Ropen

In the remote interior of Papua New Guinea's Umboi Island and across the Bismarck Archipelago, indigenous communities have long described a flying creature unlike anything in Western natural history. The Kowiai people of the region call it the ropen, meaning roughly demon flyer, and their accounts share a remarkable consistency across generations: a large, bat-like animal with a long, stiff tail ending in a diamond-shaped flange, a crest on its head, and the ability to glow with a pale bioluminescent light during nocturnal flights. The glow, witnesses say, is not constant but pulses as the creature moves. Fishermen in the coastal villages of Umboi describe watching lights cross the sky low over the water at night, lights that behave differently from any known bird or insect, moving too slowly for aircraft and too purposefully for drifting debris.

The ropen occupies a meaningful place in local spiritual life. It is considered an omen creature by some communities and is associated with death and the supernatural. Witnesses describe it raiding fishing camps and burial sites, which has led researchers to speculate that it may be an opportunistic scavenger drawn to decomposition. The creature's alleged bioluminescence has drawn particular interest from investigators who note that the Umboi Island ecosystem includes numerous bioluminescent organisms, and that indigenous observers are generally reliable interpreters of unusual natural phenomena in their own environment. Several western researchers who traveled to Umboi specifically to investigate the ropen reported collecting testimony from multiple independent witnesses whose accounts were internally consistent without apparent coordination.

Western interest intensified in the late 20th and early 21st centuries when several American expeditions traveled to Papua New Guinea specifically to investigate ropen reports. Jonathan Whitcomb, a forensic photographer who visited Umboi Island in 2004, collected testimony from multiple witnesses who described sightings consistent with one another. Carl Baugh and other researchers have argued that the ropen's morphological description, particularly the diamond-shaped tail flange and cranial crest, closely matches depictions of pterosaurs such as Rhamphorhynchus, a long-tailed pterodactyloid that the fossil record places in the Jurassic period.

Mainstream paleontologists and biologists find the pterosaur hypothesis untenable. Pterosaurs are well-documented in the fossil record up to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, and there is no credible physical evidence of their survival into the modern era. More parsimonious explanations for ropen sightings include large fruit bats such as the Bismarck flying fox, of which some individuals exceed five feet in wingspan, as well as frigatebirds and other large seabirds observed in poor lighting.