Evelyn Cheesman, Unwitting Eyewitness

The British biologist Lucy Evelyn Cheesman, according to Wikipedia, “was the first woman to be hired as a curator at Regent’s Park Zoo, in London.” She explored some tropical rain forests in New Guinea (now the country of Papua New Guinea) in the 1930’s, and unwittingly, long after her death, became connected to investigations of sightings of apparent living pterosaurs.

She probably never saw anything resembling a pterosaur, flying over any tropical rain forest; but she saw strange lights flying around in a strange manner. She observed, pondered, and made more observations, never coming to any conclusion about the source of the lights.

Decades later, in the 1990’s and early twenty-first century, a few cryptozoologists explored several areas of Papua New Guinea, searching not for little salamanders and insects but for giant living pterosaurs. Explorers have included the Americans Paul Nation, Garth Guessman, David Woetzel, and me (Jonathan Whitcomb).

How are the lights seen by Cheesman related to ropen lights and indava lights? Just a couple of mountain ranges or so south of where the British biologist observed strange flying lights—that is where Paul Nation, late in 2006, videotaped two indava lights. Many miles to the northeast of Cheesman’s viewing area, on Umboi Island, the ropen lights are seen flying regularly, sometimes from a mountain down to a reef (the creature is reported to catch fish at night). Interesting to tell, the nearby indava lights resemble Cheesman’s lights a bit less than the ropen lights do, at least regarding length-of-glow: about five seconds of glow at a time (indavas can glow longer).


One thought on “Evelyn Cheesman, Unwitting Eyewitness

  1. Pingback: Old Biologist; New Pterosaur Insight | Modern Pterosaur

Comments are closed.