🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº6501 ACTIVE

Ropen

Ropen is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near Papúa Nueva Guinea, PG. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.

Where and when was Ropen sighted?

Location: Papúa Nueva Guinea, PG
Date sighted: Unknown
Coordinates: -5.5, 148.0
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

What is Ropen?

The ropen is a flying creature said to live on Umboi Island, in the Vitiaz Strait of Papua New Guinea, and to give off a brief glow at night. Almost everything published about it comes from a single group of young-earth creationists who went looking for a surviving pterosaur in order to argue against the age of the Earth, and who said so in print: the Creation Evidence Museum of Glen Rose, Texas, dated its 1994 and 1996 expeditions by the book of Isaiah. Their best Umboi witness, Gideon Koro, described one sighting at the crater lake of Pung in 1994; his account grew between the interview of that year and the one filmed ten years later. Nothing else exists: no bone, no membrane, no photograph and no recording of an animal. What does exist on those islands is Pteropus neohibernicus, the great flying fox, whose wingspan even the believers put at under two metres; and glowing forests, since 132 species of bioluminescent fungus are known, eleven of them from Australasia and New Guinea. Barn owls dusted with luminous fungus were being reported, and explained, in 1908.

What is the history of Ropen?

The ropen file is not really a file about an animal. It is a file about a search — who paid for it, what it was looking for and why — and every part of that is documented, dated and signed, which is more than can be said for the creature. The museum that sent the first expedition said out loud what it wanted to find. The Creation Evidence Museum of Glen Rose, Texas, run by Carl E. Baugh, published an FAQ page titled "Pterodactyls Living Today?", written by staff writer David V. Bassett, M.S. It states that "flying reptiles have been known to be contemporaneous with humans before and since the Genesis Flood (~4,300-4,400 years ago)", and then: "The Creation Evidence Museum has sponsored expeditions to Papua New Guinea which have resulted in eyewitness night sightings of bioluminescent pterosaurs (see Isa.14:29 & 30:6), the most recent being in August 1994 and 1996." The two references in that parenthesis are not zoological. They are the fiery serpent and the fiery flying serpent of the book of Isaiah. The page adds that "nationals (and missionaries) speak of flying reptiles with wingspans up to 25' across and those having the macabre habit of scavenging gravesites for food", and gives no witness names. That is the founding document of the modern ropen. Everything downstream of it — the expeditions, the interviews, the composite drawings, the television crews — descends from a museum whose stated purpose was to date the Earth in thousands of years. Who actually went, and when. Baugh's 1994 party included Paul Nation, of Granbury, Texas; on that trip, according to David Woetzel's account, the missionary Jim Blume watched something through a monocular night scope and photographed a print in the sand the next morning — on Manus, not on Umboi. Neither Baugh's site nor Woetzel's has ever published the photograph. Blume, a missionary in Papua New Guinea for around thirty years, is the collector who assembled most of the native testimony; he gave a telephone interview to the Californian firefighter Garth Guessman in 2000. Nation returned on his own account in 2002 and 2006, bringing back video of two stationary lights filmed inland near Tawa village, where the local word is not ropen but indava; in 2007 Clifford Paiva and Harold Slusher, both young-earth creationists, reported that the lights were about a metre across and were not meteors, campfires, torches or aircraft. Umboi enters the story in 1994 and belongs to one witness. A young man named Gideon Koro said that he and several other boys had seen a huge flying creature at Lake Pung, a crater lake high on the volcano, and Blume interviewed him within months. In that first interview the account was of ten to twenty creatures with wingspans of ten to twenty feet. Ten years later, on video, Gideon told Jonathan Whitcomb there had been one creature, with a span he put at seven metres; Whitcomb afterwards decided that Gideon probably meant one wing was seven metres, which would make the animal larger than any pterosaur in the fossil record. 2004 is the year of the two expeditions. Whitcomb, a former forensic videographer from California, went first. In October, Guessman and Woetzel — a New Hampshire businessman who runs the creationist site Genesis Park — camped on Umboi with the pastor Jacob Kepas as interpreter. Genesis Park's own account describes how "the credibility of witnesses was carefully tested by the use of black and white profiles", and reports the expedition's single sighting, on Wednesday 27 October 2004: "a large, yellowish glow approximately 20-25% the size of the full moon which was observed to fly behind one of the volcanic peaks. The light left no trail and it twinkled around the edges. The whole sighting lasted for only a few seconds." No shape, no outline, no animal. And then the cameras came. Destination Truth filmed on the coast in early 2007 with Kepas again as a contact; MonsterQuest covered the claims on New Britain in June 2009 with a professional palaeontologist who put the odds of a surviving pterosaur at one in a hundred million. On 24 August 2014 the English Wikipedia deleted its Ropen article outright. Thirty years, five or more expeditions, three books, two television programmes: not one bone, feather, membrane, photograph or sound recording of an animal.

