Papua New Guinea Sighting – Page 2

April 24, 2015

Pterosaur Sighting in Papua New Guinea Early in 2015

Peter Beach and Milt Marcy, both of the Portland area of Oregon, led an expedition in Papua New Guinea, in March and April of 2015, searching for a living pterosaur that previous American explorers had failed to see clearly. This time Americans did see, in daylight, the form and features of an apparent pterosaur.

The exact location in Papua New Guinea is undisclosed for the present, while follow up investigation continues there. Unfortunately no photos or video were obtained during the sighting.

Beach and Marcy hope for success with a native who was given a camera and appeared determined to get back into that area of the jungle to videotape a pterosaur.

Generic photo of huts in Papua New Guinea, not directly related to the 2015 apparent-pterosaur sighting

Non-Ropen Pterosaur Sighting in 2015

The recent sighting in Papua New Guinea involved several eyewitnesses, including the Americans Peter Beach and Milt Marcy. I interviewed them separately, in three phone conversations, from April 20-23, soon after they had returned from their expedition, having been away in the southwest Pacific for about six weeks.

Marcy told me he does not want to go on record as being 100% convinced it was a pterosaur that they had seen. He did agree, however, to the estimate that it was more than 50% likely to have been so.

Peter Beach, a former biology professor, has tried to come up with some non-pterosaur explanation for what they saw, but as of April 23, 2015 (during our second phone conversation) he could not, for it was too much like a pterosaur. He could not see any evidence of feathers, so a bird seems questionable; he saw soaring-gliding flight, so a Flying Fox fruit bat is practically eliminated. He saw huge wings that were leathery and they gave an impression more like a parachute than like feathery wings.

From the telephone interviews I had with those two Americans and from what I have learned from other eyewitnesses in that area of Papua New Guinea, I believe this recent sighting was of a Pterodactyloid (short-tailed) pterosaur. In other words, it was probably not a long-tailed ropen, but it was what many Americans would call a pterodactyl.

Significance to Living-Pterosaur Investigations

Careless skeptical speculations about dishonesty in natives in Papua New Guinea—that decomposing body needs to be buried and never again dug up, so to speak. Most of the more-credible sighting reports of apparent pterosaurs in the southwest Pacific have been by Western eyewitnesses, anyway. Some of them have included the following:

Duane Hodgkinson (in recent decades a flight instructor)
Brian Hennessy (in recent years a professional psychologist)
An Australian couple (together they saw the huge creature in Perth)
A British pilot and Australian co-pilot flying northwest from Australia

That is not to say that natives of Papua New Guinea have had fewer encounters or less dramatic ones than Americans and Australians. After all, some of those native eyewitnesses have been carried off and eaten by some of the larger flying creatures (according to some indirect reports), and you can’t get closer or more dramatic than that. But we Westerners have a lot fewer detailed reports from natives we can directly question in face-to-face interviews.

Careless speculations that ropens or modern pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea are only legends—that does not fit with human experience, and it is human experience that lives at the heart of scientific progress.

Background of Peter Beach and Milt Marcy

I had interviewed both men last year, on the banks of the Yakima River in southeastern Washington state. They had witnessed flying lights over that river and knew a man who had reported an apparent “pterodactyl” in a tree on the bank of that river. But before their recent expedition in Papua New Guinea, they had never seen an apparent pterosaur in daylight, with form and features visible.

I submit that these two men would not have spend many thousands of dollars on this expedition in Papua New Guinea if they intended to deceive anybody. A liar would have just declared seeing a clear form of a pterosaur in southeastern Washington state, rather than spend his own money to go to Papua New Guinea to look for those flying creatures.

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Possible Ropen off Coast of Indonesia

H. put the plane into a dive but the creature also dived. H. then avoided a collision by banking away from what he and his co-pilot thought was something like a “pterodactyl.”

Pterosaur Expedition in Papua New Guinea

On Saturday, April 18, 2015, two American explorers returned from Papua New Guinea, after searching for living pterosaurs on a tropical island where the creatures were previously reported. . . . Both Americans saw, in daylight, a huge apparent living pterosaur.

Ropen or Pterodactyl Seen by American

In 1944, in (Papua) New Guinea, Duane Hodgkinson and his friend saw a “pterodactyl” with a wingspan similar to a Piper Tri-Pacer (29 feet).

