Two Dragon Hunters in Southern California
Garth Guessman and Jonathan Whitcomb hunt for modern pterosaurs
Contact: KSN News Release
Jonathan Whitcomb
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Murray, Utah 84123 Press Room on Live Pterosaurs
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Blog: Live Pterosaur
For Immediate Release
LONG BEACH, Calif/KSN/Mar 18, 2013 ---
Two men living in Los Angeles County proclaim that dragons are not all
fictional and that some species of pterosaurs are still alive. For Garth
Guessman of Los Angeles and Jonathan Whitcomb of Long Beach, 2013
is the tenth anniversary of their beginning serious research into sightings
of “flying dragons,” what many Americans call “pterodactyls.” Most
biologists consider those flying creatures long extinct.
Guessman and Whitcomb both explored Umboi Island, Papua New
Guinea, in separate expeditions in 2004. Both of them came to the same
conclusions: The animal called “ropen” by the islanders is a long-tailed
pterosaur, and what some people in early history called “dragons,” in
various parts of the world, were real animals and relate to the ropen of
Umboi Island.
The second ropen expedition of 2004, a few weeks after Whitcomb’s
expedition, involved three men: Guessman, David Woetzel (another
American cryptozoologist), and Jacob Kepas (a native interpreter from
the mainland of Papua New Guinea). Those three interviewed many
natives on Umboi Island, mostly north of the villages where Whitcomb
had conducted interviews a few weeks earlier.
All the major participants in the two Umboi Island expeditions of
2004 concluded that the ropen is more than a legend, that it is a real
nocturnal flying creature that glows; the American explorers call that
glow “bioluminescence.” Woetzel, Guessman, and Whitcomb also were
convinced that the ropen is a living Rhamphorhynchoid, a long-tailed
“basal” pterosaur. Whitcomb also came to believe that the flying lights
of Papua New Guinea are related to the Marfa Lights of Texas.
Guessman returned to Papua New Guinea in 2009 with the Monster-
quest paranormal television expedition team. After returning to the USA,
Guessman declared that most members of the Monsterquest team were
focused on just producing an entertaining television program, in contrast
to his own purpose of discovering and photographing a living pterosaur.
Nothing unusual was discovered on that expedition.
In the United States, Guessman continues to give lectures for Biblical
creation groups, explaining how modern living pterosaurs in Papua New
Guinea are in harmony with traditional beliefs in the Old Testament. In
February of 2013, he was contacted by a pre-production researcher for a
not-yet-disclosed TV production company, regarding the possibility of
another expedition in Papua New Guinea.
Whitcomb, after returning from his 2004 expedition, turned his attention
more to eyewitness accounts of ropen-like flying creatures in the United
States, including Southern California. After publishing hundreds of
web pages and blog posts, he received emails from eyewitnesses from
around the world, mostly Americans, persons who had seen flying
creatures described like what natives of Umboi Island had described.
For seven months, Whitcomb has monitored a game camera in Lakewood,
California, hoping it will capture the image of a living pterosaur where a
sighting occurred in mid-2012. After examining thousands of photos, he
has not yet seen any flying creatures more exotic than local song birds,
but he still searches for what most Americans assume is extinct.
He has written three nonfiction books, and a paper in a peer-reviewed
journal of science, on sightings of apparent pterosaurs.
A recent survey of biology professors in American universities gives an
indication that at least a few scientists are starting to have some doubt
that all species of pterosaurs are extinct. Of the professors responding
to the survey, the probability attached to a species of a living pterosaur
in modern times averaged 1.5%.
###
KSN News Release
Live Pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New
Guinea will take you where textbook authors
fear to go: into eyewitness sightings of what
“should not exist.” This nonfiction explains
why encounters with giant featherless flying
creatures are so rarely published in major
newspapers in Western countries. (This is a
Kindle digital book, not in print format.)
Garth Guessman (left) interviewed the
World War II veteran Duane Hodgkinson
in 2005, confirming the credibility of the
eyewitness who described the gigantic
“pterodactyl” that flew up from a jungle
clearing near Finschhafen, New Guinea,
in 1944. The tail of the flying creature was
“at least” ten or fifteen feet long, as best
as Hodgkinson could estimate.
Whitcomb regularly checks a sighting
location in Lakewood, California, and
examines the photos obtained from the
game camera. As of early March, 2013, no
image of anything like a pterosaur had
been found in more than 10,000 photos,
but this cryptozoologist still searches.
Finschhafen Harbor (photo by Whitcomb)