The original Story Here: UFOs Over Lake Erie?

By “circular reasoning,” do you mean that I assume pterosaurs are still living and use that assumption to calculate (with some speculative percentages) a number of eyewitnesses, and then I use that number as evidence for living pterosaurs? Is that what you mean? That would sound like circular reasoning, indeed, . . . if that’s what had happened.

There seems to be a misunderstanding, for I don’t remember giving out the number 1400 as an evidence that pterosaurs are still living. It is simply a very rough estimate of the number of Americans who have become very personally involved with this over the past three decades: personally observing obvious apparent live pterosaurs.

The trauma of becoming an eyewitness of a living pterosaur deserves attention. I mention it in the opening page of my new book; I mention it on web pages; I repeat: This kind of cryptid sighting scares eyewitnesses in a way that Big Foot does not. Many persons have come to doubt their own sanity, to varying degrees. Our society has not allowed anyone to see and report, opening, the sighting of a dinosaur or pterosaur.

“1400″ in the press release demonstrates that many Americans have become involved in a shocking experience that they have struggled with. It is a number to impress us with its human meaning. A few hundred or a few thousand traumatized Americans who have to decide what to do about their experience–that is the main point. But still I believe “1400″ is more useful than total ignorance of any idea of any quantity.

I could have been sure to hit the mark by saying, “700-7000.” Maybe I should have included that somewhere in the press release. but 1400 I got it from specific testimonies, and specific percentages that were estimated from what information was given to me by eyewitnesses, including those who were standing next to others who never filed any report. “1400″ may be offensive to mathematicians, but that is what we have.

What is the alternative? What if I make no press release: Can we allow the American public to believe that the well-known newspaper report of three eyewitnesses in Texas is the extent of American eyewitnesses of pterosaurs? Or that one or two cowboys in Arizona, in the late 1800′s, make up the majority of American eyewitnesses? That is probably what many Americans think when the subject of eyewitnesses of pterosaurs comes up.

I believe that “it is better to light just one little candle than to stumble in the dark.” When we start advocating the investigation of these reports, then more eyewitnesses will come forward and we will have more data to calculate things more accurately.

Please consider the eyewitnesses who have no religious point to make, no philosophy to prove, no evolution to disprove. Consider the eyewitnesses who simply want to be heard with an open mind.

7% of 1400 comes to a number (100) that is in the neighborhood of how many credible eyewitnesses I believe have reported obviously apparent pterosaurs to cryptozoologists or those who were acting as cryptozoologists during the interviews.

You mentioned something related to misidentification. That comes up a lot. Speculating on generalities seems worthless when we can look at the specific sightings. In particular, many bird and bat species can be eliminated when the apparent pterosaur is extremely large. And the large size is sometimes based on comparison with objects of known size.

One sighting involved estimating the length of the creature by the width of the road it flew over at low altitude (30 feet).

The Hodgkinson sighting of 1944 is close to ideal for estimating the giant size of a “pterodactyl.” Two men were in a small clearing; on the opposite side of the clearing was the creature taking off into the air. There were no obstructions to their view. Hodgkinson was raised on a family farm: He knew about sizes of fields and sizes of objects in fields. He was quite capable of estimating size: The creature was close to the size as a Piper-Tri-Pacer airplane.

My problem here isn’t Mr. Whitcomb’s premise, it’s his fuzzy math and circular reasoning. It’s fine to speculate, but to suggest that in the absence of real data simple speculation is somehow something more than simple speculation is poor practice for a researcher. It makes what may otherwise be a thoughtful inquiry seem silly.

1400 is actually my conservative estimate. Remember we are not dealing with millions of persons with cameras this year but 1400+ persons within the past 29+ years. Many of the sightings seem to be brief, some lasting just a few seconds. One teenager was going fishing, probably without a camera; two young adults were standing outside their house, mesmerized by what they saw and probably not thinking about leaving to get a camera; one man was on his front porch when a creature flew by too fast for him to get a camera (he knew it would be gone before he got back outside). So how many of those 1400+ (1980 to 2008) had a camera that they quickly got ready and accurately aimed and successfully shuttered when the creature was in clear view. I woud guess zero.

Am I wrong because of biased speculation? Consider my experience: I was a professional legal videographer years ago. One day I had just crossed a street with an attorney-client. We were about to videotape an accident scene. With camcorder in hand, I saw a truck that had stopped just yards away from me; it had a carnival display that I found might make a great still image on one of my web pages. While thinking about turning on my camcorder, the signal light turned green and the truck drove away. I did not have time to both think and shoot video.

In Papua New Guinea, in 1944, Duane Hodgkinson and his army buddy had one of the most famous ropen sightings on record. After the creature flew away, it returned to fly over the same clearing. After it flew away the second time, the men remembered that they were carrying a military camera.

It can happen.

How would a paleontologist react to a newly discovered fossil of a pterosaur? That gives us a clue. The discovery of a pterosaur fossil, according to standard practice if I am not mistaken, causes that stratum to be dated according to the standard concept of when that creature lived. In other words, if a 5000-year-old fossil of a pterosaur were discovered tomorrow, the soil it was found in would be dated at millions of years old. What paleontologist would dare to suggest that the fossil was only thousands of years old?

Never mind how that stratum was dated prior to the discovery; a pterosaur fossil could reset whatever opinions paleontologists had previously had about how old the soil was.

For details, here and here.

Did you know that the living-pterosaurs investigations that started in the mid-1990′s were in Papua New Guinea? Some reports were of large flying creatures that were covered with hair. The Woetzel-Guessman expedition of 2004 (a few weeks after my own expedition) involved detailed questionnaires, the main one being two pages long. There was also a silhouette page: 34 images of birds, bats, and pterosaurs. See here.

Only two eyewitnesses who had good-enough sightings to see wing-shape–those two both chose the Sordes Pilosus out of the 34 images. And “Pilosus” is Latin: “hairy.”

It is true that some eyewitnesses that my associates and I deem credible mention leathery skin. But keep in mind that from more than a few feet away, most human skin appears hairless. The typical distance between a human eyewitness and an obvious apparent pterosaur is, I believe, the distance that makes human skin appear hairless, although we know that human arms, legs, etc, are hardly hairless when unshaven.

But there’s something else: Some people have less hair than others, even though we are all of the same species. It seems quite possible that some pterosaur species may have less hair than others. If I’m not mistaken, it is only SOME of the fossils that show evidence for hair or something hair-like. Is that right?

It’s just that I would expect this to get …well, the kind of attention the sasquatch and yeti have gotten, from the same kind of people, if the evidence had the same frequency and coherence, and it kind of makes me suspicious that it doesn’t seem to have.

I guess my subjective take – subject as always to better acquaintance with the evidence – is that it’s much easier for a cryptid to stay low to the ground if it doesn’t have to fly for a living.