From the fifth chapter:
“. . . one evening, as she leaned over the veranda, gazing at the distant hills, deep in
a tropical rain forest of New Guinea, a light caught her attention . . . It disappeared
but another light appeared, then more. But why in a horizontal line and why were
the flashes four to five seconds long?”
“ . . . Evelyn Cheesman . . . explored in the southwest Pacific early in the twentieth
century, including in New Guinea. She specialized in collecting insects, not inter-
viewing natives, so when the local ‘boys’ of Mondo . . . avoided her questions about
those lights, she left off interviewing . . .”
“Maybe it’s just as well [they] told her nothing about those lights. What biologist
would have believed a native story about dragons? How hard it is for a scientist to
believe the words of a native who tells of an encounter with a giant flying creature
that glows brightly at night and has a long tail but no feathers!”
“The dogma of the extinction of all species of pterosaurs, although shallow, has
been too widely publicized for too long; I believe it has been so for over a century,
long before Cheesman saw those strange lights from her veranda.”
Copyright 2014 Jonathan David Whitcomb
Following Strange Lights - An old mystery and a new quest
Another eyewitness
describes the flight of
the nocturnal glowing
ropen of Umboi Island.
Whitcomb on expedition
in Papua New Guinea
Chapter Five of Searching for Ropens and Finding God
Nonfiction paperback
by Jonathan Whitcomb
David Moke, of Opai
Village, on Umboi Is.,
tells Whitcomb about
the strange bright
light that appeared
over his canoe one
night while he and
his friend fished at
the southern reef.
Paul Nation crosses a
river on Umboi Island,
during his expedition
in 2002, as he was
searching for ropens.