Pterosaurs seen in Cuba
I gave Eskin Kuhn a surprise phone call this morning. His response (what he said and how he said it) confirmed that his account of the 1971 sighting at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was no hoax; I have no doubt that he saw what he said that he saw: two long-tailed pterosaurs flying in daylight.
Rather than repeat the entire “Out of place artifacts” web page (Kuhn told me that he had nothing to add or modify from his previous interview-comments and cryptid-descriptions), consider some excerpts:
“I was [stationed] . . . [to the] 8th Regiment (reinforced), H&S Co., 106mm recoiless rifle platoon . . . I had been in Cuba for perhaps 4 months [1971] . . . [during] a free time period, in the middle of the day . . . I was outside and witnessed the Pterosaurs.
” . . . most of the platoon was in the new barracks . . . I was looking in the direction of the ocean when I saw an incredible sight . . . I saw 2 Pterosaurs (or Pterodactyls…what’s in a name?) flying together at low altitude, perhaps 100 feet . . . I had a perfectly clear view of them. The rythym of their large wings was very graceful, slow ; and yet they were flying and not merely gliding . . . The Pterosaurs I saw had the short hind legs attached to the rearwardmost part of the wing, and they had a long tail trailing behind with a tuft of hair at the end. The head was disproportionately large, with a long crest at the back, long bill, long neck with a crook in it . . . The vertebrae of their backs was noticeable, mostly between the shoulders. I would estimate their wingspan to be roughly 10 feet . . . They came in from the direction of the sea and flew inland.”
The many details that Kuhn gave in his original desciption make it obvious that the creature had no feathers; his sketches also make this obvious. His composure of speech, during his phone conversation with me, was compelling: He is telling the truth.
According to Brian Irwin, who interviewed native eyewitnesses on New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea, ”One afternoon late in 2005, three people from Awirin Island . . . were on the beach on the south side of the adjacent unpopulated Dililo Island . . . when they observed an amazing creature moving in the water . . . a long neck and a long tail and had a total length of about 20 metres and a width of about 2 metres. The head was described as being ‘like a dinosaur’ with an ‘oval-like face’ . . . The skin of the animal was . . . khaki green in colour. Dermal frills . . . on the creature’s back.” The description strongly suggests a sauropod dinosaur (like an apatosaurus).
Irwin seemed more interested in another sighting (or he had more information), about an apparent Therizinosaurus “sighted occasionally on Umbungi Island in West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Umbungi Island is located on the south coast of West New Britain between Kandrian and Gasmata.” That apparent dinosaur had “a long tail and a long neck and was 10–15 metres in length.”
See also Pterosaurs in Africa
R.K. (anonymous, at least for now) recently reported to me several things about the creature they call kor:
“I was born and brought up in Manus Island . . . there are lights swooping over fish shoals between rambutyo and lou baluan islands. Two years ago [on a boating trip] we . . . could see the lights soaring over us and heard flapping of wings . . . they did dive into the sea and then erupt out of it . . .” [too dark to see much]
R.K. also told me about a fisherman who died after fighting off (and killing) one of the creatures; it seems that local natives believe the kor attacked the fisherman to eat him (larger kor are said to catch and eat young crocodiles and turtles). Consider this excerpt of R.K.’s English-language version of the fight.
“. . . from the grandson . . . of the man who killed the creature [and later died himself] . . . [in the early 1960's was] the last [human] death reported by this creature . . . the animal destroyed his canoe and [the fisherman] fought it with a traditional fishing spear. . . . The animals tail and jaws took a heavy toll as it followed him to shore where a sea cave runs into a crevice . . . Badly wounded . . . [the fisherman] wedged the spear into a crevice and took the animal through the mouth with the spear [killing it] . . . [The fisherman] crawled out [and] was found by villagers . . . He died three days later.”
Umboi Island (about 200 miles to the south of these islands), where I interviewed many natives in 2004, has a very similar creature that they call “ropen.” With one exception, no human death on Umboi has been attributed to the ropen, with one exception (there was no eyewitness of any attack, and there was no human body ever found; a ”crazy” woman went into the bush looking for the ropen and never returning).
What is credibility? In regard to eyewitness accounts of cryptids, this gets complicated, for eyewitness-credibility and description-of-cryptid credibility often become intertwined. Let’s get them separated.
Consider how a witness speaks and acts under questioning, if you’re serving on a court jury; the witness might seem believable. Now consider an eyewitness of a cryptid that you feel sure could not exist; do you look for anything that might indicate the person is telling a lie or misidentifying a non-cryptid? It is hard, sometimes, to be objective, when our feelings or basic beliefs appear to be threatened by the testimony of what has appeared to another person. We are all human, regardless of what the cryptid is.
How rare the evaluator who can separate the eyewitness-credibility from the description-of-cryptid credibility! If we feel that a large hairy ape should not be living in North America, we might notice little mannerisms or hesitancies in the testimony of a Big Foot eyewitness. If we feel that all species of pterosaurs should be extinct, we might question the religious motivations of the eyewitness of an apparent Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur (most of those interviewers are creationists). We would do well to avoid rushing to a convenient conclusion, keeping an open mind to discovery, even when it means changing an old, deep-seated assumption.
See Hennessy 1971 Pterosaur Sighting (Brian Hennessy is a professional psychologist who saw one)
A surfer describes the head of a strange creature that emerged “only a few feet from me.” The hairy head he estimated to be at least three feet in diameter, resembling a cross between that of a cow and a dog. The neck was six feet long. The encounter, early in May of 2009, was around some kelp beds.
See: Cryptozoology