The following two graphs show a slow decline in numbers of reported sighting as the wingspan increases. The first graph has a column for every two feet of wingspan, increasing in wingspan to the right (the two greatest wingspans being beyond the scope of the graph). The second graph is similar, except that the columns are three feet apart in wingspan and the greatest two wingspan estimates are included.

The second graph is better at showing the steady decline to the right, but this graph gives too much emphasis to the “b” column peak. In the first graph is it more difficult to see the slow slope to the right, but the peak is more accurately shown to be spread out around the lower-to-middle wingspans.

Nocturnal Pterosaurs in San Diego

I later talked with the eyewitness by phone, verifying his credibility (I found nothing in his words or manner of speaking that would suggest the possibility of a hoax). He varied in his estimate of the flying height: thirty yards instead of forty yards. The tail was long and straight. With one of the flying creatures, he noticed a movement that he interpreted as evidence for the animal’s breathing.

Bioluminescent Flying Creature in Pennsylvania

. . . I received an email from a lady who was a passenger in a car one night; both driver and passenger saw a glowing creature as the strange thing flew by. Afterwards she did some research . . . “I have found that a pterosaur is identical to what we saw.” . . . The sighting was in Pennsylvania, and I believe it involved bioluminescence. . . . the flying creature ”was not too terribly high off the ground” and that it was ”quite large and seemed to be lit or glowing. . . . It was one of the strangest things I have ever seen.” She is one of the few eyewitnesses who have reported both a form of an apparent living pterosaur and a glow coming from the creature . . .

Pterosaur Observed in Pennsylvania

. . . in southwest Greensburg, Pennsylvaniva, a karate teacher and two of his students were talking outside. Above some small trees . . . they saw something that at first could have been mistaken for a large bird. . . . [The karate teacher said:] it caught my eye. Being that far up the “birds” body still appeared to be much larger than my 100 pound dog . . . The wingspan appeared to be at least six feet and although it was a bit away from us you could clearly make out a long “horn” or “cone” type protrusion coming out of the back of its skull . . . [The head] was at the end of an elongated neck.

We could here it splashing around, and Carrie ran around the building to see it. There are always ducks in that water as well as rats and other things. When she came back . . . she said it had taken off, Carrie said it was in the water splashing and eating or grabbing something in its mouth. [mid-2006, at 8 p.m.]

Pterosaur Press Room

“Hoaxes are disproved,” declares Jonathan Whitcomb, author of the nonfiction book, Live Pterosaurs in America. After compiling data from reports collected from early-2004 to mid-2009, from eyewitnesses across the United States, he found three kinds of evidence disproving any hoax- explanation.

Driving While Under the Influence of a Pterosaur

I doubt we will ever have Drive Safely While Witnessing a Live Pterodactyl Week. But in the United States, driving may be the most common activity when someone sees an apparent living pterosaur . . . Within a period of about three years, I received reports of at least ten sightings involving driving, in seven states: South Carolina, California, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kansas, Ohio (3), Georgia (2). With sighting dates from about 1980 to 2007, one involved driving a tractor, the rest involved driving a car.

Pterosaur Interupts a Bike Ride

“I was approx. 1/2 mile from home, riding [a bike] down an old country road . . . I looked to my left, and on a wood plank fence were two of the biggest bird-like creatures I could ever imagine! I almost crashed my bike! They were about 50 ft from me; the first thing I noticed was their heads, then I thought this can’t be! Could they be dinosaurs?”

Boyish Trespassing in a Swamp

Tom Carson . . . had no knowledge of his sister’s 1965 sighting until he spoke with Patty a few weeks ago (the flying creature seen by her was an apparent Rhamphorhynchoid). His three-second encounter was about a year later, in 1966, but in the same area of Cuba: Guantanamo Bay. . . . The flying creature he saw seems to have been the same species as the one his sister had seen and the one Eskin Kuhn would see in 1971. Tom told me it appeared to have no feathers and was bigger than a pelican. The tail was odd, like one would expect of the shaved tail of a dog.

