Live Pterosaurs in America – Page 3 – Non-fiction cryptozoology book by Jonathan David Whitcomb

June 24, 2015

New – Pterosaur Sightings in the United States

pterosaur in South Carolina, sketch by eyewitness Susan Wooten

Details are now available on ninety important sighting reports: apparent pterosaurs in the lower-48 states of the USA, with data compiled at the end of 2012. These many details had been unavailable to the public before now (June of 2015). Why? They could have been badly misinterpreted by some persons, with unjustified speculations about migrations. The data is now released with the precaution that at least the great majority of flight patterns are probably unrelated to anything involving migration.

Long Tails and Tail Flanges in Pterosaur Sightings

It seems that ropen-like featherless flying creatures dominate other apparent pterosaurs, by a ratio of ten-to-one, according to what eyewitnesses report about the presence or absence of a long tail. (All the data here revealed relates to sightings in 33 of the 48 contiguous states of the USA.)

A surprising 28% of the reports included some description of a structure at the end of the tail, sometimes called a “diamond” or “spade.” Considering how easy it would be to overlook such a structure or to have a poor viewing angle, it strongly supports that the long-tail reports are accurate. The great majority of sightings of apparent pterosaurs in the forty-eight contiguous states of the USA appear to be encounters with one or more species of extant Rhamphorhychoid pterosaurs.

Sketch by the eyewitness Susan Wooten

See the Raw Data for Yourself

To see the data itself, right-click on the following link and choose “Open in new window,” and then left-click on the image itself:

Pterosaur sightings in 48-contiguous states

States With Multiple Sightings

Many of the thirty-three states had only one sighting report in the compiled database. The following states, however, had more than two:

California: 13

Texas: 10

Georgia: 7

Washington: 6

New York: 5

North Carolina: 4

Ohio: 3

How the Reports Were Chosen

Each report used in the data compilation was considered more likely than not to have come from an actual encounter with a modern living pterosaur. If a report appeared to have been probably from something other than a sighting of an actual living pterosaur, that report was left out, and the data was never included in the database.

Most of the reports were from eyewitnesses who were interviewed by Jonathan Whitcomb, but a minority involved other interviewers and other sources.

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Pterosaur Sightings Data for USA

I now make my pterosaur-sightings data available to the public, from the compilations leading up to the end of 2012, for the forty-eight contiguous states of the USA, for the more credible reports. Out of the 128 sightings (worldwide) in that compilation, 90 were in the lower-forty-eight states.

Pterosaur Sightings in America

“ . . . my friend and I were canoeing in the creek accessed from my back yard, when we sighted a very strange creature that we had both thought to be a prehistoric bird. Immediately, I thought ‘pterodactyl.’ . . . no apparent feathers.”

Pterodactyl Sightings in America (in Virginia)

“It came from the direction of the moon . . . all I saw was its silhouette. I could see it was big even before it was close. It seemed like it crossed a great distance with only a few flaps of its wings . . . I have not before nor since ever been so petrified in my life. . . .”

Book: Live Pterosaurs in America

The ropen of Papua New Guinea might not be the only living pterosaur in the world. This book about apparent living pterosaurs in the United States could be even more shocking.

Living Pterosaurs of the United States

“I couldn’t put this book down. It is absolutely fascinating to read about eyewitness accounts of the people who have seen these creatures.” [book review of the second edition]

Non-Extinct Pterodactyls in the USA

I’ve communicated with only a few paleontologists over the past eleven years of my investigation. In general, a fossil expert will fight against the possibility of a modern pterosaur until an eventual admission emerges: He will admit there is a small chance that a species may have survived into the present.

Ropen-Pterosaur in New Mexico

An amateur astronomer, standing outside his New Mexico home, about 140 miles west of Lubbock, Texas, saw an apparent bioluminescent nocturnal pterosaur on September 1, 2014.

February 10, 2015

Dinosaurs Carbon-Dated to < 40,000 Years BP

Assumptions About Pterosaur and Dinosaur Extinctions

For generations, Americans and peoples of other Western countries have been indoctrinated, from early childhood, with continuous proclamations about all of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs becoming extinct many millions of years ago. The truth is now coming out, however, with direct carbon-dating of dinosaur bones.

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.

