Duane Hodgkinson's "Pterodactyl" Sighting near Finschhafen, New Guinea (1944)

1944. Finschhafen, on the Huon Peninsula of what was then the Australian-administered Territory of New Guinea. The Allies had turned the town into a vast rear base that the US Army called "Base F". Duane Neil Hodgkinson was a young American serviceman stationed there. He made several trips into the surrounding native villages with a friend and, in one version of the story, a native guide.

It was about noon on a clear day, during a lull in fighting with the Japanese. The group was walking a trail just west of Finschhafen. They came upon a large clearing of grass about two feet high, then heard a thrashing in the brush at one edge. Something large ran six to ten steps to their left, then ascended at an angle of about 30 degrees. Hodgkinson first took it for a bird, but the size was all wrong.

"It was huge," he recalled, "and as it took off . . . I estimated the wingflaps were maybe about one or two seconds in frequency." The wingbeats were audible: swish, swish. It disappeared over the dense brush. Then it returned. It flew over the clearing, presenting a perfect side view of its features before flying out of sight.

Hodgkinson said it looked like a "pterodactyl", with a long neck, a long beak or snout, and a head three or four feet long. "It had the long appendage out the back of its head," about half the head's length. He compared it to the pterodactyl in the Alley Oop newspaper comic and estimated a tail of at least ten or fifteen feet. "It was a dark color." Years later he owned a Piper Tri-Pacer, with a wingspan of twenty nine feet: "I would say that that pterodactyl had the approximate same wing spread as what my airplane did."

No record shows a report in 1944. The story waited six decades. In mid-2004 Jonathan Whitcomb interviewed Hodgkinson, by then a flight instructor in Livingston, Montana, with over 13,000 hours of flight time. In 2005 Garth Guessman interviewed him on camera at his Montana home while Whitcomb filmed. The video has drawn more than 275,000 views.

Whitcomb, Guessman and David Woetzel found no indication of any hallucination or hoax. Whitcomb travelled to Umboi Island in 2004, and Woetzel and Guessman led expeditions there. Among all those reports, Hodgkinson's remained the one American, daytime account. It became the cornerstone of the ropen legend.

No one has accused Hodgkinson of inventing his story. The doubts lie elsewhere. In 2010 Brian Switek wrote in Smithsonian that the living-pterosaur idea is fundamentally implausible, and pointed readers to Glen Kuban's critique. Pterosaurs leave no fossil record after the end of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago. Critics also note that the account was first recorded 60 years after the event, that the size was judged against an airplane owned decades later, and that he was focused on the crest.

Ropen reports in general have been put down to large fruit bats and frigatebirds, though none has been matched to this sighting. Mainstream sources describe the investigators as young-earth creationists. In 2014 an article in Skeptic reported that Whitcomb had admitted running ropen websites under aliases, and called it sock puppetry.

Hodgkinson died in 2014. No photograph, track or bone was ever produced. What remains is one man's memory of a grassy clearing at noon, and a dark shape that crossed it twice.