Cuba – Page 2 – Modern Pterosaur

October 5, 2011

New Sketch of Gitmo Pterosaur

Patty Carson, as a child and with one or more other children, saw this flying creature about six years before Eskin Kuhn’s 1971 sighting, also at the Guantanamo Bay military installation. The following sketch may not be complete, for it is still undergoing revisions. In some doubt is the final color selection and the precise shape of the beak. I am very fortunate to have a connection that allows me the privilege of having access to the images.

We are indeed fortunate that Patty Carson has both a good memory and a talent for sketching what she has seen, in this case surely the same species that Eskin Kuhn saw at that same military installation in Cuba. Jonathan Whitcomb has been interviewing Carson and has interviewed Kuhn.

Carson has been clear about both the absence of feathers and the presence of teeth. That eliminates, for practical purposes, any misidentification of any bird. This sketch, in the beak and the head crest, eliminates any misidentification of any bat, even if the huge size of the flying creature is not taken into account. That leaves, outside of a hoax or hoaxes, only one logical choice: a modern pterosaur.

Regarding the cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb, I have already written about the hoax possibility. See below. I don’t know if anybody has disputed his 2004 expedition, insinuating that he never even traveled to Papua New Guinea. As I had written, that expedition surely took place, for reasons mentioned. If he had any inclination to perpetrate any hoax, surely he would not have taken so much trouble, and at such expense, to travel to Papua New Guinea. He would also not have returned with an admission that he never saw anything like a modern pterosaur. He made it clear that he did not even see the flying ropen light, although his interpreter saw it when Whitcomb was asleep. Surely he has not been perpetrating hoaxes.

Kongamato Pterosaur and Hoax Possibility

To find out if Whitcomb has been carrying out a hoax, we need to go back to when he first became involved. His 2004 expedition in Papua New Guinea . . . If he were carrying on a long hoax he would probably have invented a trip to Papua New Guinea as well. But Garth Guessman and David Woetzel had their expedition to the same island . . . and it was only a few weeks after Whitcomb’s . . . explorations there. The difficulty with proving Whitcomb has been carrying on a hoax, including a false expedition on Umboi Island, seems to be insurmountable when we consider that the other two Americans talked with natives who had remembered Whitcomb’s recent visit. In addition, Whitcomb videotaped many interviews on Umboi, with his own voice in the audio track of those videos.

August 29, 2011August 29, 2011

More on the 1965 Sighting in Cuba

The Gitmo Pterosaur, as it has been called, is again in the news, at least among some cryptozoologists. A sketch has come forth, although with many remarks about its being only a preliminary drawing: It has many modifications that the eyewitness artist feels are necessary before she is comfortable with it. This eyewitness is Patty Carson, who saw one of the flying creatures at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, around 1965, when she was a child.

The following shows where Patty’s home was located in relationship to where the pterosaur sighting took place.

Yellow dots signify pterosaur flight. Purple dots signify eyewitnesses walk.

There have been a number of changes in this area in the last 46 years, but the blue circle shows the house where Patty’s family lived and the red circle shows where the children saw the Gitmo Pterosaur, what Patty at first called a “dinosaur” or “pterodactyl.”

I don’t want to publish the preliminary sketch of the pterosaur, for it may lead to some people believing it to be very accurate in its present form. For those who are unfamiliar with this sighting, I provide the following:

Gitmo Pterosaur Revisited

I noticed something interesting in Patty Carson’s testimony. She said, “It had little teeth, a LOT of them.” Well, Rhamphorhynchoids had teeth and long tails, generally, and the Gitmo pterosaur does as well, even though Eskin Kuhn did not see any teeth in the mouths of the two that he saw. That does make sense. Carson saw a winged creature on the ground, and she thought it had been eating or resting just before it stood up to look at her and her brother; she saw teeth in a mouth that was slightly open. Kuhn saw two winged creatures flying with their mouths closed; he saw no teeth.

May 25, 2011May 26, 2011

Modern Pterosaur Details

Darren Naish the paleontologist seems to me, in some of his writings, to be almost an enemy to cryptozoological research related to modern pterosaurs. He is determined to support pterosaur extinction in the face of increasing reports of eyewitness sightings.

Details are what make scientific progress possible, but Naish seems to always avoid mentioning any details involving sighting reports that are taken most seriously by the cryptozoologists most actively involved. He can write many paragraphs without mentioning even one sighting report, yet he tries to make it appear that all reports are wrong. It seems that all that is needed is the idea that standard assumptions of paleontology are threatened or at least appear to be threatened.

Naish has said that “Fossil evidence demonstrates overwhelmingly that pterosaurs did not survive beyond the end of the Cretaceous, and the sightings of pterosaur-like animals that have been reported appear to be a combination of hoaxes and misidentification of large birds and bats.” He then gives not a milligram of detail about even one sighting, let alone the many that have been investigated in detail by those who have written scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals of science: David Woetzel and Jonathan Whitcomb.

I’m sure that I have said this before, but it bears repeating. “Fossil evidence” does not demonstrate the extinction of even one species, let alone all species of pterosaurs. If that is not enough to astonish us, “overwhelmingly” strikes me as ludicrous for any scientist to use for an assumption of something that is so hotly contested, for that same word could just as well be used as follows: “Fossil evidence overwhelmingly lacks the power to demonstrate the extinction of all species of pterosaurs.”

In respect to the many eyewitnesses, those who have neither been mistaken with birds or bats or corrupted by a desire to perpetrate a hoax, I offer some details on a few sightings:

Dactyl or Delirius Driver?

I know that some skeptic can suggest drinking was the cause, but not everyone who drives a car has detailed delirium tremens hallucinations with giant Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs. In addition, even if one driver imagined a ‘dactyl or dinosaur bird flying in front of the windshield, such an imagination would never have an impact on other drivers, causing them to pull over to the side of the highway as the imaginative driver kept on driving normally.

South Carolina Sighting by Wooten – part of “Dactyl” post

Susan Wooten was driving . . . to the town of Florence, on a clear mid-afternoon in the fall of about 1989 . . . Where the road was surrounded by woods and swamps, Wooten saw something flying from her left, then passing in front of her . . . “It swooped down over the highway and back up gracefully over the pines,” but its appearance was shocking: “It looked as big as any car . . . NO feathers, not like a huge crane or egret, but like a humongous bat.”

Living Pterosaurs in the Philippines

“. . . what he called a “pterodactyl,” in fact two flying together, when he was a boy in the city of Pagbilao, Quezon Province . . . . they have long tails about 3 to 4 meters long . . .it is not a bird: They don’t have any feathers. . . . “I saw them clearly: the SHAPE, their BAT-LIKE WINGS, a LONG NECK and . . . They have a long beak. . . . They don’t have any feathers . . .”

Pterosaur in Cuba

It was a beautiful, clear summer day . . . I was looking in the direction of the ocean when I saw an incredible sight. It mesmerized me! . . . I saw two Pterosaurs . . . flying together at low altitude, perhaps 100 feet, very close in range from where I was standing, so that I had a perfectly clear view . . . they had a long tail trailing behind with a tuft of hair at the end.”

Setting aside details now, here is something general about the kongamato of Africa:

Kongamato Pterosaur in Africa

He believes a large stingray could overturn a boat (“Kongamato” means overturner of boats), declaring that a pterosaur would never have enough mass to overturn a boat. I find a number of serious problems with that pterosaur-impossible assumption, although there may have been some instances of large stingrays being labeled “Kongamato.” The point is twofold: His dismissal of the pterosaur possibility is flawed and the dependence on the label “Kongamato” can cause problems as well as solve them.