For several days, I questioned the eyewitness by emails, and I interviewed her by phone three days after the sighting. She admitted to me that she did not have time to determine if the three “dragons” had no feathers, for they fly over her car while she was driving on a freeway. Her first impression was that they were large and not birds, assuming it was some kind of stunt, perhaps with kites. She realized they were not kites when she saw their tails move.

She was driving north on the Interstate 5, just east of a golf course on the east side of Griffith Park, in Los Angeles, on Sunday, March 3, 2013. The flying creatures flew almost exactly over her car in the opposite direction. It was just minutes before sunrise, so the sky was no longer dark and she could see the undersides of the “dragons.” They were light colored and had a peculiar shape.

She admitted that she had no confidence in estimating how high they were flying or how large they were. She mentioned nothing to me about the nearby Los Angeles River, but I was struck by its proximity. It’s common for a sighting in Southern California to be near a storm channel or river bed (see “San Fernando Valley Sighting” below). In this case, the creatures were only 150 feet away from the Los Angeles River, a major storm drainage channel, flying parallel to it.

Question: “Did you see any neck on any of them?”

Answer: “Yes, that was another thing that tipped me off that they were not birds. They each had a distinct neck between body and head, that was more narrow and clearly visible.”

Question: “Did you see any feet on any of them?”

Answer: “I did not notice their feet.”

Question: “Is it possible that what appeared to have been tails were actually their feet held behind them?”

Answer: “I suppose it’s possible but they looked a lot like tails to me. Long and thin with a bigger point at the tip.”

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Approximate location of sighting near Colorado Street overpass

Top arrow: direction of “dragon” flight — bottom arrow: direction of car — blue: banks of L. A. River

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Griffith Park Dragons?

This morning . . . [within five minutes of 6:10 a.m.]  I saw three “dragons” flying over the 5-North freeway between Griffith Park and Glendale. They appeared to be several feet long, with a head:body:tail ratio that was certainly not that of a bird.

Sightings of Pterosaurs

A few years ago, a psychologist, Brian Hennessy, was interviewed concerning a reported sighting of a large “prehistoric” creature seen on Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea. The psychologist was not analyzing the mental health of the eyewitness; that psychologist, Brian Hennessy, was himself the eyewitness.

Pterosaur Sighting in South Carolina

The huge featherless creature swooped down over the highway, maybe only “twenty feet” high and only “twenty five” feet in front of the car.

Are bats Food for Pterodactyls in Los Angeles?

During my teenaged years in Pasadena, when I enjoyed watching small bats at night, my younger sister had a friend, Dianne. She told my sister about the big “pterodactyl” she had seen flying around the mountains north of Pasadena.

San Fernando Valley Sighting

Only a little over a mile north of the Los Angeles River

A couple was walking their dog at about 10:30 p.m., near the corner of Burbank Blvd and Woodman in the city of Sherman Oaks, California, when they saw a “very large, winged creature” gliding about 300 feet overhead. The woman described glowing or reflective portions of the wings; she described them to me in a way that suggested they were much dimmer than the bright flashes of ropens.

Long tails and lack of feathers are two of the more common descriptions, in eyewitness reports from around the world. And we have just enough other common descriptions* to make it obvious: People from a wide range of countries and continents are observing the same basic kind of flying creature. By far the best explanation is that witnesses are observing real creatures.

* Consider these: Rhamphorhynchoid-like tail flange and head crest (not a common combination in pterosaur fossils but not entirely unknown, either).

Quoting from a Cryptozoology book

From the nonfiction book Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea:

I partially agree with the general concept of extinctions, but without committing myself to any time frame. Most species of dinosaurs and pterosaurs appear to have been extinct for some time; nevertheless, after many years of investigations, my associates and I assert that at least two species of pterosaurs live in the southwest Pacific. . . .

The first discovery of a pterosaur fossil by a Western scientist, in 1784, was decades before Charles Darwin began writing about his ideas on extinctions and evolution. Before Darwin, Western scientists had assumed that all species of pterosaurs were extinct for a simple reason: Those who discovered the fossils had no experience with any similar animal that was living. Also important, probably no scientist at that time had considered that a few species of pterosaurs might still be alive, rarely seen because they’re both uncommon and nocturnal. . . .

Darwin emphasized extinctions. In time, the concept of many extinctions in the distant past was accepted by many scientists. That created an atmosphere unfriendly to any eyewitness account of a live pterosaur, to put it mildly. . . .

How hard it is for many Westerners to abandon the idea that all pterosaurs are long extinct! The word “science” has been tied to both men who walk on the moon and to declarations that all dinosaurs and pterosaurs have been extinct for millions of years. How shocking to encounter a cryptozoologist who is cutting down a longstanding tradition about pterosaur extinction!

