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Living Pterosaur Expedition of 2006 |
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Late in 2006, I interviewed Paul Nation in his home in Granbury, Texas, just days after he had returned from Papua New Guinea. I videotaped the interview and made a digital copy of the video footage of the two indava lights. A copy was later given to the physicist Cliff Paiva, who analyzed the lights and found them to be anything but ordinary: Not meteors, airplanes, car headlights, lanterns, or campfires. And a hoax it was not.
Paul’s 2006 living-pterosaur expedition was the first one to the remote mountainous interior of New Guinea, but it was not his first expedition in Papua New Guinea. He had searched for ropens (we believe them to be the same as or similar to indavas) on Umboi Island twice before, but 2006 was the first year that he had seen the bioluminescent creatures himself. And he seems to be the first American to have brought back any photographic or video evidence for the existence of the amazing pterosaur or pterosaur-like creature that natives call “ropen,” and “indava.”
On one night, after several sightings over several nights, near Tawa Village, he videotaped two indava lights just before they flew up from a ridge above the village. During videotaping, one light slowly turned off but the other continued glowing for a few more seconds. |
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Copyright 2007 Jonathan Whitcomb Whitcomb is a living-pterosaur investigator and author of Searching for Ropens |
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Introduction to the Indava-Light Video Recording by Paul Nation (near Tawa Village, Papua New Guinea) |
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Indava and Ropen compared
Quotations from the book Searching for Ropens
Book Review of Searching for Ropens (second edition)
Other book reviews by Jonathan Whitcomb
Press Release on the indava video and its analysis by Paiva
Paiva’s Analysis (details)
More on the pterosaur called indava (mainland PNG)
Living Pterosaurs are not the fruit bats called Flying Fox
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Chapter Seventeen of the second edition of my book, Searching for Ropens, is devoted to Paul Nation’s incredible living-pterosaur expedition of 2006 and Cliff Paiva’s analysis of the resulting video footage. |
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Jacob Kepas, a national Baptist pastor from the mainland, assisted Paul as an interpreter. As a living-pterosaur investigator himself, however, Jacob did much more: He became an eyewitness of one of the creatures they sought.
With a local man, Joseph, Jacob climbed up to where he could see the cliff (or “cave” as nationals of Papua New Guinea sometimes call overhanging cliffs) where an indava appeared to be sleeping. Joseph had climbed up first and then called Jacob, by radio, asking for assistance with Paul Nation’s video camcorder.
Jacob was not sure but thought he saw the head of the indava under one of its wings. The steep angle of observation (lower than the cliff ) and great distance made him unsure. Joseph, however, climbed to a higher vantage point and confirmed that it was the creature.
Unfortunately, none of the video footage the two natives obtained showed what they had seen. It seems that neither one was proficient with videotaping. Nevertheless, Jacob Kepas seems to have been the first living-pterosaur investigator who had a daylight sighting while searching for the creatures.
It was an historic expedition. |