Living Pterosaur Sighting East of Kansas City

Early one morning in 1974, several residents watched something fly over Kansas City, Kansas, that researcher Margie Kay later wrote up as a pterosaur. It had huge leathery wings with a 15-foot wingspan and a very long head like a pterosaur’s, and all of the witnesses were silent while they watched it fly over until it was gone. Kay’s online map of winged-creature sightings places the sighting east of Kansas City, Kansas, and the account appears in her 2021 book “Winged Aliens,” which argues that winged cryptids are aliens or interdimensional beings.

It isn’t the only Kansas report of its kind. Jonathan David Whitcomb, a cryptozoologist who collects modern pterosaur sightings, posted one that came in as a long comment under his YouTube video “Pterodactyl in a Jungle,” describing a huge ropen seen in about 1994 in Garden City, Kansas. “I was playing outside with my siblings and uncle. . . . I was running home on a dirt road when I noticed it above me,” the witness wrote. “There were no feathers on it for sure, it had a long tail with a triangle at the tip, and a crest on top of it’s head. The wings were like that of a bat- you know membrane and the beak was long and on the thinner side.” They put it at about 30 feet long, dark gray, and “about as high up as the telephone wires,” and watched it until it disappeared off into the horizon.

In another report on Whitcomb’s site, a man and his wife leaving Hudson, Kansas, on a rural highway saw “something huge” take to the air from the top of a tree row. “It looked like a dragon,” his wife said. And in 2018, near Tonganoxie, a couple who had gone out to look for a strange light they’d seen in the sky a few days earlier had a very large creature swoop down over their car. Kay’s book says it had a “leathery egg-colored body and jointed wings which were pointed at the back,” and a long beak with a cone on the back of it.

One online essay says a surprising number of tales about living pterosaurs have come out of Kansas in recent years. The Kansas pterosaurs, it says, are usually described like the Ropen of New Guinea, at 30 feet in length with a head crest and a long tail ending in a spade. Pterosaurs did live here once: when a vast inland sea covered the middle of the continent, the skies of Kansas were home to Pteranodon and its smaller cousin Nyctosaurus, and numerous pterosaur fossils have come out of the state.

On Margie Kay’s “Winged Creatures Interactive Map” there is also a sighting of a pterosaur over the heavily birded Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife area. With Kansas in the mid-America flyway and so many large herons, cranes and pelicans at Cheyenne Bottoms, a wildlife area made especially for migratory birds, the Flint Hills Paranormal writer says the pterosaur sighting may have been a misidentification. The essay’s author came to the same answer about his own childhood sighting of a gray creature with a long beak and a spade-tipped tail: it was a heron, with its legs tucked back in flight so they looked like a tail.