Chesapeake Bay Sighting, 1990

Quotations are from the nonfiction book Live Pterosaurs in America (published in 2009, available on Amazon).

Near the Virginia-Maryland border, a young man (anonymous, but referred to as "DP") was camping with friends, late in the summer of 1990. In his own words:

"We were tubing [inner-tube] in the river, some time in the morning or early afternoon. . . . I suddenly saw, parallel with the water, quite a distance away, a flying object . . . it was quite far away, but it was as big as a regular bird would appear up close. It was gliding, with an occasional slow, smooth flap. . . . It flew directly over us, about twenty yards above us, and . . . it perched on a tree about fifty yards past us. A minute later, it flew away along the same river path, and I’ve never seen anything like it since."

I interviewed the man in 2007, by emails. He told me much:

"I know what it was. It wasn’t a heron; it wasn’t a vulture; it wasn’t an albatross. I had spent countless hours as a child studying dinosaurs and playing with dinosaur models. I know what I saw."

"This . . . had a pterodactyl protruded head and a rhamphorhynchoid diamond-tipped tail. . . . It’s hard to be exact about the size. . . . wing-tip to wing-tip, about 12+ feet? I don’t even know if I’m close. . . . It was brown and leathery."

This description seems to resemble other apparent pterosaur sightings: a combination of head crest and long tail.

Read more about the Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur