Pterosaur repoted by Kuhn in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: Ropen seen in New Guinea.
Various witnesses in warmer regions of the world claim to have seen living pterodactyls as long-tailed creatures with two-pronged heads and long thin tails. No legs or feet are ever reported but wingspans are commonly reported as 20-30 feet across and the long thin tail is commonly estimated to be ten feet long. The surface has no feathers and is leathery and although different lighting conditions make the colour difficult to make out, it is most often darker or black on the back and lighter or white on the belly. A sighting made by a married couple in Perth, Australia, is typical:
were walking along Marmion Avenue between the suburbs of Heathridge and Ocean Reef. This creature could not be written off as a bird as it was bigger than any bird on the planet, it did not flap it's wings (just glided on the air current), it had a ruddy reddish brown leathery skin; (we could see it's underneath as it flew over us at about 100ft up; the glow from all the ground lighting made that possible), it had a long tail and a wingspan that we estimated at between 30-50 feet across.'
'My husband and I both have talked about what we saw many times since that night in 1997. . . It had a lizard appearance, and was a ruddy reddish brown colour, bearing in mind that all we could see was its dark shape until the ground lighting hit it, it was only for maybe between 5 to 10 seconds . . . but enough time for us to see it was a living creature. I should imagine a creature that size would have had legs and feet, but we didn't see them. It was gliding across the night sky, flying quite low, without a sound.'
It is a quite consistent feature that the sightings take place along the shoreline or on islands, or actually out at sea and seen from boats or airplanes, and ordinarily for only a few seconds. A comparison of two sightings one in 1944 and the other in 1971, as published on ropens.com, produces the results that both have no indication of feathers; pointed head crest at back of head; overall, dark colour; tail at least ten to fifteen feet long, and a longish narrow tail; loud swishing sound of wing-flaps; one or two seconds per wing-flap; 'prehistoric' appearance; 1944 - on mainland of Papua New Guinea, 1971- Bougainville Is., Papua New Guinea: the 1944 witness Hodgkinson is a professional flight trainer and the 1971 witness Hennessy is a professional psychologist. Neither one would want to damage credibility by sending in a hoax or false report.
There is a problem in all of these sightings (which occur world-wide and in fact are becoming more and more frequent with the passage of years) in that the body conformation is NOT what you would expect of a giant Pterosaur. The giant Pterosaurs were of a type that did not have much in the way of a tail: the tailed pterosaurians were the smaller kinds. Also the assumed wing membrane filling in all the way to the feet and being of a broad rhomboid overall appearance do not agree with the shape of the wings as they seem to be in these pterosaurs (nor yet with the shape of the wing membranes as preserved on fossils). On the other hand, they are exactly as represented in 1960s dinosaur movies and animated cartoons (eg, The Mighty Mightor shows Pterosaurs of that type, actually an imaginary design).
As a matter of fact I had heard of such reports and mentioned the creatures in my first letter to Ivan T. Sanderson in the 1970s. And I soon afterward came up with the solution myself: 'I supppose they could be manta rays leaping out of the water and assumed to be Pterosaurs on brief viewings. The witnesses on shore could get confused if they saw the creatures over land or see when they were remembering about it afterwards'. And in fact the size and shape of the wings and tail in all of these reports exactly correspond to a manta ray when they do NOT corresond to any type of Pterosaurian.
There is more to it than just that: witnesses in New Guinea are also apparently describing a type of very large hornbill (which is also recognised under