Good morning, Starseed, the Earth says hello

Have you always felt kind of out of place, like you didn't quite belong?  Do you have a particular affinity for astronomy?  Most importantly, do you have a fairly tenuous grip on reality?

The answer is here.  You may be an alien.

Of course, they don't like that term; it sounds fairly negative.  They prefer to call themselves "Starseeds."  They are Intelligences that have come to Earth and taken on the guise of humans, and walk among us.  The problem is, because of the pervasive brainwashing that our culture promotes, and the difficulty of being immersed amongst the "energy fields" of so many other beings, many Starseeds have forgotten about their origins, and think they're human.

Are you one?

If you're like to find out, here's a bit of advice posted by Yshatar InaEanna, a Starseed who evidently comes from the Planet of Unpronounceable Letter Combinations, and who writes for a website called International Starseed Network:

The first answer is usually the correct answer. The more you think about it the less you will know. I would say the most important thing is to go within. Familiarize yourself with who you truly are. Then and only then can you begin to seek information of this nature. It is more powerful to validate your own beliefs. All information should always come from within anything else is just a reference. Once you have understood the above figure out what it is you want to know. Always trust your gut instinct. If the information doesn't feel right then it is not your truth. you are your own best guide. Naturally we want to know where we come from.

Um... okay.  My gut instinct tells me that My Truth is that I'm from Louisiana.  But maybe I thought about it too much.

Once you've determined that you are a Starseed, of course the next thing to do is to figure out what star system you're from.  There are a number of highly (and inadvertently) amusing methods that the website suggests in order to determine this.  One simple one is to stare at a star map until one appeals to you, and that's where you're from.  I wish this worked for earthly venues, because given that it's the dead of winter in upstate New York, I've stared at a map and I find Maui really appealing.  So far I haven't vanished in a flash of ectoplasm, to show up on the beach clad in nothing but swim trunks, holding a drink with a little umbrella in it.  But maybe it only works if you're a Starseed, not an, um, "Mauiseed."

Another way is to use "Star Cards," which are these little icons you click on after meditating for a while, and it tells you where you are from.  When I did it, I got Andromeda, along with a lovely photograph of the constellation of Andromeda, and the Andromeda Galaxy.  This caused me to shout at my computer, "Andromeda is a constellation!  Which is a group of stars that only appear to have anything to do with one another from our vantage point here on Earth!  How can you be from an entire constellation?  And the galaxy that's pictured there is 2.5 million light years away, and is composed of millions of stars!"  This tirade caused my border collie, Doolin, to slink around looking extremely guilty.  But, come to think of it, I wonder if she was acting oddly because she knew I'd inadvertently stumbled upon the Starseed Network thing, and thinks I'm on to her.  I've always wondered if she's an alien, given the fact that she's the least doggy dog I have ever known.  She could well be a Canine Starseed, possibly from Sirius if not from the entire constellation of Canis Major, doing a rather poor impression of a terrestrial dog.  It would explain a good bit of her behavior.

But I digress.

The Starseed webpage has a lot of other helpful advice, including How To Tell Your Family You're A Starseed (key point: remember that in the moment of telling them, you're a human, not an extraterrestrial), how to figure out what your mission is (most of them seemed to concentrate on love, selflessness, and empowerment, none of which I can argue with), and not to be worried if your Auric Field interferes with car alarms, cellphones, and street lights.  I encourage you to peruse it.

So, anyway, that's this morning's quick dip into the deep end of the swimming pool.  As for me, I'm going to have another cup of coffee, because I'm expecting a call from Andromeda and I need to have my wits about me.  Also, StarDog here wants me to throw the frisbee for her, probably because it looks like a UFO and reminds her of home.

An atheist considers religious music

During a spare moment when I was not cooking, cleaning, or visiting with family on Christmas Day, I got onto the computer to see what was happening in the world, and found that a friend on Facebook had posted a stunning music video of Annie Lennox performing "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen."  (If you'd like to watch it, which you should, go here.)  This performance is amazing on a number of levels, not the least of which is the use of ancient instruments (hurdy gurdy, tin whistle, tabor); and the fact that I've been secretly in love with Annie Lennox for about twenty years is really only a small part of my appreciation of it.

In any case, a friend of mine pointed out the irony of an outspoken atheist posting a song with an uncompromisingly Christian message on Christmas, and the point wasn't lost on me.  The truth is, however, that I've been known to do the like many times before -- including this incredibly lovely video of 700 singers performing Thomas Tallis' 40-part motet Spem in Alium ("Hope in Another").

