Gideon Koro of Umboi Island

Ropen Sighting at Lake Pung

In a remote little village on Umboi Island, around 1994, several boys (aged about eleven to fourteen) decided to climb up to a crater lake a few kilometers to the north. Just a few minutes after they arrived at the shore of Lake Pung, they were terrified to see a giant ropen flying over the lake surface. The boys vanished into the bush, running home, but the fear did not soon vanish. Ten years later, an American showed up in their village and interviewed three of the eyewitnesses. One of them was Gideon Koro.

The ropen was described by Gideon. Its tail was seven meters long; its wings were like those of the Flying Fox fruit bat ("byung" in the local village language); the mouth of the ropen, said Gideon, was like a "crocodile."

The interviewer, Jonathan Whitcomb (of Long Beach, California) concluded that Gideon believed that the length of just one wing was seven meters (same as tail length).

For decades, reports of giant pterosaurs in the South-

west Pacific have been countered, by Westerners, with

an explanation of "Flying Fox fruit bat." But those bats, although the largest type of bat in the world, have no significant resemblance to creatures called by the names ropen, duwas, seklobali, and indava. Flying Fox bats have practically no tails, do not glow with any bright bioluminescence, and do not eat fish.

Natives of Umboi Island have no fear of the Flying Fox; when you can catch the bat, it makes good soup. There is no way that those boys could have been terrified at a Flying Fox (byung) flying over a lake. There is also no way that they could have believed that a bat over a lake had a tail seven meters long.

Read much more and listen to part of Gideon's interview.

What Happened To Pterosaurs?

Gideon Koro of Umboi Island