Carbon-14 Dating

The new concept in determining when particular dinosaurs lived is this: Date the bones themselves, not the layers that are removed from the layers in which the fossils are found. This direct method relies on the proven principles of radiocarbon dating (C14).

Carbon-12 is the normal non-radioactive isotope of carbon. The version with two extra neutrons is carbon-14. The dating method was invented by Willard Libby in the late 1940’s and is now a standard tool for archaeologists and some other scientists.

The radioactive version constantly gets created in the atmosphere by the collision of cosmic rays with nitrogen in the air. This transforms into carbon-14 and combines with oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide. Those CO2 molecules get into into plants by photosynthesis, the same way that carbon-12 does.

Animals get C-14 by eating plants, although the radioactive form of carbon is far less common than carbon-12. When an animal or plant dies, carbon no longer enters it. That is when the ratio of the radioactive isotopes (compared with non-radioactive) decreases, for C-14 gradually decays back into a non-radioactive form.

After some time, perhaps centuries or thousands of years, a sample from an animal or plant can be tested for the ratio of the isotopes of carbon. This gives scientists raw data for arriving at a calendar date for when that organism died.

This method of dating dead material can be accurate for a maximum of about 50,000 years before the present (BP), depending on the type of test and other factors. This brings up a question:

Can Dinosaur Bones be Carbon-14 Dated?

A better question may be this: “Can we learn anything useful from carbon dating dinosaur bones?” Different persons have different beliefs about when dinosaurs lived, and that makes for different reactions to the question.

If dinosaurs only lived many millions of years ago, then all of the carbon-14 should have decayed away millions of years ago. So why do we always seem to find that isotope of carbon when we do that testing on dinosaur bones? Many tests have shown ages well under 40,000 years.

Could there be contamination of the specimens? That’s the easy answer, if nobody digs deeper into the details. Unfortunately for the old standard models, the processes and results do not fit with simple contamination conjectures.

But the simple answer to the question is this: Something can be learned from carbon dating of dinosaur fossils, even if it is only to test the processes for accuracy or the preparations for contamination possibilities.

So why are not many scientists quickly following up on the earlier tests and sending dinosaur bones to the laboratories? Almost nobody wants to be seen as a fool for abandoning the old ideas about ancient extinctions many millions of years ago. Professors and researchers have lost their jobs, in the United States, for challenging such old established beliefs.

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Dinosaurs Living With Humans

Waldemar Julsrud, a German living in Acambaro, Mexico, discovered some unusual objects while riding his horse around El Toro Mountain, in July of 1944, including a partially buried ceramic figurine. This led, in time, to the discovery of many more ceramic works of art, some of which depict dinosaurs.

Carbon-14 Shows Dinosaurs Lived Recently

One of the oral presentations in the 2012 Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting in Singapore surprised at least some of the members of the audience. Dinosaur bones from several different locations had been carbon-dated, and it appears those animals lived only tens of thousands of years ago, not many millions of years ago.

Recent Dinosaurs

How recently did the dinosaurs and pterosaurs live on this planet? Why not allow modern radiocarbon dating to continue to reveal the truth about when these wonderful creatures have lived? If no C-14 is found in any of the dinosaur bones, in the new tests, then the previous positive findings may be questioned.

Sense of Truth

My friend Mitchell was in a hurry to get to the restaurant for breakfast. Looking back, we’re grateful he was late, getting to within a few blocks of the Twin Towers when the first plane hit. That restaurant was near the top of one of those towers. Yes, it was that time, on that day, in New York.

Carbon-14 Dating and Dinosaurs

Because so many paleontologists have so long assumed that all dinosaurs became extinct many million years old, the abstract of the report by the Paleochronology group was censured, deleted from the conference website because they did not like to consider such an apparently revolutionary discovery. The two chair persons did not challenge the data openly but removed it from public view without notifying the authors.

December 18, 2014

Pterodactyl Attacks in British Columbia?

Set aside any independent reports that I, Jonathan Whitcomb, may have personally received from eyewitnesses; we have two authors whose books either imply or describe apparent modern pterosaurs (AKA “pterodactyls”) in British Columbia, and those two nonfiction books include reports relating to possible attacks on humans:

Missing 411 Western United States & Canada – by David Paulides
Bird From Hell (second edition) – by Gerald McIsaac

Be aware that I have so far found nothing in the book by Paulides (missing persons) that gives any hint that he knew about living-pterosaur investigations when he wrote it. As of December 17, 2014, I have read through half of his book. The “pterodactyl” interpretation is my own, so please don’t hold that author responsible for this unorthodox view of missing persons on Vancouver Island (or anywhere else people disappear). The authors who have written from this perspective are me and Mr. McIsaac.

