Cryptid Eyewitness – Page 4 – Especially for the eyewitnesses of strange creatures

May 5, 2014November 5, 2014

Pterosaur Sightings in North America

pile of nonfiction books: "Searching for Ropens and Finding God" - by Jonathan Whitcomb

Reports of living pterosaurs, also called pterodactyls, come from many parts of the world, including North America. Let’s examine just a few of the many reports from this continent, using the nonfiction book Searching for Ropens and Finding God as the major reference.

Page 87 of the book (Jonah Jim’s sighting on Umboi Island)

Although this sighting was in the southwest Pacific, rather than in North America, it ties together the pterosaur appearance and the apparent bioluminescent glow of at least some of these strange flying creatures.

During an outdoor family gathering one night, this young man saw the ropen not as a vague, distant light but as a creature—close. In addition to the glow, he saw the long tail. I recorded no notes, for his description resembled Gideon’s, but later I would realize how important was Jonah Jim’s testimony: The glow that flies around at night is the same kind of long-tailed creature seen by Gideon and his friends. We had assumed that; now direct eyewitness testimony made it obvious.

Now let’s look at North America:

Page 165 (sighting in Canada)

. . . across the river from Detroit, in April of 2012, about one hour after sunset, a man saw something like a flying bat, but it was six times too big and it had a long tail. He sent me an email just a few hours after the sighting—I’ll call the eyewitness “DK.” He impressed me with his objectiveness: During our email exchanges, he kept searching for some way that he might have misidentified a non-ropen for what had looked more like that cryptid than anything else.

Page 163 of the book (encounter in Mexico)

I received the following Youtube message in 2007:

“ok. we are from Guadalajara jalisco in mexico… my inglish its a little bad… here in Guadalajara are ‘la barranca de huentitan’ search in google , its a canyon…

“at that time she lived near the site… she was with her mom at dusk, the two frightened by what they saw, just describe it as something very large and with a long tail it was flying in circles not far from them, she said that gave them a lot of fear and they get in to his house, obviously was not a bird or anything they have seen before, and what they remember most is a long tail, shaped diamond at the end.”

Page 183 (sighting at night in Virginia)

“I was seventeen at the time of this encounter. It was very late at night . . . I have no plans to be held in ridicule by my family, friends or the general population for that matter. I would REALLY like a logical explanation for what I saw . . . in the summer of 1999. [I’m] open to the possibility that there is another explanation . . . it was certainly not in my imagination, as there were two of us who saw, felt and heard something that night.

“I went swimming with a friend at a local reservoir where there was a tree with boards nailed into it for a ladder and a plank for a diving board. . . . located in the back of a U-shaped inlet . . . My friend went back there along the edge of the waterline trying to locate [the tree]. . . . I was standing straight up in the middle of the U section with the water about as high as my hips . . .

“It came from the direction of the moon and . . . all I saw was its silhouette. I could see it was big even before it was close. . . . [It] mostly glided but it came very fast. “I have not before nor since ever been so petrified in my life. . . . I felt incapable of moving my legs. I just stood there, facing it until it literally got about 20 to 30 feet away and it ‘stopped’ and hovered . . .

“The wings were somewhere between 15 and 20 feet wide . . . bat shaped without feathers, the head’s silhouette looked like a point . . . but what I was looking at more than anything else was its large, sharp talons. Right before it started hovering, in those few seconds I had, I thought it was going to pick me up.”

From the size of this nonfiction book, Searching for Ropens and Finding God, it has been labeled “the Bible of modern pterosaurs.”

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Five Eyewitnesses of Pterosaurs in Cuba

. . . four kids, in three separate sighting encounters, saw a large flying creature that was most likely the same species as the two that would be seen in 1971 by the U. S. Marine Eskin Kuhn.

