The ropen is a flying creature said to live in Papua New Guinea, especially on Umboi Island and the neighboring island of New Britain. Western promoters describe it as a living pterosaur, a winged reptile from the age of dinosaurs, with a long tail ending in a diamond-shaped flap and a body that glows at night. Local names reported for it include ropen and indava. The modern ropen story was built almost entirely by a small group of American young-earth creationist expeditions from the 1990s onward, who hoped that a living pterosaur would challenge evolution. Paleontologists and skeptical investigators have found no good evidence, and the best-documented “ropen” video shows a frigatebird.[1][2][3]
| Region | Papua New Guinea: Umboi Island, New Britain and nearby islands |
|---|---|
| Local names (as reported) | Ropen, indava, duwas |
| Reported description | Featherless, leathery wings, long tail with a diamond-shaped tip, toothed beak, sometimes a head crest; may glow at night |
| Claimed wingspan | From bird-sized to about 9 m (29 ft), depending on the account |
| Best-known witness | Duane Hodgkinson, US serviceman, 1944 |
| Main promoters | Creationist researchers including Carl Baugh, Jim Blume, Paul Nation, David Woetzel and Jonathan Whitcomb |
| Leading explanations | Frigatebirds, large fruit bats (flying foxes), unidentified lights, and expectation |
| Scientific status | Pterosaurs vanished about 66 million years ago; no fossil or physical evidence of survival |
What the ropen is said to look like
Accounts vary widely, but promoters’ composite description is of a dark gray, featherless creature with leathery, bat-like wings, a long beak or snout with teeth, sharp claws, sometimes a crest on the back of the head and, most distinctively, a long tail ending in a diamond- or flange-shaped tip. Reported wingspans range from about the size of a large bird to an extraordinary 29 feet (about 9 meters).[4]
The long, vaned tail is significant: it matches the rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs, such as Rhamphorhynchus, which had long tails ending in a diamond-shaped vane. But those small, long-tailed pterosaurs disappeared at the end of the Jurassic, around 145 million years ago, and none came close to the sizes claimed for the ropen.[2][4]
The lights
Many ropen accounts concern not a creature at all, but lights moving at night. The ropen is said to glow, and promoters suggest it uses bioluminescence to catch fish on coastal reefs, flying from mountain roosts to the shore and back. In 1935, the entomologist Lucy Evelyn Cheesman described seeing unusual lights during her expeditions in New Guinea in her book The Two Roads of Papua, an account later claimed for the ropen, though Cheesman herself did not connect the lights with any creature. Paul Nation filmed distant yellowish lights during a 2006 expedition, and the paranormal travel series Destination Truth featured the ropen in 2007.[1][4]
No bioluminescent vertebrate that flies is known, and no pterosaur fossil suggests one could glow. Distant lights at night in a remote region are extremely difficult to identify; they could be anything from fires, torches or fishermen’s lights to atmospheric phenomena. Interpreting them as a living pterosaur requires already believing in one.
Duane Hodgkinson’s 1944 sighting
The most frequently cited witness is Duane Hodgkinson, an American serviceman in World War II, who later became a flight instructor. He said that in 1944, near Finschhafen in what was then the Territory of New Guinea, he saw a large, featherless flying creature with a long tail, whose wingspan he later compared to that of his Piper Tri-Pacer light aircraft. Hodgkinson told his story to ropen investigators decades later; the creationist researcher Garth Guessman interviewed him in 2005, with Jonathan Whitcomb filming.[4]
Hodgkinson’s sincerity has not been seriously questioned, but a memory recorded more than sixty years after a brief sighting is a weak basis for the claim that an extinct reptile survives. Flying foxes and large birds were both present in the area.