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Credibility of Georgia Pterosaur Eyewitnesses

Flying creatures observed in the state of Georgia, according to the reports I have received from eyewitnesses, resemble apparent pterosaurs of other states . . .

Live Pterosaur in Georgia?

Reports of living “pterodactyls” in Georgia, during the past seven years, probably relate to sightings of some flying creatures in South Carolina and Florida . . .

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Live Pterosaurs in America by Jonathan David Whitcomb (third expanded edition)

On Amazon, a reviewer of the second edition wrote the following (by “stevie” quoted in part):

This is an updated review of the book and I am changing my rating to 5 stars. . . .  I remember stumbling on this subject (cryptozoology, living dinosaurs, extinct animals) in recent years. I always find myself fascinated by the subject . . .

I couldn’t get enough and their are so few books on the subject. I highly recommend this. . . . Whitcomb painstakingly reviews every account for credibility and reason. This man is not a crank. . . .

On top of this, I have great respect for a guy who follows his dreams so passionately. He has traveled to Papua New Guinea to search for the creature . . .  After Whitcomb traveled to New Guinea, he started to collect more stories from North America concerning the pterosaur like creature . . .

If you are interested in reading about this subject, this is definitely the book to get . . . this author has really done a lot of work researching this issue. . . . I do believe the author tried hard to deliver these stories and was very good at it. This is well written and very hard to put down.  [Five stars; "Oddly fascinating"]

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If we combine recent reports with those of Sandra Paradise, it may eventually make enough material for somebody to write a book about this subject: modern pterosaurs in Georgia.

Loganville, Georgia, Sighting

“On Dec 10, 2012, myself and wife were driving home at around 1:30 am on Briscoe Rd in Loganville, Ga. As we crested a hill, our light came down across a large flying animal that I instantly thought looked like a pterodactyl . . . I saw what I saw and I feel odd posting this . . . but . . .”

I asked the Loganville eyewitness three questions:

1. Was it flying over the road or just on one side of the road?  It was crossing about 30 ft in front of us over the road 
2. About how high was it flying above the ground?  It was about 10 feet off the road
3. Did you or your wife notice any tail on the creature?  [Yes]

Towns County, Georgia, Sightings

“I don’t know how to say this any other way except that I have seen these very large birds that don’t even come close to looking like anything else I’ve ever seen. I believe them to be Pterosaurs or something similar to them. Yes, I know it sounds crazy, and I know they went extinct a log time age, but the fact remains that I have seen three of these birds in the past year and a half, I have also heard them.”

American “Dragon Pterodactyl”

I was driving the same road, had just passed the point of my  second sighting. Looking ahead and up a hill, I saw a flock of crows  cross the road, from right to left, followed by . . . The pterosaur was in perfect silhouette, wings outstretched,  distinctive head in full view, pad on the tail. [similar to previous two sightings in this part of Georgia]

Georgia Sightings by Sandra Paradise

Sandra Paradise has released her name and is no longer anonymous. She was previously known simply as the lady who had seen two long-tailed pterosaurs in daylight east of Winder, Georgia, as she was driving to work on highway 82, east of the Barrow County Airport.

Living Pterosaur

Throughout human history, and more recently, come fascinating reports of what may have been living pterosaurs.

Driving a Vehicle During a Sighting

Of those sightings in which a moving vehicle was or was not clearly involved (69 sightings), 46% (32) were when one or more eyewitnesses were in a moving vehicle (54%, 37 sightings, clearly did not involve a moving vehicle). Why do so many sightings occur to persons in moving vehicles? It relates to human activities.

Most reports of modern living pterosaurs come from Americans, for they use the internet so often and communicate, in English, through email (the vaste majority of web pages on modern pterosaurs are in English). So where do Americans spend most of their time? Indoors. There are occasions when an American will look out a window and see a flying pterosaur, but those are the exceptional sightings. Most of our time, when we are not indoors, is spent in moving vehicles, either as drivers or as passengers.

Tail Length

Sixteen sightings included estimates of tail length. The average length was over nine feet; the median, six.

Wingspan

The wingspan estimates average 14.5 feet, although there is a huge range in sizes, from 1.3 to 46 feet.

Pterosaur Head Crest

Out of all the sightings, about 24% involved the observation of a head crest. Only 2% of the eyewitnesses specifically mentioned the absence of a head crest.

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Multiple Eyewitnesses of Pterosaurs

. . . from sighting accounts from various countries of the world, we learn that 53% of the sightings were with two or more persons (47% were of lone eyewitnesses).

Dragon Pterodactyl

Two of the more common words used to describe flying creatures that look like pterosaurs are “dragon” and “pterodactyl,” at least in the United States.