It's an interesting question to consider; why an atheist wouldn't be so turned off by the religious message that he wouldn't be able to appreciate the music.  But the truth is, when a piece of music is beautiful, the twining of the lyrics and melody sublime, the performance skillful and passionate, for me the religiosity of the message doesn't get in the way at all.  (It may be easier with performances in other languages -- if you don't understand the Latin, for example, Spem in Alium probably sounds like pure tonality to you, devoid of meaning.)

The fact that I don't think that the tenets of the Christian religion are true does not make me unable to appreciate the beauty it spurred its devotees to create, nor does it somehow make the beautiful ugly.  I was awestruck with the grandeur of York Minster Cathedral, the day I walked the 400-some-odd steps up the central bell tower to the top; the art of such luminaries as Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, Tintoretto, and Bellini are no less brilliant if you think that their subject is myth, not reality.  But music has always spoken to me the most intensely, and if yesterday I listened to Bach's Christmas Oratorio from beginning to end (just as I make a point of listening to The St. Matthew Passion near Easter), I'm not somehow exposing a chink in my atheistic armor.

But just as there's bad popular music, there's bad religious music.  Lots of it.  I find most of the hymns sung in churches these days simply to be devoid of any musically redeeming features whatsoever; call me a medieval throwback, but I don't think religious music has ever achieved the grandeur of the great choral works of Bach and his contemporaries.  (Although Arvo Pärt comes close; listen to this performance of his Magnificat and prepare to be transported.)  So it really is the beauty of the music, and not the message, that matters.

Well, mostly.  Even to me, the majesty of works like Bach's Magnificat in D (still my favorite of all of his choral works; here is a lovely performance of the opening chorus) depends partly upon the fact that the message is religious.  It evokes the unquestioning faith and devotion of a bygone day, with its soaring cathedrals, rainbows of stained glass, and the sonorous vibrations of pipe organs.  The fact that the music is evocative of a different place, culture, and time is part of its loveliness, and even if I am not part of that culture and do not share its beliefs does not make me insensitive to the beauty it created.

So, I realize that it seems contradictory that my CD shelves have so many religious choral works -- and if you find the irony of that to be too hard to manage, I guess that's just the way it goes.  To quote Walt Whitman:  "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)."

Kim Jong Il and the origins of credulity

The death of Kim Jong Il a few days ago has brought the country of North Korea into the news, and a lot of time has been devoted to exploring how the people of this country saw their odd, probably delusional leader -- and how they are viewing his son and heir, Kim Jong Un.

All of it has made me wonder about the origins of credulity.  Is it really possible to brainwash a whole nation?  What fraction of the people of North Korea honestly believe all of the nonsense they're saying -- and how many are just saying it because it's expedient, given the nature of the brutal, repressive regime they are subject to?

Let's look at a few of the things that have been claimed, regarding Kim Jong Il:

• He was born on the sacred mountain, Mount Paektu, and as a baby was recognized as the future "savior of the North Korean people."  At his birth, soldiers inscribed his name on trees and rocks to celebrate his coming ascendancy.
• The first time he ever picked up a bowling ball, he bowled a 300 -- a perfect game.
• He's also miraculously good at golf -- in his first-ever golf game, he hit five holes-in-one, scoring 38 under par.
• The day he died, a Manchurian crane, a traditional symbol of longevity, circled a statue of his father in the city of Hamhung for hours, and then landed, hung its head, and then flew off toward Pyongyang.
• At the moment of his death, the glacier at the top of Mount Paektu "cracked with a deafening roar," and the skies glowed red.

So, I'm reading all of this, and I'm thinking, "They actually believe this stuff?"  Any one of these would have made me say, "Oh, come on," and probably burst out laughing, which is why I would probably not last long if I lived in North Korea, especially given the fact that I'd have followed it up with, "That pudgy little guy with the blotchy face and the weird hair and the gigantic glasses did not score a 38 under par golf game."

I know that mythologizing famous figures is a frequent practice; what I wonder is why common sense doesn't kick in at some point.  You get the impression that all it would take is one person guffawing, and shouting, "That's bullshit!" to blow the whole thing away.  But no one ever does, do they?  Now, I'm not trying to claim that the North Korean people are stupid; and I just don't believe you can brainwash someone so as to remove all traces of common sense without leaving them incapable of functioning.  Somehow, the intensive training these people receive as children, to consider their "Dear Leader" as a god, must create a peculiar blind spot in their logical facilities.  It's as if the principles of rationality work just fine in all venues except for one.

