DRAGONS: MORE THAN A MYTH
The dragon is the great, great grandfather of all monsters. Before the daemon, before the vampire, before the werewolf, before the giant, before them all was the original uber-monster, the dragon. In the east a glittering rain god, in the west a flame spewing, maiden devouring monster. It is found in every culture on earth. In the UK alone there are around one hundred dragon legends. Recently Michael Wetzel, a Harvard University linguist and philologist used phylogenetic analysis of legends to trace back their origins to a far more distant time than anybody had previously thought. In his book The Origin of the World’s Mythologies he dates the first dragon legends to 75,000 years ago, the immortal dragon has its fangs and claws deep in the psyche of mankind. And it is still seen today.
What is behind this most ancient of legends? Could the dragon be a terrifying reality? I will examine the theories and look at modern day sightings of dragons, including one from the UK in December of 2023
Right good evening everybody warm welcome to the uh March meeting of suon now tonight we have the pleasure of welcoming back Mr Richard Freeman who addressed us last October on the general subject of crypto zoology now for those of you who weren’t present at that time
I just qu quickly tell you a little bit about him uh Richard as I said is the cryptos olist and an author uh he co-edits both the journal animals and men and several editions of the annual Center for 4an Zoological yearbook uh he’s written co-written or
Edited quite a number of books and has contributed widely to both foran and Zoological magazines as well as other newspapers and periodical in including foran times and paranormal magazine uh he’s also lectured across the UK at events such as the 40 and times and Convention the weird weekend
Microcon and also at museums and universities such as the Natural History Museum the grant Museum of zoology Queen Mary University of London and the last Tuesday Society he studied zoology at University and went on to become a zookeeper at toy cross Zoo then he worked as an exotic
Pet shop uh run a a reptile rescue center and he was also even a graved digger at one point now I eventually moved down to Debon where he became Zoological director of the center for foran zoology uh he’s traveled the world searching for a variety of Cryptids from
The yeti orange pendak and the Tasmanian wolf to other legendary creatures such as the Mongolian deathworm and the giant anaconda now tonight Richard will be discussing the subject of dragons now it’s very strange isn’t it that every culture and country in the world seems to have a history or a folk tale about
Dragons so are they a myth or were they or are they still a reality well here’s the man to tell you all about it so please welcome Mr Richard Freeman thank [Applause] you I’ll I’ll okay CH thanks um have a little CLI just ask for the next one next one out
Right uh what country has the best flag in the world DN straight it does the best flag in the world and Bhutan is the second best flag because they have a dragon as well it’s a white one and this is the year of the dragon can we have the first
Uh the dragon is the great the up a bit no see I can do it excuse the craf it does try it now testing testing what are we ready clocks the dragon is the great great granddaddy of all monsters it’s the most ancient widespread and powerful monster archetype in the world
Forget about demons and vampires and werewolves the dragon predates all of them there was a folklorist called Michael Wetzel and in a very interesting book called the origin of world methology he traces back folklore using uh using techniques usually used by biologists such as cladistics and evolutionary trees looking at shared derivative
Characteristics now a biologist would do this with animals or plants Wetzel did it with folk tales and legends and he found that a lot of folk tales that we thought started with uh Hans Christian Anderson or the brothers green had been a few hundred years old we’re actually thousands of years
Old and the legend of dragons have been traced back to South Africa a bare minimum of 75,000 years ago 75,000 years ago Homo erectus was still around neand were still around the denov visian were still around henis was still around and these ancient South African Dragons Were horned Serpentine creatures associated with
Rainfall and all the earliest most ancient forms of dragon are associated with the ancient element of water we associate them more with fire these days but historically and globally they’re more associated with water so keep that in mind as we go on um they’re associated with rainfall bringing rain
Having control over water and the Sea and lakes and the element of chaos these verses here are from ancient Babylon and in Babylon there was a dragon called Tiamat who was um a goddess of the water and Chaos uh all of these early dragons they are more God
Than Beast they are either deities or they battled with deities over the control of water and it was all about bringing order from chaos this particular Dragon here is called the mus hushu Rush try saying that fast uh three times after you’ve drink five pints uh its name means
Splendor Serpent and it’s found on many B Babylonian carvings in including the famous uh ishar gate and you can see it is a winged quadraped but that’s that’s from about um 8,000 years ago okay can we have the next one please this one here is from ancient
China and it shows what is possibly a shamer and if you look what he’s holding it looks to be similar to magic mushroom so whether this is some sort of Sacrament he’s using who knows but he’s having some sort of dialogue with a dragon and we see again the classic
Dragon shape the serpentine body four legs Wings reptilian so what I’m going to do in this talk is do a a quick whistle toop Whistle Stop tour of some of the different types of dragon then I will look at what what might be behind the Dragon Legends and then I’ll look at alleged
Sightings of modern-day dragons which are surprisingly more common than you think the latest one I know of happened in England on the 27th of December last year but dragons are still reported from all over the world impossible as that seems and Fantastical as that seems dragons are still reported so
Let’s get on with it can we have the next one please the classic Dragon the true Dragon also known as the fire Drake or the heraldic dragon this is the classic Dragon of the West and it has four legs and two leathery b-like Wings it’s reptilian gigantic in
Size uh incredibly hard to kill or in the early days impossible to kill uh often associated with hordes of treasure although in the UK that is very very rare there there are about a 100 Dragon Legends uh in Britain and very few of them are associated with treasure
But it breathed great Jets of fire in the early days it was poison that was associated with the dr’s breath the dr’s bite but uh the classic of Herald Dragon breathes fire it’s the largest the most powerful and the most widespread of its kind it’s it is really the classic
Dragon and the next one please there’s another image of a classic Dragon four legs two wings that is the the limb quota for for True dragons and the next one please these are just of you just love the illustrations they’re great that is a that’s a green dragon from Dungeons
And Dragons beautifully Illustrated there another example of a classic dragon and the next one now something that often gets confused with a classic dragon is the WV uh the Wy is much smaller than the dragon U classic dragons are gigantic things hundreds of feet long some of
Them the W is much more petite at around 30 or 40 ft long generally and it only has two legs it has two legs and two wings like a bird would have uh it often has a sting on the end of its tail and it was associated with
Spreading plague and disease can we have the next one please there’s another example of a wyver and uh here in Wales there were Legends of a winged serpent called a guber and it was thought that if an Adder drank the milk from a woman’s breast if a woman was breastfeeding and
Some of her milk fell to the floor and an Adder sucked it up it would become a Gua a poisonous wind Serpent and uh there is a widespread idea that dragons would drink milk they would suck the milk from cows and uh of course reptiles can’t digest milk only
Mammals could digest milk but even today there’s a in rural parts of Britain there’s an idea that um adders if if cows are lying down they will suckle the teeths of the cows which is of course absolute nonsense and the next one please something that really really really really grinds my
Gears is the conservative party but as well as the conservative party something else that grinds my gears is um wokeness in doctor who um sorry is um is how in popular films they confuse dragons and wyvn they always seem to give dragons only two legs in films which technically makes
Them wens they did it in Harry Potter they did it in Game of Thrones the worst um the the worst offender in This was um The Hobbit the film of The Hobbit because tolkin always Illustrated the dragon smag is having four legs but the lazy film makers only get it two so know
The difference the Welsh Dragon you’ve only got to look at Welsh Dragon you see he’s got four legs two wings that’s a dragon that’s what a dragon looks like a w has two legs so what others were there can we have the next one please the Basilisk was supposed to be a very
Lethal serpent very small very deadly and it was so poisonous and baleful that even if it looked at you it didn’t even have to bite you if it looked at you you would die that’s how venomous it was and these things were supposed to have lived in the Middle East and North
Africa and caused the Great deserts because they would split rocks asunder with their terrible gaze they were so poisonous and foul and birds flying over them would fall from the air because of their venomous nature and they were quite small they’re only about the length of your arm not like the thing in
In Harry Potter which is more like a worm which we’ll talk about later than than a drag than a uh a basilisk and according to Legend when a rooster not a hen a rooster a cockr laid an egg and that egg was incubated by a toad or a snake a basilisk would Emer
Emerge and there were three things that could kill a basilisk seeing its own reflection in the mirror hearing a cockro crow at dawn or the bite of a weasel and the weasel it was said that the weasel used to chew a plant called Rue that was poisonous to the Basilisk
And if it bit the Basilisk with the juice of the r on its teeth it would kill the Basilisk uh the next one please there’s another basilisk you see with a the crest on its head they were generally thought to be serpents with a crown like marking or a Crest like a
Rooster on their head and the next one please related to the Basilisk was the cockatrice which came about in a very similar manner but a cockatrice has the body of head of a rooster the wings of a bat and the tail of a serpent and basically it has the same Powers but
They were somewhat bigger about the size of a dog but equally as lethal the next one please oops there’s another cockatrice the next one please the salamander was an elemental creature uh linked with the element of fire and it was supposed to be able to live in
Nature naked flame and again was very very venomous there’s a story of um Alexander the Great’s men um hundreds of them and their horses dying because they drank from a river that a salamanda had drunk at and its poison had um infiltrated and tainted the Waters of the river um the real life
