Did We See a… Pterodactyl?

By Lee Duigon

Christmas Eve today, and Christmas Day tomorrow—I don’t feel like writing about politics, and I don’t blame you if you’d rather not read anything about politics. With a stolen election hanging over our heads, our country is in the most danger it has faced since World War II. We are looking down the barrel at the end of our republic.

But our Defender and our Champion is mighty, whose birth we proclaim this day as a historical event: our Lord Jesus Christ, whose right it is to rule Creation; and His Father, God Almighty, will carry out His plan even if no mortal in this world believes in it, and regardless of any worldly forces arrayed against Him.

But in a spirit of rest, and of leaving things up to God for two days, I travel back in memory to a lovely summer’s day, ten or fifteen years ago.

It’s our anniversary; and my wife and I have treated ourselves to a day on the Seaside Boardwalk. Now we’re driving home, on Route 34 through Holmdel—usually quite a busy highway, but today, oddly, we had it practically to ourselves.

I have a habit of glancing up at the sky now and then. So I looked up and saw something that I couldn’t quite understand.

“What’s that?”

My wife saw it, too. It glided lazily across the sky over the wooded Holmdel hills.

At first we thought it was a hang glider. But how could that be? How could he have gotten up there? For miles around there are no cliffs, no skyscrapers, nowhere for a hang glider to launch. But it certainly wasn’t any kind of small plane that we’d ever seen.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

I usually am, and this time was no exception.

“It looks like a pterodactyl,” I said. And I said that because that was indeed what it looked like—more like a soaring pterodactyl than anything else. Up there in the sky, though, all by itself, we couldn’t guess its size: nothing up there to compare it to. But we both had the feeling that it was at least as big as a human hang-glider with his apparatus.

But it couldn’t be a pterodactyl: they went extinct along with the dinosaurs. There are no more large flying reptiles.

Except for this one.

“But it can’t be,” I argued with myself. “Where would it live? And you’d need a pair of adult pterodactyls to give it birth. Why hasn’t anyone else seen it?”

How many times have I read about these creatures, drawn them, collected models and replicas of them, looked at their fossils in museums? I should know a pterodactyl when I see one! And by now I was pretty sure that I was seeing one.

We watched it soar across the sky, never flapping its wings—well, we’ve seen buzzards doing that—and as we cruised up the highway, the enigma glided out of sight.

“It can’t be!” I muttered. “But what else could it be?”

We are both convinced we saw a pterodactyl—that, or something completely unknown to us. It would’ve been nice if it had soared over the Seaside Boardwalk and a thousand people saw it; but somehow that’s never the way that these things happen.

God made flying reptiles and has since tucked them away somewhere in His universe where we can’t see them. Maybe the Holmdel pterodactyl came from someplace we can’t go; maybe it came from some other universe altogether. The science-fiction cliché of “a doorway into another dimension” springs to mind. Pseudo-science to the rescue.

The whole experience only took two or three minutes, at most; but neither of us will ever forget it. Nor will we ever be able to explain it.

Who can search out all the ways of God?

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Click the link and visit—while you can. My articles can also be found at www.chalcedon.edu/ .

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net