That you mistook a blue heron for the impossible pterodactyl therefore makes it likely that someone else would mistake .. what, swamp gas? optical illusions? RC helicopters? ... for saucers that zig-zag, come to full halts, and zip away at speeds so fast the fighter jets sent to chase them are left standing still ... that the fighter jock who later became a Mercury astronaut, just had a trick played with his eyes? Along with thousands of other otherwise perfectly rational observers?
Not likely.
So you’ve got two sightings. One with one adult and two children. In the second sighting, we have five adults and multiple kids between the ages of 7 and 13. In the second sighting, the ‘whatever’ flew directly over the house. Five adults stood stunned, and all of them would swear that they just saw a freaking pterodactyl.
Considering that it happened in the desert, not a place that one would typically expect to find a water bird, and the angle of the sun made a perfect silhouette and (in both cases) we only had two - maybe three seconds - to get a look before it was gone - the whole situation made identification difficult.
This is very close to what we saw.
Put the legs together so that it creates the illusion of a tail, change the angle slightly so that the feathers aren’t discernible and it made the picture complete.
Now, I ask you, which assumption is more reasonable? That we saw a migrating heron that was attracted to our pool or that multiple witnesses saw a pterodactyl?
All I’m saying is that our eyes and our brains play tricks on us. The only reason that I dug so deep into our experience is that, by all accounts, we saw a freaking pterodactyl flying around the desert. It made no damn sense. The heron is the most logical explanation. I’ve found much better photos than the one I posted and everyone who was there accepts this as the reality.
(Here’s a laugh for you. I just googled heron and pterodactyl and found numerous photographs and accounts of others making the same mistake. Even an article about how much a heron resembles the prehistoric bird. Another article explaining that the two aren’t related. There’s a couple of good pictures where a heron does indeed resemble a pterodactyl.)