Since the Bird From Hell book mentions a lack of feathers and that eyewitnesses describe a tail that is six feet long, I believe that this is a species of ropen.

Two missing toddlers on Vancouver Island

These two children were only two years old when they were tragically lost, on Vancouver Island, to what seems to have been the same kind mystery. One little body was found three-and-a-half miles away and the other, four miles away; both of those distances were too far to be reasonably ascribed to toddler wandering.

To learn the details of these and many other cases of missing persons, refer to the book Missing 411 – Western United States & Canada. The critical point is how these two disappearances of children in western British Columbia relate to other cases in the western United States: When the body or living victim is found, the discovery is often too many miles away from the location where the person became missing and often too much higher in elevation.

Two-year-old Yehudi Prior and his father were four miles north of Wild Duck Lake, on September 23, 1974, when the toddler disappeared. The body was found six days later, “near Hope Creek in the next valley north of Wild Duck Valley . . . a fantastic long distance . . . It seemed impossible that he could go that far.”

Two-year-old Lynn Marie Hollier left the family cabin on July 24, 1986, at Horne Lake (also on Vancouver Island), just west of Spider Lake Provincial Park and Horne Lake Caves Provincial Park. Tracking dogs were not successful. Twenty-six days after the toddler became missing, two hunters found the child’s body under a fallen log, over three miles from the family cabin. The mother later responded to the suggestion that her two-year-old had walked that far uphill: “There’s no way . . . It just doesn’t seem possible.”

Take the above two cases in context. Many similar missing-persons tragedies involve the later discovery of scattered bones or no evidence of what happened. This leads to the distinct possibility that an animal predator is involved. Yet when a body is found intact or a victim is found alive, odd assortments of clothing are missing, including one or both shoes. We now have an explanation, but it is shocking.

More research is needed, but the overall evidence seems to be pointing at a flying predator and one that is larger than any extant bird known to western science. It seems that the body of Lynn Hollier was found because the child was under that fallen log, where the flying creature could not locate what it had dropped.

That is why tracking dogs are so often unsuccessful: The victim had been carried away through the air, not dragged over the ground.

How does a flying predator drop a human prey? It’s when clothing or a shoe or two is mainly what is gripped by the animal: The person falls out of the clothing that is then left in the claws of the creature. That is why clothing is found maybe hundreds of feet away from an intact body or living victim or the clothing is never found, for the animal soon realizes what happened yet cannot find the human to eat it. The body of a missing person, or a living victim, is often found in thick bushes where the predator could not find what had been dropped.

I hope that knowing details about such tragedies can help us avoid other similar tragedies in the future. My condolences to the family members who could not have been expected to have known about these normally-nocturnal flying creatures and the dangers a few of them may pose on rare occasions. These apparent modern pterosaurs seem to be mostly fish-eaters or they often hunt bats or birds.

“Bird From Hell” of Northern British Columbia

It’s known as the “Devil Bird” by elders of the First Nation people in the area where the author Gerald McIsaac has lived for many years. He believes, as I Jonathan Whitcomb believe, that this is a species of pterosaur. To quote from McIsaac’s book Bird From Hell (second edition):

The public is well aware of [some] predators . . . but they are not aware of the pterodactyl [as a living animal]. That is the reason so many people are killed by this animal [in British Columbia].

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Women may be Attacked in British Columbia

One of the girls in the village was recently attacked by a pterodactyl. She had a campfire burning in her backyard and was attacked in the darkness. . . . She called me up, very upset, as people are laughing at her.

Deadly Pterosaurs

Not all human encounters with live pterosaurs are a pleasant surprise. On rare occasions, a ropen, or kor, or indava . . . will attack somebody, and the results are sometimes tragic . . .

Pterodactyl Attacks in Yosemite

These weird disappearances are not confined to Yosemite, nor even to the United States. Several factors do seem to tie together cases that are separated by long distances and sometimes separated by decades. To understand what may be happening in Yosemite National Park, we need to see in a broader sense. Look to Canada and to Mexico.