Timeline: the documented record of Ropen

1876 Wilhelm Peters describes Pteropus neohibernicus, the great or Bismarck flying fox; the epithet means "of New Ireland". The largest bat in Melanesia — the animal every later argument about the ropen has to get past — has had a scientific name for 118 years before the first expedition sets out.
1908 The editors of British Birds publish a note on "Luminous Owls", after stories of a pair of barn owls emitting a light "sufficiently brilliant to be mistaken for the light of a bicycle lamp". They attribute it to phosphorescent bacteria from decaying wood rubbed into the feathers in a hollow roost tree, or to "a species of feather-fungus new to science". The following year the magazine records that the evidence for occasional luminosity in barn owls "is incontrovertible".
August 1944 Duane Hodgkinson, an American serviceman near Finschhafen on the New Guinea mainland, sees a large flying creature rise from a clearing about noon. He is interviewed on video by Garth Guessman in 2005, sixty-one years later, and holds up an Alley Oop comic book to show what it reminded him of. His army companion, whom Whitcomb himself calls a biologist, denied that they had seen a pterosaur.
August 1994 The Creation Evidence Museum of Glen Rose, Texas, sponsors an expedition to Papua New Guinea. Carl Baugh's party includes Paul Nation of Granbury, Texas; on that trip, according to David Woetzel, the missionary Jim Blume watched something through a night scope and photographed a print in the sand — on Manus, not on Umboi. The photograph has never been published.
1994 Gideon Koro, of Umboi Island, says that he and several other boys saw a giant flying creature at Lake Pung, a crater lake at 1,096 m on the Talo complex. Jim Blume interviews him within months; the account at that point is of ten to twenty creatures with wingspans of ten to twenty feet.
1996 The Creation Evidence Museum sponsors its second Papua New Guinea expedition. Its own FAQ page later summarises both trips as having "resulted in eyewitness night sightings of bioluminescent pterosaurs (see Isa.14:29 & 30:6)", citing the fiery flying serpent of Isaiah as the warrant for the search.
2000 Jim Blume, by then some thirty years a missionary in Papua New Guinea, gives a telephone interview to Garth Guessman, a Southern California firefighter. This, and not 1994, is the point at which Guessman enters the story.
2003 Karl Shuker, writing in defence of undiscovered giant bats, sets the ceiling himself: the largest bat science formally recognises is the Bismarck flying fox Pteropus neohibernicus, "a total wingspan of five and a half feet to six feet". CreationWiki gives the same figure. Both sides of the ropen argument agree on the size of the animal that is definitely there.
27 October 2004 On Umboi, David Woetzel and Garth Guessman record the only sighting of their three-week expedition: "a large, yellowish glow approximately 20-25% the size of the full moon which was observed to fly behind one of the volcanic peaks. The light left no trail and it twinkled around the edges. The whole sighting lasted for only a few seconds." No shape and no body were seen. Weeks earlier Jonathan Whitcomb had interviewed Gideon Koro on the same island, drawing two heads in the sand with a machete for him to choose between.
2006 Paul Nation returns from the New Guinea mainland with video of two stationary lights filmed inland near Tawa village, where the local word is indava, not ropen. In 2007 Clifford Paiva and Harold Slusher report that the lights are about a metre across and are not meteors, campfires, torches or aircraft — a list of what they are not.
24 August 2014 The English Wikipedia deletes its Ropen article. The nomination of 17 August called it "fringe and pseudoscientific rubbish backed by fringe and pseudoscientific sources"; editors observed that the citations were the personal websites of a self-published author, and one described the subject as "the personal theory of one guy with a bunch of sock puppets".
late 2018 Jonathan Whitcomb acknowledges that the "Ptp" photograph — a supposed Civil War image of a shot pterosaur, promoted by him and Clifford Paiva for years as proof of modern pterosaurs — is a modern fabrication. It was the only photograph the living-pterosaur case ever had.
2024 Perry, Desjardin and Stevani publish a global review of bioluminescent fungi: 132 known species in five lineages of the Agaricales, glowing at 520-530 nm twenty-four hours a day on a circadian rhythm, on wood and leaf litter in closed-canopy forest, with eleven species recorded from Australasia, Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia. The forest that the ropen is said to fly over glows on its own.

Is there a rational explanation for Ropen?

