Sightings – Page 8 – Modern Pterosaur

May 20, 2014May 20, 2014

Recent Pterosaur Sightings

black and white image of an American World War II light cruiser ship

At the back of the book Searching for Ropens and Finding God, in the appendix is mentioned a sighting in the Pacific during World War II. This is not recent news, of course, but it just recently came up. Nobody was talking about it before, at least as far as I know.

Near Wake Island in the Pacific

The report comes from a nephew of a World War II veteran, but this is not Duane Hodgkinson. It was a sailor who saw a weird flying creature, and he was not alone.

The wingspan was around 30 feet, according to the sailor. The ship was doing target practice at an island in the Pacific. It looked like their ship was found by a Japanese plane, but the men came to realize that it was a flying creature, after it flapped its wings.

It came at the ship, like a Japanese plane would do, and crashed into them. The uncle told his nephew how he had been chosen to kill and dispose of the beast. He clubbed it until they were sure it was dead, for the officer in charge told them it was just a bat.

It had a long neck and very tough hair on its wings, but other parts of the body were covered with soft hair. The beak was like an elongated parrot beak. It was interesting to me that the nephew is a biologist. The uncle asked him what kind of animal it was and was surprised that his biologist-nephew did not know.

Hawaii

Another sighting in the Pacific really was recent, around the beginning of January, 2014. The eyewitness reported this:

We live in South Kona . . . About a month ago me, some friends and my girl friend were driving south on Mamalahoa By-Pass Rd. . . . [three of us] all saw a big fleshy colored, featherless bird like creature. . . . [We] saw a long head, and its mouth with sharp teeth opening and closing, then its wings opened with a wingspan of about 10-15 feet.

Recent Sighting Reports

What people have seen in California, North Carolina, Canada, Spain, and New Zealand

Is the Ropen out of Order?

If those flying dragons over Los Angeles were not enough, we now have another problem with modern pterodactyls. The ropen, which was supposed to keep out of sight in remote jungles of Papua New Guinea, has popped up in a new book: Searching for Ropens and Finding God.

April 21, 2014May 14, 2014

Sightings of Pterosaurs in and Around Kentucky

In the book Searching for Ropens and Finding God, it says:

“I live in Lamero, Kentucky. Its a small, rural area . . . I have a friend who lives near Renfro Valley, which is about twelve miles north of me. Its a wooded area as well, with . . . several caves. And I’m talking a lot of caves, lol. This county is seriously like swiss cheese . . . 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. . . .”

“They didn’t flap their wings very much, about once every second or two, definitely not as fast as a common bird flaps their wings. They . . . had every characteristic of a pterodactyl, from head to tail. I’d say they were roughly 15+ feet long and were flying at least 40 mph, but these are just rough estimates.”

Why shouldn’t Kentucky have accounts of modern pterosaurs? States all around Kentucky have had their own accounts. The forests give modern pterosaurs many places to hide, too.

wilderness forest in Kentucky

To the northeast of Kentucky is Ohio, where a man saw a pterosaur with a long tail, in fact he saw it in two different years, both times in the hottest time of the year. He called them, “huge . . . about 4.5 ft. tail, 10 ft. from head to end of tail. long skinny tail with a spade.”

To the east of Kentucky is Virginia and the book has a long account of some kind of gigantic creature that was flying over a pond at night years ago. The book says:

“I was seventeen at the time of this encounter. It was very late at night. . . . I’d place the time to be somewhere between ten and midnight. . . . at a local reservoir where there was a tree with boards nailed into it for a ladder and a plank for a diving board. . . . all I saw was its silhouette. I could see it was big even before it was close. It seemed like it crossed a great distance with only a few flaps of its wings and mostly glided but it came very fast. . . .”

“I just stood there, facing it until it literally got about 20 to 30 feet away and it ‘stopped’ and hovered mid-air. The wings were somewhere between 15 and 20 feet wide . . . The wings were bat shaped without feathers . . .”

