Jonathan D. Whitcomb – Page 3

February 23, 2016

Reply to Misidentification Conjectures

By Jonathan David Whitcomb

Sometimes a person who is mostly ignorant of the overall eyewitness evidence of modern pterosaurs will speculate about misidentification. Many of those conjectures fall to one of the following two flying creatures:

Frigate bird
Flying fox fruit bat

Yet many of the speculators avoid details, in particular avoiding any reference to any one sighting. Perhaps the weight of generations of Westerner assumptions appears sufficient, allowing a critic to simply toss a feather of skepticism onto the subject, to crush the idea of modern pterosaurs. Before we get into any particular sighting, let’s examine how cultural assumptions play a role in our thinking.

Cultural Assumptions

Each culture encapsulates what other cultures may recognize as faulty assumptions. The nature of how cultural assumptions originate may lie within the fog of ancient history, but the result is clear: The great majority of those who have been raised in a particular culture have been blinded to the weaknesses of their cultural assumptions. They will sometimes go to war, even risking destruction, to protect their weak assumptions.

Westerners have become indoctrinated into the opinion that all species of certain general types of animals became extinct many millions of years ago. In reality, no paleontologist has witnessed even one extinction of even one species of dinosaur or pterosaur. Yet the indoctrination continues, as if all of their species must have died out by 65-million years ago. This indoctrination-influence problem deserves far more attention, but we need to move on for now.

Eskin Kuhn sketched Gitmo Pterosaur he saw

Sketch drawn by the eyewitness Eskin Kuhn (sighting in Cuba)

Misidentified . . . Whatever

I have sometimes been amazed at the imaginations of some skeptics. What an imaginative collection of speculated misidentifications! It’s not been confined to oceanic birds or large bats. It has also included leaping fish and woodpeckers. Some of this deserves a little attention, even though the ideas are ludicrous.

I, Jonathan Whitcomb, have been criticized for publishing accounts of modern-pterosaur encounters, yet my critics usually ignore the following point: I have probably spent more time on living-pterosaur investigations than any other person now living on this planet. Even if I have made mistakes, those 10,000+ hours of searching, researching, interviewing, and writing may have uncovered some important truth.

If someone reports observing a potential living pterosaur and later retracts that original interpretation, it usually means we can safely classify that sighting as a misidentification. In reality, that rarely happens. To the best of my memory, I list the following cases in which a person could have changed his or her mind in that way (and these are restricted to eyewitnesses who clearly appeared to be honest):

Number of Frigate birds reported as pterosaurs: one
Number of fruit bats reported as pterosaurs: zero
Number of leaping manta-ray fish reported as pterosaurs: zero
Number of woodpeckers reported as pterosaurs: zero
Number of Hornbill birds reported as pterosaurs: zero
Number of mechanical flying models reported as pterosaurs: zero

The above does not imply that almost no such misidentifications have ever taken place. But those cases are so rare that I now recall only one of them, and that appeared to have been a Frigate bird seen by a man in Australia years ago.

Please be aware that I am not including the many YouTube videos that feature Frigate birds or mechanical models or 3D animations of apparent pterosaurs. Many of those can be resolved as hoaxes rather than honest misidentifications. I mostly refer to persons who have reported their sightings to me or to one of my associates. (An exception was the Frigate bird seen by an Australian; he reported his sighting to an online forum.)

Common Misidentifications Overlooked by Skeptics

Critics may be ignorant of the common types of actual misidentification:

Eyewitness first thought it must have been a weird bird
Eyewitness first considered it a strange big bat
Eyewitness first thought it was a perception problem

We have no room on a single blog post for all the sighting reports in which a person observed a flying creature that looked like a “dragon” or “pterodactyl” but that idea was immediately rejected. Those eyewitness pondered all the possibilities that it could have instead been some strange bird or bat. This is common with many Americans and other Westerners.

Often a person will doubt his or her ability to see properly or correctly perceive what was seen, because of the depth of Western indoctrination into extinction dogmas. In some of those sighting cases, the eyewitness will eventually come to realize that the flying creature was actually what it appeared to be. Those are the eyewitnesses that may eventually report their encounters to me.