Start with the motive, because the people involved have published it themselves. The Creation Evidence Museum justified its expeditions with two verses of Isaiah. Whitcomb's main book is called Searching for Ropens and Finding God, and on one of his own pages he warns the reader: "Be aware: This is a spiritual as well as a cryptozoological book, with much of the appendix disputing the General Theory of Evolution." He also concedes, in print, "Who else has a greater potential, at least theoretically, to be swayed by bias than me?" This is not an accusation; it is a quotation. Glen Kuban, whose 41,000-word critique is the only sustained review of the whole corpus, concludes that "the few researchers who argue otherwise appear to be largely motivated by anti-evolutionary views." Kuban also points out the logical own-goal: a surviving pterosaur would be a magnificent discovery and would refute nothing at all about the age of the Earth, exactly as the 1938 coelacanth refuted nothing. The word cannot be pinned down, so this file carries no etymology. Three incompatible glosses circulate. Genesis Park writes the ropen "(“demon flyer”)". Whitcomb's own site says only that "its name comes from the Kovai language of that tropical island". And CreationWiki — a young-earth source, arguing on the same side — concedes the opposite: "For example, 'ropen,' near Wau (mainland P.N.G.) means 'bird.' The same word (ropen), in another area of the mainland, refers to the giant fruit bat that English speakers call the Flying Fox." Jacob Kepas, the expedition's own interpreter, was surprised that the Americans said ropen at all: in his language the creature is seklo-bali, which Whitcomb glosses as "he who carries his own bed". The lexical control is thin but real: the only Kovai wordlist in Simon Greenhill's TransNewGuinea.org database, taken from McElhanon and Voorhoeve's 1970 comparative survey, has forty items; 'bird' is naŋ and 'wing' is bala, and there is no entry for bat and none resembling ropen. A word with three meanings, none of them attested in a dictionary, is not an etymology. The claim that the story "long predates Western interest" has been withdrawn from this file. It was in our own earlier text and it is not supportable from anything I could read. Umboi is not an unstudied island — Thomas Harding's Voyagers of the Vitiaz Strait (1967) is a full ethnography of the Siassi trade system — but I could not consult it (the scan is access-restricted), and I found no ethnographic or folklore source of any date describing the creature. The oldest datable appearance of the word that I have been able to locate is in the missionary and creationist literature of the 1990s. That is a statement about the record, not about the people of Umboi, and it should be read as such until an ethnographer supplies the earlier text. The glow has a documented, boring solution, and it is 86 years older than the first expedition. In 1908 the editors of British Birds devoted a note to what they called "Luminous Owls": "In the past month we have been confronted at every turn by wonderful stories of a pair of luminous Owls, which apparently possess the power of emitting a light sufficiently brilliant to be mistaken for the light of a bicycle lamp!" They gave the explanation in the same paragraph: "Firstly, and most probably, this luminosity may be due to phosphorescent bacteria derived from decaying wood. These bacteria could easily become rubbed into the feathers by their contact with the sides of some hollow tree in which the birds have probably been roosting." Their second candidate was "a species of feather-fungus new to science". Their conclusion: "the phenomenon is abnormal, and the light is almost certainly due to extraneous matter." The following year the same magazine summarised J. H. Gurney's Norfolk observations: "the evidence that Barn-owls occasionally exhibit luminosity is incontrovertible, and that the 'light' emitted is very much stronger than one would imagine possible." A night-flying bird that glows is not a hypothesis. It is an ornithological note with a page number. Whitcomb knows this literature: his own site cites F. F. Silcock's work on luminous barn owls and the Australian Min Min lights. The fungi are there too, and they behave the way the reports describe. Perry, Desjardin and Stevani's 2024 review counts 132 known bioluminescent fungal species in five lineages of the Agaricales, emitting at 520-530 nm — greenish — twenty-four hours a day on a circadian rhythm, on wood and leaf litter in closed-canopy forest, with eleven species known from Australasia, Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia. The mismatch is instructive: fungal light is continuous, but the ropen light is reported as a flash of five or six seconds. Something continuously luminous that crosses a gap in the canopy for five seconds fits both facts at once. A large animal that switches a lamp on and off does not. And the bat is real, big, and named. Pteropus neohibernicus Peters, 1876, the great or Bismarck flying fox, is by common account the largest bat in Melanesia. Karl Shuker, writing as a believer in giant unknown bats, set its ceiling himself: "The largest living species of bat whose existence is formally recognized by science is the Bismark flying fox Pteropus neohibernicus, a fruit bat native to New Guinea and the Bismark Archipelago; it has a total wingspan of five and a half feet to six feet." CreationWiki gives the same figure — "not much bigger than six feet in wingspan" — which means both sides of this argument agree on the size of the animal that is definitely there. The species account gives males a forearm of 190-207 mm and a maximum weight of 1.6 kg. GBIF holds 447 Papua New Guinean records of it, from New Britain, New Ireland, Manus, Morobe and Madang: all around Umboi. On Umboi itself, nobody has looked. Queried on 11 August 2026, GBIF holds 2,822 occurrence records of all kinds inside a box around the island, of which 229 are birds — and four are bats. All four are 1982 specimens in the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, identified no further than the order Chiroptera. There is no record of Pteropus neohibernicus on Umboi, and that zero means nothing at all: the controls in the same box show that the island's bat fauna has essentially never been sampled. This cuts against the sceptics as much as against the believers, and it is the honest state of the evidence. Two method problems that the investigators reported themselves. Whitcomb, unable to get Gideon Koro to describe a head, drew two heads in the sand with a machete and asked him to choose; he has since written that the resulting sketch is "not visually accurate", and admits he should not have interviewed Gideon, Mesa Agustin and Wesley Koro together, since they could influence each other. And the second: Duane Hodgkinson's 1944 Finschhafen sighting, filmed by Guessman in 2005 and the single most quoted case in the literature, had a second witness — Hodgkinson's army companion, whom Whitcomb himself describes as a biologist and who denied that they had seen a pterosaur. That denial appears in one of Whitcomb's books and in none of the web pages or the video. It is the same picture-book method that produced the kongamato in Northern Rhodesia in 1923, run again eighty-one years later with a machete. Dated negations, as of August 2026. No specimen, bone, membrane, photograph, film or sound recording attributable to a ropen is known. The only photograph ever offered as proof — the so-called "Ptp" image of a shot pterosaur beside Civil War soldiers, promoted for years by Whitcomb and Paiva — was acknowledged by Whitcomb himself in late 2018 to be a modern fabrication. On 24 August 2014 the English Wikipedia deleted the article; the nomination of 17 August called it "fringe and pseudoscientific rubbish backed by fringe and pseudoscientific sources", and one editor described the subject as "the personal theory of one guy with a bunch of sock puppets". That is not proof there is nothing on Umboi. It is an accurate description of the paperwork.