Sightings of Pterosaurs in and Around Kentucky

Last July, I was visiting my friend at his home. It was just a little after sunset, so it was still daylight outside. . . . We were outside, sitting on his deck . . . My friend shouted . . . ‘what in the blue h*** is that?’ Approaching us from the east . . . were two very large animals. . . .”

St. Louis and North Carolina

. . . something HUGE above me in the sky. It looked like a pale greenish white and smooth-skinned. It didn’t appear to have any feathers, and it had the tail with the diamond shape on the end. . . . I just looked up the Rhamphorhynchus . . .

September 10, 2013

Dragon Hoax or not?

Where should we start examining this apparent dragon-hoax/pterosaur-mistake? First, we need to remember that a hoax does not have to be founded on a previous hoax, and that a person may be fooled by a hoax but still promote truth while inadvertently mixing in a mistake. With that said, birds of a feather rarely flock with dragons, so we can understand why a person might disbelieve in any modern pterosaur after learning that some promoters of the idea have been seriously mistaken about one of their evidences. It now appears to me that at least one of my associates has been seriously mistaken about an image in a late-seventeenth century book.

It seems the best thing we can say about the “dragon” image below is that its origin is questionable. I care little about that, however, for even a child can understand that shooting a crow out of the sky cannot cause the extinction of the Snow Goose, notwithstanding how threatening it might appear to all birds.

Nuovi ritrovamenti divisi in due parti dell’ingegnere civile olandese Cornelius Meyer

A dragon (above) was reported to have lived in Italy in the 1600’s

I never felt comfortable with the above image. To the best of my memory, I never included it in any of my blog posts as evidence for a pterosaur living in human times. But my living-pterosaur associate David Woetzel included it with seventeen lines of text in its support in his scientific paper “The Fiery Flying Serpent” (Creation Research Society Quarterly, Volume 42, March 2006). A recent scientific paper, however, seems to have destroyed the credibility of the image and at least part of the story behind it (“Late-surviving pterosaur?” by Phil Senter and Pondanesa D. Wilkins. 2013. Palaeontological Association. Article number: 16.1.6A).

Nevertheless, the recent paper takes a narrow view, ignoring potential positive aspects of living-pterosaur investigations from the 1990’s to the present. Some of my associates and I, including David Woetzel and Garth Guessman, have explored on Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, searching for the nocturnal flying creature that the natives call “ropen.” The eyewitness testimonies we recorded, when combined with many other sighting reports from various areas of the world, make the case for modern living pterosaurs. And with the concept of pterosaurs living into the twenty-first century, obviously they would have lived in the 1600’s.

Woetzel wrote, “It seems to be a credible pterosaur specimen” and “some have suggested that it could be a fossil or faked composite, but it is much too accurate to be considered a fabrication.” In my opinion, those particular words in his scientific paper have now been shown to be incorrect, notwithstanding the many points and paragraphs, on other historical evidences, that may be much more accurate; the story of this “dragon” image, however, made up only a tiny fraction of Woetzel’s paper. Senter and Wilkins, in their early-2013 paper, actually discredited only a tiny portion of Woetzel’s paper.

“The Rhamphorhynchoid Pterosaur Scaphognathus crassirostris: A “Living Fossil” Until the 17th Century” (Adapted from a paper presented at the 1998 International Conference on Creation, Geneva, PA)

This paper by John Goertzen appears to be the source of Woetzel’s information on the seventeenth-century “dragon” of Italy. In this 1998 scientific paper, Goertzen referred to this image, noting similarities with an Egyptian sculpture. The 2013 paper by Senter and Wilkins now makes his writings on this dragon image highly questionable, to say the least.

But “Late-surviving pterosaur?” actually says nothing substantial against the countless eyewitness testimonies from sightings of living pterosaurs within the past few decades. It is extremely narrow, apparently written with the assumption that all other ideas about extant pterosaurs are equally flawed.

