I received an email from my friend and colleague, British cryptozoologist Richard Freeman. Richard is also the Zoological Director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology. He forwarded the following article about his ongoing investigation of a mass sighting of 'dragons' in England.
"Hi, Lon. You might be interested in this case for the Phantoms and Monsters site. It involves a mass witness who sighted dragons in England a little over a year ago. It's an ongoing investigation and I'll be going back to the area again. All the best, Rich"
By Richard Freeman - The dragon is the great-granddaddy of all monsters. Forget about demons, vampires, and zombies—the dragon predates all of these and other monsters. The earliest dragon legends have been traced to South Africa and date back some 75,000 years! This most powerful, ancient, and widespread monster appears in every culture and country on Earth. Great Britain alone has over one hundred dragon legends.
Many UK dragon stories feature the beast appearing out of the blue, terrorizing an area then simply vanishing as mysteriously as it appeared. There is no hero or damsel in distress. The dragons of Wormingford (Suffolk), Anwick (Lincolnshire), and Cawthorne (Yorkshire) are examples of these. They sound very like modern-day accounts of mystery animals that turn up, scare, and baffle witnesses before vanishing again. Contemporary documents like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle record sightings of dragons which are quite distinct from comets are recorded as something different.
Over the years many theories of what lies behind dragon lore have been offered. The fossil bones of dinosaurs and other huge extinct animals, meetings with huge crocodiles and pythons, or a metaphor for 'energies' running through the earth. None of them really cut the mustard as an explanation for the dragon phenomena.
Most people, at least in the West, think of the dragon as a folklore creature without any basis in reality. Yet people all over the world claim to have encountered dragons in the modern age. I have been collecting these accounts for some time. Here are just a few.
In Namibia, there is a tradition of a giant, winged serpent that has a glowing gem in its horned head.
One of the most dramatic sightings was in 1978 when a French farmer was tending his cattle in the Karas region when he saw a bright white light heading straight toward him. Then afterward he heard a massive thud and he heard one of his cattle cry out in pain, as he rushed to check what attacked the cow, he saw a dragon, He told the local police, "I saw what looked like... as the best matching description I can give you is that it looked like a dragon, it had a white bright light on its head, which was blinding me, the colour of it was brown and yellow, it had green eyes, there was a tar-like smell coming from it and it had smoke coming out of its nostrils."
Viking folklore is full of dragon legends so the next account should come as no surprise.
In 2010, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted spewing out titanic clouds of ash into the atmosphere and grounding planes for weeks. One local man watching the eruption saw something flying about the volcano. He realized that what he saw must have been huge due to the great distance he was observing it from. At first, he thought it was a plane until he saw the wings flapping. In an e-mail to Lars Thomas, the Danish biologist, and cryptozoologist, he said the following, “As I see it, there are only two possible explanations, either I was imagining the whole thing, or what I saw was, in fact, a dragon. I find that very hard to believe, but then again, I don't think I could imagine something like that.”
In the late 20th and early 21st Gunung Kancing, a mountain in the province of Lampung, Western Java was thought to be the lair of a dragon the locals called the 'ular naga' or dragon snake. It was described as resembling a huge snake with a horse-like head and bat's wings. The monster terrorized Peserwaran village for years. It stole and ate children, often attacking in broad daylight. The beast would snatch the children whilst their parents were busy in the fields. One village elder, Darga said that the dragon was seen almost daily. In the end, the villagers blocked up the entrance to the cave where they thought the creature lurked. After that, the killing stopped but the people were so scared that they mostly abandoned their homes and moved to other villages.
The late, great Fortean researcher Linda Godfrey was contacted by witnesses who claimed to have seen dragons in Wisconsin in 2007. One young man she calls 'Jim' (a pseudonym) told her that on October 7, 2007, in Oconto Falls he and some friends had attended a concert. They were lying on the top of their vans and on grass looking up at the sky when they all saw something strange. A ball of orange and blue fire shot across the sky, followed by something even weirder Jim said, “We knew it had to be a dragon because how else would you describe something flying over that was almost silent, larger than a plane, had a tail, bat-like wings, long neck, and a narrow, pointed head and scales? I remember noticing the scales because they dimly reflected the street lights below. We thought we were all seeing things but five minutes later it flew over again, this time in the opposite direction.”
Linda was later in contact with Jim's mother whom she referred to as 'Janet'. Jim had phoned his mother for a lift and told her what he had seen. Janet thought her son was joking and went to pick him up. She noticed a shadow crossing a parking lot and then saw a fireball, blue with orange around it shooting from east to west in the sky. Jim told her that he and his friends had seen the same thing before the dragon had arrived. Janet then drove her son home.
