Australia Sighting – Page 2 – Pterosaur Eyewitness

September 8, 2012August 25, 2014

Ebook Completed: “Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea”

cover of "Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea"

I have neglected writing many blog posts, of necessity, over the past few days, for my newest nonfiction book needed much editing and formatting before being sent to Amazon. Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea will soon be available for purchase online, at least on the Amazon-Kindle store. Marketing will be focused on Australia, so the spelling (“metres,” for example) is adjusted for Down-Under. But Americans should have no trouble with this nonfiction cryptozoology ebook.

~~The Amazon processing normally takes at least twelve hours or so, making the earliest date for purchase around September 9, 2012.~~ UPDATE: It was on Amazon, for a low price, but it is now FREE, as a simple pdf download. Get this as a giveaway: Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea. This should help people around the world to know about these extraordinary nocturnal flying creatures that are very much NON-extinct.

Promotional materials include the following (here quoted in part):

Featherless creatures fly overhead, in Papua New Guinea and in Australia. This nonfiction gives you up-to-date eyewitness reports, informing you why these creatures are still alive and why they are so rarely reported in newspapers.

Why do these large long-tailed flying creatures sometimes appear in daylight, when they are nocturnal? Why do natives in Papua New Guinea report their encounters but Australians rarely talk about them? Get the details from the world’s most prolific nonfiction author on this subject of modern living pterosaurs.

Update: My cryptozoology ebook ~~is now available, for $3.99 (U.S. dollars) on Amazon, as a Kindle book~~: Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea. ~~It has been submitted as a potential “Kindle Single.”~~ Update: As of August 24, 2014, it is absolutely free, on the alivedragon site.

From the Introduction (excerpt):

We must begin with the basics: What is a pterosaur? It’s not really a type of dinosaur, although it’s associated with them. The flying creature is called “pterodactyl” by many non-scientists; some Americans call those featherless fliers “dinosaur birds” or “prehistoric birds.”

Most pterosaur fossils fit into one of two types: long-tailed Rhamphorhynchoid or shorter-tailed
Pterodactyloid. Those two types differ in other ways, not just tail length, but that’s a subject for a book
on pterosaur fossils.

In modern eyewitness reports, long-tailed pterosaurs outnumber short-tails, at least four-to-one. Standard models of extinction make this ratio appear strange, for the long-tailed variety were thought to have dwindled before the short-tailed pterosaurs became dominant, at least that’s the theory. Nevertheless, the ratio is significant in modern sightings, appearing consistent regardless of the culture or beliefs or education of the eyewitness.

Australian Pterodactyls

But most of the Australian sightings in the new book have never been published before in any book, and there are at least two new ropen sighting reports from Papua New Guinea.

August 21, 2012

Book About Pterosaurs in Australia

My newest book is nearing completion: Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea. This ebook should be published next month (Sep-2012), with much of the marketing focused on Australian readers. I here include samples, even though the editing is not yet complete.

Some of the sightings mentioned in this book had not been published in any book before, to the best of my knowledge; they are first-hand accounts given to me over several years.

Introduction

. . . I don’t ask that you launch your imagination to fly with each eyewitness report you begin to encounter in the following chapters. When somebody sends me an email about a strange flying creature, I don’t jump onto the first paragraph as if the creature had to have been a living pterosaur; neither do I dismiss the whole account when I first encounter something unexpected. Please do the same: Judge not too quickly, either to one side or the other. . . .

How can pterosaurs be alive? – Chapter One

. . . The first discovery of a pterosaur fossil by a Western scientist, in 1784, was decades before Charles Darwin began writing about his ideas on extinctions and evolution. Before Darwin, Western scientists had assumed that all species of pterosaurs were extinct for a simple reason: Those who discovered the fossils had no experience with any similar animal that was living. . . .

The Finschhafen Pterodactyl – Chapter Two

. . . the two soldiers were fascinated by ants much bigger than those in the States and startled by a wild pig charging through the grass: nothing outlandish. The giant creature that flattened the grass with its wing beats, however—that divided the two soldiers, for Hodgkinson wanted to talk about the “pterodactyl,” but his buddy preferred to pretend they had no encounter. . . .

The Bougainville Creature – Chapter Three

“Thank you, Brian. Your description reminds me of other accounts in the Southwest Pacific. May I ask some questions?”

Q: “Was anything coming out the back of the head (Whether classified as a crest, appendage, horn, or comb)?”

A: “It was like a horn.”

