Tag: fear

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Brownsville, Texas, 1995 Sighting

I just received a report from a young lady who lived in Texas as a child; she reports a giant flying creature she saw in her neighbor’s backyard.

“. . . our dog hadn’t touched her dog food and . . . I found her cowering around the side of our house . . . In the open backyard next door was what looked like a 9 or 10 ft tall man . . . I realized that this man didn’t have a face like a man at all!  I froze in fear trying to figure out what I was staring at.  Then slowly I watched what looked like disgusting black leathery . . . bat-like wings unwrap from around the man . . . [I] realized this “thing” had kind of been perched on one leg like a heron would and so my mind said it must be a strange species of blue heron which I had heard [were] rather large. . . . it turned its head . . . and that’s when I realized the shape of its head and that it somehow looked like a pterodactyl.  I thought that was crazy . . . and then the thing appeared to just lift off the ground and it swooped, only it looked like it was floating, gliding at me and I ran into my house and slammed the sliding glass door behind me . . . Well, my parents never believed me.  They thought I had made it up! My dad showed me pictures of blue herons and how big they could get, but they looked nothing like what I had seen!”

I have asked the eyewitness for more information (Feb 8, 2010).

Do not confuse this sighting with the 1995 sighting by another child (a boy) in 1995. That was in Marion County, Texas, and seems to have been a different species of pterosaur.

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Eyewitness Fear

On pages 23 of my non-fiction book Live Pterosaurs in America, the eyewitness DF (anonymous) said, “The threat felt from this thing is what bothers me the most. Once . . . I encountered a cougar . . . That did not scare me. This thing did.” She is not alone.

In late 2004, I interviewed three eyewitnesses in a remote village near Lake Pung (Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea). Gideon Koro, and his brother Wesley, appeared calm during their interviews; they admitted that they were afraid during their sighting (they were with friends, including Mesa Augustin, at Lake Pung). Mesa, however, stood almost petrified as I videotaped and questioned him. I came to realize that he was still frightened, ten years after his encounter with the ropen.

But for most eyewitnesses of pterosaurs (or apparent pterosaurs) in the United States, the fear is not of the creature: People fear ridicule, for observing a living pterosaur, in our culture, is taboo. That makes the investigations challenging for me and my associates who interview eyewitnesses.