Linda also spoke to Jim's sister Jill. Jim had talked her into staying up. The pair lay on a trampoline in their backyard looking at the sky. They saw a fireball shooting east to west followed quickly by one moving west to east. Then they heard a loud screech that caused all the local dogs to bark. Then the dragon returned. The creature was flying only twenty feet above their two-story house. After looking at pictures of pterosaurs they saw that the wing structure was very different. The family also saw smaller dragons that they took to be the younger of the larger ones. The smaller creatures seemed to be playing by circling each other. Jill said, “I don't care what the scientists say, it was NOT a pterodactyl. I could see it had pearly, pale scales. And the fireball came from its mouth. They were beautiful and flew gracefully. I could see they had four legs, too. They were tucked up underneath them like when a bird flies.”
This case is interesting because the creature is described as a true dragon, having four legs and two wings. However, most screen depictions of dragons these days make the mistake of only giving them two legs, technically making them wyverns. Here, it seems the witnesses were not influenced by the media.
These are just a few of the many stories I have collected. They may seem absurd but are they any more absurd than other Fortean phenomena such as encounters with 'aliens' and 'spaceships', falls of fish, or 'spirits of the dead'?
But what about Great Britain? On December 27th, 2023, multiple witnesses saw dragons at Waverley Abbey near Farnham in Surrey, and I am conducting an ongoing investigation into the case.
Jon Downes first alerted me to the case. A group of ten people, ghost hunters from the South Coast Ghosts group had been at the abbey conducting ghost research on the evening in question when all of them saw some very strange, flying creatures.
The Abbey itself was founded In 1128 by Bishop William Giffard and was a functioning Cistercian abbey until it fell victim to Henry VIII's dissolution in 1536.
I arranged to interview one of the witnesses at the sight itself and together with fellow fortean Jackie Tonks, travelled to Surrey.
The witness was a Polish lady named Dora (second name on record). She and her mother met us at the Abbey and we interviewed her.
The group had been using a Ouija board in the cloister of the Abbey at about 9 in the evening. The planchette has spelled out the name 'Zozo'. For those not in the know, Zozo was a supposed demonic entity contacted by American Darren Evens in 2009. Darren subsequently claimed the entity was behind all kinds of havoc in his life. He recorded the story on the site True Ghost Tales. Zozo became somewhat of an internet meme for a while and even had a horror film made about it. The name first appeared in an 1816 book The Infernal Dictionary by Jacques Auguste Simon Collin de Plancy. It is one of three entities supposed to have possessed a girl. However, the author rejects the story as false because the girl had previously been punished for false claims of demonic possession.
As the modern story can be traced back to one man, Darren Evens, the story is probably a hoax and Zozo has no more reality than the Slender Man, the Rake, or the Dybbuk box.
After ending the Ouija session the group tried table-turning on a portable table with fold-up legs. Whilst their hands were on the table it shook violently and the legs snapped shut.
The group then moved over to the large yew tree in the grounds of the Abbey. Now it was about ten in the evening. Glancing over to some woods around 200 meters or 650 feet away Dora saw a huge flying creature emerge, bank around in the air, then dive back into the woods. Its wings were bat-like and 10 meters or 33 feet across, measured against the trees. None of the others saw this.
Then, another, smaller creature flew into view, much closer. Dora said it was man-sized, about 6 feet long with a 10-foot wingspan. Again the wings were bat-like. It seemed to be dark brown in colour. The creature landed on the ruins of the abbey at the South Transept. She did not get a look at the head of the creature but saw a long tail that ended in an 'arrowhead' point. The beast then flew off. The geese in a nearby river were screaming at the time. She produced a rough sketch of what she saw.
Dora admitted to being very frightened at the time. She told me, "I did not believe in dragons before but now I certainly do."
She was still frightened when Jackie and I spoke with her, thinking that the entities were 'demonic'. I explained to her that dragons were thousands of years older than the Christians or indeed any conceptions of demons.
Some days later I arranged to talk to some of the other witnesses on a Zoom call.
Darren Graham said that the group met at about 7 in the evening to go ghost hunting at the Abbey. On the way in from the car park, he saw two white lights in the sky that shot away fast.
In the cloisters he was using a Three Field Meter Mk 3, to detect static fields. The meter was in his words 'going mad'. They then went to another part of the abbey. Later when they did the Ouija board session one guy thought his late mother was trying to contact him, though Darren was sceptical of this.
