ropen – Live Pterosaurs in America

October 15, 2021October 16, 2021

Shocking Pterodactyl Sighting in Nevada

By Jonathan David Whitcomb, executive director of Animal Discovery

I was delighted to receive a long email early in October of 2021 from a man in a rural area of Nevada. His close encounter with a huge ropen one night apparently relates to missing and killed animals on nearby farms.

desert in Nevada, snow on mountains in background

(generic desert photo in Nevada)

Here is part of his first email to me:

“I found you after something amazing [happened] tonight . . . somewhere in … Nevada … These creatures are big enough and defensive enough to pose a genuine and serious threat to life …”

“Approximately 9:20 pm Saturday, 02 October, 2021 (tonight) … While studying … on the computer in the garage, I heard something very heavy land on the tin roof … Quickly, I turned off the lights. And, quietly, and very carefully I opened the door and went outside. . . .”

“The garage’s roofline measures 26 ft wide. This creature’s wingspan spread wider by about 2 feet on each side and its wingtip flapped within about 4 feet of my head as I opened the door. . . . its wing appeared nearly light/tan/brown/sandy on the topside, but more the color of the night sky underneath. . . .”

“The wingtip didn’t look like feathers, but it looked very much like a gigantic bat’s wing. . . . It makes an audible whooh whooh whooh sound of much air moved as its mighty wings power it at takeoff and climbing, then starting to flap slower as it gets about 50 or 60 yards above the terrain (or at least this big one did). . . .”

“Over the past few weeks, many of my neighbor’s barn cats disappeared (neighbor to the north). Something at night has been eating her cats. Every few nights I hear a cat screaming its last breath trying to fend off something, which kills it very quickly.”

At first, I thought it might be coyotes or a ranch dog loose at night. But, when I realized I haven’t heard or seen coyotes for quite a while now (very unusual). And, when she asked me to look around for tracks, I found no coyote tracks or dog tracks, or tracks of any kind. Only tracks of her barn cat tracks and some chickadee and quail tracks. And, while eagles and owls often land on their prey while leaving no tracks, you see wing tracks/markings when they get a jackrabbit (we saw only 1 this year, which is very unusual). . . .”

The most complete nonfiction book on sightings of modern pterosaurs: Searching for Ropens and Finding God (fourth edition)

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Pterodactyl Kills Chickens and House Cats in Nevada

A particular modern pterosaur has now been tied to chicken loses in both central Utah and in Nevada. Earlier in October of 2021 I gave it the name “Draper Ropen”, and it was last seen in a rural neighborhood of Nevada on October 2, 2021. It has also been killing barn cats in that same farming community.

Best Youtube playlist for newcomers to pterodactyl sightings

For those who have not yet been introduced to the videos of the channel “Protect Animal Life”, this is the best playlist: some of the finest and most popular modern-pterosaur videos.

Modern pterodactyls promoted by a nonprofit organization

Jonathan Whitcomb now leads “Animal Discovery” as its first executive director, and ropens will be an important part.

Popular ropen video on Youtube

See why this living-pterosaur video is among the most popular on the channel “Protect Animal Life” (interviewing J. Archer).

Attack in the Dead of Winter

Does a pterodactyl pack hunt bats at night in southern Texas?

Dinosaur book for children and teens

The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur is a nonfiction book, but it’s not technically about dinosaurs: It’s a short cryptozoology book about apparent living pterosaurs. Let’s begin with a list of some of the benefits available to young readers . . .

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Pterodactyl Attacks

. . . many human deaths may have been caused by attacks from what some Native Americans in British Columbia call the “devil bird.”

November 16, 2018November 16, 2018

‘Dinosaur’ Book for Children and Teens

living pterosaur nonfiction book - front cover

By the living-pterosaur investigator Jonathan Whitcomb

The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur is a nonfiction book, but it’s not technically about dinosaurs: It’s a short cryptozoology book about apparent living pterosaurs. Let’s begin with a list of some of the benefits available to young readers, for this is for kids and teenagers:

Simple to read yet stimulating for middle-grade children and teens
Explains the benefits of believing someone who has seen something
Gives interesting comparisons between accounts, allowing the reader to come to his or her own conclusion about each report
Explains the three major interpretations available for a sighting report, allowing the reader to choose one of them for each reported account
Gives the young reader many photos, sketches, and other images, making the book easier to dig into and understand

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first nonfiction book ever published (on this subject) which was written for children and teenagers. I know of a very few books written about living dinosaurs and living pterosaurs, but The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur is different: only about apparent non-extinct pterosaurs that have been seen by people in the 20th and 21st centuries. By the way, the sightings reported in this book are generally of ropens: long-tailed featherless flying creatures unlike any scientifically-acknowledged bat.

Buy your own copy of this living-pterosaur book on Amazon or from some other online book seller, or buy one or more to give as gifts for Christmas or for birthdays. Here are a few details:

56 printed pages (5½ by 8½ inches)
ISBN-13: 978-1727778847
Published Nov 8, 2018, by Createspace
$7.80 on Amazon (at least on Nov 16, 2018)

The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur

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New ‘dinosaur’ book for LDS and other faiths

My new nonfiction is for middle-grade children and many (but not all) teenagers: The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur. This is a short cryptozoology book, not about religion but about eyewitness sightings of apparent living pterosaurs.

“Flying Dinosaur” book for a ten-year-old reader

This post briefly mentions the book The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur, but this is mainly about sightings of apparent pterosaurs, seen by children, in the following countries:

Sudan, Africa
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
England
USA, Hawaii

The above locations for sightings are not in the book itself but are in the above-linked blog post.

