J. P. F. Brown's kongamato sighting at Fort Rosebery

The legend is older than the sighting. In 1923 Frank H. Melland published In Witch-bound Africa. His Kaonde informants in the Jiundu swamp, in the Mwinilunga district, spoke of the kongamato: "a reddish-coloured lizard with membranous bat-like wings measuring 1-2 m across, a long beak crammed with teeth." Kaonde people carried "muchi wa Kongamato" charms against it. Melland wrote that "no one ever saw a kongamato close and lived to tell the tale."

1956. J. P. F. Brown was driving back to Salisbury, in Southern Rhodesia, after a visit to Kasenga on the Luapula River in the Belgian Congo. His route ran through Fort Rosebery, today the town of Mansa in Zambia, on a relatively featureless plateau between the Luapula River and Lake Bangweulu. At about 6:00 p.m. he stopped "to get his canteen from the trunk."

Two creatures were flying slowly and silently, directly overhead. Brown said they "looked prehistoric, with a long tail and narrow head." He put the wingspan at "about 3-3 1/2 feet." Then came the detail that made the story. "One of them opened its mouth in which he saw a large number of pointed teeth."

There was no sound. No photograph. No second witness. Just one man beside his car, watching two shapes pass. On 2 April 1957 the Rhodesia Herald carried his story.

Brown's report is rarely told alone. In 1957, the story goes, a man arrived at a hospital in Fort Rosebery "with a severe wound in his chest." He claimed "a great bird had attacked him in the Bangweulu swamps." Asked to draw his attacker, he produced a sketch. In Karl Shuker's telling, the result "was a silhouette that corresponded precisely with that of a pterodactyl."

The patient was never named. Neither was any doctor. The sketch has never been published, and versions of the tale disagree on when and where it happened.

The first answer came quickly. In 1957 Reay Smithers, director of the National Museum of Southern Rhodesia, suggested that shoebill storks might be behind the sightings, at least in Brown's case. The zoologist Maurice Burton agreed. In the Illustrated London News in 1958 he pointed to the "peculiar-looking shoebill stork." He also mentioned the coelacanth, a fish caught off the African coast, as context for the idea of survival.

Not everyone was convinced. Dale Drinnon at Frontiers of Zoology argued that "the stork is a much bigger creature than is actually described in the better sightings." Others have proposed saddle-billed storks, giant bats or unidentified birds. Sharon Hill, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2014, argued that pterosaurs "lived and died along with dinosaurs... but left no descendants."

No one has accused Brown of a hoax. His report remains the main modern eyewitness account behind the idea of a living pterosaur in Africa. It sits beside other tales, from the "olitau" reported by Ivan T. Sanderson and Gerald Russell in Cameroon in 1932 to the batamzinga near Mount Kenya. Shuker noted that the Kaonde description "bears a startling similarity" to early, medium-sized pterosaurs known as rhamphorhynchoids. The kongamato appears in Bernard Heuvelmans's On the Track of Unknown Animals and in Cryptozoology A to Z by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark.

Yet the heart of the case is still missing. The sources reviewed here do not reproduce the original Rhodesia Herald article. A later reference work dates the sighting to January 1956 but gives no day. Brown's full name and original wording remain unavailable in those sources.