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.