Searching for Ropens and Finding God (nonfiction cross-genre)

From page 78 of the book:

Gideon immediately chose the drawing with the streamlined head. I concealed my delight as we continued our conversation. I asked if any book at school had a picture of a ropen. He thought for a second and then said, “No.” Had he been dishonestly trying to convince me of a non-existent creature, he would have supported his earlier answer describing the mouth. The resolute, immediate choice of a less-crocodilian-like head was evidence he had seen something—even, perhaps, a living pterosaur.

July 15, 2013September 4, 2013

Pterosaurs and Woodpeckers in Cuba

Dale A. Drinnon used to attribute pterosaur sightings to Manta rays jumping out of the water. Perhaps he later came to realize that most sightings are not over water. More recently, he has thrown up woodpeckers, including extinct ones at that, as a plausible explanation. In April of 2012, he suggested such birds as the cause of two sightings in Cuba many years ago. His post is titled “Cuban Pterosaurs?”

sketch of pterosaur seen by Patty Carson in Cuba in 1965

Sketch by the eyewitness Patty Carson: 1965 sighting in Cuba

Drinnon said:

The mixed-trait Pterosaurs do not exist in Paleontology but they DO occur commonly in popular cartoons such as The Flintstones in the 1960s. Therefore the asumption [sic] that such creatures ever existed as such in real life is born in a pre-conceived notion out of such representations as the Flintstones cartoon and born out of ignorance.

To the best of my memory, most of the flying things in the old Flintstones cartoons were feathered birds, not pterosaurs, so that reference is irrelevant, even if Drinnon did show some reason that eyewitnesses were influenced by cartoons from the 1960’s. He does not, however, show any evidence for any such influence.

Drinnon mentions “ignorance,” as if that explains something about what eyewitnesses describe. But that critic does not openly say anything about any hoax. I say that Drinnon himself is not as knowledgeable as he needs to be on the subject of pterosaur fossils. He should have done more research before making the statements he made.

He said, “Basically Pterosaurs came in two large groups,” but he went on to generalize that all of one group had head crests and all of the other group had long tails. He thinks that there is no mixture of those traits in any of the fossils. That is wrong. There were at least a small number of basal pterosaurs that had head crests, and basal pterosaurs are the ones that had long tails.

Drinnon also may be ignorant of recent discoveries in paleontology, in particular regarding head crests in some pterosaurs. At least some of those head crests grew as the creatures aged, meaning larger pterosaurs had head crests that might not have been noticeable in smaller ones of the same species. Drinnon does not take that into consideration regarding modern sightings.

He also seems to be under the assumption that no pterosaur could ever have existed unless it closely resembled a fossil that somebody has discovered up until the present. That kind of thinking would result in a future pterosaur fossil being rejected as a hoax just because of its being different from any previously known fossil.

two pterosaurs sketched by eyewitness Eskin Kuhn

Sketch by eyewitness Eskin C. Kuhn: 1971 sighting in Cuba

Drinnon says that the above sketch by Mr. Kuhn came from an encounter with two ivory-billed woodpeckers. Drinnon says that Kuhn was “startled and the sighting was brief.” Where does the critic get those ideas about the eyewitness being startled and the sighting being brief? The critic probably knows nothing about the Whitcomb-Kuhn interview in which the eyewitness said the following:

I really tried to “cram” my study at that time, focusing on details as well as taking in the overall form and motion of the pair in flight. I tried to memorize the details that would enable me to commit them to paper in a sketch so as to accurately define the creature. Some of the things that I focused on were the bony vertebrae of the back that were clearly defined . . .

That does not sound at all like a brief sighting or a misunderstanding that came from being startled. In fact, I don’t recall anything in Kuhn’s writings that he was startled at any time during the sighting of the two “pterodactyls.” Like most eyewitnesses, he was surprised at the details that he saw, but that is the opposite of what Drinnon talks about. Kuhn was surprised by the strange features of what he saw, he was not imagining things because of a surprise. Drinnon turns things upside down with his faulty reasoning.

Perching Pterosaur, not Woodpecker

Dale A. Drinnon has another explanation for pterosaur sightings in Southern California. He now says it’s a woodpecker.

Two Pterosaur Sightings in Cuba

A lady living in California, has come forward, supporting the U.S. Marine’s testimony with her own sighting report. Patty Carson observed a single pterosaur, about six years before the sighting by Kuhn.