1:

To those who would dismiss accounts like this with “mistaken identification” I would reply with, “What was it?” If what was seen in Los Angeles County, California, in 2009, was not a giant glowing ropen, then what would appear like that and not be that?

Some ill-informed supporters of the concept of living pterosaurs have seen a video of a Frigate Bird and thought it was a ropen; that is unfortunate. Frigate birds are not ropens, and they appear very different from each other.

Addendum #2:

The new nonfiction book Searching for Ropens and Finding God (third edition) has a new chapter on sightings of apparent pterosaurs in the United States of America, a chapter that is 100 pages long. This is serious.

Here is the first paragraph of that chapter in the book, a brief mentioning of a sighting of a pterosaur-like flying creature in Los Angeles County:

On a pleasant day in June of 2012, I walked into the Sheriff station in Lakewood, California, two miles northeast of my home in Long Beach. I knew better than to tell a police officer of my concerns about the safety of family pets now that pterodactyls had invaded the community. Nobody knows better than I: Avoid that word and avoid uttering the unforgivable word “dragon.” Yet there I was, holding onto the numbered tag as I waited for my turn, the moment when I would walk up to the window and tell the police officer . . . well, tell him something.

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British Biologist Observes Strange Lights

How are a British insect expert and strange flying lights in New Guinea related to reports of modern living pterosaurs in the United States? That requires a detailed explanation, but they do relate.

Bioluminescence is light produced by living organisms such as fireflies, some fungi, and some oceanic life (especially marine life deep in the oceans). According to many natives in Papua New Guinea, some flying creatures glow as they fly at night. Daylight descriptions strongly suggest modern pterosaurs live in Papua New Guinea, and some native eyewitnesses have observed the glowing flying creatures close enough to see the form (Jonah Jim and Jonathan Ragu of Umboi Island), comparing it to a silhouette sketch of a Sordes Pilosus (Rhamphornynchoid pterosaur).

The point? Evelyn Cheesman, a British entomologist, long ago observed strange flying lights deep in the mainland of what is now the nation of Papua New Guinea; just south of that location, in 2006, Paul Nation, of Texas, observed similar lights (called by the local natives “indava”). When native eyewitnesses observe the indavas in daylight, they see large winged-creatures; one native described the size in terms of an airplane (near Tawa Village is an airstrip for small planes). But strange flying lights are hardly confined to Papua New Guinea. Stories of American ghost lights abound in many areas, and in Marfa, Texas, the behavior of strange lights suggests nocturnal flying predators are hunting bats. In the United States, sightings of strange flying lights and rare daylight sightings of obvious pterosaurs are in the same general areas. As rare and strange as they may be, it seems that nocturnal pterosaurs hunt bats at night, even in the United States of America.

Saving an endangered salamander in Mexico

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American Ghost Lights

Chapters Four and Five of Live Pterosaurs in America are titled “Flying Luminescence” and “American Ghost Lights.” The lights have been seen in many states, some of them for generations, with names like Marfa Lights (Texas), Hornet Spook Light (borders Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma), Brown Mountain Light (North Carolina), Yakima Lights (Washington state), and Bingham Lights (South Carolina). The book deals more with Bingham Lights and Yakima Lights. [Update: the second edition of Live Pterosaurs in America, published late in 2010, has a whole chapter about the Marfa Lights.]

Of course not all these “ghost lights” need be from the same source, and even in one area, unidentified lights need not all be from the same source (Yakima in particular, according to the book). But the regularity, over many years, of the light-sightings in some locations strongly suggests that in at least each area, the source is the same (for many lights) over the history of that area.

My associates and I have a unique perspective, having studied the ropen light of Papua New Guinea. We know,  from many eyewitness testimonies, that those nocturnal lights correlate with sightings of glowing flying creatures described like giant Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs. We suspect that some American “ghost lights” are from living pterosaurs; some flight behaviors, such as a fast dive from the sky without any fast ascent, obviously fit a diving creature more than a ball of gas.

From my investigations (including analyzing eyewitness testimonies over several years), I believe that some of these American “ghost lights” come from at least two species of bioluminescent pterosaurs. All the species are rare, not necessarily endangered. Of course, not all apparent pterosaurs seen in daylight need be bioluminescent at night, but when a ghost-light location is nearby (note the Susan Wooten sighting in South Carolina), it deserves consideration for that particular creature.

Regardless of the degree of rarity of modern living pterosaurs in North America, how rare the scientist who has interpreted strange flying creatures or ghost lights as potential living pterosaurs! This is not in itself evidence against the hypothesis, for our society indoctrinates us into universal-extinction-of-all-dinosaurs-and-pterosaurs. The evidence for living pterosaurs (including perhaps bioluminescent ones in North America) includes rare sightings of the creatures in daylight, when they are obviously non-bird and non-bat. This deserves serious consideration, in light of the continuous invesigations that continue to involve new sighting reports.