Looking Through a Telescope

Around 2007, a man was looking through his telescope when he saw a “dinosaur bird.”

“My father has been the subject of much ridicule after claiming to have seen a ‘dinosaur bird’ fly across the moon. His neighbor has a telescope and they’d been watching the sky when they saw it. My sister and I dismissed it, although I couldn’t think of anything he could have seen and mistook for a ‘dinosaur bird.’ My father later told me that he’d done some research and learned that they were called ‘ropen.’ . . .” [page 31 of Live Pterosaurs in America, third edition]

The expanded third edition of Live Pterosaurs in America is now available on Amazon. Most of the expansion has been the addition of a critical sighting by Patty Carson, a report that supports Eskin Kuhn’s account of a long-tailed pterosaur at Guantanamo Bay in the mid-twentieth century. Here is an excerpt of this eyewitness report (from the appendix of the book):

“I was only a child when I saw it . . . around six years old. . . . We were walking from the boat yards toward home . . . There were some stagnant pools here and there, a few inches deep, in the area. . . . Suddenly it sat up, as if it had been eating something or resting. The head and upper part of its body, about a third of the wings at the joint (tips still held down) showed.

” . . . in front of us about thirty feet away. All of us froze for about five seconds, then it leaned to its left and took off with a fwap fwap fwap sound, in a big hurry, more of a scramble, and flew to its left and disappeared behind trees and terrain . . . The skin was a leathery, brownish reddish color. It had little [small] teeth, a LOT of them. The eye was smallish and dark . . .

“We went home and I was ALL excited to tell my family I had seen a dinosaur, but they all poo poo’d me and started to tell me it was a pelican or frigate bird. NO WAY! It was as tall as a man when it stood up on its haunches. It was close. It froze for a few seconds so I got a good look. . . .”

From the blog Modern Pterosaurs: (from the title page of the book)

How are sightings in the United States related to those in the southwest Pacific? How do some apparent nocturnal pterosaurs pertain to bats, and how are bats irrelevant? How could modern living pterosaurs have escaped scientific notice? These mysteries have slept in the dark, beyond the knowledge of almost all Americans, even beyond our wildest dreams (although the reality of some pterosaurs is a living nightmare to some bats). These mysteries have slept . . . until now.

Live Pterosaurs in America and Standard-Model Paleontology

This book was not intended to tear down generations of work in paleontology nor to ridicule the intelligence of paleontologists. It give more of a hint of axiomatic conflict, generations of conflict between standard models in Western society (namely Neo-Darwism and strict naturalism), but little is said about it outside the appendix, the conflict between “creationism and Dawinism.”

Life, not extinction, is what fossils mostly reveal

In my post of July 17, 2010, I mentioned a blog post (on Science Blogs) by the paleontologist Darren Naish, who has a special interest in pterosaurs. He said, “The fossil record convincingly demonstrates that pterosaurs became extinct . . . [by] 65 million years ago.” But he gives no line of reasoning for that declaration. In The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs, Wellnhofer makes it clear that pterosaur extinction was not an event but a long process. I believe that Naish needs to make a choice here: Accept Wellnhofer’s proposition about gradual extinction of pterosaurs or give some line of reasoning for a quick extinction of many species of pterosaurs.

I suggest we all try to use clear thinking about this idea of universal extinction, this assumption that all species of pterosaurs became extinct. Somewhere, somebody (I believe it was Naish or Glen Kuban, or someone commenting on one of their blog posts) said, “If a group of organisms are absent from the fossil record for tens of millions of years, and if there is no evidence indicating their survival across or beyond that time, they should be assumed to be extinct.” That reasoning is faulty, for too many obvious exceptions shoot it down.

Kuban has admitted the possibility of extant pterosaurs but greatly doubts it. Both Naish and Kuban have fought vigorously to extinguish any hope for living pterosaurs in modern times. But where is the reasoning for universal extinction of all species of pterosaurs?