Salamanders we see today are not actually reptiles Ori related to NES and they’re completely harmless some of them are mildly poisonous and it’s thought that maybe when these things were living in damp logs and when these logs were tossed onto the fire they crawled out it was thought they were generated by the
Fire and the next one please the wor which we mentioned earlier or worm is a gigantic snake uh the most famous One in Britain is the Lampton wor uh that terrorized the uh area up near Durham at the time of the Crusades and basically it’s a monstrous Serpent
And rather than breathing fire it spits poison and if you hack it into pieces the pieces can join back together again so they were incredibly hard to kill and the next one please now there another example example of a worm huge liess poisonous creature that was supposed to
Terrorize the medieval landscape and uh up in Scandinavia they call them Lindor and there were sightings of them right up until the end of the 19th century and I suppose if you count lake monsters those sightings are still going on today can we have the next one please
Over in Asia it’s a different story in that uh dragons are thought of as genu uh generally um benevolent rather than evil they’re associated with water rather than breathing fire their breath condenses and Falls as rain and they have control over the element of water rather like the ancient dragons we mentioned earlier
And um usually if treated with respect uh they would be kindly creatures but if offended they could cause earthquakes or even droughts um and a different Asian dragons had different jobs uh there was one called the responding Dragon who killed gods that got out of hand there is one Legend
Of uh the supreme god of China uh having a war war or or rather a um altercation with the God of War so he calls on his ally the responding Dragon who kills the God of War so that hearkens back um to the very ancient stories of dragons
Where they were Gods themselves or they fought with Gods next one please the Chinese dragon has a complex uh lifestyle C it starts off as an egg that often looks like a gem when it hatches out it resembles an ordinary snake an old saying that went do not
Despise the snake because he has no horns who is to say he will not one day become a dragon which was used at the end of the uh sorry at the start of the the old 70s TV show the water margin does anybody remember that anybody remember the water margin around about
The same time as monkey then after hundreds of years the snake has grown to a huge size it’s a little bit like a worm in Western law but it has a carp likee head with these barbles on it then a few more hundred years it grows four legs and its
Head is more reptilian and a few more hundred years it grows the branching horns that uh Asian drones generally have and then it most ancient and powerful form a few hundred years later it grows the wings that will carry it through the heavens next one please there’s another image of a
Oriental Dragon often times in the East uh dragons have feathery or birdlike Wings rather than bat-like wings like the Western dragon has this one is is uh based on a Persian dragon with the with the feathery wings and the next one please the Chinese dragon has four claws on each leg unless
It’s the Imperial Dragon when it has five claws the Japanese dragon also known as the Tatu or Ryu the Chinese dragon is called a long um that only has three Claws and they had a different lifestyle cycle when they hatched out they grew immensely big very very
Quickly so they hatch out and become huge almost immediately uh and fully formed so there’s differences between Dragon Legends around the world but the thing that links them all is that there are some sort of magical very powerful reptile next one please so what’s behind the dragon
Legend well uh the theory that jumps to mind first is that people are finding in ancient times they were finding the fossilized bones of dinosaurs and other large extinct animals like mammoths and woolly rhinos um a woolly Rhino skull found in the 16th century in Austria was thought
To be the skull of a Dragon for example and in China it was thought that when dragons shed their skin they shed their bones as well and regrew them and the bones would fall to Earth and become stone of course these were dinosaur bones and there were whole books written
In ancient China about how these could be used in medicine and how the yellow ones are more potent than the black ones and how they should be ground up and turned into powder that was drunk with water and so forth so you can imagine if ancient people found these bones they would
Think that they were of truly Titanic animals um the biggest dinosaurs there’s now a burgeoning amount of evidence that the biggest dinosaur were even bigger than the blue whale the blue whale is still officially the biggest animal the big one being a female uh that was 190 tons and about 110 ft
Long but there are sorod dinosaurs there on the right that’s a uh titanosaur one of the sorod dinosaurs um there are fragmentary remains from sorod dinosaurs that suggest they approach the size of the blue whale now the thing about the blue whale is back in the days
Of whaling tragically we had millions of specimens they were hunted to the age of Extinction and they we had millions of specimens that were measured most of the whales that were killed were measured by scientists on the whaling um boat so we have a very very big crosssection and the biggest one was
This individual female look 190 turns with sorod Dinosaurs we only have uh a much smaller cross-section we only have a few samples of each species so it was likely that they this didn’t uh represent the maximum of what sorod dinosaurs could reach ins and it’s been postulated that the biggest sorod
Dinosaurs and possibly the biggest animals that ever lived uh were upwards of 200 tons maybe as much as two 230 tons that’s bigger than a blue whale and there on the left we have the infamous Tyrannosaurus re uh in terms of bulk and muscular power the largest and strongest flesh eating
Dinosaur with the most powerful bite of any animal that ever lived um you may have seen uh the Jurassic Park film where one of them is killed by Spinosaurus well these two animals would have never have met they lived in different parts of the world at different times but hypothetically if
They had met Tyrannosaurus re would have killed Spinosaurus within about 60 seconds it would have been a fight it would have been a one-sided Massacre like in the old original version of King Kong where King Kong fights a tyrannosaurus well Kong would have been dead within seconds because one bite
From a Tyrannosaurus Rex would have had his arm off and he would have bled to death Tyrannosaurus Rex was the most terrifying Predator to ever walk the face of the Earth and as with other dinosaurs it’s been postulated from fragment remains it grew a lot lot bigger than we think um the biggest
Reasonably uh complete specimen is about 43 ft long 20 ft high and about 10 and 1/2 tons but there are fragmentary remains that suggest uh individuals 70% larger it’s been extinct for 65 million years but it’s still scary as next one please yeah now the thing about most dinosaur
Remains in films like Jurassic Park where they’re Excavating them they’re all laid out wonderfully as if the dinosaur thought as it when it was dying yes I’ll I’ll lie down in this pose so that in 65 million years some paleontologists can dig me up um complete well in
Reality most dead animals are destroyed by scavengers uh dead meat is a bonanza because to Predators because they don’t have to expend any energy killing it so most most uh dead animals don’t fossilize only a small amount do and it has to be under exactly the right conditions and
Often times they’ve been partially scavenged so they’re fragmentary so most remains of dinosaurs and other big extinct animals like giant sloths and wooly rhinos and mammoths and um things like that uh are fragmentary so the people digging them up wouldn’t have really known what they look like
So if you add to that there are Dragon Legends in places where dinosaur bones are very rare like Japan it doesn’t really cut the mustard in explaining what dragons are so maybe it’s time to put some flesh on the bones next please could Dragon Legends have been based on real
Reptiles to a certain extent extent yes here we have the indopacific crocodile better known as a saltwater or esterine crocodile it is the biggest and one of the most aggressive crocodiles in the world the largest one was measured by crocodile expert called Ron palosi in the 1950s on the mathur bank of the
Norman River in Australia and it was 28 ft long but there have been unverified reports of much bigger ones in the 1930s there was a guy called James Montgomery who owned a rubber Plantation in Borneo and the natives that he employed to work on the B the rub Plantation would talk
About a monster that lived in a river that they thought was the father of the devil and whenever it appeared they would throw silver coins in the water to appease it so he decided to investigate and uh he found this Enormous Crocodile on a sand bank and he
Knew that his rifle would be no use against it be like shooting peas at it so thinking discretion would be the better part of valor he went away and came back another day to measure the sand bank and he said that the the crocodile was lying on the
Sandbank with the end of its tail in the water the sandbank was 30 ft long so this crocodile would have been 33 ft and that size would be something like 3 and 1/2 tons as big as a mediumsized meat eating dinosaur like a allosaurus or a Megalosaurus they are formidable Predators their bite
Is three times more powerful than that of a great white shark they will take down Tigers water buffalos sharks and they armor notorious maners uh the most famous case being in ramri island off the coast of Burma during World War II where uh British soldiers had trapped some Japanese and
There were about a thousand Japanese trapped in the swamps of rry Island and at night saltwater crocodiles attacked them and they were the British soldiers said they saw swarms of these things swiving into the swamps and they heard hissing and bellowing and the screams of the Japanese and uh something like 50
Japanese out of a thousand walked out of the swamp the rest were taken by saltwater crocodiles and they still regularly eat people next one please this is a Nile crocodile from Africa if anything they’re even more aggressive than the saltwater crocodile well they grow to around 23 ft long but
Once again much bigger ones have been reported a very well-respected zoologist called Hans Bessa a German zoologist shot one on a river in Tanzania in 1903 and measured it at 26 ft long but it had 3 ft of the end of its tail missing probably bitten off by another
Crocodile when it was much younger so if it had the rest of the tail it would have been 28 ft long about the same size as the big saltwater crocodile and these things take down leopards Lions black rhinoceros giraffes and um there’s a notorious Manita who’s about 23 ft long in L
Tanganica in Malawi who is called gusta he’s eating about 300 people and um the uh one of the um Park Rangers there saw him attack and kill a full grown hippo and rip its throat out so that is a very formidable animal and the ancient Egyptians worshiped crocodiles in the form of the