It's fine to use your brain in everyday life; at your job, at the grocery store, while you're driving, while you're home with family.  Everything there operates by the normal rules, science works, common sense works, logic works.  But Dear Leader?  No, Dear Leader can cause birds to fly around, and trigger bizarre geological and atmospheric phenomena, not to mention performing miraculous athletic feats.  And apparently, they all just nod their heads and say, "Yup.  Good old Dear Leader," despite the fact that all of it is clean contrary to the way they know the world works.

Of course, it'd be nice if such holes in rationality were limited to North Korea, but it's not just them, is it?  Mythologizing is hardly limited to the odd figure of Kim Jong Il; it just stands out in starker relief because we haven't been indoctrinated into that particular cult.  We have our own ways of straining credulity to the limit -- specific areas in which so many of us hear impossible, counter-rational nonsense, and sit there nodding and saying, "Yup.  Makes perfect sense."

And here, having thus skated to the edge of the thinnest of thin ice, I will leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Attack of the gargoyles

A couple of days ago, Skeptophilia investigated claims of a glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl in Pennsylvania.  Keeping in the same vein, today's post is about: gargoyles in Chile.

Yes, gargoyles, those scary, weird creatures that adorn many a Gothic church roof.  Bat wings, snarling, fanged muzzle, large eyes with a diabolical leer... what are they, really?

If you said "fictional," tell that to Teresa Abett de la Torre.  De la Torre tells a story (read the entire thing here) of heading from Fuerte Baquedano, the military base where her husband was stationed, to the town of Arica at the north end of the country to visit family.  De la Torre and her husband and kids piled into their car for the long, monotonous drive across the arid Pampa Acha, an especially desolate stretch of the treeless, flat Atacama Desert.  The weather, as usual, was sunny and clear, and they expected to have nothing more than bored children to cope with on the trip.

The first one to notice something odd was one of the daughters, Carmen.  In Carmen's words:

I looked out of the window, and there were two creatures floating in the sky.  I was traveling in the back seat with my brothers, talking, and suddenly everything went dark. Then I told my brother what I was seeing and he told me to keep quiet, because Mom gets nervous. Later I looked through the window and saw some things that looked like birds, with dogs’ heads and back swept wings. My father said they were like gargoyles.

If I saw two flying gargoyles, I think "nervous" would be an understatement.  But that's just me.

But Teresa eventually noticed the creatures, despite the dad and kids' efforts to keep her from getting "nervous."  She described them as "dog-faced kangaroos."  And the day was about to get a whole lot worse, because watching some gargoyles from the air is one thing; having them attack your car is another thing entirely.

According to Teresa, they were all watching the things in the sky when suddenly her husband, Carlos, swerved, and they looked over to see that he'd narrowly missed two more of them, that had "jumped in front of the car."  They avoided colliding with the creatures by a narrow margin, and the creatures gave chase, bounding after them on "strong hind legs."  Carlos, alarmed, sped up.  "Eventually," Teresa said, "we left all four of the beasts behind."

Teresa related that she and the family were terrified to make the return trip, but eventually they had to, and it was uneventful.  At that point, they decided not to tell anyone what they'd seen.  However, when a fellow officer at stationed at Fuerte Baquedano reported seeing a dinosaur on the same stretch of road, the de la Torre family decided to go public, apparently figuring that at least their story wasn't that ridiculous.

By the way, just for the record, I'm not making any of this up.

The story was broken by Scott Corrales of the Institute of Hispanic Ufology.  When it hit the public media, reporters were quick to try to explain away the sightings as bats or ostriches, because we all know how often bats leap around on the ground in front of cars, and how often ostriches fly.

To me, the most interesting part is when the "Mysterious Universe" people got a hold of the story, because then we have an interesting chain of reasoning used; because the two explanations that have been suggested thus far are obviously wrong, our only remaining option is to assume that something paranormal is going on.

We see this in reports of ghosts all the time.  "I heard the noise of footsteps upstairs," our eyewitness says.  "My parents were out for the evening, and I went and looked in my brother's room, and he was asleep in bed.  Therefore, it must have been a ghost!"

Really?  There's no other option you can think of?  We're going to think of two rational, natural explanations, rule them out, and then leap into the supernatural?  I'm reminded of King Arthur pulling the pin on the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch and then counting, "One!  Two!  Five!"

But that's what they do, here.  What did the de la Torre family see?  Was it bats?  No.  Was it ostriches?  No.  Therefore, we are only left with the following possibilities:

1) A flying Chupacabra.
2) A southern relative of the Jersey Devil.