Is the Ropen a “Stupid Fantasy?”

As this interview became publicized online, another biology professor, this one in Minnesota, became upset and wrote his own blog post, ridiculing the idea of modern pterosaurs. The content of the post by the skeptical professor, however, was weak.

November 28, 2014

Dr. Prothero Attacks Living Pterosaurs

Jonathan David Whitcomb in 2004, near Gomlongon Village, Umboi Island

Readers of a recent post by Dr. Donald Prothero may think that I, Jonathan Whitcomb, have single-handedly deceived ignorant people into believing that pterosaurs are still alive. The paleontologist seems upset that my web pages dominate Google searches (and they used to dominate, years ago, on words like ropen.) Let’s look deeper.

Why use the Words “Apparent Pterosaur?”

Google “apparent pterosaur” (within quotes) and all nine non-image pages on the first Google-page are my publications, at least on November 28, 2014. What other search terms result in such a domination by my writings? My postings do not even come close to that dominance with the following terms used:

ropen
pterosaur
pterodactyl

In fact, today the word ropen brings up “Don’t Get Strung Along by the Ropen Myth,” on the top non-image first-page position, and that article is extremely critical of living-pterosaur ideas. In addition, pterodactyl did not bring up even one of my posts on the first-page listing on Google.

So why do my blog posts and other web pages dominate when googling apparent pterosaur within quotation marks? I often use those words when referring to an eyewitness report of a flying creature. In other words, I try to be objective and allow for the possibility that a particular encounter was not from observing a living pterosaur.

Bulverism in a post by Prothero

A major problem with Dr. Prothero’s post is in the idea that I, Jonathan Whitcomb, have used deception in promoting my ideas, thus flooding the internet with my supposed error in believing in modern pterosaurs. I will not link to “Fake Pterosaurs and Sock Puppets,” but it’s easily found. In reality, I used two pen names, in a minority of my writings, to allow readers to learn about eyewitness sightings without becoming distracted by my common name, which had been used in ridicule years earlier. I used those two pen names because of earlier false accusations about dishonesty; I did not use them to deceive.

Sock puppetry accusations pull readers’ attention away from the point, which is eyewitness testimony. Prothero has fallen into bulverism, but in a more pernicious form than the one described by C. S. Lewis decades ago.

Men of action, who search remote jungles for modern pterosaurs but who return home admitting they saw no clear pterosaur—they do not lie about their failures. They do, however, tell the truth about what natives tell them. Men who go nowhere to look for any living thing—they may be least qualified to accuse men of action of deceiving.

Objective Investigation of Reports of Living Pterosaurs

Getting back to the words apparent pterosaur, an individual eyewitness of one sighting of a flying creature can be mistaken in thinking a bird or bat or unknown non-pterodactyl was a pterosaur. Dr. Prothero and I agree on that. But that paleontologist appears to be completely ignorant of the overall sighting report details, in particular the similarities that cross cultural boundaries and cross religious differences.

Long tails on featherless flying creatures dominate reports from around the world, even in Western countries where short-tailed Pterodactyloid pterosaurs dominate in fictional television and in films. I have found practically no difference between American sighting reports and in the reports from third-world countries where cultures and traditions are greatly different.

Common kind of image seen by Americans in fiction (no long tail)

Compare the above with the sketch by Eskin Kuhn:

This is much more like what both Americans and jungle natives actually see

If a cryptozoologist becomes over-exuberant in trying to persuade the Western world that one or more species of pterosaur is alive, and loses all sense of objectiveness, would that radical person use the phrase “apparent pterosaur” so often that his pages would dominate when a Google search were done with it? Of course not. The point is that I am honestly trying to know and understand the truth about these sightings. I am trying to be objective.

I hope that many readers will come to understand that I have not spent over 10,000 hours, in the past eleven years, on a personal project to deceive people. This is not actually about me, however; it’s coming to that understanding so people can awaken to listen to the eyewitnesses with an open mind. The overall report-details make the case.

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Honesty in Ropen Searching

A different kind of attack has been launched, as an American paleontologist has dismissed the ropen as a “fake” pterosaur and dismissed me, Jonathan Whitcomb, as one who practices deception.

