According to Cryptozoology News (online), two eyewitnesses in Nevada recently saw a “reptilian-like bird” fly up and over their vehicle on Interstate-80 at 11:00 p.m., and the description of the flying creature included “long thin tail,” a head crest, and “a long and thin neck.” That sounds like a ropen.

That was a rare sighting report, that apparent pterosaur in Nevada, for the many sightings in the western United States, up until then, were in states like Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Idaho. Nevada and Colorado had been slighted by those flying creatures, apparently. Now only Colorado seems left out.

I can understand how some readers might think that the ropen flies only in the imagination of a few radical believers, only in the realm of cryptozoology. But most eyewitnesses of apparent pterosaurs in the United States had no interest in cryptids before their sightings. Their belief in the long-tailed featherless ropen ignited the moment they saw the flying creature with their own eyes.

Ropen in California

The following is part of an email I got in mid-December of 2012:

I would like to report seeing a very strange creature flying above. I saw it around 9 a.m. this morning today. It was a giant black bird of some types. I live very close to San Fernando and Fletcher [Los Angeles area] . . . after the rain settled I saw this big black bird figure fly over an electrical post. . . . It was just huge. A big beautiful thing. It had a long tail but it was a different color than what was reported. It was black… I think it was a pterosaur.

Ropen in Oregon

Searching for Ropens and Finding God (4th edition of the nonfiction) says:

In May of 2010, a man and his wife were driving, at mid-day, on the I-84, by the Columbia Gorge in Oregon, when something flew across the highway. The man reported, “It was pretty good size and the thing that really stood out was that it had a long tail and unusually shaped wings, different from a bird because they seemed to be more curved.”

” . . . it was brown and appeared to have no feathers.” After searching online, he concluded that it was a ropen.

Ropen in Washington State

From the book Live Pterosaurs in America (3rd edition) we read:

“I was 15 yrs old [when] I saw two ropens together sitting on a fence. I was riding my bike home from a friend’s house around 5 pm in [a town in southwest Washington state]. I lived in the country with my parents on a . . . ranch.

” . . . on a wood plank fence were two of the biggest bird-like creatures I could ever imagine! I almost crashed my bike! . . .

” . . . the first thing I noticed was their heads, then I thought this can’t be! Could they be dinosaurs? . . .

“[Their] heads [were] . . . maybe 4 ft long with the beak. . . . a brown body color that looked like hair . . . the wings looked like black rubber. . . .”

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Recent Ropen Sightings

Virginia (2015)

West Virginia (2015)

Nicaragua (2009)

Louisiana (2014)

Modern Pterosaurs in North America

The name for this featherless flying creature in North America does not mean it needs to be the same species of pterosaur as the glowing ropen in Papua New Guinea.

“Dinosaur Bird” in Nevada

[The pterosaur was] grey in color and had a long and thin neck. Its head, says Davis, was also thin and pointy with a long beak. He remembers it had a “crest” on the top of its head.

Ropen, a Still-Living Pterosaur

Although this apparent extant pterosaur on  Umboi Island does not seem to be much of a  threat to humans, there have been reports, in  other areas of Papua New Guinea, of attacks  on natives.

Reasons to Believe Eyewitnesses of the Ropen

Not only natives of Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, have seen the long-tailed ropen but Westerners like the American Duane Hodgkinson and two Australians in Perth.

Ropen Searching

What is this flying creature called “ropen?”  Countless eyewitnesses, in many countries  across the planet, have pondered what it  was they had seen.

Giant Ropen in Papua New Guinea

Gideon Koro, of Umboi Island, was one of seven boys who encountered the huge ropen one day as it flew over a crater lake: a terrifiying ordeal for Gideon.

The Ropen as a Rhamphorhynchoid

Ropen is the local name of a nocturnal creature on Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea that glows while flying, and which is held by many cryptozoologists as a possible living pterosaur.

Live Pterosaurs in America

So in conclusion, what do I think of the book? It’s not polished, it’s not gripping at least in style (though the accounts are fascinating and Whitcomb makes some clever arguments) and it’s all way beyond my boggle threshold: I’m slightly more inclined to believe in live pterosaurs in the USA now than before I read it . . .

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Live Pterosaurs in America (third edition) by Whitcomb

From a reader of the previous (second) edition of this nonfiction book:

“I  couldn’t put this book down. It is absolutely  fascinating to read about eyewitness accounts of  the people who have seen these creatures. To learn  about these testimonies from such an open minded  perspective is refreshing in the extreme! . . .  I  highly recommend this book to anyone! People  should know the truth about what is going on. . . .”