Another member Luke Sturgess caught a glimpse of two 'dark things' swooping about in the sky. He also felt that the thing coming through the board was demonic and not the other member's mother.
During the table tipping, the table was thrown about violently and they all felt uneasy.
The group moved to the yew tree and tried the board again. A member called Nigel wanted to try the board again, under the tree. The geese started to make a noise. Then another member cried 'Look at that'. About 100 feet away, above the ruins, and flying towards them was a big, bat-like creature. Darren said it was long and back and made a fruit bat look tiny. Its body was about 6 feet long and he estimated the wings to be 8 feet across. As it drew close it turned its long head to look at them, then turned on its axis and flew back the way it came. Nigel said 'Zozo' was on the board when the creature appeared though I'm not inclined to give this any relevance to what was being seen.
Darren said the wings were bat-like and were adamant that the thing was not a goose, swan, heron, or cormorant. He thought he saw legs under the body but could not be sure. He did not notice eyes and as the creature did not open its mouth he saw no teeth, Nobody wanted to investigate any closer. He said that it was useless to try and use his camera as it was too dark. He said, "I've thought of every other option. It's not something normal that would have been around at night."
Julia Pooley said she was in the cloisters when she thought she heard children's voices called 'mum'. The geese made a noise.
When they moved to the tree she heard somebody say 'Look at that'. Looking up she saw what she thought was a bat circling and thought 'My god, that's the biggest bat I've ever seen'. The creature's wings looked bat-like but did not beat as fast as a bat's. The wings moved more like a bird's despite being structured like a bat's. It had a long tail and a long thin head.
The creature looked black but when caught in the moonlight or by torchlight it was silver in colour. Something was trailing under it, maybe legs. The creature landed in the yew tree before taking off again and a second one flew by the ruins. She tried to take a picture on her phone but all she got was a whitish blob. She said, "It had bat's wings rather than bird's wings. I've not seen anything like it. It looked podgy when in the tree but long and slender in flight."
Julia felt afraid of the creatures and felt they could easily swoop down and kill her.
Luke Sturgess did not get a good look at the creatures. He did see they had bat wings and when one one landed in the yew he could see a silvery eye shine as it looked at him.
Luke Gosling said that he was at the 'hanging tree' (the old yew) engaging in table tipping when he thought he saw a bat. It soon resolved into a massive flying animal with a 10-foot wingspan and a long tail. It had a long neck and pointed head.
The creature flew into the tree. When he shone his torch at it he saw the log tail with the arrowhead point. He produced a sketch of the creature showing its bat-like wings and long tail. He was convinced it was not any kind of bird.
I was impressed by the lack of exaggeration in the witness's accounts. There were no gnashing teeth or flaming breath. They just reported what they saw with no dressing. As Darren said, they were looking for ghosts, dragons were the last thing they expected to see. Neither is there a dragon legend associated with the abbey.
I decided that Jackie Tonks and I needed to meet with some more of the witnesses at the Abbey to try and recreate what the group was doing on the night. Not every one of the original ten witnesses could make it but Darren, Julie, Dora, and the two Lukes were able to join us just before sunset at the abbey.
We saw a large heron fishing nearby and Darren confirmed that the flying creatures he saw looked nothing like it.
As darkness fell we had a Ouija board session. The planchette indicated that a dragon would manifest that night but then degenerated into nonsense. I'm skeptical about Ouija boards, as in my experience, they seldom make any sense.
Later we tried table-turning with a small, fold-up table. Several of us lightly put our hands on the surface of the table. It began to tremble and jerk after a while and then would rise up on two, then one leg and spin around. I failed to see how this was happening naturally as we were not gripping the sides but just gently laying our fingers upon it.
A little later I glanced at a tree line some 250 meters (820 feet) away. This was not the same tree line that Dora saw the huge bat-winged entity. For a split second, I saw a black shape that seemed to fall into the trees from above. I could not make out a shape, it was just a black mass. However, it was visible against the night sky and would have had to be of a decent size for me to see it from so far away.
Shortly after, from the same general area came a very strange noise that I can best describe as a moaning growl. It was unlike any wild animal or indeed any livestock I have ever heard of. I make no claim that this was a 'dragon' vocalizing or indeed that it was paranormal, I just couldn't identify it.
Whilst walking near the transept sometime later, I saw a small bright golden light about the size of a pea. It whizzed past my face about three feet away dragging a comet-like trail behind it. The sighting only lasted a couple of seconds. Nothing further happened that night and we finally left at about midnight.
