Twelve feet of bioluminescent wingspan and seventeen unreturned voicemails: WTC’s frontline correspondent is already on the ground, already too close, and already filing.

Trail camera image recovered from Grid Seven of the Madang Province monitoring network, timestamped 2:17 AM local time. The DCA has confirmed the image is ‘not not real.’ The ornithological community has confirmed nothing and has gone very quiet.

Community Notice

Okay so we just got here and I want to establish right away that the light situation on the ground is — it is something. The canopy overhead is dense enough that it is currently 11:00 AM and my phone is telling me it is basically dusk, which is relevant because my phone is also not working correctly in the sense that it is taking photographs but not of things that are in front of it, and I have been using it as my primary recording device since the Cairns connection, so some of what follows is reconstructed from notes. The notes are good. The notes are always good.

The Ropen — and I want to be clear that what we have here is a trail camera image of an entity consistent with Ropen morphology, wingspan estimates in the nine-to-fourteen foot range, documented bioluminescence along the ventral surface, and a flight trajectory that ground observers describe as ‘purposeful,’ which is a word that I am writing down and underlining — the Ropen was captured on a motion-triggered trail camera installed by the Madang Province Ecological Monitoring Network at approximately 2:17 AM local time on Tuesday. The camera has since been retrieved. The retrieval team has since been debriefed. The debrief is classified at a level the DCA describes as ‘administrative pending,’ which is a classification level I did not know existed until forty minutes ago.

What The Witness Saw, And What The Other Witness Also Says He Saw

I am speaking with Bernard Kapi, a field technician with the monitoring network who was approximately four hundred metres from the camera site when the image was captured and who described — I am quoting directly from my notebook here — ‘a blue light, big, very big, and then the trees moved from the wind of it passing and then it was quiet in a way that was different from before.’ Mr. Kapi has been conducting ecological fieldwork in this region for eleven years and says he has seen the light before, always between 1:00 and 3:00 AM, always moving northeast. He did not seem frightened. He seemed like a man who had long since made a decision about what to do with the information and had chosen to continue doing his job, which I respect enormously.

A blue light, big, very big, and then the trees moved from the wind of it passing and then it was quiet in a way that was different from before.

— Bernard Kapi, ecological field technician, Madang Province Monitoring Network

I also spoke with a man named Trevor who was standing near the equipment staging area and who told me he was here on holiday, which raises — hang on, we’re being asked to move back from the camera retrieval site — which raises several questions I have written in the notebook and which I intend to return to. Trevor said he did not see the creature but that his campsite, approximately two kilometres from here, had experienced what he described as ‘interference’ on three consecutive nights: his portable speaker cycling through radio frequencies on its own, his tent pegs vibrating in the ground, and, on the third night, a smell he compared to ‘the inside of a plasma globe but also a little bit like a very large animal.’ Trevor seemed entirely unbothered by this. I am treating his account with the same journalistic weight as Bernard’s because that is how journalism works and also because Trevor had very specific details about the plasma globe smell that I find genuinely compelling.

The inside of a plasma globe, but also a little bit like a very large animal.

— Trevor, tourist, precise region of origin not established

Official Response, Such As It Is

Arthur Pritchard, spokesperson for the Department of Cryptid Affairs, issued a statement this morning describing the situation as ‘under active assessment by the relevant working group,’ which is the DCA’s standard phrasing for situations in which a working group has not yet been formed. Pritchard confirmed that a Form 7-Aerial has been filed, that a Form 7-Aerial Supplement will be filed once the initial form clears processing, and that members of the public should feel reassured that established protocols are functioning as designed. The established protocols, for reference, currently have a processing backlog of fourteen months. The Ropen, to my knowledge, is not waiting. Authorities have the situation under control. I am standing approximately thirty metres from where that control is being exercised and it looks — it looks like a good situation. Very much under control.

What I can tell you is this: something with a twelve-foot wingspan and the ability to produce its own light source flew over this section of old-growth jungle at 2:17 AM on a Tuesday. It was caught on camera. The camera has been retrieved. The ornithologists are not picking up. Bernard Kapi is back at work. Trevor has apparently gone to find a waterfall. And I am standing in a jungle that smells, now that he’s mentioned it, faintly of plasma globes and something I can only describe as large, and my recording equipment is producing photographs of things that are not in front of it, and Hal is going to want a follow-up by Thursday, and I have fourteen events in the notebook with no debrief on any of them, and I want to say for the record that I am not scared. I am extremely, specifically, professionally alert. There is a difference. The difference is that I am still here.

This is Rico Valez, reporting live from approximately four hundred metres inside the restricted monitoring perimeter, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. We will keep you updated. I will be out of contact for the next several hours due to the phone situation and also because I am going to follow up with Trevor about the waterfall. The notebook is open. The questions are outstanding. We are very much still here.