By Jonathan David Whitcomb

Sometimes a person who is mostly ignorant of the overall eyewitness evidence of modern pterosaurs will speculate about misidentification. Many of those conjectures fall to one of the following two flying creatures:

1. Frigate bird
2. Flying fox fruit bat

Yet many of the speculators avoid details, in particular avoiding any reference to any one sighting. Perhaps the weight of generations of Westerner assumptions appears sufficient, allowing a critic to simply toss a feather of skepticism onto the subject, to crush the idea of modern pterosaurs. Before we get into any particular sighting, let’s examine how cultural assumptions play a role in our thinking.

Cultural Assumptions

Each culture encapsulates what other cultures may recognize as faulty assumptions. The nature of how cultural assumptions originate may lie within the fog of ancient history, but the result is clear: The great majority of those who have been raised in a particular culture have been blinded to the weaknesses of their cultural assumptions. They will sometimes go to war, even risking destruction, to protect their weak assumptions.

Westerners have become indoctrinated into the opinion that all species of certain general types of animals became extinct many millions of years ago. In reality, no paleontologist has witnessed even one extinction of even one species of dinosaur or pterosaur. Yet the indoctrination continues, as if all of their species must have died out by 65-million years ago. This indoctrination-influence problem deserves far more attention, but we need to move on for now.

Sketch drawn by the eyewitness Eskin Kuhn (sighting in Cuba)

Misidentified . . . Whatever

I have sometimes been amazed at the imaginations of some skeptics. What an imaginative collection of speculated misidentifications! It’s not been confined to oceanic birds or large bats. It has also included leaping fish and woodpeckers. Some of this deserves a little attention, even though the ideas are ludicrous.

I, Jonathan Whitcomb, have been criticized for publishing accounts of modern-pterosaur encounters, yet my critics usually ignore the following point: I have probably spent more time on living-pterosaur investigations than any other person now living on this planet. Even if I have made mistakes, those 10,000+ hours of searching, researching, interviewing, and writing may have uncovered some important truth.

If someone reports observing a potential living pterosaur and later retracts that original interpretation, it usually means we can safely classify that sighting as a misidentification. In reality, that rarely happens. To the best of my memory, I list the following cases in which a person could have changed his or her mind in that way (and these are restricted to eyewitnesses who clearly appeared to be honest):

• Number of Frigate birds reported as pterosaurs: one
• Number of fruit bats reported as pterosaurs: zero
• Number of leaping manta-ray fish reported as pterosaurs: zero
• Number of woodpeckers reported as pterosaurs: zero
• Number of Hornbill birds reported as pterosaurs: zero
• Number of mechanical flying models reported as pterosaurs: zero

The above does not imply that almost no such misidentifications have ever taken place. But those cases are so rare that I now recall only one of them, and that appeared to have been a Frigate bird seen by a man in Australia years ago.

Please be aware that I am not including the many YouTube videos that feature Frigate birds or mechanical models or 3D animations of apparent pterosaurs. Many of those can be resolved as hoaxes rather than honest misidentifications. I mostly refer to persons who have reported their sightings to me or to one of my associates. (An exception was the Frigate bird seen by an Australian; he reported his sighting to an online forum.)

Common Misidentifications Overlooked by Skeptics

Critics may be ignorant of the common types of actual misidentification:

• Eyewitness first thought it must have been a weird bird
• Eyewitness first considered it a strange big bat
• Eyewitness first thought it was a perception problem

We have no room on a single blog post for all the sighting reports in which a person observed a flying creature that looked like a “dragon” or “pterodactyl” but that idea was immediately rejected. Those eyewitness pondered all the possibilities that it could have instead been some strange bird or bat. This is common with many Americans and other Westerners.

Often a person will doubt his or her ability to see properly or correctly perceive what was seen, because of the depth of Western indoctrination into extinction dogmas. In some of those sighting cases, the eyewitness will eventually come to realize that the flying creature was actually what it appeared to be. Those are the eyewitnesses that may eventually report their encounters to me.

That kind of misidentification seems to have been overlooked by the skeptics and critics. The important point about misidentification is this: When a person comes to correct an apparently wrong early interpretation—that case has a significant potential for being a misidentification, and the vast majority of such misidentifications are for actual modern pterosaurs that were at first thought to have been strange manifestations or misperceptions of other things. This calls for examples.

Paperback book Live Pterosaurs in America (third edition)

Page 28:

The two men [in Florida one night] had no time to recover when a second creature flew in the opposite direction, toward the neighbor’s backyard. . . . This one was not as clearly visible, but obviously very similar. DR said to his friend, “Was that what I think it was?” He replied, “Naa, it had to be something else.”

Page 32:

It’s common for an eyewitness to first assume that what is seen is a bird. In Kentucky, MR first assumed he was watching a “large bird.” In Wisconsin, EWED first assumed a “strange looking bird.” In Michigan, RT first assumed an ordinary “large dark colored bird.”

