Children who saw a Pterodactyl
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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. . . 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 . . .
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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.
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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) . . .
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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 . . .
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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.
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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.
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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.