That kind of misidentification seems to have been overlooked by the skeptics and critics. The important point about misidentification is this: When a person comes to correct an apparently wrong early interpretation—that case has a significant potential for being a misidentification, and the vast majority of such misidentifications are for actual modern pterosaurs that were at first thought to have been strange manifestations or misperceptions of other things. This calls for examples.

Paperback book Live Pterosaurs in America (third edition)

Page 28:

The two men [in Florida one night] had no time to recover when a second creature flew in the opposite direction, toward the neighbor’s backyard. . . . This one was not as clearly visible, but obviously very similar. DR said to his friend, “Was that what I think it was?” He replied, “Naa, it had to be something else.”

Page 32:

It’s common for an eyewitness to first assume that what is seen is a bird. In Kentucky, MR first assumed he was watching a “large bird.” In Wisconsin, EWED first assumed a “strange looking bird.” In Michigan, RT first assumed an ordinary “large dark colored bird.”

Pages 35-36 [Brownsville, Texas]

She was twelve years old, at most (around 1995), when she walked out into her backyard one morning to check on the dog . . . Next door, in the neighbor’s backyard, was what she first thought was a tall man; but he was about as tall as the house, too tall. He was “draped in a long black coat or cape,” facing away from her. “Dracula” came to mind as GR tried to understand what she was looking at. The “man” turned, and revealed a face that terrified the child: It was non-human.

Slowing the creature . . . unwrapped its bat-like wings, dark leathery wings.

Notice how eyewitnesses in the United States, in the above cases, initially searched for a non-pterosaur explanation for what was encountered. Only after careful consideration did they realize it may have been a pterosaur, an animal that they had been taught was extinct. Without that extinction indoctrination, it would have been immediately obvious to the eyewitnesses that they had observed a pterosaur.

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Honesty Credibility in Pterodactyl Sightings

Let’s examine what’s been learned from sighting reports that are mostly from North America, with a critical eye on the overall honesty-credibility of eyewitnesses.

Ropens in Western USA

According to Cryptozoology News (online), two eyewitnesses in Nevada recently saw a “reptilian-like bird” fly up and over their vehicle on Interstate-80 at 11:00 p.m., and the description of the flying creature included “long thin tail,” a head crest, and “a long and thin neck.” That sounds like a ropen.

Living Pterosaurs? Not by Glen Kuban

. . . the testimonies of Brian Hennessy and Duane Hodgkinson. Glen Kuban’s web page ignores those two witnesses entirely. . . . [sightings of] “prehistoric” looking flying creatures in daylight, at fairly close range, with locations being Bougainville Island and the Finschhafen area . . . [in] the nation of Papua New Guinea.

Figurines of Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs in Mexico

Where is the physical evidence for modern ropens, or extant long-tailed pterosaurs? It’s there to see, for those who are open-minded enough to look.

Misidentification Possibilities With Pterosaurs

Perhaps the oldest misidentification suggestion, for reports of living pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea, has been “Flying Fox fruit bat.” It seems to satisfy reports of large featherless flying creatures in the southwest Pacific, but there are problems with “misidentified bat.”

July 1, 2015

Dinosaurs Dated to Thousands of Years Old

How do dinosaur bones relate to long-tailed ropens that are reported to fly in North America? The ropen appears to be a huge Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur, notwithstanding those flying creatures were supposed to have all fallen to the ground many millions of years ago, and recent dating of dinosaur bones tell us that those huge creatures of the earth lived only thousands of years ago.

Both dinosaurs and pterosaurs have been assumed, by many Americans, to have lived only millions of years ago, with their fossils bones somehow evidence for their ancient existence. Carbon-dating of dinosaur bones has now shown that assumption is false. No C-14 should exist in the remains of something that lived millions of years ago. But results of testing are consistent: A number of types of dinosaurs have been dating to recent ages, even to less than 60,000 years in age. Pterosaurs living in our modern world now make sense, in light of recent dinosaurs.

