No-Joke Pterosaurs in San Diego

This past November, on a clear evening at about 8:00 p.m., in the middle of San Diego, California, two men saw something flying in from the west. At first, they assumed it was a bird, but when it got closer it was obviously no ordinary bird, if it was a bird at all. It was much too big and had a long tail. One of the men reported the sighting to the cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb, who lives just up the coast, in Long Beach, California.

Nocturnal Pterosaurs in San Diego

“I was at my friend’s house. Well it was a really clear night, because it had rained the day before. We were standing in the street and I couldn’t keep my eyes off the stars, they were really bright. Then from the west came this dark object in the sky. It was right over us about, I say, 40 yards [high]. As it got closer we both yelled, “What the hell is that?” It looked like a huge bird. It was gliding . . . I was stuck looking at it the entire time. I began yelling at it, then it turned around and it stood still in the air. It was flapping its wings while it was there. Then outta nowhere here came another one. It was waiting for it; as it got close to the other one, they both went east.”

The eyewitness who reported the sighting thought the wings were each ten to fifteen feet long, making a wingpan of at least twenty feet. He could not be sure whether or not the ropen-like creatures had feathers, but he remembers that the tails were long and straight. He also reported that he could see the color of the underside of the torso, describing it as “kinda goldish brownish.”

The problem with notifying the news media, in this case, was that just three months previously somebody had played a practical joke. A statue in northern San Diego County was found to have a model “pterodactyl” fixed onto the top. This was carried in the news, becoming well-known in the San Diego area. What news reporter would thereafter give serious consideration to a report of two giant pterodactyls flying over the middle of San Diego? Even if a reporter believed the story, how could it be presented to the editing supervisor of the newspaper?