Book About Ropens

"Searching for Ropens and Finding God" - front cover - non-fiction book

Book by Whitcomb: Searching for Ropens and Finding God

This book says very little about “finding God,” but boy it says a lot about “searching for ropens.” It’s 354 pages long, yes that’s a long book. Don’t bother even opening it, if you get your hands on a copy, unless you want to spend a lot of time reading. Once you get started, it’s really hard to put it down, and I’m just passing along what other people have said about this third edition and previous editions. I almost forgot to mention the name of the book, Searching for Ropens and Finding God.

The author, Jonathan Whitcomb, is a devout Mormon and makes no effort to cover up that fact. Yet he says more about Baptists than about Mormons, and that’s because so many Baptists have been searching for the ropens. Even so, the book is not about churches. It’s about men who have braved the steamy jungles of Papua New Guinea to get a photo or a bit of video of a ropen. The religious motivations are mentioned but not put on a pedestal. You’ll find a few pages about faith in God, but you’ll find many chapters about the ropens and about the people who see modern pterosaurs, and those eyewitnesses almost never say anything about religion. This is mostly cryptozoology.

Here is the title page:

Near the front of the book is the Title Page

I’ll tell you what I like best about the title page. “Working with people of other faiths” and “it soars above disputes about religion.” You won’t find much about Muslims, Jews, or Hindus in this book. It’s about Christians of different denominations who work together to find a modern pterosaur. I also like the part at the end: “Speculation that religious bias of investigators has played a big part in sighting reports of apparent pterosaurs—that conjecture has been shot down.”

I don’t mean that there’s hardly anything about religion. You’ll find some pages about that. But the meat of the book is searching in Papua New Guinea and in other countries, searching for pterosaurs.

Here is the first page of the Introduction:

First page of the Introduction to the book

I like this part about helping people avoid suicide:

After reading this book, if one person finds a reason to live and abandons thoughts of suicide, what a reward for all of us involved! This is not a textbook for preventing suicide, yet I suggest each of us can find ways to bring meaning into the lives of persons around us, motivating all of us to keep living and learning.

The book doesn’t say exactly, in so many words, how to help anybody avoid suicide. It’s not in the words exactly, but these men have endured years of ridicule and disappointment, yet they keep living and trying. It’s in their examples, never giving up hope or becoming despondent. The author suffers more failure than anybody else, if you read the book to the end. But he too keeps on going, like everything has to turn out right in the end. I guess readers can follow that example and keep moving forward in their own lives, in whatever they are doing.

New Pterosaur Book on Ropens

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.”

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"Searching for Ropens and Finding God" - front cover - non-fiction book

Searching for Ropens and Finding God—The perfect gift for a loved one or for yourself

You deserve a break from the ordinary routine. Treat yourself to an extraordinary true-life adventure about encounters with flying creatures that most Americans thought became extinct long ago. Find out for yourself what may fly over our heads at night.

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Recent Pterosaur Sightings

black and white image of an American World War II light cruiser ship

At the back of the book Searching for Ropens and Finding God, in the appendix is mentioned a sighting in the Pacific during World War II. This is not recent news, of course, but it just recently came up. Nobody was talking about it before, at least as far as I know.

black and white image of an American World War II light cruiser ship

Near Wake Island in the Pacific

The report comes from a nephew of a World War II veteran, but this is not Duane Hodgkinson. It was a sailor who saw a weird flying creature, and he was not alone.

The wingspan was around 30 feet, according to the sailor. The ship was doing target practice at an island in the Pacific. It looked like their ship was found by a Japanese plane, but the men came to realize that it was a flying creature, after it flapped its wings.

It came at the ship, like a Japanese plane would do, and crashed into them. The uncle told his nephew how he had been chosen to kill and dispose of the beast. He clubbed it until they were sure it was dead, for the officer in charge told them it was just a bat.

It had a long neck and very tough hair on its wings, but other parts of the body were covered with soft hair. The beak was like an elongated parrot beak. It was interesting to me that the nephew is a biologist. The uncle asked him what kind of animal it was and was surprised that his biologist-nephew did not know.

Hawaii

Another sighting in the Pacific really was recent, around the beginning of January, 2014. The eyewitness reported this:

We live in South Kona . . . About a month ago me, some friends and my girl friend were driving south on Mamalahoa By-Pass Rd. . . . [three of us] all saw a big fleshy colored, featherless bird like creature. . . . [We] saw a long head, and its mouth with sharp teeth opening and closing, then its wings opened with a wingspan of about 10-15 feet.

Recent Sighting Reports

What people have seen in California, North Carolina, Canada, Spain, and New Zealand

Is the Ropen out of Order?

If those flying dragons over Los Angeles were not enough, we now have another problem with modern pterodactyls. The ropen, which was supposed to keep out of sight in remote jungles of Papua New Guinea, has popped up in a new book: Searching for Ropens and Finding God.

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Sightings of Pterosaurs in and Around Kentucky

Kentucky wilderness forest

In the book Searching for Ropens and Finding God, it says:

“I live in Lamero, Kentucky. Its a small, rural area . . . I have a friend who lives near Renfro Valley, which is about twelve miles north of me. Its a wooded area as well, with . . . several caves. And I’m talking a lot of caves, lol. This county is seriously like swiss cheese . . . Last July, I was visiting my friend at his home. It was just a little after sunset, so it was still daylight outside. . . . We were outside, sitting on his deck . . . My friend shouted . . . ‘what in the blue h*** is that?’ Approaching us from the east . . . were two very large animals. . . .”

“They didn’t flap their wings very much, about once every second or two, definitely not as fast as a common bird flaps their wings. They . . . had every characteristic of a pterodactyl, from head to tail. I’d say they were roughly 15+ feet long and were flying at least 40 mph, but these are just rough estimates.”

Why shouldn’t Kentucky have accounts of modern pterosaurs? States all around Kentucky have had their own accounts. The forests give modern pterosaurs many places to hide, too.

Kentucky wilderness forest wilderness forest in Kentucky

To the northeast of Kentucky is Ohio, where a man saw a pterosaur with a long tail, in fact he saw it in two different years, both times in the hottest time of the year. He called them, “huge . . . about 4.5 ft. tail, 10 ft. from head to end of tail. long skinny tail with a spade.”

To the east of Kentucky is Virginia and the book has a long account of some kind of gigantic creature that was flying over a pond at night years ago. The book says:

“I was seventeen at the time of this encounter. It was very late at night. . . . I’d place the time to be somewhere between ten and midnight. . . . at a local reservoir where there was a tree with boards nailed into it for a ladder and a plank for a diving board. . . . all I saw was its silhouette. I could see it was big even before it was close. It seemed like it crossed a great distance with only a few flaps of its wings and mostly glided but it came very fast. . . .”

“I just stood there, facing it until it literally got about 20 to 30 feet away and it ‘stopped’ and hovered mid-air. The wings were somewhere between 15 and 20 feet wide . . . The wings were bat shaped without feathers . . .”

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Supporting the Bible, yet respecting beliefs of those of various religions, "Searching for Ropens and Finding God" can appeal to many

Searching for Ropens and Finding God (nonfiction cross-genre)

From page 78 of the book:

Gideon immediately chose the drawing with the streamlined head. I concealed my delight as we continued our conversation. I asked if any book at school had a picture of a ropen. He thought for a second and then said, “No.” Had he been dishonestly trying to convince me of a non-existent creature, he would have supported his earlier answer describing the mouth. The resolute, immediate choice of a less-crocodilian-like head was evidence he had seen something—even, perhaps, a living pterosaur.

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