So what is occurring at Waverley Abbey? There seem to be several phenomena. Weird creatures, strange lights, and poltergeist-like activity all occurring in what may be a new 'window area'. Jon Downes thinks this may be the most important UK Fortean flap since the Owlman saga.
I think it is highly unlikely that the witnesses were lying, they seemed genuinely scared by what they had seen. They were looking for ghosts and dragons were the last thing in their minds.
Could they have mistaken large birds? Britain's largest native bird, the great bustard can have a wingspan of 8 foot 10 inches and weigh in at 46lbs. They are found only in Wiltshire in the UK and there are about 100 of them living there after a re-introduction program.
Other large birds found in the UK include mute and whooper swans, golden and white-tailed eagles, common cranes, grey herons, European eagle owls, and Canada geese. But none of these have bat-like wings or long tails ending in arrow-shaped points.
The HBO TV series House of the Dragon (technically House of the Wyvern), the prequel to Game of Thrones, was filming in Bourne Woods some 1000 meters (3280 feet) from the abbey in 2023. The filming took place from August to October and wrapped long before the sightings on December 27th. Battle scenes were filmed there as well as a blue screen on which a CGI wyvern would later be animated.
All the wyverns in House of the Dragon were CGI so none of them could be used as an explanation for sightings of dragons at Waverley Abbey. Flying, remote-controlled dragons were not used in the production at all. Remote control pterosaurs, some life-sized have been built in the past but in flight, they look stiff and unreal and they cannot land in trees and abbey ruins and crawl around so we can discount this. The filming of a fantasy series in the area is simply synchronicity.
I do not think the dragons people are reporting from around the world are flesh and blood animals in the way a crocodile or anaconda is. If these plane-sized things inhabited our world full time they would be seen regularly not to mention turning up on the radar. They would be attacking aircraft, carrying people off, and burning down cities. The dragon, in feel, is, for want of a better term, a paranormal manifestation. Dragons are 'real' but just a different kind of real. They are part of what I call the 'global monster template'.
The global monster template is a theory I developed in Thailand in 2000 while searching for giant snakes in the Mekong. Every culture seems to have the same kinds of monsters in their folklore. Dragons, hairy giants, monstrous dogs, giant birds, little people, and monstrous cats turn up in stories from all over the world.
This Global Monster Template may have its genesis back in the mists of time, in our own evolutionary past. Several million years ago, our Australopithecine ancestors on the plains of East Africa had a struggle to survive. Our ancestors were being preyed upon by, and were in competition with, various formidable creatures. Crocodiles and pythons ate them, as did big cats, African hunting dogs, and large birds of prey such as eagles. They competed against other, primates such as giant baboons and other races of hominids, some larger than them and some smaller. All of these creatures can be slotted nicely into the universal monster template.
Maybe at the same time, our ancestors began to grasp their own mortality and have a concept of death and the fact that they too would one day die, something that could happen at the drop of a hat in such a deadly, predator-filled environment.
The concept of 'fossil memories' runs that modern-day organisms, including humans, retain behaviour developed for dealing with predators and competitors from our ancient past. These behavioural quirks are passed down in our genes. An example is how, in homes with more than one story, the bedroom is almost always upstairs. This is a throwback to sleeping in trees to avoid predators. As well as behaviour, latent fears are passed down too. We associate black with evil, and villains dress in black, this is due to a primordial fear of the dark, when human vision is poor but the vision of primate-eating predators like leopards, is acute. Our ancestors were at a disadvantage. The Global Monster Template is formed from the ancient terrors of our early African ancestors, passed down in our genes through millions of years, from generation to generation through species to species. Even after three million years of more of evolution, those fears remain with us.
The Buddhist monks of Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of the Orient have long claimed to be able to create tangible objects with the power of their minds alone. Through deep concentration, and extreme mental discipline, it is said they can create a kind of spirit being - an artificial ghost if you will - that is so convincing that it is often mistaken for a real person or animal. These mind beings are called tulpas.
Westerners have experimented with them to varying degrees of success. One example is the famous 'Philip' experiment carried out in Toronto, Canada by a group called the Toronto Society for Psychical Research. It was led by parapsychologist Dr. A.R. George Owen and psychologist Dr. Joel Whitton, its aim was to create an artificial ghost using the mind power of participants. They gave their fake ghost a background but it seemed to break away from them. It seems that this artificial ghost where created by the power of the group's minds working together.