Both Naish and Kuban seem to have been oblivious to the obvious conclusion that Wellnhofer unwittingly allowed. If only a tiny portion of pterosaur remains have been discovered as fossils, how many species may have existed of which we are unaware! Since we have no fossil evidence for the life of many species of pterosaurs, how can we come to any conclusion about any extinction of even one of those undiscovered species? Protecting the reputation of standard paleontology should not be the primary objective of paleontologists: The first priority should be to know the truth.

**********

For a few brief statements about pterosaur extinction (or lack thereof), see Questions and Answers.

Fallacy of the Flying Fox Explanation

. . . Reports of “pterodactyls” in New Guinea . . . were dismissed with the explanation that people were just observing Flying Foxes. In the early 21st Century, a web page by Glen Kuban was dedicated to repudiating the idea that pterosaurs ever lived in human times; he suggested at least some of the sightings were of fruit bats.

The fruit bat known as “Flying Fox” is quite large for a bat; some species have wingspans as great as five feet. To visitors from America and Europe, these dog-faced bats are striking.

Bat Misidentification Rather Than Pterosaur?

Don’t be mislead by old tales about bat-misidentification. Scientists and professionals in various fields are eyewitnesses of large pterosaurs, very much non-extinct pterosaurs: cryptids obviously not bats.

The Flying Fox fruit bat in captivity—it still sleeps in the daylight hours, for this kind of bat is a creature of the night: nocturnal. Some were shown in the second Indiana Jones movie.

But first we’ll consider what Woetzel himself quoted on the dragon reported by Christopher Schorerum in Europe long ago:

Dragons in History

“On a warm night in 1619, while contemplating the serenity of the heavens, I saw a shining dragon of great size in front of Mt. Pilatus [Switzerland] . . .  seen flying . . . It was of a large size, with a long tail, a long neck, a reptile’s head, and ferocious gaping jaws. As it flew it was like iron struck in a forge when pressed together that scatters sparks. . . .”

Critic of the Dragon Account

The critic who disparages Woetzels’ writing, however, does not give any direct reason for disbelieving the historical record. The critic says, “. . . is claimed to be true, but it’s not. No pterosaur ever glow, sparkle, and illuminate in the night sky.” Where does that critic get such an idea? No evidence is given for the impossibility of pterosaur bioluminescence. That critic says much about wild dragon tales and strange things in old writings, but nothing more about that particular account. It seems that the skeptic avoids any more direct reference to the sighting by Christopher Schorerum because there is no direct evidence to contradict that eyewitness’s account.

Not everyone who disagrees with a popular idea of Western culture is stupid; not everyone who promotes such an idea is telling lies. To use those words in the URL of ones web site suggests the possibility of bulverism. A deeper examination is needed. I suggest the April 6, 2010, post on the blog Live Pterosaur (not this WordPress blog but another by this same name).

Extant Pterosaurs and Bulverism

Regarding the honesty of Creationists who have explored in Papua New Guinea, searching for living pterosaurs, can truth be uncovered by ignoring their findings, accusing them all of fabricating falsehoods, and then dropping the subject? No, accusing everyone who might have the label “creationist” with “liar,” a beggarly excuse for reasoning, covers up the truth. How much better to examine what the investigators have said and done!

Now consider two sightings of flying lights in the twentieth century:

Ropen Sighting by Cottingham

On Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea (by Cottingham):

My sighting occurred at night near Lab Lab on the southern tip of Umboi. The light lasted for four to five seconds, and until reading your reports now, have never been able to explain the sighting.

On the Papua New Guinea mainland (by Evelyn Cheesman):

The flash lasted “about four or five seconds, but that flash had been a little distance away from the first. Flashes continued at intervals. . . . a most intriguing mystery; because by no possibility could there be human beings out there using flash-lamps at intervals . . .”