Whitcomb interviewed on Monster-X Radio

“Maybe, Shane, I should go a little bit into some of the ideas that have been floating around and thrown out by skeptics . . . One of them is about, well, people are just misidentifying flying foxes. That’s one of the oldest: I heard of that way back in 2004; I think that was already an old idea. But this is one of the examples: You see, these seven boys were terrified at this creature that was not a flying fox because they would not have been scared of it. . . .”

Ropen in Papua New Guinea

Hodgkinson continues to give a powerful testimony of his 1944 encounter with a huge flying creature that is an obvious live pterosaur, notwithstanding the Western dogma about universal extinction.

C. S. Lewis and Bulverism

When someone publishes a web site with a URL that includes the words “stupid” and “lies,” and the point of the site is to ridicule those who promote the idea of living dinosaurs or living pterosaurs, “bulverism” probably fits . . .

The quest for discovering modern pterosaurs – nonfiction book

Searching for Ropens and Finding God – fourth edition

September 18, 2014

Ropen Expedition Ten Years Ago

Glowing Pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea

I took the flight from Los Angeles International Airport ten years ago tomorrow, to eventually arrive in Papua New Guinea, to search for ropens. How did the living-pterosaur expeditions in those remote tropical rain forests promote awareness that similar flying creatures live in the Americas? That deserves attention.

That expedition in Papua New Guinea required many months of preparation, but when I returned to the United States, early in October of 2004, I was ill prepared for the next few years, when I would get many sighting reports of apparent American ropens. Few persons should have been less shocked than me, to learn that similar flying creatures live in the USA, yet it took some getting use to, for I was still a child of Western culture and our part of this wonderful world, the American part, appears so scientific, so undragonish.

How could it be possible for a real dragon, on any night it chooses, to fly over the Smithsonian castle in Washington D.C.? The most popular science fiction movies show pterodactyls (none of them glowing with any bioluminescence) flying over the most remote tropical rain forests of the planet. Nonetheless, which is more believable:

Dinosaurs and pterosaurs from eggs laid in nests in wilderness areas?
Dinosaurs and pterosaurs extracted from ancient blood in mosquitos?

I choose well-hidden eggs, for no miraculous DNA magic-manipulation is needed for those little darlings to hatch and grow. At least for some species of pterosaurs, it’s much easier to believe in natural nocturnal flying creatures, glowing in the sky and causing ancient people to write about fire-breathing dragons.

Kept in a Corner of Earth or Flying Around the World?

So how exactly do you prevent a large flying creature from spreading out across the globe over a period of thousands of years? You don’t. Some butterflies get blown across a sea or even an ocean on occasion, and some birds navigate across much of the earth, in extraordinary migrations. A large dragon can certainly do the same, and flying dragons have swept across worldwide human cultures, through countless stories, for countless centuries. Don’t even think about trying to hold one of them down on the ground in Papua New Guinea or in any other island or continent in the southwest Pacific.

Jonathan David Whitcomb in 2004, near Gomlongon Village, Umboi Island Jonathan Whitcomb on Umboi Island

Sling shots on a table in a hotel in Papua New Guinea Sling shots, gifts for villager leaders

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A Glowing Ropen in New Mexico

The moon had already gone behind the trees, by the middle of that night a week ago Monday, so Mr. Slack and his buddy searched the sky for the Andromeda Nebula. This required using a low-magnification eyepiece, fortunately, to locate that galaxy, allowing the amateur astronomer to see the flying creature sweep through the field of view.

Ropen Only Extinct on Wikipedia

Regarding the definition of “ropen,” that encyclopedia-dictionary quotation is outdated. In my nonfiction Searching for Ropens and Finding God, it is defined thus: “A modern pterosaur with Rhamphorhynchoid characteristics.”

Destination Truth Ropen Episode

These great winged beasts — which possess leathery wings, a flanged tail, teeth-lined beaks and razor-sharp claws — are reputedly nocturnal . . .

September 12, 2014September 18, 2014

Ropen or Pterosaur in New Mexico

An amateur astronomer, standing outside his New Mexico home, about 140 miles west of Lubbock, Texas, saw an apparent bioluminescent nocturnal pterosaur on September 1, 2014. It was gliding across the telescope’s field of view, which was at low magnification for finding the Andromeda Nebula. Michael Slack, of Roswell, New Mexico watched the flying creature both through the eyepiece and by direct observation.

