ropen – Modern Pterosaur

October 19, 2018

New Book on Child (and Adult) Eyewitnesses of Living Pterosaurs

I quote from this nonfiction book, although this is a preliminary form of these sentences in this book, The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur:

Chapter 1: Patty Carson in Cuba (Guantanamo Bay)

Scientists use the word ‘pterosaur’ for a group of flying creatures that they know about because of fossils. Most people . . . use another word: ‘pterodactyl.’ That is not scientific, but most people are not scientists. That is why Patty used the word ‘pterodactyl.’

Her father did not believe her at first, but later may have been unsure. Patty’s older brother and sister later saw what may have been the same thing, but they did not see so clearly. . . .

Patty’s older brother, Tom, saw something like it about one year after her sighting, but he did not get such a good look. He saw it for only about three seconds. I talked with him by phone in 2011, and he answered my questions.

Tom was ten years old and was with two other boys. He saw the thing flying about 100 feet over their heads. It looked like it had no feathers, but Tom is not sure about that. It looked larger than a pelican.

Support From Eyewitness Eskin Kuhn

An extremely important point about the sightings those children had at Guantanamo Bay is this: A few years later, the U.S. Marine Eskin C. Kuhn had a sighting of two “pterodactyls,” also at Gitmo, and within minutes of his view of them he sketched what he had seen.

Sketches by Eskin Kuhn (left) and Patty Carson* (right; *reversed horizontally) – Notice similarities in the head crest and in the beak.

Real Eyewitnesses, Child and Adult

These two persons have given their real names to the world, so we’re not dealing with anonymous third-hand accounts. I, Jonathan Whitcomb, have questioned them many times, over a period of years, and I submit that they are both credible eyewitnesses of this kind of flying creature.

Patty Carson (her sighting was in 1965)
Eskin Kuhn (his sighting was in 1971)

This long-tailed featherless animal is now called ‘ropen.’ That name comes from the Kovai language of Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, where American explorers first searched, repeatedly, for a modern living pterosaur. I do not declare that the species of nocturnal flying creature on Umboi Island is the same species seen in Cuba in the mid-twentieth century, but I do suggest a close relationship may exist between them and that they are living pterosaurs.

Patty Carson points toward a popular island tourist attraction

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Books about the ropen, or “flying dinosaurs”

I’m presently writing a nonfiction book for children 8-12 years old. It should be published and in print sometime in November (2018): The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur.

Books about modern pterosaurs

Three nonfiction paperback books on these wonderful flying creatures, what some people call “pterodactyls” or “dinosaur birds,” and another book in digital format: Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea

Kids who see “pterodactyls”

Patty Carson was only a small child, when she and her brother saw a Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur in clear daylight, at the Guantanamo Bay military station in eastern Cuba, around 1965.

Child and his mother saw a dinosaur bird

After a hot afternoon in the Salt Lake Valley, on the first day of summer, a lady and her 12-year-old son decided to sleep in their backyard in western Draper and look at the stars, at least for the first part of the night. They had no idea that anyone had seen a huge dragon-like creature fly over the neighborhood earlier in the year.

Little girl saw a flying dinosaur

This eyewitness is Patty Carson, who saw one of the flying creatures at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, around 1965, when she was a child.

Ropens in North America

Sightings of modern pterosaurs in recent history:

California (three)
Louisiana
Cuba

Books on extant pterosaurs

These nonfiction books are divided into three types:

Worldwide sightings in general
Pterosaur encounters in North America
Sightings in the Southwest Pacific

May 30, 2016

The Big Picture of Modern Pterosaurs

Let’s begin with “A Brief Introduction to Living-Pterosaur Investigations:”

YouTube video produced by Jonathan David Whitcomb

Definition of “Modern Pterosaur”

From page 294 of the fourth edition of my nonfiction book Searching for Ropens and Finding God, we can read the technical definition:

A featherless vertebrate two-winged creature, living within the past few thousand years, having an elongated digit-like bone on the leading edge of each wing and an absence of any bat-like wing-support involving bones that radiate into the wing membranes

For those who would prefer a simple definition:

A modern pterosaur is a non-extinct featherless flying creature often called “pterodactyl” or “flying dinosaur”

Cryptozoology Rather Than Standard Zoology

As of May 29, 2016, the modern pterosaur appears to fly only in cryptozoology, not yet landing on any page of a biology text book. I can be seen in the many eyewitness descriptions rather than in the zoo or in the biology laboratory.

