Two Dragon Hunters in Southern California Garth Guessman and Jonathan Whitcomb hunt for modern pterosaurs Contact:                                                       KSN News Release Jonathan Whitcomb 5347 South New Hampton Dr. Murray, Utah 84123                     Press Room on Live Pterosaurs PHONE: 801 590-9692 EMAIL  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)