Possible Ropen Bioluminescence

The eyewitness said, “As to there being any ‘lights’ or luminescence…the grayish colored areas of my sketches was a dull grayish brown (Brackish) color that could easily be seen with the naked eye against the night sky. The yellow colored pencil I used in my sketches represents the “Dull” yellowish spotting I saw. On the drawing of the winged creature if you will notice there is some yellow color added…this also represents the area of the creature that looked to me like the most illuminated aspects/parts of the thing combined with the afore mentioned grayish/brown coloring.”

Other Night Sightings of Possible Pterosaurs in Western USA

From the book Searching for Ropens and Finding God (third edition) we read about sightings of strange nocturnal flying creatures:

That report prepared me for an email I received years later, early in 2012, about two men who had seen two huge flying creatures about twenty-five miles to the south, over San Diego [California]. One of the men told me, “It was about 8 pm. . . . it was a really clear night cuzz it had rained the day before. We were standing in the street . . . from the west came this dark object in the sky. It was right over us [90-120 feet high] . . . it looked like a huge bird, it was gliding in the air . . . it turned around and it stood still in the air, it was flapping its wings while it was there. Then . . . came another one . . . as it got close to the other one they both went east.”

From a California Newspaper Article in 1891

[Introduction to Los Angeles Herald article] The Fresno sportsman now goes gunning for pterodactyls. These are dragons who lived in the carboniferous age, but who forgot to get petrified . . .

FRESNO, July 31. The report that two strange dragons with wings have recently appeared in the swamps east of Selma was at first regarded by many as a sen- sational story without foundation in fact, but after different persons at different places had claimed to have seen the strange creatures it began to be thought worth investigating. . . .

The men who live along the swales and sand hollows east and southeast of Selma on the evening of July 13th heard strange sounds in the air just after dark, like the rushing of wings when some large bird passes swiftly through the air overhead. At the same time a cry was heard, resembling that of a swan, though enough different to make it plain it was not a swan . . .

[On another night two men] were surprised to hear a strange, strangling noise in the deep swale under the bridge. In a moment there was a heavy flapping of wings and the two monsters rose slowly from the water and flew so near the men that the wind from their wings was plainly felt.

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Glowing Ropen in New Mexico

The moon had already gone behind the trees, by the middle of that night a week ago Monday, so Mr. Slack and his buddy searched the sky for the Andromeda Nebula. This required using a low-magnification eyepiece, fortunately, to locate that galaxy, allowing the amateur astronomer to see the flying creature sweep through the field of view.

Ropen of Papua New Guinea

Jonathan David Whitcomb, a forensic videographer, interviewed Hodgkinson, in 2004, and found his testimony credible [the sighting itself was in New Guinea in 1944]. In 2005, Garth Guessman, another ropen investigator, in Montana video-taped his own interview with Hodgkinson and the session was analyzed by Whitcomb, who became even more convinced the World War II veteran was telling the truth: The man had seen a ropen.

“Pterodactyl” in Southern States

“I live in central [New Mexico]. Fourteen years ago, in [Socorro], N.M., me and a close friend, who now has a masters in biology, were hiking during the midday sun at [a] box canyon and something blocked the sun for a moment. We both looked up to see what did that and saw a large flying animal.”

Live Pterosaurs in Texas

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.”

August 29, 2014April 14, 2015

Is the Ropen a “Stupid Fantasy?”

Professor Peter Beach is interviewed by cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb, on the banks of the Yakima River in Washington state

It began after the online publication of a photo of a biology professor from Oregon; he was standing by the Yakima River in Washington state. Professor Peter Beach (who has taught at a small college in the Portland area) was being interviewed by me, Jonathan D. Whitcomb (an American cryptozoology author), on August 6, 2014, with Milt Marcy (also from Portland), another cryptozoologist. The controversy related to what Beach and Marcy believe they may have seen: bioluminescent pterosaurs, perhaps even ropens.

Peter Beach explains how the flying light left this tree at night

As this interview became publicized online, another biology professor, this one in Minnesota, became upset and wrote his own blog post, ridiculing the idea of modern pterosaurs. The content of the post by the skeptical professor, however, was weak; it relied on words like “stupid” (in the title) and with “turds” to describe the many writings of a cryptozoologist with whom the Minnesota professor disagrees. I think it would have been more intelligent to rely on reasoning or facts, rather than on bulverism.