God sebc and would um give offerings of gold and jewels to them which may be where the idea that the dragon horde comes from can we have the next one please that’s another picture of a uh a Nile crocodile that’s a much younger one next one
Please in the early part of the 20th century there were stories um circulating in Indonesia about a dragonik monster that lived on some remote islands and uh criminals were supposed to be banished to these islands to be eaten by these dragons and shortly before World War I a
Pilot crash landed on Komodo Island and was chased up a tree by these huge lizards and that was when we first heard of this lizard called the kodo dragon the largest known species of lizard in the world grows to 10 ft long it has very sharp teeth they’re very small hard
To see they’re like a ripol they’re very sharp it has very sharp claws and it has uh venomous saliva it has venom glands down in the neck you can see the Bulge there is quite possibly the Venom gland they’re the they’re the heaviest and bulkiest venomous animals in the world and
Uh can we have the next photograph please you can see some of the slobber there which is venomous they produce masses of this saliva um a bit like me when I think about goth girls and when they bite something it’s an anti-coagulant so it stops it stops the
Uh the blood congealing and if they don’t kill it in the initial attack the prey will um bleed to death and they will often follow their prey for days and days and days and then devour it when it fin aums and they take animals as big as uh water
Buffalo and occasionally human beings there was a uh uh an Austrian uh nobleman who went out to uh uh to Komodo once and uh went off the beaten Trail and all they found of him was his shoes can you still hear me all right as
They uh switch it off of you oh all right TR push up oh yeah that better no but uh I make 10 the commod is a bit small to be behind the Dragon Legends and they’re only found on a few islands kodo rra and Flores in Indonesia however once upon a time there
Was an even bigger lizard living on Mainland Australia can we have the next uh this is veranus priscus better known as Megalania or the Giant butcher God must have been ripped to the tits when he made Australia because not only did he have mammals that lay eggs and marsupial
Wolves he had wombats the size of rhinos diprotodon he had 10ft tall kangaroos procoptodon they had meat eating kangaroos they had a 10ft tall flightless duck called Jenny ores they had a giant snake that and I kid you not was given the scientific name montypython Nades and praying on all of these was veranus priscus it’s only known from fragmentary remains but it seems to have been bigger than the kodo Dragon estimates of its size have ranged from 11t all the way up to 30t can we have the next one
Please that sort of gives you an idea of the size of varanas priscus and its larger estimate a incredibly formidable animal and it was quite possibly venomous as well like it’s small relative the Komodo dragon there have been um alleged sightings of huge lizards in Australia and New
Guinea uh can we have the next one please the uh Aborigines have something in their folkl called mumar the goana bun and goana is an Australian name for monitor lizard which is supposed to be a gigantic lizard um there is one story about herpetologist scientist who studies
Reptiles who in the outback saw what he thought was a dead tree uh lying in the forest and when he started up his Land Rover this tree stood upon four powerful legs and lumbered off and it was a 30ft lizard and these stories emanate from the
Outback every so often some of them are linked with a guy who’s he’s passed away now called Rex Gilroy who to say the least is not very credible but not all of the stories can be traced back to Rex Gilroy in New Guinea there are persistent rumors of lizards 20 to 30 ft
Long uh in 1960 uh an Australian newspaper reported that uh tribes people in New Guinea were supposed to be seeing these gigantic dragons that could rear up on their hind legs and had huge teeth and Claws and spat fire and were killing people now the fire was also almost
Certainly the flickering of the orange tongue coming in and out of the the creature’s Jaws but um a group was sent to investigate this and they didn’t see these giant LS but they talked to people that had and they saw the bodies of the people that have been killed by them and
The Nini tribesmen were building stockades around the Villages to stop them getting into into their Villages there is a giant lizard in um New Guinea called the crocodile monitor or the salvadori dragon which grows to 15 ft long which is big bigger in terms of length than the kodo dragon but it’s
Nowhere near as bulky or most of the length is taken up by a long thin tail whatever these things were they were much bigger and much heavier and uh much bulkier and much more aggressive but uh New Guinea is so poorly explored there could be anything living
There uh there are stories of surviving thos signs in the mountains of New Guinea there are stories of 30 plus crocodiles that are venerated by the tribes along some of the rivers it’s a place I’d really like to go to and it’s one of the last places
In the world where cannibalism is still practiced the next one please giant constricting snakes um are another possibility of of something that’s added to Dragon law this is the green anaconda uh the world’s largest known snake uh the biggest one ever measured was about 27 ft long they have
On rare occasions been known to kill people basically it’s a tube of muscle with teeth at one end um yes a 20 yard long a 20 20 7t plus tube of muscle and I’m not talking about the contents of my pants they have they feed mainly on caparas and small Caymans occasionally
They’ll take down things like Jaguars but uh in the olden days the gaos the um South American Cowboys on the ranches would say that these things grew to immense size and they called them the manoro the bull killer they said that they would grab a hold of full grown bulls pull them down
Constrict them and swallow them whole horses too and there have been reports of of anaconda 40 50 and even 60t long in the jungles of South America uh when I was in South America uh I was talking to a tribal Chief who said some Hunters had told him of an immense
Anaconda in a place called Corona Falls and it was so big they ran away from it and he asked them how big was it and they said it was crawling over a fallen palm tree in a swamp and they pointed to a palm tree that was about 30t tall it’s
About the size of that he said the head was jutting out from one end and the tail from the other so they had a a frame of reference with it so that would have made it 40 foot plus and can we have the next one please that’s another giant anaconda uh
Well that’s a standard size Anaconda actually the big ones spend all their time in water boiled up by the water they don’t lay eggs they give birth to live young so they very seldom come onto dry land the really big ones and the next one please the articulated python from Asia
Is another gigantic snake and the biggest one was measured in the Indonesian island of the celes in the 1930s and it was 33 ft long but once again there are reports of specimens of upwards of 45 ft unproven but P persistent and this is the snake that
Eats people more than any other there are quite a few um verified cases from Sumatra Borneo the CIP cabes and Malaysia of these things constricting and swallowing for grown human beings this one here is called fragrant flower she’s kept in a zoo in Java and she’s 23 feet long so that’s
Big but by no means the biggest can we have the next one please there’s a closeup of the head of articulated python you can see they have these cat-like eyes because they’re nocturnal Predators they crawl around at night looking for food whereas the uh aan aond is an aquatic Predator it lives
In very murky water so it has poor eyesight and it relies mainly on senses of smell and vibration to grab a hold of its prey the anacondra is much more bulkier a much bulkier heavier animal than the articulated pipe but it’s a lot less aggressive um the articulated Pon can be
A very aggressive snake indeed and there is some old film of one of these things attacking a tiger and there’s a fight between these and the tiger just manages to escape with its life shake it off and run away but um a really big ridicul python
I back it against a tiger and probably the only thing that would uh it would have to fear would be a big saltwater crocodile the next one please but smaller snakes as well might have something to add to the dragon legend we remember the TS of the
Basilisk from North Africa well this is a snake that some people feel that the basilis is based on and it’s a the S scale Viper and it makes a a sound rather like water being poured on a hot plate and it does this by rubbing it scales together it’s
One of the most venomous snakes in the world and it’s regarded as possibly the most dangerous snake because it can be highly aggressive and it’s not afraid to strike multiple times and its venom is very potent and it’s thought that you see the little almost Crown shaped
Marking on the head there it’s thought that maybe the Basilisk is a garbled um account of the S scale Viper have the next one please a spitting cobra there are a number of species of spitting cobra they um fangs act almost like water pistols and they can shoot their venom over 10
Ft and they aim for the victim’s eyes and if not washed out very quickly it will blind you they can also inject Venom like ordinary cobras and it’s thought that maybe some of the basilis Legends are also based on spitting cobras there is one um British Dragon Story uh from
Essex of a serpent That was supposed to have inhabited a wood and it was reported in I think the same year that Shakespeare died and they said it was about 9 ft long it lived in this wood and it fed on conies or rabbits that’s an old word for rabbits uh but when
Anybody approached it it would rear its head up and look most arrogantly around it which sounds like a cobra rearing its head up and it would cast forth Venom and kill both man and dogs but not eat them it fed on the uh on the rabbits that sounds like a spitting cobra which
May have been brought back from abroad we think of zoos as very modern things but um there have been animals kept in captivity in Britain for hundreds of years at the uh the Tower of London they used to have a managerie with lions tigers and bears and and other things and
Uh there is a uh a legend in suffk of a of a dragon that was supposed to appeared in a river and it’s described as a great long thing with armored skin that arrows couldn’t penetrate and great jaws and it would seize people and animals and
Um it terrorized the area for a while and then disappeared in Winter and was never seen again that may have been a crocodile that was brought back to Britain escaped lived for a while in the summer then died in the winter we don’t know it’s just a
Theory can we have the next one please this is the basilisk lizard from South America it’s quite beautiful and fairly harmless it’s got a nasty bite if you if you mess around with it but uh it was named after the mythical basilisk because of the crest on its head looking
Somewhat like a a roosters conb and although it lacks the terrible gaze of the mythological basilisk it does have an unusual power its other name is the Jesus Christ lizard because it can walk on water and what it does it gets running very fast and it will run across
The surface of the water with its toes splayed out uh Distributing weight and it can run on water for um over 100 ft so it’s quite a remarkable creature next one please so far we’ve talked about dragons as physical Flesh and Blood animals um one
