Land creatures. United States

A Goshen, Indiana man says he and a group of friends came across an unidentified flying animal that resembled a “pterodactyl” with a wingspan of approximately 12 feet.

The eyewitness, a 39-year-old professional trainer who provided his full name and contact information but asked to remain anonymous, sent the following report to Cryptozoology News:

“I just read your article about the dinosaur winged creature a man saw and that brought back some interesting memories.

We were taking a night hike to a local dam. It was my second year college at Goshen College, back in 2000. I was with a few people and a friend of mine who lived within a 3-minute walk to the dam. We always liked to take night hikes, especially on full moon nights. This was around early to mid September and we could remember the moon being super bright and big. The dam area has a long walk to the edge where the waterfall flows over into a smaller part of the Elkhart river. There’s another part that goes into a wooded trail section down below. You can take some steps down this rocky area down to where the dam falls flow into the river. In that area there’s a lot of vegetation and what not. A lot of people use that area for fishing and just hanging out. But on this night, we only made it up to the upper part where the water drops off.

Not even a minute into getting to the edge of the falls, we heard this loud rumbling noise where the rocks were at. It sounded as if something was moving the rocks around. All of the sudden we see this dinosaur looking creature flying upwards from that area. It was dark but we could still see it in the moon light. We knew it wasn’t a stork or any other type of bird because we were close enough to feel a huge gust of wings coming from the creature as it took off. The sound of flaps from its wings sounded like something from a Jurassic Park movie. However, that was not the scariest part; about two flaps into the air, we heard the brush down below which connects to the woods move around a lot and then we heard the loudest BOOM. Someone shot a shotgun at it, we took off running as fast as we could. We ran around 100 feet before we could see the large creature crash into a tree across the lake. We ended up running back to my friends house, and not even three minutes later, we heard cop sirens heading to the area.

The next day, we went to the other side of the dam where we think the creature landed at and we didn’t find anything. We found a bunch of huge broken tree limbs and that was it, no blood, nothing… The other odd part was there was an old man that was walking around there with his dog. He stopped by us and looked up and said ‘you saw it as well, didn’t you?’ We said ‘saw what?’ He said ‘the flying thing’. We said ‘yeah’ and asked him if he’s seen it before and he said ‘I’ve seen a lot of things in my time I can’t explain. Some things you don’t want to mess with and others simply just want to be left alone, and this is the second kind’. He said it’s never harmed anyone or anything that he knows of, and that the creature was big enough to carry us off if it wanted to. We asked him about who was shooting at it, he said there are others who have seen it too, but who knows what their agenda was with it, probably fame from killing it.”