The Indava

The Indava of Papua New Guinea

On the mainland of Papua New Guinea, lives a colony of creatures unclassified by science but known to the villagers as “indava.” They are said to fly to the coast to feed at night but this is a long flight for a meal: To the east, the round trip is over a hundred miles.

The villagers almost never see these creatures in daylight. Why? The indavas are nocturnal. But how can the creatures navigate over the tropical rain forest mountains at night? Their bright bioluminescent glow lights the way as they follow the terrain.

Cryptozoology is the classification of the kind of investigations done by the explorers who have visited these tropical rain forests since 1994. Carl Baugh, Paul Nation, and Jim Blume pioneered the search for these pterosaur-like creatures and other Americans followed: Jonathan Whitcomb, Garth Guessman, and David Woetzel, all of them believing in giant living pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific.

Paul Nation returned to Papua New Guinea late in 2006 and became the first Westerner to bring back video evidence for the indava.

According to the book Searching for Ropens, rare Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs still fly in the Southwest Pacific and probably elsewhere. The author, Jonathan Whitcomb, has interviewed many eyewitnesses. In 2004, he interviewed villagers on Umboi Island, the home of the ropen. He believes the large (even giant) creatures found there are the same kind of creature as the indava, perhaps the same species.

But why believe that the indava is a living pterosaur? Don’t the textbooks declare all such flying creatures became extinct millions of years ago? Whitcomb’s book explains that the idea, that all pterosaurs (called by most Americans “pterodactyls”) are long gone, is not a proven fact but an assumption. But what does this have to do with the indava? This creature has been described as the size of an airplane, but there’s more.

On Umboi Island and on the mainland of Papua New Guinea, giant bioluminescent flying creatures have been seen by natives; others have seen similar (or the same species) of creature in daylight and the descriptions strongly suggest giant Rhamphorhynchoid (long-tailed) pterosaurs.

The indava is a giant bioluminescent flying creature, so the investigators think it’s the same kind of creature: a long-tailed pterosaur.

What is the indava?

Is it a pterosaur?

Is the indava the same

thing as the “ropen?”

Credibility of the

eyewitnesses

Scientific and Religious significance

of living-pterosaurs research

living pterosaur,

Perth, Australia

Living pterosaurs and the