The creationist expeditions
The ropen was largely unknown outside New Guinea until the 1990s. Missionary Jim Blume collected local accounts, and the creationist Carl Baugh, of the Creation Evidence Museum in Texas, led early expeditions to the islands. The cryptozoologist Bill Gibbons helped bring the ropen to wider cryptozoological attention around 2000, and after that a series of expeditions followed:[3]
- Paul Nation took part in several expeditions, including some of the earliest.[3]
- Jonathan Whitcomb traveled to Umboi in 2004, interviewed local witnesses and later wrote Searching for Ropens. He concluded that a single large animal probably lived on the island.[3][4]
- Garth Guessman and others searched the region in 2004.[3]
- David Woetzel argued in a creationist journal that living pterosaurs may be the “fiery flying serpent” of the Book of Isaiah.[2]
- Milt Marcy and Peter Beach visited Umboi in 2015 and filmed a distant flying animal that they could not identify.[4]
For years the expeditions were secretive, and almost no one outside the creationist community investigated the ropen. That matters, because the expeditions were not neutral: their stated aim was to find evidence against evolution. When investigators set out looking for a pterosaur, questions, pictures and translation can all nudge witnesses toward describing one.[3]
The frigatebird video
In 2010, the science writer Riley Black, writing for Smithsonian magazine, examined a widely shared video promoted as showing a living pterosaur in Papua New Guinea. The animal in the clip was a frigatebird, most likely a female great frigatebird, identifiable by its dark plumage and white chest patch and behaving exactly as frigatebirds do elsewhere. With long, angular wings, a deeply forked tail and a hooked bill, a frigatebird soaring overhead can look startlingly prehistoric.[2]
What could explain ropen reports?
- Frigatebirds. Large, dark seabirds with long, pointed wings and a long, forked tail that can look like a single “tail” in flight.[2]
- Flying foxes. Papua New Guinea has very large fruit bats. They are featherless, have leathery wings, are active at night and feed in large numbers, matching several key features of the ropen.
- Unidentified lights. Many reports involve only lights, which do not need a creature to explain them.
- Expectation. Leading questions, and translation between local languages, English and Tok Pisin, make it easy for a general local belief in night-flying spirits to be turned into a description of a specific prehistoric reptile.
Paleontologists also point to the fossil record. Pterosaurs vanished at the end of the Cretaceous, around 66 million years ago, and there is no fossil evidence of any surviving afterward. Critics such as Glen Kuban and the paleontologist Darren Naish have written about the claims. Riley Black has also noted that even a living pterosaur would not disprove evolution, just as living crocodiles do not.[2]
The ropen and other flying cryptids
The ropen belongs to a family of “living pterosaur” cryptids, including the African Kongamato, and is sometimes connected by promoters to the North American Thunderbird. Jonathan Whitcomb has claimed that pterosaurs are seen around the world, including in the United States. None of these claims has produced a specimen, a bone or a clear photograph.[3]
Our assessment
The ropen is a modern legend, assembled by creationist researchers from local folklore about night-flying creatures and lights, a handful of sincere eyewitness accounts and a great deal of expectation. The best evidence offered has turned out to be a frigatebird. Large bats, seabirds and unexplained lights are far more likely explanations than a pterosaur that has hidden from science for 66 million years.
References
- T. S. Mart and Mel Cabre, A Guide to Sky Monsters (Red Lightning Books, 2021), excerpted as “The Truth Is Out There,” Literary Hub (6 May 2021).
- Riley Black, “Don’t Get Strung Along by the ‘Ropen’ Myth,” Smithsonian Magazine (16 August 2010).
- “Creationism in cryptozoology,” Encyclopaedia of Cryptozoology (Fandom).
- Mart and Cabre (2021), as above, on Cheesman (1935), Hodgkinson (1944), Whitcomb (2004), Nation (2006) and Marcy and Beach (2015).
Correction note (October 2026): This entry was rewritten from documented sources. Earlier versions presented the ropen’s pterosaur identity and bioluminescence as established features and omitted the creationist origins of most reports. The illustration above is an artistic impression.