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How do dinosaur bones relate to long-tailed ropens that are reported to fly in North America? The ropen appears to be a huge Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur, notwithstanding those flying creatures were supposed to have all fallen to the ground many millions of years ago, and recent dating of dinosaur bones tell us that those huge creatures of the earth lived only thousands of years ago.

Both dinosaurs and pterosaurs have been assumed, by many Americans, to have lived only millions of years ago, with their fossils bones somehow evidence for their ancient existence. Carbon-dating of dinosaur bones has now shown that assumption is false. No C-14 should exist in the remains of something that lived millions of years ago. But results of testing are consistent: A number of types of dinosaurs have been dating to recent ages, even to less than 60,000 years in age. Pterosaurs living in our modern world now make sense, in light of recent dinosaurs.

Human experience and scientific testing cannot be dismissed out of personal distaste for the religious beliefs of the persons that are involved or are assumed to be involved in the sightings and in the radiocarbon testing.

Radiocarbon in Dinosaur and Other Fossils

That’s the title of a scientific paper by Brian Thomas and Vance Nelson, published in the Creation Research Society Quarterly, Volume 51, Number 4 (Spring of 2015). Here’s an excerpt from that article:

[page 303, after a paragraph on carbon-dating fossil wood]

Next, a whole hadrosaur caudal vertebra (ICR 021 Institute for Creation Research), minus its spinous process, was donated by Mr. Paul Koepp of Dallas, Texas. . . .

Abundant disarticulated hadrosaur and ceratopsian fossils occur on the Schmidt ranch, as at other Hell Creek Formation sites, mostly across Montana. . . .

The interior trabecular bone was plainly not infilled with sediment, and retains its in vivo spongy structure, albeit colored almost black . . . This fossil also yielded radiocarbon in amounts well within the detection threshold of the AMS technique at 20,850 +/- 90 BP for the interior trabecular portion, and 28,790 +/- 100 BP . . .

Conclusions

Carbon-14 dating of dinosaur fossils shows them to be only tens of thousands of years old (at most), and this is the only direct dating-measurements that have been done on such supposedly ancient bones. (Other radiometric dating methods had not been done directly on those fossils, and the interpretations depended on a number of assumptions.)

This is completely in harmony with the finding of soft tissue in T-Rex and other dinosaur bones. It also makes sense in light of the many sightings of pterosaurs that still fly overhead (though usually at night). Ropens are not extinct but still living.

Ridiculing a religious belief is no substitute for objective consideration of these many findings. And let the evidences be made known, not covered up.

Jonathan Whitcomb

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Dinosaurs dated to be young

. . . dinosaur bone apatite had been successfully RC dated in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s and significant amounts of C-14 were detected and reported.

Neutron Capture in Carbon-Dated Dinosaur Bones?

Awkward Explanation for Carbon-14 Dated Dinosaurs

American Hammerhead Ropen

The American cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb gave the name “American Hammerhead Ropen” to a type of apparent Rhamphorhynchoid that has been reported . . . to live in North America.

Pterosaur Sightings in the USA

Details are now available on ninety important sighting reports: apparent pterosaurs in the lower-48 states of the USA, with data compiled at the end of 2012.

Scientific Testing of Dinosaur Bones

“Not everybody embraces a dinosaur that is not yet completely decomposed.” . . . Carbon-14 methods cannot date anything older than a few tens of thousands of years old . . . Dating accuracy may be as high as 60,000 years, at best, but carbon-14 just does not last much longer.

Recent Sightings of Ropens

For the past eleven years, I (Jonathan Whitcomb) have interviewed eyewitnesses of apparent pterosaurs from various areas of the world. Many of those whom I have questioned report a flying creature resembling what my associates and I call ropens.

Dinosaur Bone Contains Radiocarbon

Scientists believing in deep time (i.e. millions of years) would not expect to find radiocarbon (C-14) in dinosaur bone. . . . they assume that the “terrible lizards” died out some 65 million years ago. . . . what happens if researchers actually test whether dinosaur fossils contain C-14? They find it.

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A newspaper article was published in Salt Lake City, about a century ago, reporting a huge flying creature described as half-bird and half-reptile. How big was it? The image coming with that article showed a dragon flying off with a horse in its mouth. Where was that flying thing flying? Over Stansbury Island, which is in the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

Three children, including Devon Roberts and his brother Dallin, saw something huge flying overhead, at about 11 p.m., around the fall of 2001, something very unlike any bird. Devon estimated the flying creature had a wingspan of fifteen to twenty feet, although that estimate depends on his estimate of the distance. Where was that flying thing flying? Over Grantsville, which is just south of the Great Salt Lake.

