Recent statistical analysis of ninety-eight sighting reports of apparent living pterosaurs shows that there could have been no major involvement from hoaxes. Wingspan estimates were given by fifty-seven eyewitnesses, with the data showing no reasonable possibility that hoaxes accounted for any more than a maximum of 20% of those sightings, and probably much less.

In addition, the degree of certainty of the featherless appearance of the flying creatures independently indicated no hoax or combination of hoaxes could have created that data, provided it was obtained from those who had made sighting reports.

Why a Hoax Fails

What about tail-length in relation to wingspan? Many sightings include descriptions of long tails that suggest Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs, and those long-tailed species are believed to have been much smaller, according to fossil records. But the estimates shown above, for wingspan, shows nothing even remotely like any peak related to those fossils.

The big pterodactyl-sighting year, at least in Texas, was probably 1976, when many newspapers covered the strange encounters. Some of these are compiled in the cryptozoology book by Ken Gerhard: Big Bird. Other pterosaur encounters are reported in other states: Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, in particular.

Pterosaurs in Georgia

She had driven less than ten miles, just leaving an area of pasture, entering an area of thick woods, around a mild downhill curve, with high banks and brush on each side of the road, when an animal suddenly flew from the right, just over the front of her car. . . .

On the Track of Pterodactyls

“Jonathan Whitcomb is actually based in Long Beach, where as a cryptozoology author he offers an explanation of the mystery lights of Marfa, Texas, and Papua New Guinea. Human inhabitants in both places have observed in the sky balls of light . . .”

Pterosaur in South Carolina

From the book Live Pterosaurs in America, third edition: “Susan Wooten was driving east on Highway 20, to the town of Florence, on a clear mid-afternoon in the fall of about 1989 . . . Where the road was surrounded by woods and swamps, Wooten saw something flying from her left, then passing in front of her . . . ‘It swooped down over the highway and back up gracefully over the pines,’ but its appearance was shocking: ‘It looked as big as any car . . . NO feathers, not like a huge crane or egret, but like a humongous bat.’”

It was not an eyewitness being attacked by a large flying creature in the dark of night. The victim was a cryptozoologist—Jonathan Whitcomb—who was attacked in the words of an online forum discussion. Whitcomb believes the words of eyewitnesses of living “pterodactyls,” and that seems to upset skeptics. The point is this: Is Jonathan Whitcomb a pterodactyl expert?

Paleontologists have long assumed that all species of pterosaurs, both Rhamphorhynchoids and Pterodactyloids, have been extinct for many millions of years. Whitcomb has proclaimed, in his nonfiction books and in his blog posts, that both long-tailed and short-tailed pterosaurs still live in different areas of the world, although he believes that they are mostly nocturnal. This annoys skeptics.

Attack on the “Pterodactyl Expert”

In the sense of being a paleontologist, I am not a pterosaur expert; but many paleontologists do not seem to even consider the possibility that any pterosaurs are extant. “Ape man” seems to rebel against any idea involving any modern living pterosaur. But in that sense—some living pterosaurs (AKA “pterodactyls”)—I am probably one of the leading “pterodactyl experts” in the world.

Pterodactyl Expert

He is a cryptozoologist who interviews eyewitnesses of what many call “pterodactyls,” which is simply the name many non-paleontologists use for “pterosaur.”

According to one of the two eyewitnesses of the large flying creatures, they had long tails and wingspans around 20-30 feet, as they flew only about a hundred feet above San Diego, California, in November of 2011. The tails were long and straight. The first creature was flying only about 30-40 yards high. No sound was heard from the creatures but the sighting may have been too near a freeway for the eyewitnesses to have heard anything from the two apparent pterodactyls.

Two Pterosaurs in San Diego

The men first noticed just one long-tailed creature, as it came gliding in from the direction of the ocean, but it was soon met by another one. . . . Although the moon helped light up the creatures, it was not possible to be sure whether or not they had feathers. The color was like golden brown, where color was discernable.

Continuing on the subject of still-breathing pterosaurs, commonly called “pterodactyls,” we have something from the Orange County Weekly, by way of KSN News:

Tracking Pterodactyls

“Jonathan Whitcomb is actually based in Long Beach, where as a cryptozoology author he offers an explanation of the mystery lights of Marfa, Texas, and Papua New Guinea. Human inhabitants in both places have observed in the sky balls of light that seem to split into two, fly away from each other and then turn around and fly back together.