That's it?  It's not possible that they made it up?  That they were the victims of a hoax?  Because they didn't see giant airborne ostriches, we are forced to the conclusion that they were seeing the Jersey Devil?

Touchingly, the report in Mysterious Universe concludes with an ecological message: Given that there was no sighting of the gargoyles in Chile prior to 2004, it may be that human damage to the ecosystem was at fault.  "...might we surmise," the author writes, "that jungle deforestation or some other manner of likely human encroachment has forced these critters out of hiding and into the public eye?"

Because clearly the Atacama Desert was heavily forested with jungle until 2004, at which point it became as desolate as the Land of the Lorax after all of the Truffula Trees were cut down.  (Greenpeace's new motto: "Save the Gargoyles.")

Anyway, as it is probably apparent by now, I'm not sold on the story.  As I've discussed before, even if we won't go as far as to accuse the de la Torres of lying outright, eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable.  Given that there's never been a gargoyle hit by a car, no one's ever found a skull or wing bone, and no one in the de la Torre family even thought of taking a photograph of this amazing event, we'll have to file this one under "Probably Not."

Shrouded in mystery

In a surprising coup, scientists in Italy have done a study, sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church, and have concluded that the Shroud of Turin is authentic.

The scientists also announced that they'd done experiments concluding that the Pope was infallible and that confession to a priest really works.

Okay, I made that part up, but really.  You're trying to convince me that an experiment could prove that this was the burial cloth of Christ?  And that somehow, the fact that the experiments were conducted with the blessing of the Vatican didn't bias the outcome?

Apparently the answer to both of these questions is "yes," because Paolo di Lazzaro, head of the team that did the investigation, came just short of stating it outright.  "The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin, has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining ... is impossible to obtain in a laboratory," di Lazzaro told reporters.  "When one talks about a flash of light being able to color a piece of linen in the same way as the Shroud, discussion inevitably touches on things like miracles and resurrection.  But as scientists, we were concerned only with verifiable scientific processes.  We hope our results can open up a philosophical and theological debate but we will leave the conclusions to the experts, and ultimately to the conscience of individuals."

*wink wink nudge nudge*

So what we have here is our old friend Argument from Ignorance, wrapped up nicely in a piece of ancient linen cloth.  What evidence do the scientists actually have?  Well, after analysis, they concluded that they had no idea how the marks were made.  Conclusion: it must have been the burial cloth of Christ.

If you look at the scientific studies of the Shroud, it turns out that it's not quite that simple.  Starting with the fact that a carbon-dating study done in 1988 dated the linen cloth to between 1260 and 1390.  Various other studies have attempted to account for the stains on the cloth as iron oxide, tempera paint, treatment with acid, or due to a technique called "dust transfer."  Some skeptics have attributed the piece to Leonardo da Vinci.

Each of those has been answered by Shroud devotees as false, and the argument has bounced back and forth with the regularity of a tennis ball during Wimbledon.  "It is Jesus' burial cloth.  Attempting to replicate the image using iron oxide haven't worked!"  "No, it's not.  The features of the man are wrong.  It looks like a Gothic painting, with elongated limbs and narrow facial features!  It's a fake!"  "No, it's not!  It looks like a photographic negative, as if the image was made by light coming from Jesus' body!"  "That could be the result of natural processes!"

Oh, c'mon, people.  Let's just step back a moment, okay?  What do we know?

The Shroud was made from linen, an organic fiber.  As such, carbon dating should work fairly well on it.  However, the Shroud was nearly destroyed in a fire that occurred in the church that housed it in 1532.  Fires produce smoke, smoke contains carbon, and there's some opinion that the soot residues could render the carbon-dating procedure inaccurate.  The historical origins of the Shroud are, well, shrouded in mystery -- the earliest reasonably certain mention of it was in 1352.  From the 15th century, its whereabouts are well documented.

My point here:  what do we really know about the Shroud, in the scientific sense of factual knowledge?  Not too bloody much.  Therefore, as befits proper skeptics, our position should be simple:  we don't know.  Espousing either camp's views is unwarranted, given the fact that we've got almost no really hard evidence to go on.  Could the fiber be older than the carbon dating tests indicated?  Possibly.  Is the image's origin enigmatic?  Certainly.  Past that... we can't say.

