Summary and Contents of the Nonfiction Book
Live Pterosaurs in America takes you into the lives of those who report encounters with apparent living pterosaurs. The eyewitnesses
themselves tell you of their shocking and sometimes frightening sightings of flying creatures that our culture teaches us should not
be there: shocking indeed.
Chapter One: South Carolina Sighting
" . . . We had a group that would often travel to Bingham, nearby. .
. . There was an old abandoned stretch of railway leading into the swamp where we would . . . see the ‘Bingham Lights.’ No one
knew what they were . . ."
Chapter Two: California Sightings
". . . southeast of Fresno . . . two featherless flying creatures
with wingspans of fifteen feet. . . . the two 'dragons' . . . broad heads, long bills, and large eyes. . . . the 'monsters' were held
responsible for attacking chickens, with 'many of the hens being bitten in two and left partly devoured.'"
Chapter Three: Other
U.S. Sightings
"Bowling Green, Kentucky. Today I opened my back door . . . and I noticed a large bird in the sky . . . it seemed strange
because I [saw] a tail with a spade-like end; also the wingspan was a lot larger than any bird I have ever seen around here."
Chapter
Four: Flying Luminescence
Chapter Five: American Ghost Lights
Chapter Six: The Truth of Tall Tails
"The combined descriptions
convinced me that those three had reported actual events; it was no hoax-collaboration. But rare be tales of no-tails."
Chapter
Seven: The Bat Connection
"I’ve encountered no eyewitness who described a fruit bat while calling it a pterosaur, and I’ve encountered
many eyewitnesses, many indeed. But the bat explanation sounds reasonable to specifically-ignorant Westerners who have never personally
encountered eyewitnesses of apparent pterosaurs."
Chapter Eight: Belief in Living Pterosaurs
"First, is it true that 'seeing is
believing?' To the point, must we experience a thing personally before believing it exists? Human knowledge includes experiences acquired
indirectly: We belief what we’re told, at least sometimes, otherwise we’d be hermits, each ignorant of everything except what each
experiences directly, without need for language, without books."
Appendix
"The world’s greatest expert on chickens—that’s a fox.
The details of that expertise culminate in picking bones, executed differently than, but for the same purpose as, the work of a fossil
expert: to make a living. The hope differs: The paleontologist searches for ancient bones somehow protected from the destructive forces
of time; the fox, for fresh meat, somehow unprotected by the farmer for a time. Interminable dogmatism keeps both of them searching:
one for death anciently; the other, death soon-to-be."
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For the cryptozoologist
By Jonathan David Whitcomb
Author of "Searching for Ropens"
Home Page
Live Pterosaurs in Papua
New Guinea (Piugini)
about ropens
Cryptozoology seems like a new field of science, but it’s more of an open-minded
approach to investigating eye-witness testimonies of creatures not classified (in the Western scientific community) or not recognized
as presently living.
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