Theory I haven’t touched on yet was by a guy called Peter Dickinson who wrote a book in 198 called the flight of dragons and he came up with this theory that Dragons Were descended from flesh eating dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex that survived the great Extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period that
Killed off all the non-avian dinosaurs if anybody tells you dinosaurs are extinct they’re wrong birds are dinosaurs so if you’ve eaten a chicken you’ve eaten a dinosaur if you got a pet budie you’ve got pet dinosaur a chicken has more in common of Tyrannosaurus Rex has more in common with a chicken than
It does with Triceratops birds are literally dinosaurs but he uh he came up with this theory that big meat eating dinosaurs survived the end of the Cretaceous Extinction and evolved into dragons and they flew by the manipulation of lighter than air gas in their stomachs their stomachs were expandable and acted
Rather like hot air balloons they were filled with um uh hydrogen gas which they got from uh consuming the calcium in the bones of their victims and also eating Limestone um together with the gastric juices that would form gas which they use to fly the wings were actually the
Rib cage covered with um a flap flaps of skin which they use to um steer in the air and the fiery breath was uh caused by a chemical Catalyst and they use this to control how they flew so they fill their gut with gas when they wanted to go up
They’d burn it off with a flaming breath when they wanted to descend again and after they died the acids were so powerful in their stomachs they would dissolve the dragon’s carcass and he hence no dragon fossils it’s a very very ingenious the the I don’t believe it
Mainly because it makes them too fragile like a big balloon that could be popped dragons were supposed to be as near as dam it to invulnerable so great Theory but maybe he’s barking up the wrong tree so maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree all together in seeing the dragon
As a flesh and blood animal in the same way that crocodile or a python or a codo dragon is a flesh and blood animal maybe it’s something much much stranger this is a picture of uh an astral epithe our early ancestors now a couple of million years
Ago these guys were coming out of the jungles of Africa onto the plains of Africa the climate was changing the jungles were receding the grasslands were becoming more prevalent and their ancestors our ancestors were coming out of the Jungle to exploit new food sources it’s been postulated that uh
Bipedalism has been linked with us leaving the trees and walking around on uh the Savannah where you have to stand up on your hind legs and look around for Predators but it’s been found that orangutans often walk erect in the trees so by ped probably actually evolved before we
Descended from the trees and went out onto the plains but carry in a good new high protein food source can we have the next one please so other picture of astropy thein what’s this Got to Do With Dragons you might say well in the year 2000 which is also from
Enough the Year of the Dragon I was making a documentary um about sightings of giant snakes in Thailand called nagas and uh we were getting some uh film in a statue Park in the jungle and they had several of the creatures from Thai folklore there they
Had the Naga which is this giant crusted snake they had the singar which is a myth I ological lion that was supposed to live in the jungles of Thailand in fact in reality the nearest lions are in the G forests of India hundreds and hundreds of miles away and they had the
Guda which is a creature half man and half bird and I thought to myself isn’t it funny that’s almost like the the legends of Cornwall in Cornwall you’ve got the Great Serpent morgar the sea serpent which is reported from the seas around Cornwall you got the mystery big cats
Like the east of bodet and then you’ve got this half man half bird thing the owl man of morning uh which is reported from the woods around mour and old church in Cornwall and uh which I dismissed for a long time there nothing more than uh the
Sightings of an eagle owl which is the largest of all of the owls it can have a wingspan of over 6 feet and they can kill Small Deer they’re enormous things they take down wild cats but a friend of mine who is now a very well-respected
Scientist saw this thing when he was a teenager and he said no why was it an eagle owl it was this weird creature with a great gaping mouth staring eyes silvery feathers claws on its wings and these weird pencil likee Talons so I thought isn’t it weird that we’ve got
The same sort of monsters in both cultures and the more I thought about it the more I realized that there was this thing which I came to call the global monster template in every culture you seem to get the same monsters repeated again and again
And again as if they’re being read off a a script you will get dragons or analoges of dragons giant reptiles basically you’ll get monstrous Birds the Thunderbird the rock the guda the tangu things like that you will get hairy Giants whether you call them Yeti Sasquatch trolls in ancient and Medieval
Europe all over the world you get these these hairy Giants you get little people goblins Pixies gnomes and so forth uh you get monstrous cats and you get monstrous dogs werewolves black dogs and so forth and I thought hang on a minute something seems familiar about this
There something that’s ringing a bell in my subconscious and and I realized that all of these creatures from the global monster template have analoges in things that were praying on or competing with our asesine ancestors about 2 million years ago on the plains of East Africa they
Would have been prayed on by crocodiles and big constricting snakes like the African rock python uh that have been prayed on by Raptors um big birds of prey like the Marshal eagle and we know this because we’ve got fossilized Asal osine skulls with Talon marks of the Eagles in them
Big cats like lions and especially leopards would have prayed on them leopards are the most dangerous all the big cats because they um have a lot of primates in their in their diet so they look at a human as another kind of primate and also there were other big
Cats back then like homoa cimer tooth cats that were even more formidable they would have been attacked by African wild dogs the hunting dogs which are um incredibly efficient hunters and they would have been in competition with other primates there were other kinds of asopos um our ancestor was uh asopus
Afarensis but there were other asopos a asopus robustus which was much bigger and more robust and it may be the ancestor of the Yeti and there were also giant baboons dinopithecus which was the size of a gorilla and would have been incredibly formidable and there were smaller primates that they were in competition
With as well so it was almost as if that these things that that they were in competition with or were in fear of have become the basis for the global monster template and it’s all to do do with our subconscious fears and how those fears and behaviors are passed
Down from generation to generation over thousands and millions of years now have you ever been in the countryside uh on a nice sunny day and then the wind Cuts up rough and a cloud comes in front of the sun and it sends a big sh Shadow shooting across the land
Across for just just a fracture of a second you sort freeze what the hell is that as if you’re in fear of something up in the sky something big and flying in the sky and this Behavior has been seen in monkeys it’s a freezing Behavior Uh an Lenas as well
Against predatory birds like eagles and it’s been found that even monkeys raising captivity that have never even seen an eagle for Generations still have this freezing um behavior when a shadow goes over them why is black associated with evil why do villains wear black it’s because we’re frightened of
The night we’re frightened of the dark we can’t see in the dark particularly in the days before we made fire and even in the early days of fire outside of that ring of fire there’s the darkness where we’re at a disadvantage we can’t see but leopards
And lions and uh simitar tooth cats can see wonderfully well why is it that in buildings of more than one story bedrooms are on the second floor it’s been postulated that this is because we feel safer up high because our ancestors at night would have climbed into trees to stop things
Getting at them these things are called fossil memories and the global monster template I think has its Genesis in fossil memories but how does it work can we have the next one please this is Dame Alex Alexander David Neil she was a French woman and she
Started off as a singer and she got really interested in in tibetan culture went over to the Himalayas studied for many years and became a Tibetan llama don’t know if she ever saw a Yeti I don’t think so but she became a Tibetan llama now in Tibet in
Tibetan culture they have this thing called a Tula it’s often wrongly said to be a Buddhist idea but it’s really a Tibetan idea uh that’s been co-opted into to uh Tibetan Buddhism now a Tula or thought form is supposed to be a threedimensional image created by the power of the the
Mind that other people can see and has some sort of physical power it can interact with its environment and D Alexander David Neil claimed that she created the Culper of a monk after many many months of concentration she created this image of a monk that other people thought was a
Real Flesh and Blood monk that was just part of her Entourage and she said he would follow the the Entourage around with all the other monks but after a while this chubby Jolly looking fellow started to take a a sort of lean and sneaky look about him and she realized he was trying
To fight for his own independence to become an dependent entity and she had to destroy him and she took us long to destroy the Tula as she had to create it now some people have said Dam Alexander David Neil full of old bollocks and she never went to
Tibet and she just just pretended to and she was in France all the time but I don’t know if that’s true or not but she’s not the only person um to have uh supposedly created a Tula um Dion Fortune the famous Witch uh said that she created a wolf tper that was based
On the Viking um entity um fenis that was supposed to have devoured Odin in Ragnarok and can we have the next one please this guy here is franic kuski and he was a medium that was operating uh uh in the Years running up to the first world war and he said that his
Particular specialization was materializing creatures during seances and various Witnesses and there are many many witnesses to this said that he materialized a number of creatures including a great cat that looked like a lion that would lick the sitter’s hands with its rough tongue an enormous black dog rather like the
Barest or black shook from ancient legends um a huge shambling eight man akin to something like a what we call a Bigfoot or a Yeti today and this huge bird this looks very like a night jar that would sit on his head and it’s almost as if he is tapping
Into the global monster template and he is creating these things so if tulas can be created and I’ve experimented with Tula creation when I was a student in lead um I spent a couple of years creating the Tula of an enormous spider in a um Cellar I had in This Old House I
