The nonfiction Missing 411 Western United States & Canada, by the investigative journalist David Paulides, documents many strange missing-persons cases that were never solved. New investigations in cryptozoology now reveal an explanation for some of the cases.

Four American cryptozoologists have explored jungles in Papua New Guinea, during the past fourteen years:

• Paul Nation of Texas
• Garth Guessman of California
• Jonathan Whitcomb of Utah
• David Woetzel of New Hampshire

In the southwest Pacific, they interviewed native eyewitnesses of strange nocturnal flying creatures, large animals that are called by various names in villages that have different native languages:

• Ropen (Umboi Island)
• Wawanar (small islands near southwest coast of New Britain)
• Kor (islands north of Umboi)
• Indava (mainland of New Guinea)

Paul Nation, in his expedition in 2006, learned that the indavas once terrorized villagers on the mainland, carrying off pigs and even children. In other parts of the mainland, large flying creatures were reported to have even carried away full-grown men, in particular near villages around the cities of Lae and Finschhafen.

Whitcomb now proposes that at least a few of the strangest cases of missing children in wilderness areas of the United States may be from attacks from similar flying creatures, especially those cases that involve more than one of the following:

• Human body was found badly scratched and too far away from the original location
• Dogs cannot track where the child walked away
• Living child was found in thick berry bushes
• Toddler was found in higher elevation and too many miles away
• Some articles of clothing missing in cold weather: one shoe or just a sweater or the pants

Those four American cryptozoologists believe these flying creatures are related to those that left fossils that are known, in Western countries, as pterosaurs. Many Americans call those “primitive” flying creatures pterodactyls.

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Missing Children in the USA

He was playing in a small wash with his four-year-old brother on that cold February morning. Ronald did not return home with his brother, which must have alarmed their mother. A search found no sign of the two-year-old, a search that lasted four days and included airplanes, tracking dogs, and over two hundred volunteers and professional searchers, no sign until the fourth day.

“Pterodactyl” attacks in British Columbia, Canada

For many years, there have been reports of people being attacked in Africa and in Papua New Guinea. I have only recently noticed this news about flying creatures attacking people in British Columbia at night.

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Norman Huntington (a pseudonym used by American author Jonathan Whitcomb), a writer on a cryptozoology blog, contends that sightings of apparent pterosaurs in Cuba, in the 1960′s and 1970′s, are not from misidentified woodpeckers. He was replying to another cryptozoology post, by a Dale Drinnon, in which extinct woodpeckers were suggested as an explanation for the “pterodactyl” encounters.

According to Huntington/Whitcomb, eyewitness accounts of featherless flying creatures with head crests and long tails, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not from the imaginations of persons who had watched too many Flintstones cartoons. He suggests that the most modern insights into pterosaur fossils allow for the possibility that a large long-tailed pterosaur species with a head crest might very well have lived, and might still be living.

That line of thinking comes from details in two sighting reports from the U.S. military installation at Gitmo, Cuba. Patty Carson reported a flying “dinosaur” was there in 1965 and Eskin Kuhn reported two “pterodactyls” were there in 1971. Both eyewitnesses drew sketches, neither of which looked anything like a woodpecker. Both sketches looked like pterosaurs with long head crests and no feathers.

In addition, those two sketches have compared favorably to details in sighting reports from other areas of North America, including in the United States, according to Whitcomb.

Pterosaurs and Woodpeckers in Cuba

There were at least a small number of basal pterosaurs that had head crests, and basal pterosaurs are the ones that had long tails.

Pterosaur Sightings in Cuba

“I was looking in the direction of the ocean when I saw an incredible sight. It mesmerized me! I saw two pterosaurs . . . flying together  . . . perhaps 100 feet [high], very close in range from where I was standing, so that I had a perfectly clear view of them.”

(KSN) This remote semi-desert area in southwest Texas has become famous for the Marfa Lights, strange flying and dancing lights that return several times each year. Edson Hendricks, a scientist living in California, is reported to have related the following about a sighting he had in February, 1991:

“I was puzzled by this light, but I had not yet been able to decide whether I might be seeing another automobile headlight.  And then, as I stared with great surprise, the light divided into two separate lights which continued to move southward and gradually drew apart. . . . As I continued to watch what was now a pair of lights, the leftmost one (to the south) flickered a bit, quickly increased brightness, and divided again.  At the same moment, the rightmost light of the original pair (to the north) abruptly changed direction, began to move away to the north accelerating to a speed much greater than any automobile headlights I’d observed earlier . . .”

Another scientist in California, Jonathan Whitcomb, has suggested the possibility that Marfa Lights are caused by large bioluminescent flying predators.