Q: “Can you remember the wing-flapping well enough to estimate the frequency? Thinking of one cycle as the time it takes for the wings to go up and also go down, how many seconds did it take for one cycle (up-and-down-flap)?”

A: “Estimate every 2 seconds.”

Q: “Was the tail straight? (Was any bending of the tail visible?)”

A: “As far as I can recall, straight.”

The Perth Creature – Chapter Six

The creature seen flying over Perth in December of 1997 may not have been the same species as the one seen by Duane Hodgkinson in New Guinea in 1944 or the ones seen by natives on Umboi Island, for the Perth creature seems to have had a short neck. But it appeared to those two Australians as a real living creature . . .

March 5, 2012March 5, 2012

Hoax or Pterosaur?

I have sometimes observed, in the writing of critics or skeptics, a fondness for throwing together “hoax” and “misidentification.” I now think that misidentifications are more likely than hoaxess, for those reports that are less credible, but the large majority of sightings that are reported to me from emails are credible reports, with no major sign of either a practical joke or a misidentified bird or bat.

Several factors practically eliminate hoaxes as a major cause for those publicized sightings that have been emphasized by the most recent LP-cryptozoologists (who specialize in living pterosaur sightings). For now, let’s look into the post-sighting experiences of some eyewitnesses.

I interviewed the Perth couple over a period of several years, by emails, and found a hoax was practically eliminated as any reasonable explanation. I know that some skeptics could respond with something like, “a giant long-tailed pterosaur in the modern day is unreasonable.” But the skeptics do not rely on any observation; they rely on a popular assumption.

I eventually found the original report that the lady had made to an online forum. As she had told me earlier, the replies to her report of a giant pterosaur-like flying creature were rude and insulting. How easy it was to see why the lady had become upset at being called a liar. But she and her husband have stood by their testimonies for years, inspite of that ridicule, making it hard to stand by the accusation that they had played a hoax.

The same could be said of the experiences of the U. S. Marine Eskin C. Kuhn, whose sighting has been called a “hoax.” I gave him a surprise phone call, a few years ago, and found him to be highly credible, answering my questions as a valid eyewitness would respond, not as a hoaxer would respond. He has stood by his sighting account for four decades, in spite of accusations that his experience never happened.

What about Susan Wooten, of South Carolina? She has encountered skeptics, since her sighting of a huge featherless flying creature, but she stands by her account. The apparent pterosaur flew right in front of her car, and other drivers on that highway in South Carolina pulled over to the side of the road in reponse to the flyover. She has been upset at the words of those who doubt her account, but she still maintains that she saw what she has said that she saw.

Who would insinuate that Brian Hennessy had played a hoax? He is another eyewitness who has given his name to the world as he has given us his account of the prehistoric-looking creature that flew over his head on Bougainville Island (now part of the nation of Papua New Guinea) in 1971.

Other eyewitnesses could be mentioned, credible persons who stand by their testimonies of their encounters with flying creatures that cannot reasonably be interpreted as any bird or any bat.

A Hoax or Not

That practically eliminates a hoax as in relation to our investigations: We would not lie when telling everybody that we never saw a pterosaur. Woetzel and I and other American explorers encountered eyewitnesses of the ropen, and descriptions of that flying creature suggest a modern pterosaur far more than any bird or bat.

Hoax Explanation for Living Pterosaurs

“Mr. Paiva also found that Plate 24-B shows that no image-pasting hoax created the two lights. In other words, Paul Nation videotaped these two lights; they were not created separately and then inserted onto the background.”

Pterosaur Sightings From Hoaxes?

I interviewed Hodgkinson sixty years later, by phone, emails, and mail, for he still lives in reasonable health, in Livingston, Montana. I continued interviewing him, on occasion, and my associate in cryptozoology, Garth Guessman, also interviewed Hodgkinson. Over a period of eight years, we have found no indication of any hoax.

Pterosaur Eyewitnesses not Playing Hoaxes

When an eyewitness estimates wingspan (not all eyewitnesses estimate it), I record it and later compare it with other estimates. After several years of interviewing eyewitnesses of apparent pterosaurs in the United States, I found a peak at 8-10 feet; in fact, 27% are in that range, with a wide variety of other estimates falling off on both sides. This size is far too small or too big for hoaxers, for standard models suggest Rhamphorhynchoids were much smaller but cryptozoological reports from Papua New Guinea suggest ropens can get much larger. A combination of hoaxes would not produce this peak.