Ropen-Pterosaur Seen in Washington State?

On August 6, 2014, I interviewed Milt Marcy and Peter Beach on the bank of the Yakima River in Washington state. I knew, when we arrived for the interview, about the flying light that they had witnessed one night and the apparent pterosaur that another man had encountered in daylight

November 25, 2014

Donald Prothero and “Fake Pterosaurs”

Another paleontologist has stepped outside his field of expertise and railed against my writings about modern pterosaurs: Donald Prothero, who specializes in mammalian paleontology, according to Wikipedia. His November 24, 2014, post is titled “Fake Pterosaurs and Sock Puppets” on skeptic.com. I avoid linking to libelous pages, and this one includes “Whitcomb admitted the deception in July, 2014” and links to one of my posts. Strange to tell, but that post of mine explains why I was NOT being dishonest in using pen names. Here’s the link: Jonathan Whitcomb pen names. It gives me some hope that Prothero was making an honest mistake, when he included that link; nevertheless, his post appears sure to lead his readers astray from the truth, not only about my motivations but about investigations of living-pterosaur sighting reports in general. I must respond.

I’ll not say much about the sock puppet accusations here; I’ve written much on it already. For those who go to that link in question, it may become obvious that I was not trying to deceive anybody concerning reports of modern living pterosaurs, including the flying creature called ropen; for those who read only that post by Prothero, however, it can seem like I’ve tried to deceive people about the ropen and that I did so almost single-handedly. Let us look deeper.

Do “virtually all” writings about the ropen come from just one person: Jonathan Whitcomb?

My blog posts and web pages outnumber those of anyone else on the subject of modern “pterodactyls” or primitive flying creatures that have been assumed to have been long extinct; that need not suggest that I have been dishonest. Skeptics include at least three of the best-known paleontologists in the world; that need not suggest my investigation over the past eleven years has been in vain. Look at some details.

Notice, if you read that post by Dr. Prothero, the absence of the following words:

Umboi
expedition
exploration
eyewitness

Now notice the absence of the following names of explorers, on his post:

Paul Nation
Garth Guessman
David Woetzel
Jacob Kepas
James Blume

“Whitcomb” is found twelve times on his post. If only it were saying only nice things about people. Oh well, I’m getting used to it.

What does Donald Prothero think I have been writing about for eleven years? Most of my web page publications have been in blog-post format, and those posts number well over a thousand. Yet to anyone who wants to look deeper, it will become obvious why Google has not penalized my pages about eyewitness accounts of these flying creatures: My posts are not spam-repetition of previously published pages. Their quoting of other pages is limited, as is this post by Prothero (“Fake Pterosaurs and Sock Puppets”).

A paleontologist has stepped outside his area of expertise in yet another way, declaring that my online writings are a “classic case” of “sock puppetry” online. Nonsense! The majority of my posts have been under my name of Jonathan Whitcomb (or Jon Whitcomb), NOT any pen name. And by the way, for a spammer to use many alias would hardly hide repetitive content from detection by a search engine system like Google. It seems Prothero is again outside his field of knowledge, making another assumption without any deep investigation beforehand. (I’ll leave sock puppetry for another post, but I used two pen names because I was falsely accused of dishonesty, NOT to be dishonest. Readers really needed to be enlightened by eyewitness reports, without being distracted by my name.)

Expeditions in Papua New Guinea

I was surprised at the way Prothero referred to the Destination Truth and Monsterquest episodes that related to the ropen of Papua New Guinea. He declares that those two television show episodes were “based on the obsessions of one individual.” Really?! I was consulted by the pre-production researchers of both Destination Truth and Monsterquest before their expeditions in the southwest Pacific, it is true. But many persons have been involved in interviews in Papua New Guinea, before my own 2004 expedition in that remote area of the planet.

Again Mr. Prothero appears to have stepped outside his area of expertise. I would not have expected him to deeply investigate how those two production teams decided to include the ropen in their shows, yet one paleontologist has taken a big leap of faith, and a blind leap apparently, in assuming that I, Jonathan Whitcomb, as a lone individual, inspired those television producers to pay for teams to be sent to Papua New Guinea. Some of my web pages may have caught their attention but the power of persuasion was in the eyewitness testimonies.