Lived in in leads and I got the idea to do it after throwing a golf party um to celebrate 10 years of being a golf uh that’s a long time ago and uh and after this party in which I decked out the entire Cellar and with all this ult paraphernalia including
A um altar to A non-existent God Called Alat Nar who was created by uh the science fiction writer Clark Ashton Smith a friend and contemporary of HP Lovecraft I decided Well I’m going to use this as a focus to create a Tula of a huge spider and I won’t go into too
Much detail on this because it’s a whole talk onto itself but hi had a remarkable amount of success in creating a visual Phantom with the power of my mind and this had a knock on effect other people felt it as well so my mind is about as focused and
Clear and tidy as Elbert steptoe’s backyard if I can have some limited success in doing this what can a Buddhist monk meditating do what can the gal Collective unconscious of mankind do if we carry these fears of all these creatures in our Collective unconscious under certain circumstances couldn’t we
Create an unconscious Tula now a lot of monster sightings the creature turns up terrorizes an area then vanishes like a phantom if you look at a lot of the Dragon Legends in Britain a lot of time the dragon isn’t killed by a champion or a warrior or it
Just appears scares the pants off a load of people and then disappears again so as a cryptozoologist I think that there are many many many flesh blood animals that we know nothing about like the yeti and the Tasmanian wolf and the giant anacon but also I think there are Supernatural analoges of
Them um a good example is that um people report these demonic black dogs shook barest hairy Jack call them what you will they’re found in every County in Britain and they have different names but there are real big black dogs as as well so there’s no
Reason there can’t be a real Flesh and Blood Bigfoot and a phantom Bigfoot which appears in places that can’t support it ecologically and often behaves in a very weird way it’s often seen with strange lights and Poltergeist outbreaks and things which are all I think part of the same thing now I’ve
Written a new book it’s out in um uh sometime in the next couple of months uh called the highest strin stress where I look at monsters ghosts UFOs and miscellaneous foriana and I select the strangest stories the most whacked out weird bollocks you’ve ever heard in your life
Uh a talking Mongoose giant ghost crabs ghost trees um wind martians that visit a woman on Christmas in the West Midland eat minced pies with her um all sorts of biz that’s the tip of the iceberg that’s that’s nothing the ghost of Elvis Presley in jarro um but something that runs through all
Of these and what I’m looking for in this is threads that link them together and the strongest thread that I get are balls of light balls of weird light sometimes Bigfoot is seen holding a ball of light or with lights around it um balls of Light have appeared at the same
Time of lake monsters and things like that so we’re on to something here there’s something going on can we have the next photo please that’s not me with a te cozy on my head that’s aliser Crowley the famous magician now he once carried out a ritual at bin house on the shores of
Wait for it l Ness and the ritual was called the ritual of Abra and the mage and abrel was supposed to have been this 19th century guy who went around all the Middle East Egypt and place he looking for real life Wizards and magicians and writing
Down what they told him and this ritual was supposed to be um done over a period of 18 months he chose bin house because of the architecture of it and the ritual supposedly was to bring down and bind the four Dukes of Hell Satan Lucifer the lightbearer they’re not the same beob and
Leviathan now Leviathan is a Hebrew dragon that lived in the sea very similar to the more ancient tmat he was about halfway through this ritual when the boss of a a cult organization called Golden Dawn um contacted him a fellow called Greg matthys uh said he was in trouble in
France could he come and help him basically matth was trying to mooch money off him and Crowley like a great knit left the ritual AB abrel in the Mage to go and help out matys who turned out to be basically a Conor when he got back he found that it
Had all gone to because he hadn’t carried on the ritual he said that the house seemed to be haunted by shapeless black Phantoms his um staff started to go mad a one guy who had been completely T tootal went off on a three-day bender and then tried
To kill his wife another guy another servant attacked Crowley himself and tried to kill him with an axe croad did not punch him unconscious and lock him in the coal house until the police came and he left the area he left the house and returned to London with the ritual
Unfulfilled but some people think this may have Disturbed something uh next one please now that’s the house that’s bin house as it was it burnt down a couple of times it’s being rebuilt at the minute recently but that’s how it was uh in the 60s and it was brought by Jimmy pagee
The rock music Jimmy pagee and he had a uh a guy there to look after it when he wasn’t there and this chapter said all sorts of things went on there was outbreaks of poltergeist activity particularly when the house was being altered one time he
Saw a great statue of Satan rise up off the floor and fly through the air and one night he said that there was some huge creature beating at his bedroom door making these awful noises and he was terrified and he was in there clutching a knife and it didn’t stop
Until Daybreak but shortly after Crowley left uh the monster began began to be seen in L Ness and there are various uh witnesses to the less monster that seemed to say it had an air of evil about it um can we have the next one please this is a guy called FW
Holiday uh he wrote a great book called The Dragon and the dis which is about the link between UFOs and light monsters if you’ve not read it get hold of a copy cuz it’s great he does make errors in it he does get a bit paranoid in it but basically I think
He’s on the right track um George Spicer who saw the creature on land slithering Along on land in front of his car with his wife um Spicer’s wife not the longest Monster’s wife um described this great gray thing with a head and neck like an elephant’s trunk uh he called it an
Abomination he said it terrified him and he called for the lock to be dynamited Richard Jenkins who saw it in 1974 said it looked like a great stomach with a writhing length of gut attached to it and he called it obscene and he said that even after the creature had
Vanished there was an air of obscenity about it and this has been seen with with other light monsters as well holiday in the 1950s uh interviewed a librarian called Georgina carbury who had seen a monster in l f in Ireland and she’d been out with friends on a fishing
Expedition and she said this thing emerged from behind an island it was 30 ft long had these shark like jaws and a long Serpentine writhing body and she said it terrified them and the they ran got into the car and drove away but as they were driving away she had this
Feeling of pursuit as if somehow this thing had psychically left the lock and was pursuing her and she would never go back there for years and years afterwards uh and never again after dark she was terrified of it now this feeling of pursuit I’ve heard this before my
Friend who is now a very well respected scientist saw the Owlman when he was a teenager with his girlfriend and both he and his girlfriend said that they thought that this thing had somehow psychically pursued them back to Hampshire where they lived all the way from Cornwall and that uh he said that
He thought it was lurking in the woods outside his house he was having nightmares about it and he thought it was in the woods looking at him and both of them said they think thought they glimpsed it when they were walking to school and this went went on for years
And he’s in his 40s now and he’s still scared of it um there are sightings of Bigfoot like creatures in brit which couldn’t possibly support a whole population of 7 to8 foot tall Relic homins it’s a nonstarter it’s more likely to be Elvis Presley in a monkey suit it is a a
British Bigfoot the British Bigfoot doesn’t exist not as a flesh and blood animal but uh a few years well a few years more 15 years ago now um my friend John DS and I um and Mike hallwell uh from Newcastle investigated sightings of this big hairy bipedal creature and at uh a
Place uh a country Park um called bolum Lake uh about 30 Mi up south of Newcastle there’s not going to be a a wild man living in a 100 Acre Park 30 Mi south of Jord land but we talked to people that had seen it and it seemed to bring an
Absolute Terror with it and I talked to this one woman called Naomi and a teenage son and then they said they’d seen it they’d heard about it they drove to the area to look for it and they were in a car park and they saw this massive hairy figure
Standing several hundred feet away and even though it was standing still it they had a feeling that it was rushing towards them and they got so frighten they got in the car and drove off and they had this feeling once again of pursuit as if it was somehow psychically pursuing them now holiday
Noticed that there was lots and lots of sightings of weird balls of light around Lo Ness and other lakes that were inhabited by monsters and his idea was that they were part of the same greater foran hole they were manifestations of the same thing can we have the next one please in
1975 this guy the Reverend Donald O exercise less because he thought that like um after willly holiday the less monster was literally a dragon it was a an aquatic wormlike utterly evil Supernatural dragon and uh he had had an encounter in the F of trolls in Norway when he was um
With the captain of a boat he’d seen this humped sea serpent that seemed to be charging at the boat and he thought it was going to ram the boat and the captain said don’t worry it won’t attack you physically this isn’t a flesh and blood animal in the way you understand
It it’s an evil spiritual entity similar to the serpent in the Garden of Eden he was couching it in in Christian terminology so you’ve always got to look at the cultural background of people who are involved in this because they will always talk about it in terms that they
Understand and he said that uh it has a degenerate effect on men’s souls and he became an exorcist and he dealed dealt with all sorts of things not just supposed demonic possessions but black dogs vampires um Chinese Idols that supposed to have evil spirits with them there’s a
Great book called by Mark Alexander called devil Hunter it’s another one you can hunt down online but that’s great it’s all about his life and work and he was at a conference a psychology conference once and he got talking and it was in um Sweden and he got talking
To this psychologist about L monsters and this psychologist said that he’d met loads of people that had seen L monsters that had gone on to become morally degenerate as if it had an effect on them I don’t like Monsters maybe that explains a lot um so he decided
To exercise L Ness and he he did the exorcism at the Four Points of L Ness and in the center and um he there it’s written down what he said and there was a part about this creature cloaking itself in the form of prehistoric demons and how
It should no more uh corrupt the sons of men but he failed because the less monster is still reported now personally I think most of the sightings of the L this monster are explicable with things like seals seabirds boat wakes debes some of it may be a gigantic eel I think