It's a source of annoyance to me that so many people seem not to be able to withhold voicing an opinion.  It's almost as if everyone has to have an opinion about everything, whether or not they have any evidence, or even a good logical argument, to back it up.  My stance has always been that I am perfectly willing to suspend judgment indefinitely if I need to -- until the evidence drives me to one side or the other.  Until that time, I'm perfectly comfortable saying, "The jury's still out on that one."

This seems to be intensely uncomfortable for a lot of folks, but the fact is, it's an essential characteristic for a good scientist.  There's only one thing that should matter, and that's where the facts lead.  Other than that, it's okay to remain in ignorance.  In fact, it's the only honest thing to do.

Or, as my dad used to say: The world would be a much better place if there were more facts and fewer opinions.

The emulation of creativity

In yet another step toward rendering humans superfluous, programmer Selmer Bringsjord of Renssselaer Polytechnic Institute has now programmed a computer to write fiction.

The program, called "Brutus," is designed to take the basics of plot, character, setting, and dialogue, and devise a story.  The result, Bringsjord says, is "pretty convincing."

As an aspiring writer of fiction, the whole thing gives me pause.  I've often wondered what it was that was going on in my head when I come up with a story -- am I, like Brutus, simply following some kind of internal algorithm, albeit hopefully a more complex one?  How would you tell?

"There's a certain bag of tricks that Brutus had for saying things at the right time to convince the reader that 'boy, there is something really deep linguistically going on here,'" Bringsjord said.  On the other hand, he isn't convinced that what Brutus is doing is the same as human creativity. "The machine is just doing what you've programmed it to do.  If a machine is creative, the designer of the system — knowing the algorithms involved, data structure — is completely mystified by how the output came out. In my opinion, if that's not the case, then we're just cloning our own intelligence."

I'm not so sure.  Consider Stephen Thaler's "Creative Machine," an artificial neural net that has composed music, designed snack foods, and solved problems in military science.  The Creative Machine is capable of learning -- as Thaler has shown by introducing "noise" into the system to disrupt a rote solution, and watching what the program does.  The Creative Machine is able to adapt, and find alternate ways to use the information it has.  "And therein is where discovery takes place," Thaler said. "It's not in the rote memories that we have committed to memory, it's in the generalization of all those memories into concepts and plans of action."

I'm beginning to think we're getting close to creating a true artificial intelligence -- a software that can flexibly respond, learn, and create.  This idea repels a lot of people, and fascinates others.  Some folks believe there has to be more to the human mind -- there's got to be something inside our skulls that is more than just the sum of our neural firings, and therefore would make it impossible to emulate with a machine.  The two basic attitudes toward this problem were parsed out by philosopher John Searle and mathematician Alan Turing.

Searle, for his part, thought that artificial intelligence was impossible, and used his "Chinese Room" analogy to illustrate why.  Imagine a man in a sealed room, with an English/Chinese dictionary and a book of the grammatical rules of Chinese.  His task: he will be handed a string of Chinese characters through a slot in the wall; he will use the dictionary and rule book to convert it to a string of English characters and stick the result out through the slot.  This is what Searle said that computers do; they are simply converting one string of characters to another in a rote fashion, however complex it might look from the outside.  Because there's nothing "more" in the computer's circuits -- just as there's no true understanding going on in the man translating the characters -- there is no real intelligence there.

It doesn't matter, says Turing; all that matters is the output.  The Turing test hinges on whether a sufficiently smart human could be fooled.  We have no access to our own wiring, either; what's going on in our brain might just be a sophisticated set of electrical signals.  Or maybe there's something "more."  Whatever it is, we don't have access to it at its fundamental level.  So we have to judge by the output -- same as we do with our fellow humans.  Therefore, if a computer program could respond to a questioner in a way that fools him/her into thinking that the program is an intelligent human responder -- it is by definition intelligent.

I've always been in Turing's camp, personally; I don't think it's ever really been demonstrated that the "something more" that Searle says computers don't have actually exists in my brain, much less what that "something more" might be.  I know that I'm often mystified as to where my own creative impulses come from -- when I write, I feel like the characters and story come from some enigmatic source, and they often feel like they spring from my head fully-formed.  There is seldom a feeling of "working it out," the way you might a math problem.  The ideas are just... "there."  (Or not.  Some days, the ideas won't come, for equally puzzling reasons.)

But whatever the truth of human intelligence and creativity, machines have just taken one further step toward emulating it.  And I, for one, find that fascinating.  I wonder -- by creating these machines, and studying them, what might we learn about how our own brain works? 