Other paleontologists, including Darren Naish, have at least dipped their toes into the ocean of eyewitness sighting reports, before rejecting everything that chilled them. Dr. Prothero seems to pretend that the ocean does not even exist, at least in this post “Fake Pterosaurs and Sock Puppets.” Dr. Prothero, burying ones head in a fossil bed in the middle of North America does not make the Pacific Ocean disappear.

Eyewitnesses are the point

For those who read his post about me, I would ask, “Where do I get new material for writing countless web pages about apparent living pterosaurs?” I promise I do not just repeat myself endlessly. I continue to get emails from eyewitnesses of flying creatures that appear to have been living pterosaurs. I now have reports from eyewitnesses from four continents and from islands in the Pacific. No need for much repetition. I write about new sighting reports and compare them to older accounts.

Now please notice the following names of eyewitnesses, persons from various places and with various backgrounds and religious beliefs. Each of these names is found in the fourth edition of my nonfiction book Searching for Ropens and Finding God. Not all of them believe in modern pterosaurs, but most of them do, having seen them. (Some of these persons witnessed a flying light at night, rather than the form of an apparent pterosaur.)

Blume, James
Bunnel, James
Carson, Patty
Cheesman, Evelyn
Conrad, Venice
Cooper, Sherry
Cottingham, Steven
Eunice of Umboi Island
Fabian of Salamaua
Gates, Joshua
Gima, William
Grotty, Rob
Guessman, Garth
Hennessy, Brian
Hodgkinson, Duane
Jonah Jim
Kau, Mark
Kepas, Jacob
Koro, Gideon
Koro, Wesley
Kuhn, Eskin
Laura in Arkansas
Leonard of Opai
Marcy, Milt
Meixner, Kevin
Moke, David
Nation, Paul
Nolo, Dickson
Norman, Scott
Paina, Luke
Paradise, Sandra
Quiroz, Lydia
Ragu, Jonathan
Rhodriquez, Devin
Schroder, David
Stew (in Mexico)
Watters, Professor Steven
Woetzel, David
Wooten, Susan
Zacharia of Owongai Village

The above is not a complete listing, in my book, of all the eyewitnesses of possible pterosaurs, but it should suffice.

Why not listen to the eyewitnesses? They are the point of all these investigations in cryptozoology, including the work of my associates, Paul Nation, Cliff Paiva, Garth Guessman, David Woetzel, Jacob Kepas, and others. I testify that I have not been alone in this work, and the eyewitnesses deserve to be heard.

Eunice, an eyewitness on Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea

Garth Guessman and Duane Hodgkinson, both eyewitnesses of one or more living pterosaurs

David Woetzel, another cryptozoologist-eyewitness of living pterosaurs

Jonathan Whitcomb, nonfiction writer and author who believes many of the eyewitnesses

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Is there no new evidence for modern pterosaurs?

Ricky Kearns and family members witnessed a large flying creature at night, and it had wings that were glowing. This was in Point Pleasant, although Ricky mentioned to me that what he saw did not look like what the Mothman is reported to look like. Nevertheless, there may be a relationship with some sightings of what has been labeled “Mothman.”

Modern pterosaurs, AKA “flying dinosaurs”

Look up “pterosaur” in a dictionary and one of the first words you’ll see is “extinct.” Many Americans call them “pterodactyls” or “flying dinosaurs.” Few Americans have admitted believing that those “prehistoric” flying creatures could still be living, few indeed, until recently.

Flying creature of the night

So who do you call? I hope you’ll contact me, Jonathan Whitcomb. As far as I know, I am the only person on earth who has devoted anything like a full-time effort, over years, to interview eyewitnesses of apparent living pterosaurs or ropens, promoting the idea that these flying creatures are not extinct but very much alive.

Live Pterosaur Media – press releases

A physicist [Clifford Paiva], who examined video footage of two strange lights that explorers think are bioluminescent pterosaurs, declares that the glow is not from meteors, lanterns, campfires or an airplane.

A quest for discovering modern pterosaurs

October 29, 2014October 29, 2014

New Book on Ropens – Live Pterosaurs Worldwide

"Searching for Ropens and Finding God" - 4th edition of nonfiction book

At 360 pages in a 6-inch by 9-inch book—Searching for Ropens and Finding God may look heavy, but it’s sprinkled with humor and crafted for reading enjoyment. The fourth edition should be available on Amazon by about November 7, 2014. The following quotations are from the early part of this nonfiction book.

