Skip to content

Pterosaurs Living in California

Posted by on 14 January 2012, 9:18 am

Accounts of living pterodactyls flying in California are not restricted to any particular part of the state: north, south, or central. I hope that we will receive more accounts like the following.

Pterosaur Sighting in Orange County, California

30 feet long, with 15-16 feet of that being a tail. He saw the creature fly “at low altitude,” in front of his car, over the road (Campus Drive), into the San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary, in daylight. . . . SNW (anonymous) had no view of any feet and no good view of the head. He noticed that during the creature’s flight the tail was straight, as if it was “stretched out to be measured.” A flange, close to the end of the tail, he described as “triangle-shaped.”

The man who saw that “flying dinosaur,” as some would call it, was driving down a street near Irvine, in Orange County, California. According to this online report, he is either a doctor or a lawyer or a policeman or a fireman, and he does not want his name publicized.

Live Pterosaurs in Northern California

Account in summer of 2011

A vague report came in about flying lights south-by-southwest of Shasta-Trinity National Forest, much closer to the coast. But the eyewitness gave an account more of his feelings than of what he had actually seen. If this eyewitness, in this recent sighting, is correct, the nocturnal flying creatures get close enough to react to his camera zoom.

Comment

Wingspan Estimates Eliminate Hoax

Posted by on 29 December 2011, 6:31 am

Recent statistics have been analyzed for sighting data that goes back several decades. It is amazing what can be learned from the ninety-eight reports, especially from the fifty-seven wingspan estimates.

Wingspan, Statistics, and Hoax-Not

Why examine the possibility that a significant portion of the sighting reports might have come from hoaxers who were trying to convince people that they had seen Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs? For several years, at least since before the middle of 2005, it has been obvious, to cryptozoologist who specialize in pterosaur-sightings, that most eyewitnesses report long tails on the flying creatures that they report. In addition, many of those who report long tails also report a structure at the end of the tail, suggesting a Rhamphorhynchoid tail vane. But a detailed evaluation of the data reveals a major problem with that kind of hoax conjecture: Too many wingspan estimates are too large to precisely coorelate with Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur fossils, and the downward slope for larger wingspans is too shallow, much too shallow.

To put it in a nutshell, the fifty-seven wingspan estimates show a fairly smooth curve downwards toward the giant wingspans, and it is far too shallow a curve to have come from hoaxers who would have tried to fool people into thinking that the hoaxers had seen long-tailed pterosaurs. The reason for that is that those Rhamphorhynchoids are commonly believed to have been smaller pterosaurs with wingspans generally less than seven feet. The statistics show something far different.

1 Comment

Demon Flyer of Papua New Guinea

Posted by on 10 December 2011, 3:38 pm

It seems that the “Demon Flyer” of Papua New Guinea may have been ill-named. The word “ropen” does not actually come from a literal translation of the word “ropen,” although at least one native tradition on Umboi Island is that the nocturnal flying creature is sort of like a spirit but also sort of like a human. It seems that “ropen” actually means something more like simply ”flyer.”

Is “Demon Flyer” Correct?

Interviews with native eyewitnesses, including the 2004 interview with Mesa Agustin, can reveal a fear that natives have of the ropen, but that does not necessarily mean that those eyewitnesses believe that the creature is an evil spirit or monster . . .

So in those two small areas of Papua New Guinea (villages of Umboi Island including Opai and Gomlongon, and at least one village near Wau on the mainland) the meaning of the word “ropen” differs greatly. An examination of the expedition reports from American cryptozoologists who have searched for living pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea in the 1990′s and early twenty-first century—that reveals that the Western-world usage of ”ropen” comes from the Kovai-speaking islanders of Opai and Gomlongon.

Evelyn Cheesman and Possible Bioluminescent Pterosaurs

The lights observed and analyzed by Cheesman were, according to her conclusion, not from any human origin. This reminds me of investigations of Marfa Lights of Texas, where investigators like James Bunnell, Edson Hendricks, and others are convinced some strange lights are not from any car headlights.

Comment

Pterosaur News

Posted by on 25 October 2011, 1:07 pm

For nobody does time rest. I have not become extinct in the past few weeks, just neglectful of writing on this blog. Pterosaurs are still in the news, including new reports of sightings of living ones, at least according to the eyewitnesses.

Pterosaur News on “Live Pterodactyl”

. . . in southwest Greensburg, Pennsylvaniva, a karate teacher and two of his students were talking outside . . . they saw something that at first could have been mistaken for a large bird. . . . [The karate teacher said:] it caught my eye. Being that far up the “birds” body still appeared to be much larger than my 100 pound dog . . .

Gitmo Pterosaur on “Live Pterosaur Media Center”

“I saw two pterosaurs (or pterodactyls, what’s in a name?) flying together at low altitude, perhaps 100 feet, very close in range from where I was standing, so that I had a perfectly clear view of them.  “The rhythm of their large wings was very graceful, slow, and yet they were flying and not merely gliding . . .”

In May, 2011, another eyewitness came forward: Patty Carson, an R.N. in Southern California, found one of Whitcomb’s web pages about the sighting and contacted the cryptozoologist. She had her own sighting at Guantanamo Bay, six years earlier but the same kind of animal: very similar in appearance to the sketch by Kuhn.

News of Live Pterosaur in North Carolina

I was driving . . .  When I was almost home (. . .  going towards Country Club Rd in Jacksonville, NC), I saw something HUGE above me in the sky.  It looked like a pale greenish white and smooth-skinned. It didn’t appear to have any feathers, and it had the tail with the diamond shape on the end.

Fruit Bats and Pterosaurs (for news media)

. . . when the Umboi native Jonah Jim was interviewed by Garth Guessman and David Woetzel, in 2004, he was shown a page of silhouettes of various species of birds, bats, and pterosaurs. From those thirty-four images, Jonah Jim chose number thirteen, which was of a Sordes Pilosus, a Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur. In addition, he saw that the flying creature was glowing, and he estimated the tail length at two-and-a-half to three meters (8-9 feet long), eliminating the bat-misidentification idea.

Comment
« Older Entries