Was it an over-imaginative newspaper reporter a century ago and three over-imaginative children fourteen years ago, with no relationship between the stories? Maybe . . . but maybe not. I suggest both stories may have had some truth, with more credibility for the recent sighting, for two of those three eyewitnesses (sighting around the fall of 2001) I myself interviewed face-to-face, and those two young men appeared perfectly credible to me. I also suggest the two young men did, in fact, observe a very large bioluminescent flying creature and the best candidate for that kind of animal is the ropen.

Devon Roberts was interviewed, in 2015, by Jonathan Whitcomb

I recently interviewed Devon and Dallin Roberts, of St. George, Utah, concerning the flying creature they witnessed, when they were children, in the farming town of Grantsville. The point of this investigation of that encounter fourteen years ago is not to promote belief in a dragon that carried away a full-grown horse and flew over the Great Salt Lake a century ago, but to promote an open mind to the possibility that something much larger than any classified bird now flies over North America, including northern Utah.

Some of the sighting reports in the United States suggest the larger ones, the creatures that resemble pterosaurs, may be able to lift much more weight than eagles or owls can, for the wingspans of the apparent ropens are much greater. But let’s now concentrate on the sighting in Grantsville.

Sighting in Grantsville, Utah

Twelve-year-old Dallin was the first of the three boys to see the strange thing that was flying overhead that night. None of those boys could see it well enough to say it was a half-bird and half-reptile, as an earlier generation may (or may not) have seen in that area of Utah, for the more-recent encounter was late at night. How did they see the creature? It was glowing, although the light went off and on over a period of minutes.

At first, Devon thought his brother was playing a joke. Dallin was telling him there was a huge bird that was “on fire” and then it disappeared. Sure! But then Devon saw the glowing creature. It was no joke but real, seeming to disappear when the glow stopped.

So how could the recent sighting relate to the old story of a horse-carrying dragon-like thing? When the flying creature in 2001 turned on its glow, the farm animals under its flight path “started going berserk” (words of Devon Roberts). Those animals felt threatened, even if the flying creature was not large enough to carry away a horse.

Perhaps the old report included an exaggeration and a false detail about a horse, but that does not mean that all aspects of that old newspaper story were only fictional. Regardless of how truthful that horse-eating story was, the three boys in Grantsville, in 2001, saw something other eyewitnesses have seen in North Ameria: a strange flying creature that glows when it flies at night, an animal much bigger than any bird in a science textbook.

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Ropen Bioluminescence in Utah

Three boys were playing at night on a playground in the farming community of Grantsville, Utah, around the fall of 2001, when they were shocked at the appearance of a large glowing creature that flew overhead.

Van Meter Flying Creature

If the town of Van Meter, Iowa, stood alone with a series of sightings in the early 20th century, what about recent sightings? What about reported encounters with pterosaur-like animals in recent times, in the neighboring states of Wisconsin and Missouri? I doubt that Van Meter really stands alone.

Author in Utah Reports Flying Creatures

Do you believe in the possibility that long-tailed featherless flying creatures, much larger than any fruit bat, live in the jungles of Papua New Guinea? Your belief depends a great deal on where you lived your childhood: in a village like Gomlongon on Umboi Island or in a western country like the United States.

Are Modern Pterosaurs Bioluminescent?

I suggest, to anyone who would attempt to explain pterosaur bioluminescence to a skeptic, that we begin with reports of large flying creatures known to some of the natives of Papua New Guinea, creatures that glow as they fly.

Bioluminescence in Pterosaurs

I interviewed Paul Nation in his home in Texas, soon after he had returned to the United States  from his late-2006 expedition in Papua New Guinea. . . . Jacob Kepas, his interpreter, was able to climb up a cliff where he and a local native saw what  appeared to be a giant winged creature sleeping on another cliff.

Ropen Pterosaur

The word “ropen” comes from Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea,  where in the local language of Kovai it refers to a large nocturnal flying creature that  briefly, on occasion on some nights, glows brightly.

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Nonfiction paperback: Live Pterosaurs in America – by J. D. Whitcomb

From a reader in Wisconsin:

“. . . there is something here for everyone . . . Once you  start to reading it you won’t want to put it down . . .  amazing and awe inspiring . . . Out of five stars, I’ll give  it all five.” (From Isaac Elekom)

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