First part of the Title Page

This overshadows common true-life adventures, revealing the early stages of what may become the most unsettling scientific discovery since Galileo and Copernicus. It soars above disputes about religion, revealing why an official discovery of an extraordinary animal was delayed for so long. Above all, this explores human experiences—of eyewitnesses and those who interviewed them. People have become connected by common encounters: Persons of various faiths, with various levels of education, from various countries and cultures, have seen a living pterosaur.

From the Introduction

Expect references to the Biblical fiery flying serpent and the Flood of Noah. I added “finding God” to the title of the third edition to avoid offending anyone wanting only cryptozoology, a reader who would be offended to find a little religion, however limited; it’s continued in this fourth edition: finding God. Yet this is not mainly about religion, not in the usual sense. It’s less likely to take you to church than into the lives of ordinary persons who have encountered extraordinary flying creatures, and into the lives of Christians who have risked their health, even their lives, in searching for living pterosaurs. Our disbelief in the General Theory of Evolution has freed us to search far and near, and for years, with a firm belief that God’s purposes will prevail.

Beginning of Chapter 1

It looked like a dead pterodactyl; not fossil bones but with skin, like it had died recently. Could those creatures, non-extinct, still fly? Although I could not verify the photo was genuine, the idea within that image in a soon-forgotten book would be awakened four decades later, to plunge me into the most dramatic adventure of my life: exploring a remote tropical island, searching for giant living pterosaurs.

My first exposure to a remote tropical island with a giant reptile—when my younger sister Cindy and I were infants—came from Mommy reading Peter Pan. When I was four, the new sister was born, not to the name chosen by Cindy and me, “Captain Hook,” but to a name chosen by compromising parents: Wendy.

I came to regard the Peter Pan story a practical fiction, useful in more than just providing names for new babies. Each character had a role; the crocodile, however, at first puzzled me. In time, it resolved into both good and bad: useful to Peter Pan as true enemy to Hook but dangerous when out of place. Perhaps that was the seed of my understanding that a general principal can be complex, both true and false, useful sometimes but false when out of place, even dangerous.

From Chapter 3

“. . . in 1944 . . . I was stationed in Finschhafen, New Guinea, with the U.S. military. While there, I made several trips into some of the surrounding native villages with a friend of mine and a native guide (provided by the Australian government). On this one particular trip, we had the wonderful opportunity to witness a pterodactyl take off from the ground and then circle back overhead and to the side, giving us a perfect side view which clearly showed the long beak and appendage protruding from the back of its head . . . It was a big one! I have a Piper Tri-Pacer airplane [wingspan twenty nine feet] and it appeared to be about that size.

“The frequency of its wing flaps was . . . about one or two seconds. With each flap, we could hear a loud ‘swish, swish’ and the plants and brush immediately beneath its take off path were deflected by the down rush of air. I have not told many people about this as, of course, prehistoric creatures simply don’t exist!”

By telephone and letter, Hodgkinson told me more. Before spotting the creature, while the native guide was ahead of them on the trail, he and his friend stopped in a clearing. The two soldiers heard a “crashing” noise in the brush, and when they looked toward the uphill side of the clearing they saw the creature take off into the air. Before this takeoff, it was unseen. A wild pig, which had caused the noise, then ran to the downhill side of the clearing, into the taller brush; apparently, it had startled the “pterodactyl,” which then circled above the clearing. Hodgkinson didn’t remember much about the tail, for he was focusing on the head; after the creature had flown out of sight for the second time, however, the men did remember that they carried a military camera.

Searching for Ropens and Finding God, fourth edition, by Jonathan Whitcomb

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Fourth Edition of Ropen Book

“I have been reading some of your recent updates about ropens eating bats. That brought to mind a story I heard earlier this year by someone in my organization who served as a missionary in the Congo for some time. . . .”

Thank you to Eyewitnesses of Pterosaurs

. . . Eyewitness testimonies of natives, Australians, and the American veteran Duane Hodgkinson contributed, in the early years, priceless evidence. Reports from other areas of the world later supported our strange theory of modern living pterosaurs, including reported sightings in England, Spain, the Netherlands, various parts of Africa, Singapore, the Philippines, and other countries.