Mr. Drinnon insists that any extant pterosaur on this planet must resemble pterosaurs known from fossils that have been discovered and that any deviation in appearance means the creature observed cannot be that type of flying creature. He does not explain why he has taken that stand, but he dogmatically holds onto that position.

Hypothetical Encounter at a Zoo

Let’s apply that position to fossils in general and to modern creatures in general (why should pterosaurs get special treatment?). How would we react if a paleontologist marched up to the administration office of a zoo and insisted that a particular animal enclosure be labeled “Animatronic – not a real animal?” Everybody else knows that those animals are biological and not fake. Why is that paleontologist mistaken in his dogmatism? He knows that no fossil yet discovered is exactly like what we all see in that zoo enclosure, so he insists that the animals in question cannot be biological. Why is he wrong? (Of course that paleontologist is imaginary.)

Biological Diversity

Almost every adult human in Western society understands biological diversity, whether those adult humans are Biblical Creationists or strict Darwinist Evolutionists. Chihuahuas and Saint Bernards are the same species, regardless of outward differences. Why should pterosaurs drastically differ from the general rule?

Paleontologists know from pterosaur fossils that varieties existed in the past, great diversity in those flying creatures. Why should we be shocked that a modern pterosaur would have one or two or even three details of appearance that differ, in some degree, from already-discovered fossils of pterosaurs? In fact, new varieties of pterosaurs are still being discovered in fossil form. The shock is in discovering that not all their species are extinct, after generations of indoctrination into the universal-extinction dogma.

Ray Resemblance

Mr. Drinnon emphasizes anything that seems to relate to a Manta ray fish (with sighting reports of pterosaurs) especially the general shape of the body of the Manta ray. But he mentions almost no details, no particular sighting, in most of his writings; what sighting report has a description of a ray shape and was over a large body of water? Two creatures flying together, high over a city in the Philippines could not have been a leaping Manta ray, although Drinnon still wants to hold onto the possibility that it was that fish (because that city is near water).

Rhamphorhynchoid Pterosaur Resemblance

In the second ropen expedition of 2004 (I led the first one), Garth Guessman and David Woetzel interviewed a few native eyewitnesses, in Papua New Guinea, by using a page of silhouettes. Those images (unlabeled except for numbers) were of dozens of known birds, bats, and pterosaurs. Only two natives had a good-enough view of the flying creature (that they called “ropen”) to make a valid evaluate of shape, comparing the images with what they remembered observing on Umboi Island. I have photocopies of the detailed reports of those interviews.

The two natives who had good views of the ropen both chose the image of the Sordes Pilosus, a Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur:

That silhouette does bear a slight resemblance to the shape of a Manta ray (if we cut off the Rhamphorhynchoid tail vane and the head). But both Jonathan Ragu and Jonah Jim (in two seperate sightings) saw a flying creature that was glowing, not a Manta ray that jumped out of the sea and fell back. In fact, Jonah Jim was miles from the coast, far from any major body of water.

Ragu witnessed, with his daughter, the glowing ropen flying at or near the northwest coast of Umboi Island. Take the case that the man and his daughter had merely seen a jumping Manta ray, as unlikely as that appears to have been. Why would he have chosen the same silhouette as Jonah Jim would later choose? And why would Ragu report the same strange phenomenon: a glow? Those factors practically eliminate the jumping Manta ray misidentification as a reasonable conjecture for these two sightings. Ragu and Jonah Jim had surely seen the same flying creature, regardless of how shocking a modern giant Sordes Pilosus may be to Westerners.

Mr. Drinnon is mistaken on two major points: The critical sightings that my associates and I have analyzed could not have been misidentified leaping rays, and modern pterosaurs need not be precisely similar, in all details, to those paleontologists know from fossils.

Pterosaur, not Manta Ray

The Four Key Sightings in the Southwest Pacific

Ropen, not Misidentified Frigate Bird

Misidentified sea birds [Frigate bird] are a far cry from how serious living-pterosaur investigations really began.

Leaping Fish or Pterosaur

No Manta rays would appear to fly through the air together and change directions in the air . . .

Preface:

. . . I believe in living pterosaurs and hope they will soon be officially discovered. More important, I believe in you, that you can soar above dogmatic assumptions about extinctions. I hope that you already understand that we are more than a by-product of culture: Our existence transcends the boundaries of the human cultural assumptions that have shaped our beliefs. . . .

Chapter Four

As I prepared for my expedition, to be in a remote wilderness, leaving my wife at home for weeks, how fortunate that I was married to a trustworthy Christian woman . . . You know what I mean: “Thou shalt not kill!” Actually, I brought up the subject gradually: An important expedition was needed . . . I must assist those who would go . . . Unfortunately none of the other Americans was a professional videographer . . . Unfortunately, I myself had to go.

