Nocturnal Ropen Appears in Daylight in Southern California
On June 19, 2012, over a storm drain in Lakewood, California, in clear daylight at about noon, a long-tailed featherless creature sat on a telephone line, making strange burping noises. A lady, who desires to be anonymous, was sitting at her computer, under her gazebo in her backyard, when she realized that the strange noises were not coming from her dog, who was barking wildly.
She looked up to see a strange winged creature that immediately flew off, startled by the human who had suddenly come out from under the nearby gazebo. . . . The long-tailed creature flew off to a large tree in a neighbor’s yard, whereupon the lady ran into her house to tell her husband. The two of them then drove around the neighborhood, camera in hand, searching for what the lady later referred to as a “dragon pteradactal.”
The next day, she and her husband were interviewed by the cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb. She estimated the wingspan at five and a half feet. Whitcomb realized that she could not have seen a Frigate bird, sometimes mistaken for a pterosaur, for the lady described a long neck and a “triangle on his tail, like a dragon.”
Three and a half days later, at about midnight, the husband went out into the backyard to search for any sight of the creature, for Whitcomb had mentioned that it was probably mostly nocturnal. He did not see anything but heard a strange noise in the neighbor’s backyard. He later imitated the sound for his wife to hear; she responded that it was the same noise that she had seen just a moment before she had seen the creature.
The next day after the man’s audio encounter, he told Whitcomb that he used to see many possums around the storm drain but in the past twelve months they have almost all disappeared. Whitcomb concluded that the ropen had been catching possums and rats at night, in that area of Lakewood, California.
Storm channel where a ropen was seen in Lakewood, California