Cheesman – Modern Pterosaur

I realize that I have previously said a good deal about pterosaurs in Texas, but the Marfa Lights mystery keeps coming back. Prior to last month’s press release, “Unmasking a Flying Predator in Texas,” few Americans would have even thought about the possibility that those mysterious lights were from living entities of this world. Some persons conjectured UFO intelligence, but that seems unlikely, because of the frequent returns of the lights to the same rather barren countryside.

I know that James Bunnell of Texas and Edson Hendricks of California have done extensive studies of the more mysterious Marfa Lights. Both men seem to be well educated in science, with years of experience in their respective fields. Yet it has been pointed out that neither one is a biologist, and the conjectures and hypotheses of bioluminescence in Marfa Lights calls for a biologist.

I have written previously about Evelyn Cheesman, the British biologist. For a short time, she worked on learning as much as she could about the mysterious lights that flew near the top of a ridge that was in view from her base camp deep in the mainland of New Guinea. I think it possibly important to note that the natives would not talk about those lights, so Cheesman was left with no local information about them. If I understand correctly, in many native settlements in Papua New Guinea the traditions about glowing nocturnal flying creatures include traditions about bad luck and danger from those creatures. Cheesman may have been with a tribe that was so fearful that they did not want to talk about the flying lights that villagers to the south (Tawa Village area) were later willing to talk about with the American explorer Paul Nation. Be that as it may, Chessman became convinced that the flying lights she observed could not have been from any “human agency.”

In addition:

There’s a new web site titled “Marfa Ghost Lights.” To quote one paragraph:

The flying Marfa Lights of southwest Texas have been compared with the ropen of Papua New Guinea. There the lights have been coorelated with appearances of large and giant long-tailed flying creatures, featherless and resembling Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs.

Evelyn Cheesman was no cryptozoologist. She explored remote jungles in New Guinea to discover new species of insects or new species of amphibians, not modern pterosaurs. This British biologist was respected in the scientific community; here is part of what Wikipedia says:

” . . . unable to train for a career as a veterinary surgeon due to restrictions on women’s education . . . she studied entomology, and was the first woman to be hired as a curator at Regent’s Park Zoo, in London. In 1924 she was invited to join a zoological expedition to the Marquesas and Galapagos Islands. She spent approximately twelve years on similar expeditions, travelling to New Guinea, the New Hebrides and other islands in the Pacific Ocean. In New Guinea she made a collecting expedition . . . collecting insects.

If my information is correct, it was in the early 1930’s when Cheesman was baffled by flying lights just below the top of a nearby ridge deep in the mainland of New Guinea. She wrote about the mysterious lights in her book The Two Roads of Papua; the publishing date was 1935.

The lights could not reasonably be explained away as coming from the locals, for they were glowing in a somewhat horizontal formation, inexplicable as human-caused. But in more recent decades, a number of explorers have searched in Papua New Guinea for flying creatures that are reported to be bioluminescent. The flying creatures have names like “duwas,” “ropen,” “seklo-bali,” and “indava.” They are said, by natives, to glow as they fly at night. This seems to be what Cheesman saw many years ago. She would have been shocked at the suggestion that she had been observing living pterosaurs.

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