Human experience and scientific testing cannot be dismissed out of personal distaste for the religious beliefs of the persons that are involved or are assumed to be involved in the sightings and in the radiocarbon testing.

Radiocarbon in Dinosaur and Other Fossils

That’s the title of a scientific paper by Brian Thomas and Vance Nelson, published in the Creation Research Society Quarterly, Volume 51, Number 4 (Spring of 2015). Here’s an excerpt from that article:

[page 303, after a paragraph on carbon-dating fossil wood]

Next, a whole hadrosaur caudal vertebra (ICR 021 Institute for Creation Research), minus its spinous process, was donated by Mr. Paul Koepp of Dallas, Texas. . . .

Abundant disarticulated hadrosaur and ceratopsian fossils occur on the Schmidt ranch, as at other Hell Creek Formation sites, mostly across Montana. . . .

The interior trabecular bone was plainly not infilled with sediment, and retains its in vivo spongy structure, albeit colored almost black . . . This fossil also yielded radiocarbon in amounts well within the detection threshold of the AMS technique at 20,850 +/- 90 BP for the interior trabecular portion, and 28,790 +/- 100 BP . . .

Conclusions

Carbon-14 dating of dinosaur fossils shows them to be only tens of thousands of years old (at most), and this is the only direct dating-measurements that have been done on such supposedly ancient bones. (Other radiometric dating methods had not been done directly on those fossils, and the interpretations depended on a number of assumptions.)

This is completely in harmony with the finding of soft tissue in T-Rex and other dinosaur bones. It also makes sense in light of the many sightings of pterosaurs that still fly overhead (though usually at night). Ropens are not extinct but still living.

Ridiculing a religious belief is no substitute for objective consideration of these many findings. And let the evidences be made known, not covered up.

Jonathan Whitcomb

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Dinosaurs dated to be young

. . . dinosaur bone apatite had been successfully RC dated in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s and significant amounts of C-14 were detected and reported.

Neutron Capture in Carbon-Dated Dinosaur Bones?

Awkward Explanation for Carbon-14 Dated Dinosaurs

American Hammerhead Ropen

The American cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb gave the name “American Hammerhead Ropen” to a type of apparent Rhamphorhynchoid that has been reported . . . to live in North America.

Pterosaur Sightings in the USA

Details are now available on ninety important sighting reports: apparent pterosaurs in the lower-48 states of the USA, with data compiled at the end of 2012.

Scientific Testing of Dinosaur Bones

“Not everybody embraces a dinosaur that is not yet completely decomposed.” . . . Carbon-14 methods cannot date anything older than a few tens of thousands of years old . . . Dating accuracy may be as high as 60,000 years, at best, but carbon-14 just does not last much longer.

Recent Sightings of Ropens

For the past eleven years, I (Jonathan Whitcomb) have interviewed eyewitnesses of apparent pterosaurs from various areas of the world. Many of those whom I have questioned report a flying creature resembling what my associates and I call ropens.

Dinosaur Bone Contains Radiocarbon

Scientists believing in deep time (i.e. millions of years) would not expect to find radiocarbon (C-14) in dinosaur bone. . . . they assume that the “terrible lizards” died out some 65 million years ago. . . . what happens if researchers actually test whether dinosaur fossils contain C-14? They find it.

June 12, 2015July 20, 2015

Big Flying Creature in Utah

A newspaper article was published in Salt Lake City, about a century ago, reporting a huge flying creature described as half-bird and half-reptile. How big was it? The image coming with that article showed a dragon flying off with a horse in its mouth. Where was that flying thing flying? Over Stansbury Island, which is in the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

Three children, including Devon Roberts and his brother Dallin, saw something huge flying overhead, at about 11 p.m., around the fall of 2001, something very unlike any bird. Devon estimated the flying creature had a wingspan of fifteen to twenty feet, although that estimate depends on his estimate of the distance. Where was that flying thing flying? Over Grantsville, which is just south of the Great Salt Lake.

