Is the Manta Ray Illuminating?
by admin on Nov.01, 2012, under Strange
The fish called “Manta ray” has recently been suggested as an explanation for sightings of apparent living pterosaurs. Sometimes a big Manta ray will jump out of the water, perhaps even reaching ten feet above the surface. But that misidentification hypothesis falls flat when serious problems come to the surface.
The American cryptozoologists Garth Guessman, Jonathan Whitcomb, and David Woetzel explored Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, in 2004, interviewing many eyewitnesses of the flying creature the natives call “ropen.” The great majority of sightings were not over the sea but over land. That eliminates Manta rays jumping out of the water. One critical sighting, around 1994, was at Lake Pung, which is surrounded by mountain peaks in the middle of the island, far from the coast. The giant ropen was flying over the surface of the lake, but that lake has no access to the sea or any other large body of water. It’s an isolated crater lake.
Some natives of Umboi Island told two of the American explorers that the empty shells of giant clams, found far inland, up above the sea, were carried there by the ropen. No Manta ray fish could do such a thing.
Another sighting involved two pilots of a small plane flying away from the northwest coast of Australia. They nearly collided with a huge flying creature that the pilot first thought was an oncoming plane. The pilot realized it was no plane when it flapped its wings. That sighting was thousands of feet above the sea, eliminating a Manta ray fish interpretation.
Do Jumping Fish Look Like Flying Pterosaurs
What about the 1965 sighting by Patty Carson? This was close to the sea, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But the “dinosaur” that Patty and her brother watched on one particular day was sitting upright in tall grass before it flapped its wings and flew away.
Manta Rays or Modern Pterosaurs
The critical point is that the man who witnessed the sighting of two apparent pterosaurs was in a CITY, not in a boat. And he saw two of the creatures flying together. That eliminates that sighting regarding Manta rays that leap out of the sea.