 

“Such sights have produced legends about dancing devils or ghosts and scientific explanations involving lightning or earthlights. Whitcomb has a far different explanation: bioluminescent predators flying together until they notice an increased presence of insects.

 

“The pterodactyls–which are actually known as pterosaurs–then split up because their meal of choice–big brown bats–feed on insects. When the brown bats, known as Eptesicus fuscus, start feeding on the insects, the pterosaurses bear down on the bats from opposite sides. . . .”

Paleontologist Comments on Pterosaurs

. . . “Is it possible that at least a few of those thousands of discovered pterosaur fossils actually prevented the strata from being dated as post-Cretaceous?” . . . inadvertant circular reasoning in this assumption that all pterosaur fossils have been from ancient life?

 

The problem with getting an objective evaluation of this fossil dating is in the deeply-entrenched assumption of pterosaur extinction and the assumption that they only lived many millions of years ago. That could have influenced the dating of some of the strata from which the pterosaur fossils were taken, invalidating the claim that all those fossils had been proven to be ancient.

An eyewitness of a long-tailed featherless flying creature has recently come forward: Patty Carson of Southern California. She witnessed the “Gitmo Pterosaur” when she was a child, on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, in 1965. Jonathan Whitcomb, the cryptozoologist who interviewed her, believes the flying creature is related to the kongamato of Africa.

Patty Carson described the encounter:

I was only a child when I saw it. . . . around six years old. My brother George was with me, but he was only around four. We were walking down near the boat yards, headed home. We lived . . . by the radio tower. . . . Where it was sandy . . . scrub vegetation around four feet tall . . . There were some stagnant pools here and there, a few inches deep . . . We were walking through that scrub area, and suddenly it sat up, as if it had been eating something or resting. The head and upper part of its body, about a third of the wings at the joint . . . showed. . . . about thirty feet away. All of us froze for about five seconds, then it leaned to its left and took off with a fwap fwap fwap sound . . . and flew to its left and disappeared behind trees and terrain. . . . It did have a tail and it had a diamond shaped tip . . . The skin was a leathery, brownish reddish color. It had little teeth, a LOT of them.

 

We went home and I was ALL excited to tell my family I had seen a dinosaur, but they all poo poo’d me and started to tell me it was a pelican or frigate bird. NO WAY! It was as tall as a man when it stood up on it haunches. It was close. It froze for a few seconds so I got a good look. When we were kids we lived in Arlington (dad worked in the Pentagon) and we would often go
to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and when I saw it I knew exactly that it was a pterodactyl, and even named it as such to my family. They didn’t believe me. I know what I saw. I know exactly what I saw.

Carson’s report resembles the one by a U. S. Marine, Eskin C. Kuhn, who watched two similar creatures fly by at Guantanamo Bay, six years after Carson’s sighting:

Pterosaurs in Cuba

“I saw two pterosaurs . . . flying together . . . perhaps 100 feet [high], very close in range from where I was standing, so that I had a perfectly clear view of them. . . . ”

 

Mr. Kuhn had assumed that the two long-tailed pterosaurs he observed were exceptional cases and that short tails were what would be expected of modern living pterosaurs. That was before his 2010 interview with cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb. Most sightings do involve long tails.

Kongamato Pterodactyl

Before considering the origin of the word “kongamato,” we need to evaluate what witnesses have seem to have seen, regardless of what they call the flying creature. How can two freshwater stingrays fly slowly, directly over ones head? They cannot. It is possible for one stingray to jump out of a river, however uncommon that may be, but never two overhead, flying slowly. How can a freshwater stingray have a head that looks like “an elongated snout of a dog?” It cannot. But a pterosaur, called by some people “pterodactyl,” may appear as described by J. P. F. Brown, according to his report, regardless of whether or not someone else had once seen a freshwater stingray and called it “kongamato.”

Dinosaur Bird

Of course “dinosaur bird” is incorrect in a scientific sense, for a pterosaur is neither dinosaur nor bird. But an eyewitness like Patty Carson probably said something similar when she, as a child who had just seen a  live pterosaur in Cuba, reported her encounter to her family. In more recent years, a man in Richmond, Virginia, reported a “dinosaur bird” after he looked through a telescope.