Was it an over-imaginative newspaper reporter a century ago and three over-imaginative children fourteen years ago, with no relationship between the stories? Maybe . . . but maybe not. I suggest both stories may have had some truth, with more credibility for the recent sighting, for two of those three eyewitnesses (sighting around the fall of 2001) I myself interviewed face-to-face, and those two young men appeared perfectly credible to me. I also suggest the two young men did, in fact, observe a very large bioluminescent flying creature and the best candidate for that kind of animal is the ropen.

Devon Roberts was interviewed, in 2015, by Jonathan Whitcomb

I recently interviewed Devon and Dallin Roberts, of St. George, Utah, concerning the flying creature they witnessed, when they were children, in the farming town of Grantsville. The point of this investigation of that encounter fourteen years ago is not to promote belief in a dragon that carried away a full-grown horse and flew over the Great Salt Lake a century ago, but to promote an open mind to the possibility that something much larger than any classified bird now flies over North America, including northern Utah.

Some of the sighting reports in the United States suggest the larger ones, the creatures that resemble pterosaurs, may be able to lift much more weight than eagles or owls can, for the wingspans of the apparent ropens are much greater. But let’s now concentrate on the sighting in Grantsville.

Sighting in Grantsville, Utah

Twelve-year-old Dallin was the first of the three boys to see the strange thing that was flying overhead that night. None of those boys could see it well enough to say it was a half-bird and half-reptile, as an earlier generation may (or may not) have seen in that area of Utah, for the more-recent encounter was late at night. How did they see the creature? It was glowing, although the light went off and on over a period of minutes.

At first, Devon thought his brother was playing a joke. Dallin was telling him there was a huge bird that was “on fire” and then it disappeared. Sure! But then Devon saw the glowing creature. It was no joke but real, seeming to disappear when the glow stopped.

So how could the recent sighting relate to the old story of a horse-carrying dragon-like thing? When the flying creature in 2001 turned on its glow, the farm animals under its flight path “started going berserk” (words of Devon Roberts). Those animals felt threatened, even if the flying creature was not large enough to carry away a horse.

Perhaps the old report included an exaggeration and a false detail about a horse, but that does not mean that all aspects of that old newspaper story were only fictional. Regardless of how truthful that horse-eating story was, the three boys in Grantsville, in 2001, saw something other eyewitnesses have seen in North Ameria: a strange flying creature that glows when it flies at night, an animal much bigger than any bird in a science textbook.

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Ropen Bioluminescence in Utah

Three boys were playing at night on a playground in the farming community of Grantsville, Utah, around the fall of 2001, when they were shocked at the appearance of a large glowing creature that flew overhead.

Van Meter Flying Creature

If the town of Van Meter, Iowa, stood alone with a series of sightings in the early 20th century, what about recent sightings? What about reported encounters with pterosaur-like animals in recent times, in the neighboring states of Wisconsin and Missouri? I doubt that Van Meter really stands alone.

Author in Utah Reports Flying Creatures

Do you believe in the possibility that long-tailed featherless flying creatures, much larger than any fruit bat, live in the jungles of Papua New Guinea? Your belief depends a great deal on where you lived your childhood: in a village like Gomlongon on Umboi Island or in a western country like the United States.

Are Modern Pterosaurs Bioluminescent?

I suggest, to anyone who would attempt to explain pterosaur bioluminescence to a skeptic, that we begin with reports of large flying creatures known to some of the natives of Papua New Guinea, creatures that glow as they fly.

Bioluminescence in Pterosaurs

I interviewed Paul Nation in his home in Texas, soon after he had returned to the United States from his late-2006 expedition in Papua New Guinea. . . . Jacob Kepas, his interpreter, was able to climb up a cliff where he and a local native saw what appeared to be a giant winged creature sleeping on another cliff.

Ropen Pterosaur

The word “ropen” comes from Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, where in the local language of Kovai it refers to a large nocturnal flying creature that briefly, on occasion on some nights, glows brightly.

Nonfiction paperback: Live Pterosaurs in America – by J. D. Whitcomb

From a reader in Wisconsin:

“. . . there is something here for everyone . . . Once you start to reading it you won’t want to put it down . . . amazing and awe inspiring . . . Out of five stars, I’ll give it all five.” (From Isaac Elekom)