Ropen – a real living pterosaur

With many photos, this is an online map of what is probably the oldest modern-pterosaur site ever published: Pterosaurs Still Living.

“Flying Dinosaur” book (pterosaurs)

I wrote the nonfiction book The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur for several purposes. As a gift giver for a child or teenager, you need to know what this does and does not do and what benefits it can give to the young reader.

Nonfiction books on living pterosaurs

This has brief book reviews: comparing two cryptozoology books about these astonishing featherless flying creatures. These two paperbacks include much information about ropens.

These nonfiction books are Live Pterosaurs in America (third edition) and Searching for Ropens and Finding God (fourth edition).

October 23, 2018

Children who saw a Pterodactyl

modern-pterosaur sketch by the eyewitness

Lately I’ve been writing more about children who have witnessed a modern pterosaur, although I have included sightings in which adults have been present. Indeed, for a number of weeks I’ve been writing a new nonfiction book for children: The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur.

In keeping with the setting of that book, let’s consider the six-year-old eyewitness Patty Carson. She was only about six when she saw the “dinosaur” at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, around 1965.

Before getting into what that flying creature was, let’s discover what it was not. Remember Sherlock Holmes: Once the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.

It was not a pelican. Patty is sure that it was larger than a pelican, yet there’s more. That kind of bird does not have a long horn-like structure coming out the back of the head, an appendage looking bone-like. In addition, no pelican has a mouth filled with many small teeth. What’s more, that kind of bird does not have a long featherless tail that ends with a diamond-shaped structure. If Patty were mistaken about one or two of those four characteristics of her flying creature, we could still not reasonably dismiss the other two or three points that make it a non-pelican.

Could it have been a frigatebird? When that kind of bird is standing on the ground, which it almost never does, it would never be “as tall as a man.” In addition, no such bird has a long neck. If you can discount all that and insist that the girl hallucinated many small teeth, then you might also proclaim the following: The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was not from Japanese planes but from frigatebirds, with bird poop being misidentified as bombs.

What about teeth? If it wasn’t a bird, maybe it was a bat, for they have teeth. Look at the sketch Patty drew a few years ago. That is no bat head. And what bat has a long skinny tail that ends with a Rhamphorhynchoid-like flange? In addition, no bat known to Western science is as tall as a man when it stands on the ground.

Could it have been a little girl’s nightmare? Memory can play tricks on us, over a long period of time, but look at the sketch drawn by the U.S. Marine Eskin Kuhn. He drew this just minutes after his sighting in 1971, at that same area of Cuba: Guantanamo Bay:

Flying creatures seen by Kuhn (left) and Carson (right)

Verification

Of course children sometimes make mistakes, even sometimes imagining things that are not there or that differ greatly from what they imagined, but when an adult sees something very similar, and at about the same place, we need to admit the obvious, no matter how improbable it appears: Both Patty and Eskin saw something like what many Western scientists have assumed became extinct many millions of years ago.

Although the ropen of mid-twentieth century Cuba is unlike any well-known fossil of a pterosaur, it is much more like a pterosaur than it is like any known bird or bat.

Aside

By the way, those apparent ropens are not confined to Cuba. I have received many reports of such flying creatures in the United States, and they are very similar. If they’re not all the same species, they surely are closely related.

By the independent investigative journalist Jonathan D. Whitcomb

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Child saw a pterosaur

. . . nobody forces any adult to disbelieve any story of a child. Several things have led me to believe that Aaron Tullock, as a child, saw a living pterosaur, regardless of American indoctrinations into universal extinctions . . .

Three children saw a live pterosaur in Pennsylvania

Near Pottstown, Pennsylvania, about 40 miles northwest of Philadelphia, three children observed an apparent pterosaur flying overhead. I received an email from their father last week, on what he learned by questioning them.

The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur

This will be a short nonfiction book for children eight to twelve years old or thereabouts; I hope that it will be finished and on sale before the first of December (2018) . . .

Important Ropen Sightings

Here is a list of sightings of these long-tailed modern pterosaurs, although this is only a partial list of the more important encounters, by eyewitness name, or by place if the eyewitness is anonymous . . .

An American saw a Ropen During World War II

Around mid-1944, on the eastern edge of the island of New Guinea, after the Japanese military had left that area of the southwest Pacific, two American soldiers obtained permission to hike into the jungle interior west of Finschhafen. While in a jungle clearing that was about a hundred feet across, they witnessed a huge flying creature take off into the air. That sighting in clear daylight, with no obstruction to the view of those two men, has in recent years become known, among at least some cryptozoologists, as an important report among many accounts of encounters with living pterosaurs in the 20th century.

Modern Pterosaurs in England

My sighting took place just after 2 PM on Valentine’s day of the same year in an area called “The Silkin Way”. It’s a local nature reserve and a lot of people visit it to bike, fish and walk their dogs. [Telford Town Park, Shropshire, England] . . .

A creature with a wingspan of about 4-6 feet and a mottled greyish brown colouration flew directly overhead and onwards towards a field where several horses are kept.

Gigantic Featherless Flying Creature

Before getting into this eyewitness account, keep in mind that I have received hundreds of reports, over the past 15 years, of encounters with apparent pterosaurs, some of which have been close and clear sightings. The flying creature seen in New Jersey in 2016 was very close to the lady who had stopped her car at a stop sign, but she concentrated on what was right in front of her face. She saw and remembers mostly that face and those wings.

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.

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.

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.