Can you visit Ropen?

There is no ropen to visit, no museum, no festival and no trail. What exists is Umboi, and it is a large, remote and almost untouristed volcanic island. The island. Umboi — also called Rooke, Ruk or Siassi Island — lies in the Vitiaz Strait between the New Guinea mainland and New Britain, in the Tawae-Siassi District of Morobe Province. The Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program catalogues it as volcano 251060, at 5.592°S, 147.892°E, 1,335 m high, and describes it as the largest of the volcanic islands off the north coast of New Guinea, about 50 km at its longest: several coalescing stratovolcanoes cut by a caldera 13 by 17 km whose walls rise up to a kilometre above the floor, breached to the sea on the north-east. Inside the caldera stand three young post-caldera cones with summit crater lakes — Talo, Soal and Barik — and the catalogued craters include Apalong, Bono and Pung, at 1,096 m, 5°35'36"S 147°51'33"E. Lake Pung, where Gideon Koro's account is set, is a real crater lake on the shoulder of an active volcanic complex, roughly eight kilometres inland and a kilometre above the coastal village of Gomlongon. No eruption has ever been recorded, but the mountain is not quiet. GVP lists no Holocene eruption, though the post-caldera cones are thought to have been active until the last few centuries. In August 1985 damaging earthquakes alarmed the islanders; R. W. Johnson of the Bureau of Mineral Resources visited on 5 September and found no sign of imminent eruption, but inspection of the thermal area on the west flank of Talo on 12 September showed local ground subsidence, and nine local earthquakes were recorded between 11 and 14 September. There are thermal areas on Talo. Treat them as you would any solfatara: gas pools in hollows. Getting there is the real obstacle. GVP counts 249 people within 5 km of the volcano and 1,127 within 10 km; the island's villages are coastal and the interior is walked, not driven. There is no scheduled air service and no ferry timetable that I have been able to verify from any published source; access is by small boat across the Vitiaz Strait from Lae, Finschhafen or the New Britain side, weather permitting, and by arrangement. There is no hotel, no visitor centre and no signposted route to Lake Pung; reaching it means a guided climb from the coast. Nothing in this file should be read as an itinerary. One courtesy that is not optional. The stories the expeditions collected on Umboi are, in part, stories about graves being opened and bodies taken. Turning up and asking villagers about that is not the same as asking about a lake. If you go, go for the island.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-11 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas (folclore)