Pterosaur Eyewitness

Even recent criciticms (for example, by the paleontologist Darren Naish) of living-pterosaur research sometimes includes the insinuation of misidentification regarding bats, especially the fruit bat called “flying fox.” A typical sighting of a large long-tailed pterosaur, however, differs greatly from a sighting of a Flying Fox fruit bat. For one thing, at least some critics fail to realize how many sightings of apparent pterosaurs are in locations where this Megabat does not live.

Georgia Pterosaur (from the cryptozoology book Live Pterosaurs in America)

The lady . . . had been trying to find someone who might help her verify the existence of the strange animals that she had seen twice in the past few weeks. . . . Her first sighting was at 7 a.m., the second, 9 a.m., with both mornings overcast. . . .

Fifteen miles of her commute is on a two-lane 55-mph road through woods alternating with pastures . . . on August 27, 2008. She had woken up early and could not get back to sleep, so she left her house at 6:45 a.m., with the sky still overcast from the last remnants of [a] storm. . . . She had driven less than ten miles, just leaving an area of pasture, entering an area of thick woods . . . when an animal suddenly flew from the right, just over the front of her car. Although alone, she yelled, “What the — what — what is that?” She was stunned.

. . . It was the tail; she looked up at a “very long” tail that had a strange shape at the end. . . . a thick almost-heart-shape at the end of the tail . . . “Dive-bombing my car,” is how she described the flight path, as it crossed the highway in front of and slightly above her. “Curved, like a hammer,” is how she described the head, which had a crest that she thought was “solid, not feathery at all.” . . . a smoothly curved head crest.

Obviously what the lady saw near Winder, Georgia, in the summer of 2008, was no Flying Fox fruit bat, even if that species of Megabat lived in Georgia, which it does not. So what about sightings in Papua New Guinea, where those bats live in great numbers?

Hodgkinson-Hennessy Ropen

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. . . .

. . . 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.

Both Duane Hodgkinson and Brian Hennessy were struck by the long pterosaur tail . . .  in a manner of speaking, and Hodgkinson was close enough to make an estimate of tail-length: “at least ten or fifteen feet.” It was obviously not any Flying Fox fruit bat.

Eskin Kuhn Pterosaur Sighting

Her sighting [Patty Carson] confirms the credibility of the eyewitness Eskin Kuhn, who long ago reported his 1971 encounter. But Patty saw a similar creature in 1965 . . .

Kuhn sketched what he had seen, soon after his sighting (obviously no fruit bat):

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)

In a recent issue of Creation Research Society Quarterly, the problems with bat-interpretations were explained:

[Critics have suggested that sightings] were of the fruit bat called the “flying fox” (Kuban, 2007). But that bat has a maximum wingspan of 6 ft, and the best sightings that we have investigated include wingspan estimates that range from “at least 2 m, probably more” (Hennessy) to “30 and 50 ft” (Perth couple). The bat has almost no tail, unlike the reported tail of “at least 10–15 ft” (Hodgkinson) or “7 m” (G. Koro). It has no head crest, nor does it glow at night. Two hunters on Umboi Island witnessed a ropen hanging upright on a tree trunk; the bats hang head-down from branches (Table I). These details, as a whole, preclude bat sightings.

“Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific,” by Jonathan D. Whitcomb, in Creation Research Society Quarterly, Volume 45, Number 3 (Winter 2009).

Over the years, I have noticed that the general bat-explanation (for sighting reports of apparent living pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific) comes from critics who fail to investigate the reports in detail. For example, Glen Kuban has a web page that for years has criticized the living-pterosaur investigations, yet he seems to have written little or nothing about the 1944 sighting by Duane Hodgkinson or the 1971 sighting by Brian Hennessy. Those are critical sightings that establish the credibility of the case for living pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific. So why criticize in generalities while ignoring critical details? How much better to evaluate the detailed descriptions by Hodgkinson and Hennessy!