The Ropen

Thank you for letting me tell this. I have been waiting a long time to share what happened to us. My name is Bernard, and I am calling from Lae City in Papua New Guinea. But when I was a boy, maybe twelve years old, I lived in a small village on Umboi Island. You probably never heard of it. Most people outside our country never have. It is a volcanic island between the mainland and New Britain, very remote, very isolated. We call it Siassi in our language. In our village, we had stories about the ropen. The name means demon flyer. The older people told us about it since we were small children. They said it lives in the caves up in the mountains, near the crater lakes. They said it sleeps during the day, clinging upright to the trunk of a tree, not hanging upside down like the flying foxes we have everywhere. At night, they said, it comes out to hunt. It flies to the reefs to catch fish, and the whole time it glows. A bright light that moves through the darkness for maybe five seconds at a time. We children, we believed these stories the way children believe everything. But we also thought maybe the old people were exaggerating. Maybe it was just a bigger kind of bat. Maybe the glow was just fireflies or something in the water. I tell you this because you need to understand, we did not know. We had never seen it ourselves. Not yet.

In my village, around 1993, there was a group of us boys who were always together. Seven of us. We ranged from about ten to maybe fifteen, sixteen years old. We were curious boys, always exploring, always wanting to go places our parents told us not to go. One day we decided we would hike up to Lake Pung. This is a crater lake high up in the mountains, near Mount Tolo. The adults did not like us going up there. They said the ropen sometimes flies over that lake. But we were young and we thought we were brave. The hike took us most of the morning. The jungle on Umboi is thick, very thick, and the trails are steep. By the time we reached the lake, we were exhausted but happy. The view was beautiful. The water was still and dark, surrounded by the green of the crater walls. We sat down to rest, laughing and joking with each other. We had been there only a few minutes. Maybe five minutes, maybe less. That is when it happened. My friend Thomas, he was the first to see it. He stopped talking mid-sentence and just pointed. His face went completely white. I turned to look where he was pointing, and my whole body went cold.

It came down over the lake. That is the only way I can describe it. It came down from the sky and flew maybe thirty meters above the surface of the water. And I tell you, my heart stopped beating when I saw what it was. It was massive. The wingspan had to be at least seven meters, maybe more. meter wingspan is massive for any flying creature - Jake' The wings were like leather, like a bat, but this was no bat. The body was dark gray, almost black. And the tail. The tail was as long as the wings were wide. Seven meters long, easily, with a shape at the end like a diamond. A flat diamond shape that moved side to side as it flew. The head was the worst part. It had a long snout, like a crocodile my friend said later, full of teeth. On the back of its head was a crest, a long straight thing that pointed backward. And along its neck and back, there were bumps or ridges running all the way down. It was the most terrifying thing I have ever seen in my life. It looked like something from before humans existed. Something that should not be alive. None of us moved. We could not move. We just watched as this creature, this ropen, flew low over Lake Pung. It did not seem to notice us, or maybe it did not care. It flew from one end of the lake toward the other, and then it banked and flew off toward Mount Bel, disappearing over the ridge.