There are some huge eels in a lot of these Lakes like Lo Ness Lo f l Mora but there does seem to be a supernatural element to them as well a guy I know um called Warren speed was actually making a documentary about alist Crowley at lot n and he was
Driving a long lock nest with producer when they saw a massive hump come out of the water rather like an upturn boat and they they saw this thing swimming around and then it dived under the water and they said no one’s going to believe that we’ve seen this because we were up here
Making a film about the less monster and he described it as rather like a whale now something that big can’t live in Loch Ness Loch Ness is very biologically um depleted because there’s so much um peaked in the water light doesn’t penetrate very far so there’s not enough energy going up the food
Chain P trophic levels to support big predators you get fish in lot Nest but not hell of a lot of them so there couldn’t be a population of large animals whale siiz animals in l n so what was it that they saw next one please so modern day sightings of dragons
There are a hell of a lot of them uh the late great Linda Godfrey who’s wrot written several books on Monsters including the Beast of Bray Road the werewolf like creature in Wisconsin um she was contacted by a group of people that said they saw a white dragon in
2007 uh at a place called a conto Falls in Wisconsin and it was after a concert they were in a car park they saw a orange and blue ball of fire shoot across the sky and they wonder what the hell it was and then they saw this
Enormous white dragon and they said it had four legs the classic long tail with the arrow shaped Spike at the end the um back like wings a long neck with a wedg shaped head and they said could see it’s scales and it’s muscles and it
Would breathe fire but not in a jet but in a ball of fire and there was a group of them that saw this and a bit later on one of them went back home and told his mother and sister about it that didn’t believe him but later that night they
Saw the same thing again flying above their house with a number of what L like young ones with it that were much smaller now if you were going to make up a story about Dragon would you have it white I think you’d have it green wouldn’t you or red or or
Something anyway that’s just one story uh next one please that’s an illustration from my new book the highest strangeness of that particular event but it was said to be the size of a plane next one please oh we’re missing one there but okay that’s Namibia uh in Namibia there’s a
Tradition of this thing called the flying snake which is supposed to be a huge wind Serpent and uh in the 1950s the son of a white farmer was supposed be attacked by one of these things and the case was investigated by margorie Courtney latima the scientist that discovered the prehistoric fish the
Ca camp that was thought to be extinct for uh 65 million years and she was convinced there was something to this having interviewed the boy and found tracks where this thing had slithered uh in the 1970s a guy uh from the simia phone the police said that a dragon was
Attacking and killing his cows and he described it as a great Serpentine animal with batlike wings great Jaws biting the cows and smoke was coming up out of its nostrils uh can we have the next one please Um there’s a guy called lar Thomas who’s an expert on animal hair he works for our organization Center of for zology and he does uh analysis on any hair we bring back from our Expeditions now he was contacted a few years ago when the volcano in Iceland with the totally unpronouncable name
Which I’m not even going to attempt went off uh if you remember it downed PLS all across Europe for a couple of months because his volcano was beling out um Ash and gas and so forth that about 10 years ago I believe uh he was contacted
By this guy from Iceland he said he’d been looking at the volcano through binoculars and he said he saw what he thought plane was a plane flying around in it and he was saying what the hell is a plane doing flying through the Ash and then he said the
Plane started to beat its wings and as he looked more closely he saw this thing was a gigantic dragon that had come up from the inside of the volcano and was flying around in the cloud of action he said either I’ve gone mad or I’ve seen a
Dragon when I was in Mongolia hunting for the Mongolian death worm um we were told of contemporary sightings of dragons and there was a well where a dragon was supposed to have lived and people saw the Dr entering the well and coming out of the well and at the time
It was uh under Communist Regime and uh they they thought this was some sort of religious manifestation so they frowned on it and they poured oil into the well and locks the well and the three communist officials two of them died so The Story Goes within a week of
Doing that and one of them was struck Baron and the people believed it was a curse from the dragon but there was another story much more recent um in Mongolia their equivalent of a county is called a su suum and often AUM is the size of a small country because
Mongolia is a fast fast area and uh we were invited for dinner by the uh the head of of one of these sons and he told us that a few years before there had been a traveling doctor who goes around from some to Su uh um village to Village
Uh tending to people and he said he’d gone to draw water from a well and he saw this creature coiled up in a well which had a great snake likee body but with limbs was green and he said it had a face like a horse or a camel and he
Was convinced that it was a dragon and belief of of dragons and Dragons is very strong in Mongolia but they thought they thought of a supernatural entities and they will often come down from the mountains with rainclouds next one please now I said that recently there been a sighting of dragons in England
Well this happened in on December the 27th last year at a place called Waverly Abbey and there was a bunch of Ghost Hunters there were 10 of them there and they were trying to do a seance and looking for ghosts the last thing on their mind was dragons but I’ve
Interviewed five of the 10 of these people uh one polish woman called Dora said she was looking up at a wood which is was about 500 ft away from where uh they were carrying out this salance and she said she saw a creature with enormous backat like wings about 10
M or 33 AC ft across come up out of the woods circle around and then dive back in again she said she didn’t get a good look at the body but the wings were batlik so she didn’t exaggerate at all she said I didn’t see the body I just saw the wings then
Later a whole lot of them saw two smaller dragons now this woman Dora said she saw this thing with batlik wings she said it was about the size of a man about 6 ft long uh once again she didn’t get a good look at the head she said it
Had backl wings it squatted on the ruins and she saw a long tail with the Arrow Head at the end and it looked like it was very dark brown uh other people saw who saw these things said they look to be black in color until one was caught
In the beam of a light and then it appeared sort of a silvery gray color um the wings were ribbed and batlike they had long tails with the a point at the end fairly long necks long head heads one man said he thought he he thought he
Saw limbs underneath it but he couldn’t be sure um once again nobody exaggerated they didn’t say glowing eyes nashing teeth uh one guy said he only saw one of the wings of the thing when it went past but it was like an enormous bat they thought they were bats at first until
They realized how big they were at a distance uh and bats would have been hibernating that time of year they said they were about 10 ft across the wings and 6t long so small all as dragons go um one of them circled around landed in a tree and crouched in a tree and
Everyone I talked to felt intense fear when they saw these things and then they flew off again but 10 people saw these things two small ones and one woman saw a bigger one so that was contemporary 21st century England can we have the next one
Please that is a draing from one of the guys called Luke who saw it he he’s got a long tail with a spike on back like wings long neck uh they were adamant that these weren’t Birds they weren’t geese they weren’t herons we saw well I’ve I’ve been down there twice and
Talked to these people we saw a heron when we were there and it was nothing like what they saw not herons not geese not swans not owls but they were very very afraid of these things and we tried to recreate what they were doing there they were
Doing sort of some table turning and a sance and at one point I looked up and I saw a dark shape seeming to fall down into the trees I couldn’t say what it was it was a distance it was dark it looked large shortly after there was a
Really weird growling sound that I couldn’t identify then sometime later I saw a little ball of Golden Light about 2 feet away from my eyes uh leaving a trail behind it that sort of looped around and then vanished wasn’t a firefly because I’ve seen loads of fireflies and it was
Too early for fireflies so it seems something weird is going on at wely Abbey it’s an ongoing investigation so what will become of it I don’t know so what’s what’s the mechanism that behind all this if these are created from our own subconscious if these are tlers how does it work well
Paul devil R um he came up with this idea of these things called Earth lights which are balls of plasma caused by certain um geophysical effects like the pressure deep in the earth and basically they are ionized plasma but they act like they’re alive now there’s another researcher
Whose name like croan and I’ve got it written on a piece of paper so I’ll have to look at it uh he’s a Romanian guy a friend of Paul Deo and uh this fellow David bom now he’s been studying plasma balls and he said that when they have electrons attached to
Them they start to behave almost like living cells and if there are a number of them together they will act like one entity now I haven’t read all the papers on this I’m not a physicist I’m a zoologist this is only preliminary research that I’ve done but I’m thinking
If there’s anything to the Earth light’s theory if these balls of plasma can act like cells could could they be the building blocks with which are collective subconscious creates monsters with because these balls of light are prevalent in so many 14 cases can we have the next one
Please we’ve gone back the wrong way there are a number of stories of creatures being raised by ritual magic we’ve already seen um Crowley inadvertently do it at L mess there was a story by a guy uh a guy called Alexander rol who was a Russian
Researcher and he was told by an old hunter that prior to World War II he had been in the Russian tigar the great forests of Russia and he’d been out hunting and he saw this group of people uh in headdresses and stuff as the sun was setting and they seemed to be
Chanting and doing some sort of ritual and they seemed to summon up this great Serpentine animal but it had horns and legs and they were bowing down and worshiping it and uh he ran away in Terror from it he was absolutely petrified can we have the next one
Please that’s that’s onea oh I think we’ve missed one somewhere yeah yeah I think we have yeah oh anyway um Nick Redfern have you all heard of Nick Redfern famous for WR UFO books we heard of Nick Redford yeah famous UFO Rider friend of mine he was contacted
