Pterosaur Eyewitness

The American Duane Hodgkinson and the Australian Brian Hennessy have something in common: They have seen, in daylight, in Papua New Guinea, a huge long-tailed featherless flying creature. In the blog Live Pterosaurs, “Hodgkinson-Hennessy Ropen,” we read:

The cryptid seen in New Guinea, by Duane Hodgkinson in 1944 and by Brian Hennessy in 1971, I have named “Hodgkinson-Hennessy Ropen.” Similarities between the descriptions given to me by these two eyewitnesses struck me as too much for coincidence. . . .

As I mentioned in my scientific paper (in The Creation Research Society Quarterly, Volume 45, Number 3, “Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific”), these different lengths of head crest I believe fall within the range of eyewitness error. In other words, the creatures observed by these two men could very well have had the same length of head crest (relative to the size of the head) . . .  it seems likely that the species is the same for the 1944 and 1971 sightings.

I have interviewed both of these eyewitnesses, finding both of them to be highly credible. Nothing in either the substance of their testimonies or in the way they communicated with me gave any hint of any hoax or any reasonable possibility of any misidentification error.

Pterosaurs are sometimes called “dinosaur birds,” even though they are neither dinosaurs nor birds.

According to Wikipedia, “Lucy Evelyn Cheesman (1881 – 1969) was a British entomologist and traveller” who was the first woman to be hired as a curator at the Regent’s Park Zoo (London, England). Her accomplishments in biological discovery, during her many travels around the world, extended beyond finding new species of insects. The following species were named in her honor:

Lipinia cheesmanae (Parker, 1940) – a skink (lizard);
Platymantis cheesmanae (Parker, 1940) – a direct-breeding frog;
Litoria cheesmani (Tyler, 1964) – a treefrog;
Barygenys cheesmanae (Parker, 1936) – a microhylid frog;
Cophixalus cheesmanae (Parker, 1934) – a microhylid frog.

Her name was probably never associated with cryptozoology until Richard Muirhead (a British cryptozoologist) looked through an old copy of the book The Two Roads of Papua (by Cheesman, published in 1935). Muirhead recognized the significance of the strange lights that Cheesman observed in the jungle on the mainland of New Guinea: apparently ropen lights. Consider what has been written on other web pages and blog posts.

Modern Pterosaurs — “Evelyn Cheesman, Biologist and Eyewitness”

Modern living pterosaurs were the last organisms that she would have dreamed could be living deep in the mainland of New Guinea in the 1930′s; her specialty was small insects, not giant cryptids. But those strange lights just above the forest canopy—they appeared to defy any common explanation.

Live Pterosaur — “Indava and Ropen of Papua New Guinea”

The British entomologist would surely have been interested in the explanation of “large flying animal” if the local villagers had said anything; but they were reluctant to talk about the lights. Nevertheless, Cheeman wrote about the mystery in her book, The Two Roads of Papua (published in 1935).

Another resource: Science and Clear Thinking (reg. critics of living-pterosaurs perspectives)

When I began interviewing Gideon Koro, I was still assuming that at least ”ten or twenty” ropens live on Umboi Island. I came to explore the island to videotape at least one of the apparent-pterosaurs, but here I was, videotaping an eyewitness (Whitcomb-Kenda 2004 expedition). When my questioning got to the number of ropens that he and his six friends had seen years ago, Gideon surprised me, staring at me as if I were very ignorant: They had seen only one ropen. I resumed questioning; I’d have to figure out that puzzle later.

When I got to the tail-length of the ropen, Gideon said, “sefan meetuh.” “Seven meters?” I asked. “Yea.” Only later did I tie this length-estimate to the puzzle of the “ten or twenty” comment in an interview many years earlier. That first interview with Gideon (around 1994) involved a question about the size of the creature. When the two interviewers looked away at a nearby house (to get an idea of ropen-size), Gideon said something about “ten or twenty.” The interviewers thought that he meant the numbers of creatures. He must, however, have still been talking about size, for fifteen meters (the medium of ten and twenty) is roughly similar to the length of a ropen that has a tail length of seven meters.

It was his third expedition in Papua New Guinea, but the first one on the mainland. Deep in the mountainous interior, in Tawa Village, at 7:20 p.m., on Nov 9, 2006, Paul Nation videotaped two lights on a nearby ridge. A few weeks later, in Central California, Cliff Paiva (a missile defense physicist) analyzed the video footage, concluding that the two lights were not from any campfires, flashlights, car headlights, meteors, or airplanes. They were also not from any camera artifacts or paste-on hoax. Paiva was unable to resolve the structure that creatured those two lights, for the recording had been done on a typical video camera, not an expensive thermal imaging recorder. But according to his associate living-pterosaur investigators, Paul Nation was the first American to bring back video evidence for living bioluminescent pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea.

An article in the Creation Research Society Quarterly (Volume 45, Number 3, “Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific”) states:

The first American to bring back video evidence for the bioluminescence of the ropen was Paul Nation, who explored near Tawa Village in late 2006. He saw a number of flying lights on several nights and videotaped, for about fifteen seconds, two lights that were on a ridge where there were no roads, cars, or campfires.

According to Wikipedia (English Wikipedia: “ropen”):

In late 2006, Paul Nation, of Texas, explored a remote mountainous area on the mainland of Papua New Guinea. He videotaped two lights that the local natives called ‘indava.’ Nation believed the lights were from the bioluminescence of creatures similar to the ropen of Umboi Island.

From Searching for Ropens (second edition, nonfiction book):

[We] “saw one yellow glow start from a small glow to a bright glow and then a second appearance start and increase in intensity. The second and higher up the mountain glow, flew up and over the ridge and out of sight. While the first glow went out. 10 pm saw a single yellow glow flying along the mountain ridge to the east of our location following the terrain up and down going south to north.”

From Live Pterosaurs in America (nonfiction book, published in 2009):

On the Papua New Guinea mainland, in 2006, Paul Nation and his associate, native minister Jacob Kepas, explored deep in the highland interior. One night, Paul videotaped two glowing objects at the top of a ridge. The natives attribute this kind of light to large flying creatures that used to carry away animals and children from their village.

More resources:

Giant Bat and ropen of Papua New Guinea

Problems with a bat interpretation (this blog site)

Paul Nation, the most active LP explorer (another blog on living pterosaurs)