In the new nonfiction book Searching for Ropens and Finding God, several sighting reports from Texas are included, encounters with very strange flying creatures.
From page 217
I got an email, in August of 2010, from a lady who had seen an “extremely large bird” that looked like a “pterodactyl.” The eyewitness was only a child in 1988 or 1989, when the creature flew over the playground of a school in the Houston area. Apparently she knew nothing, at the time, about other sightings in that area, strange flying creatures seen in southeast Texas in the 1980’s. Only when she was older did she look for reports of other sightings like hers.
From page 219
Getting back to the lady’s encounter northwest of Austin, she told her husband, “It looked like a pterodactyl.” Note that she first was thinking or hoping for a commonplace explanation: a big turkey vulture, only this thing had a long neck and a pointed beak and head. The wingspan was the length of the water trough, six feet, and it was “at least four foot tall.”
From page 221
Consider more of what he told me. It was the loud screeching that caused him to look up. He saw nothing strange at first, just something circling high up in the sky, like a hawk or buzzard. The screeching continued as the boy ran to the house to get binoculars, for the sound was strange and he was unsure if it was coming from the dark-colored thing that was gliding fast, unlike a bird.
Why so few Newspaper Headlines?
Here’s a small part of the answer, from page 300 of the book:
For the past century and a half, few newspapers have ever put a live-pterodactyl story on the front page. Why? Hardly any biologist would admit that kind of creature could still exist. Yet what could grab the attention of a biologist other than a front-page newspaper headline? It was almost impossible for any biologist to see the big picture in pterosaur sightings until the past few years, when many people, from around the world, have become connected by the internet. But even if a professor sees a report about a sighting, that’s just one report.
In other words, very few biology professors have anything remotely like a broad perspective on eyewitness reports of flying creatures that resemble pterosaurs. Without that support from those kind of professors, few newspapers publish articles on such reports. But that is part of what is needed to attract the attention of biology professors: media reports of apparent living pterosaurs.
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Flying Creature in Los Angeles
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. . . .
Religion and Science in the new Ropen Book
How much religion and science are found in the nonfiction Searching for Ropens and Finding God? It depends on what you’re looking for.
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