Of course the same could once be said for other animals including gorillas in Africa. We now have no doubt in the existence of the gorilla, although it was once thought to swing from jungle trees only in the imaginations of gullible persons. Westerners once found it convenient to dismiss stories of gorillas as Boogeyman tales.

So what evidence do we now have that at least one species of pterosaur is presently living? It’s in the wide range of testimonies, from a great variety of eyewitnesses from around the world, describing flying creatures that have a remarkable consistency in details of description.

The Long-Tailed Ropen

If reports of non-extinct “pterodactyls” were not enough to shock people, many of the descriptions include a long tail. In fact, the ratio between the presence of a long tail and the absence of one, in the overall sighting reports, is about 20-to-1 (41% to 2%).

What’s so unusual about a dominance of long tails in modern pterosaurs? It’s the opposite of what we would expect if people were just playing hoaxes. Think of the last film or television science fiction show you saw that had “pterodactyls” in it. That movie or TV show probably was depicting short-tailed pterosaurs. Those Pterodactyloid short-tailed flying creatures were assumed by many scientists to have been the last ones to survive, after the long-tailed ones had mostly died off. Those are the pterosaurs often shown in science fiction films and on TV, yet it’s the long-tailed ones that dominate in actual human encounters with those flying creatures.

What is a ropen? It’s a long-tailed pterosaur, similar in some ways to Rhamphorhynchoid (“basal”) fossils. The end of the tail is often seen as having a structure described in various ways:

diamond-shaped
spade shape
triangle

Sightings Around the World

People see them in many parts of the planet. I, Jonathan Whitcomb, have received reports directly from eyewitnesses who report encountering living pterosaurs on five continents, as I have been available to communicate with those persons over the past 12+ years.

A recent sighting was in northwestern Arkansas, in the first week or two of May, 2016. Here is part of the report:

. . . saw a pterosaur come up out of the water and fly into the woods. It was grey and did not have feathers. . . . [wingspan] was from 15 to 19 feet! . . . grey leathery skin.

I had previously received several reports of pterosaur sightings in Arkansas as well as many in surrounding states. These included (but are not limited to) the following:

Texas
Oklahoma
Louisiana
Mississippi
Alabama
Tennessee
Missouri

Indeed, it’s easier to list the American states in which modern pterosaurs have not been reported than it is to list the ones in which they have been seen. The states shown above are listed because they surround Arkansas.

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Cryptozoology and Pterodactyls

. . . the belief that all pterosaurs became extinct many millions of years ago is not based on sound objective evidence but on a number of assumptions.

What is this flying ropen?

How often we’ve been taught that all dinosaurs and pterosaurs became extinct . . . as if that were proven! But what if some are still living? . . . consider the many eyewitness testimonies of those flying creatures.

The Ropen and Destination Truth

Adventure, danger, enlightenment—those I experienced half a year later, sitting in my living room, delighting in the ropen-episode of Destination Truth. I thought I remembered advising the production team “do not” enter a cave that might contain a ropen . . .

Rhamphorhynchoid Pterosaurs and Ropens

The pterosaur suborder of Rhamphorhynchoidea, those long-tailed featherless flying creatures—they’re also called basal pterosaurs. For generations, many scientists have assumed that they became extinct . . .

July 28, 2015

Rhamphorhynchoid Pterosaurs and Ropens

Gitmo Pterosaur sketched by eyewitness Patty Carson

The pterosaur suborder of Rhamphorhynchoidea, those long-tailed featherless flying creatures—they’re also called basal pterosaurs. For generations, many scientists have assumed that they became extinct, at least for most of their species, before the last of the Pterodactyloid pterosaurs dominated the skies, many millions of years ago. At least that has been the assumption.

