Expeditions in Papua New Guinea – Page 2

September 5, 2014

Ropen Q & A – Modern Pterosaur

Hodgkinson described the field of tall grass where he and his army buddy saw a huge "pterodactyl" (ropen) fly up into the air

Questions and Answers About the Ropen

I just got an email from a reader of my digital nonfiction book Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea. The man’s questions deserve answers but for everybody, not just this one reader.

Q: In your ebook, the Ropen is almost always described consistently throughout witness testimonies. Are there variations across the region (for example, different behavior, coloration, etc.)?

A: The reader probably refers to the southwest Pacific, including Australia and Papua New Guinea. Even within that geographic area, how deep is this question! We do not yet have enough eyewitness reports to determine variations of species of the long-tailed featherless flying creatures that we call “ropen.” The Perth creature may be a different species than the ones observed by Duane Hodgkinson (1944) and by Gideon Koro (~1994), based upon the apparent differences in rations between wingspan and length of tail (as well as beak-to-tail-end length), but even that is uncertain; different eyewitnesses have different abilities in estimating sizes, even if they all had the same perspective on the flying creatures. Even the capture of several flying creatures would be only the beginning in answering this broad question.

Q: Is it possible that Ropen present sexual dimorphism (color variation between genders, males possessing larger crests/tail diamonds, etc.)?

A: Another difficult question. This may take many years to answer adequately, for we need many detailed photographs and videos, even after we obtain captures animals.

Q: Have [ropens] ever been observed interacting with other animals?

A: This is easier, at least for those few reports that include observations of potential ropens that are catching (or trying to catch) prey. Yet many of these are in North America rather than in Australia or in Papua New Guinea. Many of those reports suggest at least some ropens in North America hunt birds. See the appendix of the most recent edition of Searching for Ropens and Finding God.

Q: Are there accounts of [Ropens] attacking humans?

A: Some areas of the earth have reports of attacks on people, including a valley in British Columbia (Canada) and in Papua New Guinea. I suspect that most of the real attacks have been from rogue ropens, a few creatures that were suffering from something that prevented them from obtaining normal prey.

We should define “attack” here. I leave out those cases in which an apparent pterosaur may have stopped a potential attack after discovering that the intended prey was human. This appears to have been the case with a teenager in Virginia (late 20th century) who encountered a huge flying creature that stopped its predatory dive about twenty feet short of the girl; that was in the dark of night, except for the moon light.

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Ropen Eyewitness Interview

In this Youtube video, Garth Guessman interviews the World War II veteran Duane Hodgkinson, who witnessed a huge ropen take off into the air in 1944 in New Guinea.

Ropen of Papua New Guinea

“Several Americans have investigated reports of what natives of Umboi Island call ‘ropen,’ including three pioneers. Jim Blume, a missionary in Papua New Guinea for decades, interviewed dozens of native eyewitnesses of pterosaur-like creatures. . . .”

Rhamphorhynchoid Ropen

Around 1965, Patty Carson saw a similar creature at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She drew a sketch of the featherless long-tailed “dinosaur.” A few years after her sighting, the U.S. Marine Eskin Kuhn saw two “pterodactyls” flying in from the sea at Guantanamo Bay.

June 18, 2014June 18, 2014

Book About Ropens

"Searching for Ropens and Finding God" - front cover - non-fiction book

This book says very little about “finding God,” but boy it says a lot about “searching for ropens.” It’s 354 pages long, yes that’s a long book. Don’t bother even opening it, if you get your hands on a copy, unless you want to spend a lot of time reading. Once you get started, it’s really hard to put it down, and I’m just passing along what other people have said about this third edition and previous editions. I almost forgot to mention the name of the book, Searching for Ropens and Finding God.

The author, Jonathan Whitcomb, is a devout Mormon and makes no effort to cover up that fact. Yet he says more about Baptists than about Mormons, and that’s because so many Baptists have been searching for the ropens. Even so, the book is not about churches. It’s about men who have braved the steamy jungles of Papua New Guinea to get a photo or a bit of video of a ropen. The religious motivations are mentioned but not put on a pedestal. You’ll find a few pages about faith in God, but you’ll find many chapters about the ropens and about the people who see modern pterosaurs, and those eyewitnesses almost never say anything about religion. This is mostly cryptozoology.