Years and years ago by this guy called Rob who said that uh his farm which was near canic Chase in the Midlands which is Infamous for all sorts of weird things going on that UFOs black dogs all sorts of things um that sheep were been found sacrificed and laid out in circles
On his farm and he’d been investigating this and he’ stumbled over something and he got some information to give to uh Nick Redfern and he met Nick in a pub and this guy Rob like me was a goth and he said that uh he had stumbled over [Applause]
This cult he called them the cult of the Moon Beast that was his name for them not theirs and he said that there are only a few of them but they did these rituals around the country and they summoned up monsters and the reason for doing this that that they would be paid
To send these things out to frighten people to death if someone wanted somebody killed they could send one of these things out to frighten them to death and there would be no uh there’ be no murder weapon or anything like this and that initially when they appeared they were balls of
Light and these balls of light could transform into dragonik creatures into things that look like werewolves or dog men things that look like Bigfoot things that look like huge black dog now I would have dismissed this as a load of old bollocks um if it wasn’t for the weird lights being involved I’m
Still not 100% sold on it but the idea the idea of these things are formed from lights their initial form is light um there have been many cases where people have seen Bigfoot transform into a ball of light or a ball of light transform into into Bigfoot there have been cases
When this has happened with black dogs the other theory is that rather than being created by our subconscious and built out of Earth energies is that these things are completely independent independent of us um a less narcissistic Theory maybe but um theoretical physicists have postulated that there are something like 28 different
Dimensions and what lives in these Dimensions if that’s correct really dodgy stuff but the ritual of Abra in the Mage it was supposed to bind the four Dukes of Hell to stop them causing trouble so it was supposed to supposedly be u a good ritual but
Um yeah many good many tales tell you of they’re going to do good when reading their their thought processes are not good they’re dark is they you know so just you know there’s a couple of sort of coincidences there Mak me wonder oh these people are doing no good well I
Think I think ritual magic can possibly attract these things but I don’t think you can control them no you might be able to control a demon you might be able to control a that’s getting that Expos these things are darking so a dragon is more like a god so you’re you’re dealing with
Something like lovecrafts great old ones yeah this white dragon that was seen in Wisconsin yeah was there a previous history by with the Native Americans or anything like that not that I know not that I know no um Native American DRS seem to be for the most part Serpentine like horn serp are
Associated with water living in lakes and stuff rather than the fire breathing winged European ones so no there wasn’t so this is a very European type dragon seen in a in a very American style place maybe it’s got something to do with the people that saw it maybe all
Foran phenomenon the comp a component to them is is the people that see them and their cultural backgrounds like for instance fairies we think as fairies as as delightful little Sprites with wings where in actuality theories in Legend are something to be feared like dragons they they’re often malevolent at best
Unpredictable and they never had wings in Legend but some of the modern sightings of them Give Them Wings maybe because it’s what the viewer expect I’m I’m from the Welsh Valley so I tell us the fair people is is what I remember the that and obviously I come
From a world speaking background um from school in and the way we was told the mythology of the fairies while I was in school from the app bar region Blackwood and those places were that the fairies were um they were ambivalent humans at best um and were standoffish and very much sort of
Um they would help if they felt like it more often than not they didn’t more often than not they were um they would carry out their own business and if you got in their way you would find out about it um they would help if
You needed it and if they felt was in their best interest help um but more often or not um it was a kind of if it was the the nice thing to do um in their own um sort of um morality then they would have not in
Human morality so it was kind of it was kind of an OD sense of balance you’d never know when it was a nice thing to do you never know when it was when when they would help or when they would give give you an assistance so it was never nice to sort of
Think you know from your point of view that they would help um so it was kind of like expecting another animal to help you out um for expecting them you know sort of giving them favors in expectance of of being helped um and so a lot of people would sort of
Give them fa you know try and try and offer them favors in in order to be helped and then would be bitly disappointed or if they would see it as insult to be given you know to or left left sort of silver or whatever and they’ve end up with you know the houses
Bur down and things like that and some of the German um houres or spes or whatever would would treat humans in exactly the same way you know like you know you sort of crossed them but you wouldn’t understand how You’ cross them so sometimes the r fairies would be
Very difficult to deal with because you’d never understand how the morality worked the fairness in their in their morality would be up to them not up to you to understand so I’m just wondering if U if some of the Sprites at some of those S of mysterious lands mysterious worlds
That we think we understand have no bearing whatsoever around here across the world in other in other cultures as oh yeah yes there are there are stories that have exact parallels there’s a story from Japan they have these things called tangu which are winged humanoids and there’s a story of a man
Who had a great lump on his face and he’s walking through the woods one day and he hears a tangu making music so he takes out his um bwa which is like straming he plays along with them and they like it and they said you you’ve done such a nice job we’ll take
This growth from your face so he tells another guy who’s got a growth on his face and he goes to the area but instead of playing along with them he tries to play over them and they get angry and give them another growth from the other
Side of his face well there’s a Celtic story that’s exactly the same but it’s it’s the fairies it’s a guy with a hunch back and they cure his hunch back when he plays along with them and when another guy with the Hunchback tries to play over them they make his hunch twice
As big so it’s the same basically it’s the same story I’ll tell you something 24 years ago I was up on dartmore and it was in late October or early November and we’ve gone to see a stone circle called scorl which is the biggest stone circle on dartmore and you can actually drive
Up to it and there’s a car park but we didn’t know at the time I I was with three other people and we’d park the car quite away from the circle we were walking across the MS to get to the stone circle and we entered this field that had a dry stone
Wall and we got into this field and it was um what in Deon is called the dimy um Twilight but you could still see quite well and and it wasn’t a big field it had some sheep in it it was I don’t think it would have been even an
Acre and we were walking around in this field and we couldn’t find the gate at the other side and we were walking around for ages and there’s this feeling of wooly headedness almost like you’re walking through tree and I thought there’s something weirds going on here
Why can’t we find the gate on the other side and I noticed it had got dark and I thought hang on how long have people been wandering around in this field for then by the dry stone wall there appears a ring of Lights almost like the lights on a big wheel and they’re
About 5 ft across this ring and they’re Bluey white all these dots and I said to the look at that and they all saw it and then it winked out and the lights came on again but they were like in the outline of a human being um do you
Remember the old gry whistle test do you remember at the start they had the figure with is is outlined in it’s sort of like that but the shape was like um the image on a toilet door where you’ve got the men and the women it was like
The image of a man with his arms and legs like that but the the head seemed sunken down into the the neck and it was about four and a half 5T tall and it was in midair and we all saw it and then that winked off again and I realized
Some weird was going on and there’s an old um legend that if you’re under the spell of the Pixies on dmore the thing to do is take your jacket off turn it inside out and put it on inside out and I said to everybody okay everyone
Take your coats off turn them inside out and put them on again nobody said Rich are you radio rental why are we going to do that they all just did it and instantly the gate was there in front of us and we went through got to
The stone circle and the weird thing was on the drive home we never discussed it we never talked about it so yeah theories exist there one of islands on sorry where if they apply for planning to build buildings in Ireland they apply to the Dwarfs and
All yeah they do it in Iceland as well the country not the shop yeah and in in New Zealand they have same beliefs about dragons they call them tinwa but you have to you have to get the permission of the tinwa to to move in because they live
Underground he said he was in a talk and he was saying if they didn’t apply for permission to build the property yeah to be smashed up everything the next day going up be stuff wrong yeah everything real there was a house built in Germany and the people of the village
Said to this guy you can’t if you build your your extension on that side of the house it’ll be demolished every single night you need to build it on that side of the house this guy said do bollocks I wanted that side and he built he built
The house and he you know he didn’t live in the area he wanted it there every night half the building would just collapsed and they he said well it’s got to be subsidence he people there every single time to survey and every else and they said there’s not subsidence there’s
Nothing wrong with it so we kept building it kept building it kept building it every week on the dock that sort side of the building kept collapsing he went back to the postmaster of the village and he said why is it h happening he said cuz there’s a fairy a fairy track goes
Straight to do that you he said if he put on that side of the house nothing will happen to her So eventually after months of building this thing and rebuilding it you put it over there and nothing ever happened to it again and he said You’ just got to you just got to
Keep that path clear so as soon as you keep that there you’ll be fine and that’s it he just moved it across he changed it he moved it across the door the other side and that was fine em yeah just the white dragon you know he about the
White dragon the red dragon yeah but apparently the white dragon was a symbol of the early Anglo Saxons yes H hor the leaders of the sax took over Kent originally their symbol was the white dragon and there’s a a legend in uh in Wales I think it’s in the Marin Oran