In other words, according to orthodox evolutionary ideas, a typical species of Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur either became extinct or it evolved into another form before the short-tailed pterosaurs became the dominant type, long ago. That line of thinking also includes the idea that all species, of both suborders, had become extinct by about 65 million years ago. All of those ideas, to me (Jonathan Whitcomb) and to my associates, are like fairy tales. Both of those suborders are still living, represented by at least a few species worldwide.

Modern Rhamphorhynchoids we call ropens. Two differences emerge with some of the modern versions of this featherless flying creature:

Some ropens can be much larger than a typical fossil
Some of them have a prominent horn-like head crest

Sighting in Wetlands of Central California in 1994

From a report in Cryptozoology News, we learn of an encounter in California in which a mother and daughter saw an apparent pterosaur, one with a long tail.

A few miles south of Sacramento, California, thousands of acres of the Stone Lakes National Wildlife Refuge are managed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. On a clear spring day in 1994, the two eyewitnesses there saw a flying creature, apparently featherless, with long thin tail and a “pterodactyl-like head.” They were sure that it was living, not a kite. It circled overhead and then departed the area in its flight.

The eyewitness who reported the sighting said, “It had a long neck, long head and long pointed beak area. It had a large wingspan, bigger than a blue heron. It was gliding very high up, with very little flapping movement of its wings.” That woman, who is a avid bird watcher, also said, “What we saw was neither a crane nor a heron. We saw a real living animal that was not familiar to us and looked like it was straight out of Jurassic Park.”

Scott Norman’s Sighting in Central California

According to the cryptozooogist Chad Arment, Scott Norman had reported to him a sighting of an apparent pterosaur one night in mid-2007 in Central California (much further to the south of Sacramento):

. . . this animal came gliding just over the [nearby] shed . . . [It] had an 8-10 foot wingspan, the wings were bat-like in shape . . . The body was about 5-6 feet in length, the neck about 1-2 feet in length, the head was about four feet in length . . .

The flying creature had a head crest that the eyewitness estimated was about two feet long. Norman did not see a tail that night, but he told Arment that another eyewitness had seen an apparent pterosaur in that area in daylight, and the other man reported a long tail.

Sighting in Southern California

Moving further south, the 1994 sighting in wetlands near Sacramento brings to mind another sighting in wetlands, this one in Orange County in 2007, over a hundred miles south of Scott Norman’s sighting but in the same year. It was just northwest of the University of California, Irvine.

From the nonfiction cryptozoology book Live Pterosaurs in America (third edition), we read about this apparent ropen:

[The eyewitness] 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 anonymous eyewitness saw the featherless creature fly just above Campus Drive, which separates two marshy areas, and the length of that road tells us about the size of the apparent ropen. The flying creature was about as long as the width of that road, which is thirty feet. Half of that thirty feet was the approximate length of the tail.

Eyewitness sketch of a featherless flying creature seen in Cuba in 1965

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Gitmo Rhamphorhynchoid

I have also learned that Carson, later in childhood or adolescence, was inquisitive and sharp and recognized one or more images of pterosaurs at the Smithsonian, when her father worked in Washington D.C.

Ropen Observed in Alberta, Canada

A family saw an apparent pterosaur flying over the city of Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) recently, and the flying creature appeared to have been a ropen.

Rhamphorhynchoid Suborder of Pterosaurs

Before scientists created words like Rhamphorhynchoid for long-tailed pterosaurs, common folk used the word dragon for large destructive creatures, including those with long tails and wings but no feathers.

Recent Ropen Sightings

I’m not positive about what [I] and my 16 year old son saw flying across a major road in Richmond, Virginia . . . Its wing span was massive! It looked to be about 10 feet across and its tail was long with a triangle point! We were so flabbergasted looking at it that I nearly crashed!

Long Tails of Rhamphorhynchoid Pterosaurs

How common is a long tail on a modern pterosaur! Of the 128 more-credible sighting reports compiled at the end of 2012, 41% reported a long tail.

Universal Pterosaur Extinction?

To be plain, extinction has two meanings, or distinct usages, so beware of anyone—even a paleontologist—who uses the word in a general sense but with an air, and only an air, of sounding specific.

Strange Flying Creatures in the United States

When I led a brief expedition in Papua New Guinea in 2004, I had no idea that many Americans had encountered, in the forty-eight contiguous states of the USA, flying creatures like the ropen.