Pterosaur Eyewitness

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)

The Kongamato, according to Wikipedia, is said to reside in Western Zambia, Angola and Congo (Africa). According to In Witchbound Africa (non-fiction book by F. Melland), this very dangerous creature flies along certain rivers, attacking small boats, at times, hence the name that means “breaker of boats.” Although the wingspan seems smaller than the ropen of Papua New Guinea (four to seven feet), some pterosaur-like creatures in P.N.G. have been described as about that size, especially the kor of the Manus Island area (northern P.N.G.).

But what about the “flying snake” of Namibia? According to research done by the British cryptozoologist Richard Muirhead, one of these creatures “swooped down” from a cave near Kirris West, in 1942, (sixty miles east of Keetmanshoop, south-west Namibia.) It left a trace of something on the ground and a burning smell. Could that burning smell be related to the cause of death of a fisherman who was killed by a kor (northern Papua New Guinea, 1960′s)? The man died three days after being attacked by the pterosaur-like animal; his body was not just torn: It was also burned. In at least one other area of Papua New Guinea, the creatures are said to drip a liquid that can burn human skin.