Chapter Six

In Australia, eyewitnesses also see large flying creatures unlike any bird or bat; unlike natives of Papua New Guinea, however, most Australians have no common tradition of any extant flying creature larger than any bird or bat. Most Australians do know the Western assumption that all dinosaurs and pterosaurs became extinct millions of years ago; but that Western tradition slaps eyewitnesses in the face. How do you tell a friend, neighbor, or relative that you saw a live pterodactyl?

New Book About Live Pterosaurs

This low-cost ebook gives detailed eyewitness accounts of the strange flying creatures seen in the Southwest Pacific, with explanations for why these sightings are absent from news headlines.

“Pterodactyls in Australia”

The author of the book, the American cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb, believes he has found the answer to why the nocturnal creatures are sometimes observed in daylight

Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific

Michael, of Opai Village, “was one of the witnesses of a strange light that came to the grave . . . where the body of a man was buried . . .

We all understand the concept of misidentification. How easy to imagine that an eyewitness has seen something commonplace under unusual conditions! What’s the problem when a scientist or non-scientific skeptic suggests a sighting of something strange was just something normal? The skeptic usually just let’s the subject drop, without any attempt to test the misidentification conjecture.

In the documentary I saw, the explorer suggested to the camera that natives had seen elephants that were swimming with little showing except their trunks and the tops of their bodies. We the audience were shown how hiding the bottom part of an elephant photo can appear strange, but wait . . . Why did the explorer not show that trick to the native eyewitnesses? Why did he assume that they knew what an elephant looks like in the forest but not what it looks like in deep water? How careless! (Or how shrewd!) The simple direct testing of that hypothesis would have been so easy, but then it probably would have resulted in the destruction of the agenda of National Geographic in that documentary.

Scott Norman, Pterosaur Eyewitness

The late Scott Norman searched for the Mokele Mbembe in Africa, many years ago; but I remember him best as a kind hearted man who humbly reported his sighting of a large flying creature that he encountered one night in 2007.

Silent, with stars for a background, the dark creature flew twenty feet high, over a shed only twenty feet from Scott . . . there was no mistaking it: . . . a head three to four feet long, and a two-foot-long head-crest that reminded him of a Pteranodon. . . . [Wings] more bat-like than bird-like.

Introduction

I have found, after many years of questioning eyewitnesses, that some accounts cannot be dismissed as misidentified birds or bats or as hoaxes. Keep the door open to discovering something for yourself; I expect you’ll discover something important before the last chapter.

Chapter One: How can Pterosaurs be Alive?

Dragon stories abound in many human cultures, and before the late nineteenth century “dragon” would have been what an eyewitness might have called a living pterosaur. I suggest that some legends of flying dragons are less than 100% fictional, but this book examines more recent reports, not old legends. Nevertheless, part of the problem resides in the old English word “dragon.”

Chapter Three: The Bougainville Creature

Did you notice the word absent from Hennessy’s account but obvious in Hodgkinson’s? In all my email correspondence with Hennessy, he never said “pterodactyl” (or “pterosaur”). Nevertheless, he was clear about the description and clear about his impression of the flying creature: “prehistoric.”

Chapter Five: Another Expedition on Umboi Island

Before leaving Kampalap, they learned about the ropen’s behavior on that northeast coast. It glows until it alights on a tree on a promontory north of the village; when it lands on the tree, the light goes out. Later the ropen flies to the nearby reef to feed.

Chapter Eight: Expedition of 2006

Paul Nation and Jacob Kepas were flown into the remote mountainous area by the plane pilot Jim Blume, the same missionary who assisted the 1990 expeditions and the second 2004 expedition. . . . Blume had to make two flights, for the two passengers and their luggage, but he himself did not stay long in Tawa.

“I [Paul Nation] was able to watch the two [lights] on the mountain range . . . at this little saddle. . . . [the lower left light] appeared first. About a minute or so later, the higher one . . . appeared, and the first one disappeared. . . . the second one . . . took up and over [flew over] . . . the back side [of the ridge]. . . .”

To make this book available to as many readers as possible, and to preserve trees, it is being published as an e-book. Please contribute to the preservation of the enviroment and the propogation of knowledge by purchasing your own copy in electronic format (it might never be released in paper-book format).

Book About Pterosaurs in Australia

Some of the sightings mentioned in this book had not been published in any book before, to the best of my knowledge; they are first-hand accounts given to me over several years.

Pterosaur Extinction (or not)

In brief, Mr. Kuban draws attention to the weakest reasons for believing  in modern pterosaurs, the weak reports; he also points out  flaws or just possible flaws  in some of the words and reasoning of those who promote the concept of living pterosaurs. . . . But consider two critical points that he ignores: the strongest eyewitness-testimony accounts and the philosophical foundations of the conflict.