The strange case of the glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl

In the past week, I've written about a few cases for which an application of the sharp edge of Ockham's Razor would be advisable -- such as blaming your troubles on your poodle's being possessed by demons, deciding that a shadow on a NASA photograph is a cloaked alien spacecraft, and giving credit to stories of a "zone of silence" inhabited by blond alien guys wearing yellow rain slickers.

There should be a name for the opposite of Ockham's Razor, shouldn't there?  Taking the available evidence, giving it careful consideration, and then running right off the cliff with it -- coming up with the weirdest, most convoluted, most difficult-to-swallow explanation you can.

Take the case of the the strange observations of a flying creature reported last week by a woman in Pennsylvania.  She states that she saw a "strange glowing thing at night" that flew over her car while she was driving.  It was "quite large," she said, and "was not too terribly high off the ground;" and "(it) seemed to be lit, or glowing."

Okay, that's the evidence; one woman's claim of a strange sighting.  From this, what hypotheses can we devise?

• She saw an ordinary flying creature -- possibly a barn owl, whose silent flight and all-white underside could easily trick the eye into thinking that it was a glowing creature in the air.
• She was making up the story for her own reasons, possibly for the attention or because she likes to tell weird stories -- i.e., she was lying.
• She's a wingnut.
• She saw a glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl.

Now, the story that I read told little more than the bits and pieces I've quoted, and I very much got the impression that that was all there was to the story -- she had no evidence, no photographs, not even a sketch of what she saw.  Just a report of a flying creature that was glowing.  I'm the first to admit that I have no particular reason to conclude that she was lying -- I don't know her, and have no desire to impugn the motives of a total stranger.  But take our four hypotheses, and you rank them for plausibility.  I ask even the wooiest woo-woo out there in the studio audience; don't you think it's more likely that she saw a barn owl, or made the whole thing up, than...  Oh, come on.  Really?  A bioluminescent pterodactyl?

On second thought, there is a name for the opposite of Ockham's Razor; it's called confirmation bias -- the acceptance of miniscule pieces of evidence to support a theory you already had decided was true.  It's why believers in astrology will crow about the one newspaper horoscope a year that happens to be reasonably accurate, and ignore all the ones that aren't; it's why the religious will proclaim it a miracle when the ill person they prayed for got better, and ignore all the people who were prayed for and died in horrible agony.  Maybe at this point I should tell you the website the glowing pterodactyl story appeared on.

It's called LivePterosaur.

Yup, there's an entire website devoted to the idea that pteranodons and other pterodactyloids have survived through the millions of years since the last fossil evidence, conveniently leaving not a trace behind in all of the geologic strata from the intervening eras, and now are gliding their way over the wilds of Pennsylvania.  A lot of the evidence, if you can call it that, comes from native legends, just as the totality of the "evidence" for Mokele-Mbembe and the Bunyip being dinosaur survivals comes from tales from the natives of central Africa and Australia, respectively.  The pterodactyl legend is apparently especially to be found in Papua New Guinea, where a flying creature called the "Ropen" supposedly haunts the rain forest; but there's the "Wawanar" of western Australia and the "Kongamato" of Africa, and also the unnamed sighting in Cuba where it presumably was called the "holy mother of god what the hell is that thing?", only in Spanish.

Did these people actually see something strange?  Could be.  There are plenty of big birds around; in the tropics, we also have fruit bats, one group of which (the "flying foxes" of the genus Pteropus) can have a wingspan of five feet.  Could they have been lying?  Drunk?  Crazy?  Sure.  Could it just be a story, and no more true than tales of unicorns and dragons?  Sure.  And I think any of those is more likely than it being a pterodactyl.

Now, don't mistake me; no one would think it was cooler than I would if it turned out that some kind of pterodactyloid actually had survived all these years.  I'm also fully aware of the times that it's turned out that something has made it to the present day, after years of only being known from the fossil record.  (The most famous being the coelacanth, the prehistoric lobe-finned fish that turned out not to be so prehistoric after all.)  I just don't think that it's all that likely that somehow a giant bioluminescent pterodactyl is gliding around in the woods of Pennsylvania, and has escaped all notice of the biologists until now.  It's slightly more likely that one could live in the forests of Papua New Guinea, or central Africa, given the remoteness and the dense woods; but only slightly.  The likelihood of it being a tall tale is orders of magnitude greater.

So, sorry to be a party-pooper, but I really do think that the lady in Pennsylvania saw a barn owl.  Or else should be more careful to take her medication regularly.  Whatever it was she saw, I'd be willing to bet a significant amount of money that it wasn't a glow-in-the-dark pterodactyl.