The long-tailed "basal" pterosaur Scaphognathus crassirostris - sketch by the artist Dmitry Bogdanov

Scaphognathus crassirostris (a “basal” pterosaur)

Many pterosaurs of the suborder Rhamphorhynchoidea (long-tailed) have lived at some time in the past. Goertzen seems to have assumed that Scaphognathus crassirostris (Sc) may have been a species that survived until at least a few centuries ago; perhaps he is right. But if the above image accurately depicts the head crest, then another species may better explain the living-pterosaur evidences from human history. Many of the sighting reports that I have received over the past nine years point to a much more pointed head crest, much like a horn coming out of the back of the head.

The big point, however, is this: overwhelming eyewitness evidence makes the case for modern living pterosaurs, regardless of the questionable aspects of old images of dragons with wings.

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When a Child Sees a Pterosaur

What happens when a child reports a sighting of a live pterosaur or “pterodactyl?” Will an adult care what the child says or believe the account? Children often spend much time outdoors, so they observe what flies overhead. But what if a child reports the same large featherless flying creature that some adults report? If many persons reject the reports of adult eyewitnesses, those skeptics will probably reject the report of a child.

Third edition of Live Pterosaurs in America – nonfiction

Excerpt from the above cryptozoology book:

She was twelve years old, at most (around 1995), when she walked out into her backyard one morning to check on the dog . . . [She] found the poor animal cowering around the side of the house, apparently trying to hide behind a banana tree. The girl had no idea what was wrong . . . Fearing it was sick, [The child] was about to run back into the house to tell her mother. . . . She turned her head and saw what it was that had terrified the dog.

. . . in the neighbor’s backyard, was what she first thought was a tall man . . . He was “draped in a long black coat or cape,” facing away from her. “Dracula” came to mind as [the girl] tried to understand what she was looking at. The “man” turned, and revealed a face that terrified the child: It was non-human. . . . the creature . . . unwrapped its bat-like wings, dark leathery wings. The girl had never seen anything remotely like them.

. . . it was nothing like [any bird or bat]: too big, and without feathers. The girl was frozen in fear . . . [It] began to walk towards her. . . .

Child Care

March 11, 2013May 28, 2013

Dragons of Los Angeles

Do you believe in flying dragons? Have you ever seen a large long-tailed featherless flying creature? If so, you’re not alone.

For several days, I questioned the eyewitness by emails, and I interviewed her by phone three days after the sighting. She admitted that she did not have time to determine if the three “dragons” had no feathers, for they flew 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.”

Approximate location of sighting of three "dragons" - satellite image of a portion of Griffith Park (golf course) and Los Angeles River

Approximate location of sighting near Colorado Street overpass

satellite image of a part of Griffith Park, Los Angeles, including I-5 freeway and river

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

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.

January 11, 2013

Why Believe Pterosaur Eyewitnesses?

When an eyewitness sees a “pterodactyl” flying over a highway in Georgia or taking off from a cliff over a river in Arkansas, why believe the eyewitness? After all, it seems extinction proclamations are everywhere, regarding dinosaurs or “primitive” creatures associated with the dinosaur era. Why not just assume a pterosaur sighting was just a mistake? The descriptions given by American eyewitnesses are too close to those given by eyewitnesses in other parts of the planet, not in the wording or in all the details, but just too close to be from any kind of mistake.

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!

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 . . .

Third edition of the cryptozoology book Live Pterosaurs in America

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”]

January 3, 2013

Pterodactyl in Georgia

Two eyewitnesses reported sightings of pterosaurs or “pterodactyls,” in Georgia, encounters in December of 2012. Other citizens of Georgia have recently reported older sightings.

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:

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
About how high was it flying above the ground? It was about 10 feet off the road
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.

December 8, 2012December 8, 2012

Statistics on Sightings of Pterosaurs

Since late 2003, I have accumulated data on sightings (of living pterosaurs) from around the world. The latest compilation (late 2012) includes data never before analyzed in detail, in particular related to driving or riding in a vehicle.

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.

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.