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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.

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Validity of Sightings at Night

A recent post on the “Live Pterosaur” blog was about the credibility of sightings at night. I will not quote much of that post here, but I would like to add more ammunition, more eyewitness sightings.

Two Eyewitnesses See Two Pterosaurs in Florida

According to the nonfiction book Live Pterosaurs in America, a man in Florida saw, in 2008, at about 2:30 a.m., two small pterosaurs flying over houses in the neighborhood. The man’s friend also saw the creatures that had no feathers, a pointed beak, and a “long pointed thing protruding from the back of its head.”

What is not mentioned in that post is that the first flying creature was illuminated by a flood light, making it clearly visible at a close distance.

“Pterdactyl Attacks”

Regarding the report mentioned in the above link, why believe that modern pterosaurs were involved in these attacks? For one thing, birds and bats don’t usually attack people at night. For another, the pterosaurs that attack people in British Columbia do not always kill people. Some victims survive to tell other people about the attacks. The closeness of the encounters, involving attacks, goes without saying, and closeness means the person being attacked gets a close view of the attacker.

San Antonio, Texas, Pterosaur at Night

I quote from the book Live Pterosaurs in America:

“One evening, I was outside my apartment building . . . talking to my brother. . . . We were very used to the normal nightly activities of the area. We knew what the local birds and bats looked like . . . My dad and I had, on several occasions, noticed bats flying right near our heads . . . Neither my brother or I was prone to being scared by anything outside at night. This night was different. We noticed something flying around across the road from where we were . . . the creature was flying just above the phone lines. It would go one direction, turn, and swoop back. The shape was wrong for any large bird of the area, and the size was much too large to be any bat I have ever seen (I have seen a flying fox in a zoo, too, once with wings spread). The wingspan was huge, anywhere from 6-10 feet across. We watched the thing for maybe twenty minutes or so . . .

This sighting in San Antonio is important, for two eyewitnesses, familiar with local birds and bats, realized that a flying creature was too much unlike any bird or bat. I sense that this sighting may not have as high a credibility as other sightings at night, but should be considered more than zero credibility, when taken in context with the many other sightings of modern pterosaurs, in Texas and out, in the night and in the daytime.

Flying Creature of the Night

I recall part of a comment from a critic, some years ago, ridiculing the credibility of eyewitnesses who “misidentify” birds or bats at night. But he was only tossing out a generalization, assuming that all reported sightings (those encounters that serious invesigators publicize) all fit neatly into his mental image of a dark landscape where people imagine that birds and bats are pterosaurs. Science thrives on details of human experience, so let’s examine particular sightings.

The above blog post mentions night sightings in Sudan, Africa, in San Diego, California, and in Ohio. More could be said about more sightings in other areas of the world.

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A Real Pterosaur in Pennsylvania

I refer to the blog post “Pennsylvania Pterosaur”

What caught my attention to this sighting was the obvious rebuttal to the model-pterodactyl-misidentification suggestion that I occasionally read about. There is no mechanical model, of a pterosaur, that catches and eats ducks or rats. Let me explain with reference to this apparent pterosaur in Pennsylvania, quoting from both the Live Pterosaur blog mentioned and the source for that posting on that blog.

In 2006 myself and two of my students were standing outside of my karate school. My school was located on route 119 . . . In Southwest Greensburg PA. This is by no means a rural area.

I noticed a large black bird in the sky. . . . I observed it for about two minutes as it flew towards us very slowly (it seemed slow) until it was maybe another 50 feet away from the tree line . . .  Being that far up the “birds” body still appeared to be much larger than my 100 pound dog (wider and longer).

I called my students attention to it and they were both instantly mesmerized. The wing span appeared to be at least six feet . . . you could clearly make out a long “horn” or “cone” type protrusion coming out of the back of its skull, which was at the end of an elongated neck . . .

This “bird” also seemed to have a long tail . . . As it was almost directly over us we all agreed we couldn’t see feathers anywhere and my student Carrie said “It looks like pterodactyl . . .  doesn’t it?”

It flew over top us and landed in the water behind the school. It was like city run off or whatever and was in a concrete ravine about 15 feet deep [the water itself is shallow] . . .

We could here it splashing around, and Carrie ran around the building to see it. There are always ducks in that water as well as rats and other things. When she came back . . . she said it had taken off, Carrie said it was in the water splashing and eating or grabbing something in its mouth.

No mechanical model would dive into a pool of water, grab an animal or bird, and fly away with the meal in its mouth. But before setting aside the subject of misidentified models airplanes or model gliders, in the shapes of pterosaurs, I refer to the 1944 “pterodactyl” sighting by Duane Hodgkinson. In that sighting, the flying creature with a wingspan of a Piper Tri-Pacer could not have been a man-made model.

I could go on with other sightings but let this suffice: model pterosaurs have no relevance to many critical sighting reports. Critics needs to be more careful before commenting.

Pterosaur Misidentification in Cuba?

“I saw two pterosaurs . . . flying together . . . perhaps 100 feet [high], very close in range from where I was standing, so that I had a perfectly clear view of them.

Eskin Kuhn, a talented artist, drew a sketch of the two pterosaurs, soon after observing them. Misidentification is unlikely, since he was in close range of them and there was no obstruction, and they were very unlike any bird or bat.

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