Pages 35-36 [Brownsville, Texas]

She was twelve years old, at most (around 1995), when she walked out into her backyard one morning to check on the dog . . . Next door, in the neighbor’s backyard, was what she first thought was a tall man; but he was about as tall as the house, too tall. He was “draped in a long black coat or cape,” facing away from her. “Dracula” came to mind as GR tried to understand what she was looking at. The “man” turned, and revealed a face that terrified the child: It was non-human.

Slowing the creature . . . unwrapped its bat-like wings, dark leathery wings.

Notice how eyewitnesses in the United States, in the above cases, initially searched for a non-pterosaur explanation for what was encountered. Only after careful consideration did they realize it may have been a pterosaur, an animal that they had been taught was extinct. Without that extinction indoctrination, it would have been immediately obvious to the eyewitnesses that they had observed a pterosaur.

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Honesty Credibility in Pterodactyl Sightings

Let’s examine what’s been learned from sighting reports that are mostly from North America, with a critical eye on the overall honesty-credibility of eyewitnesses.

Ropens in Western USA

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.

Living Pterosaurs? Not by Glen Kuban

. . .  the testimonies of Brian Hennessy and Duane Hodgkinson. Glen Kuban’s web page ignores those two witnesses entirely. . . . [sightings of] “prehistoric” looking flying creatures in daylight, at fairly close range, with locations being Bougainville Island and the Finschhafen area . . . [in] the nation of Papua New Guinea.

Figurines of Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs in Mexico

Where is the physical evidence for modern ropens, or extant long-tailed pterosaurs? It’s there to see, for those who are open-minded enough to look.

Misidentification Possibilities With Pterosaurs

Perhaps the oldest misidentification suggestion, for reports of living pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea, has been “Flying Fox fruit bat.” It seems to satisfy reports of large featherless flying creatures in the southwest Pacific, but there are problems with “misidentified bat.”

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Dale A. Drinnon has another explanation for pterosaur sightings in Southern California. He now says it’s a woodpecker. In his blog post “Living Pterosaurs of Hollywood,” he says:

This sounds like possibly another series of sightings of an outsized woodpecker similar to the Ivory-billed woodpecker, already suspected from “Pteranodon” sightings from further North in California and in Oregon. There is a larger species related to the Ivory-Billed woodpecker native to Mexico but it is thought to be extinct. The creature which is reported as a pterosaur perches upright, which no kind of a pterosaur could do.

I’d better explain the context. Drinnon says that after what looks like a quote, but I haven’t been able to find the source, after I Googled on his text. Maybe he was quoting correctly. If he did, with “Jonathan David Whitcomb states on Facebook” then I accept that is what was written on Facebook. It relates to the May 13th sighting this year, a little southeast of Griffith Park. The animal was called a pterosaur by the eyewitness and she said that it had no feathers but it did have a head crest.

Here are some problems with what Drinnon has said:

• He said “perching” but the May 13th sighting had a “pterosaur” flying over a freeway. It did not perch.
• He said no kind of pterosaur can perch but the kind that is often reported in Southern California looks like a member of Rhamphornynchoidea, which could perch.
• He said a woodpecker could be what is being seen, but almost all sightings are of much larger flying creatures, far bigger than any woodpecker.
• He said sightings in Southern California are related to “Pteranodon sightings” further north in California and in Oregon but he does not say why those might be related to sightings in Southern California.
• He thinks the head crest mentioned by the May 13th eyewitness is the same thing as what some woodpeckers have, but she chose only pterosaur images from a survey. Drinnon says nothing about that survey.
• He thinks none of the eyewitnesses are capable of determining that they had seen flying creatures that were not birds. Why does Drinnon think he can judge all those persons when his own judgment has not been sufficiently proven? Has he even questioned any eyewitness of a strange flying creature?

Does a Pterosaur Perch?

It could be that Drinnon was thinking about the Lakewood, California, sighting that happened last June, in 2012. The eyewitness said that the “dragon-pterodactyl” was perched on a telephone cable just a little overhead. But she also described a long tail with a “triangle” at tail end, as I recall. That would make it the type of pterosaur that had digits on the feet that could perch, for that would be a basal pterosaur.

Dragons or Pterosaurs Over Interstate-5

Right between the Los Angeles River and Griffith Park—that’s where the three “dragons” were flying on March 3, 2013, at 6:10 a.m., but another driver on the I-5 Freeway saw one “pterosaur” ten weeks later, just a little over a mile south of the first sighting location.

California Ropens – Are They Woodpeckers?

Immediately after mentioning the woodpecker interpretation of pterosaur sightings in California, the skeptic said, “The creature which is reported as a pterosaur perches upright, which no kind of a pterosaur could do.” Well, that old generalization no longer applies, for we now know that one type of pterosaur could indeed perch upright, and that long-tailed variety just happens to be . . . yes, the same general type observed perching upright on a telephone line in Lakewood, California, on June 19, 2012: the long-tailed variety.

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?