The skeptic proclaimed the absence of any evidence for modern pterosaurs (ropen or not) and used his imagination to come up with various faulty motivations for the one that he concentrated on criticizing.

No Evidence for Living Pterosaurs?

Do cryptozoologists really have no evidence for the bioluminescent ropen? It depends on how one defines “evidence.” One thing is certain: There is no evidence of any kind for the universal extinction of all species of pterosaurs.

So what about modern living ones? The great weight of evidence for extant pterosaurs lives in eyewitness testimonies and the statistical analysis of the compiled data from those records. Hoaxes have been eliminated as a significant possibility for the overall case of 128 sighting reports compiled at the end of 2012, by several methods.

In other words, ropen searching and research still lives within the realm of cryptozoology, with no dead or living body of this flying creature to examine in a laboratory or in a zoo; yet scientific methods have been used in examining the eyewitness evidence. Biologists need not worry that cryptozoology is trying to break down a back door or to sneak through a crack in the wall of biology; thus far, it’s just a few scientific tools being borrowed from science, to be used in this narrow field of cryptozoology: Nothing is stolen. When a ropen is caught, dead or alive, it will be brought in through the front door. (Once it’s inside, however, the philosophical case will be opened wide.)

What is a Ropen?

The title of the skeptic’s post was “There are no living pterosaurs, and ‘ropen’ is a stupid fantasy.” So what is the definition for this flying creature whose existence the skeptic-professor in Minnesota disputes? The third edition of my nonfiction book Searching for Ropens and Finding God gives it thus: “A modern pterosaur with Rhamphorhynchoid characteristics.” In other words, a long-tailed featherless flying creature that many American non-scientists would call a “pterodactyl.”

Yet we need to clarify the difference between “Rhamphorhynchoid” and “ropen.” At least as of August 27, 2014, “ropen” refers to a cryptid, and the longer name refers to a type of pterosaur known from fossils. The relationship between them, however, is critical: worldwide, the resemblances are astonishing: featherless flying creatures that have long tails that end with a “diamond” (or a similar description for a tail flange).

On a book cover: sketch of an apparent pterosaur seen by Patty Carson in Cuba

Definition of “Stupid”

One dictionary defined it as “lacking ordinary quickness and keenness of mind.” Take that simply in the literal sense and the biology professor in Minnesota has a problem in making that word useful to his case. A closer look reveals that “stupid” problem.

The cryptozoologist criticized by the professor in Minnesota has worked in his specialty (of sighting reports of apparent pterosaurs) for eleven years, with many thousands of hours of experience with the overall subject; the critic, probably less than ten serious hours. Even if the skeptic in Minnesota were ten times as smart (or less stupid) than the cryptozoologist he criticized, the professor would be at the wrong end of the resulting ratio, 60-to-1. Those are not good odds for the man who teaches biology in Minnesota. This is not to say that the professor is stupid. He is just not likely to be many hundreds of times smarter than the cryptozoologist who has written several nonfiction books on the subject, in addition to a published scientific paper in a recognized peer-reviewed journal of science.

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Ropen – A Modern Pterosaur

Countless eyewitnesses, in many countries across the planet, have pondered what it was they had seen. But ropens continue to fly overhead, continuing to shock humans who had assumed that all pterosaurs had become extinct millions of years ago.

Destination Truth Ropen Episode

I’m thinking about a particular native who was interviewed by Josh Gates, during the Destination Truth expedition of 2007: Fabian. In spite of Fabian’s assurance, however, the expedition team was probably skeptical, at least to some extent, for those visitors to Papua New Guinea were, after all, Americans. They may have thought, “How could a large long-tailed pterosaur be still alive, without the knowledge of any of our scientists?”

Bioluminescent Pterosaurs

There is a species other than a pterosaur that is purported to have intrinsic bioluminescent capability, namely the common barn owl, Tyto Alba.

Evidence for Pterosaurs and Honesty

For modern living pterosaurs, however, we have BOTH physical evidence and eyewitness evidence. The difficulty some persons have with it, however, is that reported eyewitness encounters with living pterosaurs dominate the physical evidence, in both quantity and quality.

July 26, 2014

Live Pterosaurs in Texas

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.

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.