At least with online reports, living pterosaurs appear to be more popular than live dinosaurs. One somewhat speculative area is on the Marfa Lights of Texas. To quote briefly from one page of the “Searching for Ropens” page:
“Although there is only indirect evidence, by late 2010, that the mysterious flying lights of Marfa, Texas, (those that are classified as “CE-III” by the scientist James Bunnell) are caused by bioluminescent pterosaurs, that possibility is so extraordinary that it deserves a thorough scientific investigation. What a discovery it would be if those flying lights were found to be actual pterosaurs!”
I found a number of other pages, not related directly to Marfa Lights but related to living pterosaurs:
With so many reports of living pterosaurs in Australia and in Papua New Guinea, why should there not be living pterosaurs in New Zealand? What would keep large flying creatures from reaching that those large islands?
“The bird that bit Catherine” involves a child who was reading while sitting on a fence. “She became aware of a little creature sitting next to her,” but gave it little attention at first. She thought it to be just a small green bird with a long tail. When it became noisy, she tried to shoo it away, whereupon the creature bit her finger, spread its leathery wings, and flew away. She then realized how unusual it was and ran to tell her father that she had seen a “dinosaur.”
The concept here is that model “pterodactyls” cannot explain most sighting reports of living pterosaurs. They just don’t fit. Who reports what they believe to be a surviving prehistoric flying creature when that “creature” sounds like a model airplane? The sound would make it obviously not a living creature, I think.
On the subject of glowing pterosaurs, what about the kor of northern Papua New Guinea, or the ropen of Umboi Island, or the indava deep in the mainland? Each name, whether or not of the same species, refers to a large flying animal described like a pterosaur, and each is said to glow and to eat: often fish or clam, sometimes animal or human. A mechanical pterodactyl might be made to light up, as it flew in a civilized part of the world; but no mechanical model would use its glow to help it catch fish in a remote tropical wilderness.
I think that really does “shoot down” the concept that model airplanes are what people have been seeing. What do you think?