Questionable Report of Living Pterosaurs

sketch by Eskin Kuhn - one of two "pterodactyls" in Cuba

Background Check on the World News Daily Report

Actually no background check is necessary, as the site in question acknowledges the fictional nature of its “news” reports.  How does this relate to reports of living pterosaurs? We’ll see.

“About us”

The online “news” site includes the following on its “About us” page:

Our News Team is composed of award winning christian, muslim and jewish journalists, retired Mossad agents and veterans of the Israeli Armed Forces.

We are based in Tel Aviv since 1988 where are published more then 200,000 copies of our Daily Report paper edition everyday.

From their FAQ page

Our News Team counts members fluent in more then 12 languages. We thus have access to thousands of newspapers around the world and choose information we feel is of interest to the christian, muslim and jewish zionist community worldwide.

Disclaimer from World News Daily Report

World News Daily Report is a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. All news articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fiction, and presumably fake news.

Conclusions from the Above

We don’t need to examine any article from any page of WNDR to know of its credibility. Notice the disclaimer above: “All news articles . . . are fiction.” A reader need not be educated enough to see the strangeness in retired Mossad agents working alongside both Muslims and Christians, all of them being award winning journalists. The disclaimer itself makes it clear: fiction. Not even one article, not even the most believable article, can be taken as factual. With that said, I feel it may benefit us to look into one article.

Reports of Living Pterosaurs

I am aware of how strange it may appear to many people: a few Americans traveling to a remote tropical island in the southwest Pacific, traveling on their own limited personal funds, with the intent of discovering modern living pterosaurs, or at least of learning about giant long-tailed featherless flying creatures by interviewing natives.

I am one of those rare Americans who used limited personal funds to interview, face-to-face, native eyewitnesses on Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea. As strange as Garth Guessman and David Woetzel and Paul Nation and I may appear to be, to many people, we are quite real, nonfictional characters who videotaped natives in remote tropical jungles. We are convinced that modern pterosaurs are indeed real living animals, mostly nocturnal and uncommon when compared with most species of owls and bats.

I may not have gone on as many foreign expeditions as some of my associates, but I may have written more about living pterosaurs than any other cryptozoologist has written. Perhaps I have written more original material on this subject than all other writers in the world combined, if Google searches give an accurate appraisal. Regardless, I submit the following evaluation of the WNDR article that they have titled “Pterodactyl Sighting in New Guinea Terrorizes Villagers, Alarms Authorities.” Take this in context: I am convinced that many natives in remote areas of this part of the world have seen living pterosaurs, but this particular article is a fictional story.

A photo shows what is purported to be a “Local Dayak chief,” and he looks like what we’d expect of an old native man living on the western side of the island of New Guinea. The problem is this: The Dayak people live on the island of Borneo, not on the island of New Guinea, and they appear Asian, not at all like the natives far to the east and not at all like that native man in the photo.

The WNDR article mentions the word Kalimantan but that word also relates to the island of Borneo. We read no explanation for the dual geographic references, and that alone can cast doubt on the article, but there’s more.

WNDR quotes the old man, who uses the word ropen as if it were a word in his language. On these countless islands in this part of the world, hundreds of languages may contain countless words for various flying things. Ropen, however, is the word used by many villagers on Umboi Island, and it refers to the large flying creature that glows for a few seconds at a time as it flies. Please note: that word refers to that apparent Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur, and it’s a word in the Kovai language that is restricted to part of Umboi Island.

Yet even on that island the nocturnal creature has more than one name, depending on the particular village you may be visiting. What is the chance that the word ropen would also be used by villagers in a different village, on a different island, even in a different country (Indonesia), and used for the same kind of creature?

Of course it’s possible the interviewer told that old native man the name ropen and the native then repeated that name back to the visitor. But it’s just one more strange thing that discredits the story. A baseball player walks up to the plate to bat with only three strikes available, and the journalist responsible for this story strikes out for credibility. It appears typical of the stories on WNDR: fictional.

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Rhamphorhynchoid Tail Flange

Sketch by the eyewitness of the flying creature seen in Lakewood, CA, in mid-2012

Possible Ropen in Indonesia

In June of 2008, H. (anonymous) was flying a small twin-engined plane with his co-pilot, B.; both are former navy pilots. They were mostly finished with the 700-mile flight from Broome, Australia, to Bali, Indonesia, when H. saw what he at first assumed was another airplane flying in a head-on collision course.

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