About the the red dragon fighting the white dragon Yes civilizing W it’s the Kels from the Anglo Saxons yeah I’m not either I’m a Viking an ancestrally so I don’t have a dog in that fight yeah but it was Merlin wasn’t it it was Merlin who who told the king
That it was the two dragons under the tower fighting now that’s a case of um dragons being used as an allegory and people have tried to explain dragons away as allegorical but you can’t have an allegory without something to make the allegory you can’t say someone who’s as
Brave as a lion without there being a lion to be compared to so apparently there there a white dragon in in the WR yeah it’s a p you think they might have played out the allegory in a ritual and then the dragons with the thought forms are fighting from the
Consciousness it could well have been it could well have been yeah yeah can I ask you you there’s a I’m sorry started no go ahead no go ahead okay I was going to ask um obviously you mentioned the story with the uh fairies have you encountered in your work any
Other Cryptid like not just stories and I’m in ComEd anything yourself oh um yes yeah when I was in Tasmania I’ve been to Tasmania three times looking for the Tasmanian wolf which is this flesh eating marsupial that looks like a wolf with a tiger stripes officially it’s extinct but it
Isn’t I’ve met loads of people that have seen it um I was over there with a guy called Mike Williams who’s an Aussie and he got some friends that lived slap bang in the middle of Tasmania and their daughter had seen one of these things when she
Was a kid so we went to stay with them to talk about it the daughter wasn’t there but Mike said that there are weird lights are seen in the woods by this house uh it’s near a man-made Lagoon called Bronte Lagoon which has had a lake monster scene in it so it’s all
Going down there and Mike says I’ve seen these things I think they’re paranormal so I went there not really expecting to see anything and he says they started about 10:00 and they ended about 12:00 at night so it’s about two hour almost as if it’s a show with a start and an
End so my and I and the this couple that um live in this house they have a goat farm um they said they they see these things every night unless it’s raining um they don’t come if it’s raining and they said one time one of these lights came right up close to the
House and it went along a window box and in the morning all the plants were dead in the window box so I wasn’t expecting to see anything we were outside looking for these things then this yellowy white sort of loing shaped light about the size of a grape appears over a chicken
Shed and they said yeah that’s one of them that’s one of these lights and then it Winks out and then more lights started to come on in the forest and as many as four were visible at once and some were on the floor some were in midair some were up in the
Branches and you go towards them you get within about 10 ft and then they wink out and then appear about 10 ft further into the forest these weren’t fireflies or gloworms cuz I’m familiar with them and uh you follow them through to the forest and then you turn around the
Bit behind you so Mike said let’s drive down to the other side of the Lagoon to make sure it’s nothing to do with the lighthouse that’s at the Lagoon so we drove around and we found this Lighthouse the beam didn’t even reach the house and the woods because they
Were on a cliff they were higher up but when we were on the the far side of the lake we saw this sphere of red light about the size of a beach ball up in the trees so we drove back down back round by the time we got there it had
Gone but the couple that own the house said that they’ seen it as to but they thought it was orange rather than red but it was that Hue that was sort of on the cusp of being orange or red and uh then it stopped at 12:00 it’s just
Stopped as if you know they’re on the clock all right that’s all done and I got up in the middle of the night to go to the L and I watched and I looked and there was nothing but that had a very different feel to the thing on dartmore
The dmore thing felt like there was an intelligence behind it that was just with us for some reason this felt almost mechanical as if even if there was no one there to see it it would just happen mechanically um so what the hell that was I don’t
Know uh I’ve heard the call of the orang pend deck on many occasions and I’ve found it Footprints and its handprints and I found its hair that’s been examined by uh lar Thomas from Copenhagen University and he says it’s uh a new sort of primate it’s related to
The orangutan but it’s not an orangutan it’s a new primate uh I came very close to seeing the Russian Wild Man the almasty when I was in staking out an old abandoned farmhouse in Russia something went past a door and whatever it was was 7 foot plus the door was open there was
Light Moonlight coming through it and we heard this thing vocalized and it came along a uh a Aranda and went past the door and whatever it was was on two legs think was 7 foot plus but I didn’t get a good good enough look at it uh I saw the
Monster of Martin Mia which was a lake in Lang show turned out to be a huge catfish uh that’s that’s about it when you uh when you went to see that flesh you did in um yeah the tesan wolf what was you wearing um I was wearing what I
Generally wear on Expeditions which is generally like um Cary or camouflage colored jacket and shirt and trousers just wondering put some pad in all right yeah there’s only one case of of them biting a human being and that’s when someone poked one with a stick and what was your question I think you
Answered it I think You’ answered it in the fact that I was going to ask your formal education is science-based yeah and what you’ve walked in on and what your passion seems to be is nonscience based well that’s sort of half true um cuz if you’re painting in
Very broad Strokes there’s two types of monsters they fall into two categories one of them are the true Cryptids which are just animals we don’t know about that’s animals that are unknown to science like sea serpents the yeti stuff like that and then there are animals
That are thought to be extinct but might still be around like the Tasmanian wolf the giant ground sloth the pink-headed duck the I woodpecker so and then there are animals that are bigger than what the textbooks said say they should be like Giant anac there Giant crocodil and
Stuff but then there’s this other lot that seems to be paranormal for want of a better word uh in that they appear in places that can’t couldn’t support them and they appear alongside of the foran phenomenon like Poltergeist outbreaks and UFOs they might appear and disappear
In front of witness’s eyes or they they morph into balls of light or grow from balls of light um I mean in in this book I’ve written there are cases of creatures that are like Bigfoot haunting houses like ghosts there’s there’s a case from Australia and they call the
Wild man of Australia the yahi there was a case from the 1950s of this house being haunted typical pter stuff they’re in the middle of it the door bursts open this great big hairy AP like thing comes in grabs a Woman by the legs and tries
To pull her out through the door in the middle of a pug outbreak in America there’s this there were cases of a Bigfoot like creature with red glowing eyes in a haunted house walking through walls like a ghost so you see UFOs monsters ghosts bleeding into each other
Like they’re all part of the same thing and there’s a chapter on miscellaneous as well that doesn’t it isn’t easily fit fit into the the others but they’re all part of the same bigger phenomenon whatever the hell it is so through your experience then and obviously got extensive experience from
From a range of topics or or subsections of all these creatures do you believe that governments or higher ups know about these beings and they keep them from us or what do you think no I think they they governments don’t like when they don’t know about things and I don’t
Think they know about these things I think they as baffled as the rest of us I there are conspiracy theories that say that the Tasmanian government know about the the Tasmanian wolf and they keep it stun because it would affect the logging industry like there’s a bird called the
Spotted ow in North America and they Clos down loads of the logging industry to protect this quite rightly to protect this endangered owl and some people say that the US government know about Sasquatch and they don’t want to affect the logging industry and there’s a series of books by a guy called David
Pades called Missing 411 um if you try and buy them on Amazon they cost a bomb but if you go to his website you can get them fairly reasonably they’re absolutely fascinating and terrifying and they’re about people disappearing in American and Canadian national parks under really really weird circumstances and he’s convinced that
And the Rangers have told him as well something’s going on and they they don’t keep a database of missing people they don’t even keep a written list on a piece of paper of missing people in these American national parks and he’s convinced that they know about it and
Because it they make so much money off the national parks they don’t want people as to what’s taking these people that’s a different story I think some of them are rogue Sasquatch uh some of them are something else but we don’t know what’s interesting about them is some of
The disappearance people look fly cloth up tidy yeah and just left them there and then then they say oh yeah that was a pummer that it was eaten by a pumer a pummer that very nicely folds your clothes up after it’s eaten you yeah the really weird one there there’s a woman
Called um what was her name um um Evelyn man Manuel Roseman and she was in a an dancer stripper and she went on a uh solo hike in yosam National Park and they found a body beneath this place called uh this big waterfall um in the
Park but the body wasn’t at the bottom of the waterfall it was a long way from The Cliffs and the clothes weren’t wet so she wasn’t swept off by the waterfall and at that time of year the water was very low um it they it seemed that she was picked
Up by something with inhuman strength and thrown off this Cliff but afterwards and grimit her when she hit the floor she died from massive trauma to the head and internal organs basically her head was destroyed cuz she’d been thrown off a 500 foot cliff by something with hidious strength but
Afterwards the corpse had been raped and there were um vaginal lesions and seamen inside her and they didn’t have DNA analysis back then this was 68 I think but if they did have back DNA analysis back then I think it would not have been or what
Something you and I would call human I think that was a road Sasquatch but apparently they still won’t they still won’t releas the details of it all these years later to call [Applause] it
2 Comments
The theory of lighter than air gasses being held in the body of the dragon do to some kind of evolutionary process is intriguing because you could correlate and postulate a similar alternative evolutionary process could've also taken place in some early sub species of mankind to evolve into what mythology describes as " Sylf" or elven species purported to visit ancient man in flying ships etc.
A fascinating and well presented talk. Ronald Hutton also does a good podcast on Dragons. Rupert Sheldrake might be able to explain "fossil memories". Best wishes from Truth Proof. Keep up the good work.