The 17th-century sighting by Christopher Schorerum is hardly an isolated report, isolated in earlier European history. It harmonizes quite well with the modern hypothesis that modern pterosaurs, in at least some species, use bioluminescence. It blends in with and complements pterosaur sightings in the 20th and 21st centuries.

When I interviewed natives on Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, in 2004, the great majority of eyewitnesses had seen only a distant flying light. On the other hand, the dramatic sightings in which details of appearance gave convincing evidence for living pterosaurs there—those sightings were few. That brings up two reasons for nocturnal behavior being probable on Umboi.

The apparent bioluminescence, with extreme brightness, means this flying creature has a major biological committment for night flying. Some of the sightings, albeit few, have shown us that the flying light is indeed the glow from one or more of the pterosaurs or pterosaur-like creatures (separate sightings by Jonathan Ragu and Jonah Jim). In other words, there are not two extraordinary flying objects (a giant flying light and a giant flying pterosaur): There is only one extraordinary flying phenomenon on Umboi, with details observed depending on distant from observer to the ropen. But the point is this: Bioluminescence is useful in the dark.

The Lake Pung sighting, around 1994, by seven “boys” (maybe young teenagers or pre-teens) has allowed us to learn a number of details about the giant ropen. Three of the seven eyewitnesses I interviewed in person, in 2004: Gideon Koro, his brother Wesley, and Mesa Agustin. But aside from details like a long tail, “mouth like a crocodile,” and lack of feathers, we learn something else, something less obvious: Few islanders on Umboi have seen a ropen in daylight. Think about it: With thousands of natives living in many villages scattered across Umboi Island, if a giant flying creature were diurnal, would not many natives have seen it in daylight during their lifetimes? Less than one percent of those natives have ever had a clear view of a ropen in daylight because it rarely comes out in the day.

Nocturnal Modern Pterosaur

We might review the two daylight sightings in Georgia a few years ago. The eyewitness saw two apparent pterosaurs flying early in the morning, but after sunrise, the first sighting being very soon after a major storm passed through that part of the United States. It seems likely that the storm had disturbed two nocturnal pterosaurs enough that they made themselves known in daylight, by flying over a highway.

Cryptozoology Books

“I can hardly put this book down. It is quite astonishing to read of creatures so large that they can lift a human up into the air or rob a corpse from a new grave. They even glow at night with bioluminescence.. . . This book is so refreshing. Jonathan Whitcomb is to be congratulated for giving us a glimpse of our world denied us by the wildlife ‘experts’ from western countries.”

California

In July of 2008, I received a phone call from a man who reported a very large flying creature . . . in Orange County . . . north of the University of California at Irvine. He described the dark gray or black animal as 30 feet long, with 15-16 feet of that being a tail. [The creature flew] “at low altitude,” in front of his car, over the road (Campus Drive), into the San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary.

Washington

I received an email from man who reported a pair of ropen-like creatures in the state of Washington. His account of the 1987 sightings included some descriptions that differed from those by other eyewitnesses . . .

“I lived in the country with my parents on a . . . ranch. I was approx. 1/2 mile from home, riding [a bike] down an old country road . . . I looked to my left, and on a wood plank fence were two of the biggest bird-like creatures I could ever imagine! I almost crashed my bike! They were about 50 ft from me; the first thing I noticed was their heads, then I thought this can’t be! Could they be dinosaurs?”

Wisconsin

“ . . . wanted to tell someone about a sighting I had back in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s. I grew up on a farm and picked cucumbers to make money as a kid. . . . one late afternoon, I had just brought out the tractor to pick up the bags of cucumbers when I noticed a strange looking bird in the sky. . . . The thing that caught my eye was that it looked like something straight out of the dinosaurs era. It scared the . . . out of me right away. I knew it was not a sand hill crane, which we have a few hundred migrating thru.”

New York

In the Northeast (east of Buffalo, New York), a “pterodactyl” was seen. I received this email in mid-2007, just weeks after the sighting:

“ . . . 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.’ It was a greyish color with no apparent feathers.”