Here is the title page:

I’ll tell you what I like best about the title page. “Working with people of other faiths” and “it soars above disputes about religion.” You won’t find much about Muslims, Jews, or Hindus in this book. It’s about Christians of different denominations who work together to find a modern pterosaur. I also like the part at the end: “Speculation that religious bias of investigators has played a big part in sighting reports of apparent pterosaurs—that conjecture has been shot down.”

I don’t mean that there’s hardly anything about religion. You’ll find some pages about that. But the meat of the book is searching in Papua New Guinea and in other countries, searching for pterosaurs.

Here is the first page of the Introduction:

I like this part about helping people avoid suicide:

After reading this book, if one person finds a reason to live and abandons thoughts of suicide, what a reward for all of us involved! This is not a textbook for preventing suicide, yet I suggest each of us can find ways to bring meaning into the lives of persons around us, motivating all of us to keep living and learning.

The book doesn’t say exactly, in so many words, how to help anybody avoid suicide. It’s not in the words exactly, but these men have endured years of ridicule and disappointment, yet they keep living and trying. It’s in their examples, never giving up hope or becoming despondent. The author suffers more failure than anybody else, if you read the book to the end. But he too keeps on going, like everything has to turn out right in the end. I guess readers can follow that example and keep moving forward in their own lives, in whatever they are doing.

New Pterosaur Book on Ropens

My first exposure to a remote tropical island with a giant reptile—when my younger sister Cindy and I were infants—came from Mommy reading Peter Pan. When I was four, the new sister was born, not to the name chosen by Cindy and me, “Captain Hook,” but to a name chosen by compromising parents: “Wendy.”

Searching for Ropens and Finding God—The perfect gift for a loved one or for yourself

You deserve a break from the ordinary routine. Treat yourself to an extraordinary true-life adventure about encounters with flying creatures that most Americans thought became extinct long ago. Find out for yourself what may fly over our heads at night.

May 3, 2013May 14, 2014

Ropen-Duah Tradition Dies Hard

I see two problems with the ropen/duah information in the book Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology, by Michael Newton.

Whitcomb’s post on this book has an explanation for the word duah. It may be just a mistake by an English-speaking researcher. The correct version of the name may be duwas.
Another problem has nothing to do with the correct version or spelling of the name of duah. It’s about the idea that this is a different kind of creature, not the same species perhaps as the ropen. I find fault with the concept.

Newton’s book on cryptozoology was published early in 2005 and the entry for the ropen was probably written long before any information was available from the 2004 expeditions by Whitcomb, Guessman, and Woetzel. Even Paul Nation, if I recall correctly, has shown doubts about the two names referring to two different kinds of flying creature, and that was many years ago.

Here is a better idea about the duwas and the ropen. They are just two names, in different village languages, for the same flying creature of the night. I think that’s Paul Nation’s position and he has explored in Papua New Guinea more than any other American that I know of, looking for the bioluminescent pterosaurs, as we believe they are.

I think that the reason this idea of two sizes of ropens has been hanging around so long is that the earlier researchers, William Gibbons and Karl Shuker, are generally respected, at least in their own separate circles, and they may be more educated than some of the explorers of more recent years. But their anonymous sources may have been mostly missionaries in Papua New Guinea, and we don’t seem to have any quotations from any interviews that were conducted. Third hand, or even fourth hand, accounts may have been involved, who knows?

Pterosaurs in Philippines and Near Indonesia

The two men were flying a Britten-Norman Islander, past the halfway point from Broome, Australia, to Bali, Indonesia, at 6500 feet, when they nearly collided with a large flying creature.

Are Modern Pterosaurs Bioluminescent?

There is a species other than a pterosaur that is purported to have intrinsic bioluminescent capability, namely the common barn owl, Tyto Alba.

Old Biologist; New Pterosaur Insight

If my information is correct, it was in the early 1930′s when Cheesman was baffled by flying lights just below the top of a nearby ridge deep in the mainland of New Guinea. She wrote about the mysterious lights in her book The Two Roads of Papua; the publishing date was 1935.

Searching for Ropens and Finding God has been called the “Bible of modern pterosaurs”

From page 172:

Believe what you will, I believe that those professors who replied to the survey had no knowledge of our investigations and that they would have given a higher estimate than 5%, if they knew half of what I know about sighting reports from around the world. Strange as modern pterosaurs may sound, just a few centuries ago the earth revolving around the sun also sounded strange.