Ohio

I received an email from a lady [OJ] who had recently witnessed . . . a “pterodactyl,” at night in Ohio. . . . With clear sky and a still-full moon, the landscape was brightly lit. A creature swooped down—an obvious “pterodactyl”—gliding gracefully over the hood of her car. She watched it fly into some dense underbrush of trees. . . . OJ was impressed with that slow smooth flight, with no wing flapping. She told me, “It was very eerie . . . Sent shivers over me.”

Kansas

“I had seen an extremely large bird that resembled a pterodactyl some years ago when [I was] driving to town from the family farm between Rush Center and Larned, Kansas. I could not believe my eyes as I immediately thought of a prehistoric bird when I saw it. It must have had a wing-span of 16-20 feet.”

Texas

RG and his friend, in the late afternoon of a clear day, were startled by a flying creature less than 150 feet away. For about fifteen seconds, they watched it fly, about fifty feet high, before it disappeared into some trees. The general appearance was “leathery” and it had a pointed beak and head appendage. The total length, about five feet, included about two feet of tail, the end of which had a “flange or sail.”

Florida

. . . in the early morning hours (they had not been drinking or using drugs), the two men saw a creature fly over the roof of the house, toward the backyard. A “long pointed thing protruding from the back of its head,” made visible by a flood light illuminating the underside of the creature, as it moved its head to look at them—that is what prompted DR to think it was a pterosaur.

Washington Sightings

We have seen and heard a strange nocturnal, bat-like creature . . . huge, light grey, skin with no fur, feathers or scales. It silently swoops down at you with giant bat wings. . . . We keep our chickens and goats, small dogs and cats safely housed at night, however two of our cats who sneaked out one night onto the roof disappeared without a trace . . .

The eyewitness calls the flying creatures “monkey birds,” because of the weird sound they make. It brings to my mind the sightings by another eyewitness in the state of Washington, a man I interviewed in 2008. I quote from my cryptozoology book Live Pterosaurs in America (second edition).

Another Sighting of Apparent Pterosaurs in Washington State

GW is anonymous.

“I was 15 yrs old [when] I saw two ropens together sitting on a fence. I was riding my bike home from a friend’s house around 5 pm in [a town in southwest Washington state]. I lived in the country with my parents . . . on a wood plank fence were two of the biggest bird-like creatures I could ever imagine! I almost crashed my bike! They were about 50 ft from me; the first thing I noticed was their heads, then I thought this can’t be! Could they be dinosaurs? . . .

“They were huge! [Their feet] wrapped around a 2”x6” plank; I just couldn’t believe it! [Their] heads I would have to say it was maybe 4 ft long with the beak. . . . a brown body color that looked like hair . . .”

After that initial sighting, the high school student told his mother.  He later both saw and heard the two flying creatures.

“I used to trap back in that area when I was young, so I grabbed my 22 rifle an walked down the trails. I still heard a screeching type noise, enough to make your skin crawl.”

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Learn for yourself about these amazing eyewitness encounters across the United States, including (but not limited to) California, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, Maine, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Kansas, and Washington. Find out the truth for yourself: Pterosaurs are not all extinct, at least not all species.

From the title page of Live Pterosaurs in America, second edition:

Reports of huge flying “pterodactyls” in American skies have floated around the internet for years; but before about 2005, details were scarce. When an eyewitness was named, the interviewer was often anonymous; even when an eyewitness was credible, and the account published in a newspaper, the story was ridiculed, discouraging others who had also seen strange flying creatures. Where could eyewitnesses go? What a predicament for them! Who would believe their reports? . . .

How are sightings in the United States related to those in the southwest Pacific? How do some apparent nocturnal pterosaurs pertain to bats, and how are bats irrelevant? How could modern living pterosaurs have escaped scientific notice? These mysteries have slept in the dark, beyond the knowledge of almost all Americans, even beyond our wildest dreams (although the reality of some pterosaurs is a living nightmare to some bats). These mysteries have slept . . . until now.