Sometimes it seems that even fictional characters can leave the page and be seen by their creators. John Constantine is a character created by the legendary comic book writer, Alan Moore, and debuting in issue 37 of the DC comic Swamp Thing in 1985. Constantine is a working-class, British occultist from Liverpool. He bears a strong resemblance to Sting, the singer of the band The Police. Unshaven, wearing a long raincoat, and depicted as constantly having a fag hanging from his lips, Constantine is like an occult cross between Gene Hunt from the TV series Life on Mars and Steerpike from Mervyn Peak's gothic fantasy Titus Groan.
Alan Moor, Jamie Delano, Peter Milligan, and Brian Azzarello all claim to have met and in some cases even spoken with the fictional John Constantine.
The medium Franek Kluski (1873- 1943) was said to materialise creatures at seances, these included a huge bird like a night jar, a massive black dog, a lion-like big cat, and an ape-man. It was almost as if he was tapping into the global monster template.
I experimented with tulpa creation whilst in my student digs in Leeds in the 1990s. Focusing on Atlach-Nacha,, a fictional spider god created by the writer Clark Ashton Smith. The results were surprising, to say the least, but that is an article on itself.
If one mind, or a handful of minds, in intense concentration can create a tulpa, what could the gestalt unconscious of mankind as a whole do? Rupert Sheldrake postulated shared 'morphogenic fields'.He hypothesised the m fields of all individuals of a species, were linked to a huge gestalt m-field. He proposed that evolutionary changes, behavioural patterns, and information were shared at a subconscious level between the whole species. When individuals pick up advantageous new behavioural traits, it is incorporated into the gestalt. He believed this was passed on by resonance, rather like the way that the energy wave from a plucked string on an instrument, can resonate onto another string on the same instrument that has not been plucked. This works because part of the unplucked string has the potential to resonate at frequencies in common with the vibrating string, and thus can resonate in harmony. In music, this is called harmonic resonance. Sheldrake called his biological analogue, morphic resonance.
This would seem to be the ideal way for gigantic racial thought forms to occur. Perhaps we should seek the origin of dragons and other monsters, in the jungles of our own minds, and in the fossil memories handed down to us in our genes from our remote ancestors. UFOs and ghosts may stem from the confusing new lights seen in the night sky by our once jungle-dwelling primate ancestors and their own awakenings to the nature of death.
When these ancient horrors re-emerge they seem to take on palpable form for a time. Is this where some of our stranger monster reports have their genesis?
There is, however, another possibility about the nature of monsters, ghosts UFOs, and other strange things - a disquieting one. Namely that they are truly real, not products of our minds but fully independent and from another dimension. The idea of other realities that co-exist with ours, is not new. In the dark ages, this place was called fairyland. In the Victorian era, it was known as the astral plane. Modern writers have many names for it, John Keel calls it the super-spectrum, Jerome Clark the outer-edge, and F. W. Holliday the goblin-universe.This elsewhere is the postulated domain of just about every monster, phantom, and weird entity ever reported. Irish poet and author, W.B Yeats, studied esoteric and occult subjects and spoke to The Ghost Club several times about his experiences.
Fairyland actually exists as an invisible world within which the visible world is immersed like an island in an unexplored ocean and is peopled by more species of living beings than this world because it is incomparably more vast and varied in its possibilities.
In Islamic lore, there is a race of daemons known as djinn. This is where the Western concept of the genie is derived from. Djinn were not one type of creature but came in as many kinds as there are animals in our dimension. The Koran devotes a whole chapter to them. Djinn are made from 'smokeless fire' which could be translated in modern parlance to energy. They are said to inhabit our world but are usually invisible to us, and we to them. Sometimes the veil slips and the djinn are seen.
Djinn comes in many forms, other Muslims have told me, quite independently, that the main djinn forms are dragons and huge serpents, huge black dogs with glowing eyes, ape-like beasts, huge birds, and massive black cats. Ring any bells? They are right out of the Global Monster Template.
The Hindus call the same entities rakshasas, shape-shifting daemons. Jerome Clark and D. Scott Rogo point out an interesting factor of monster sightings, in their book Earth's Secret Inhabitants. They note that most reported monsters resemble real animals, either living or extinct.
Odd caricatures of the types of life forms that populate the earth these creatures represent the outcome of some evolutionary process paralleling life on this planet, but not exactly corresponding to it.
In other words, the monsters come not from some other sphere, but a parallel reality within our own. Central to the idea of magick is the idea of other worlds that co-exist in a subtle way with ours.
I extrapolate on these theories in my new book 'The Highest Strangeness.'
For now, the investigation into the dragons of Waverley Abbey is ongoing. It will be interesting to see where it leads. But I will leave you with the unsettling thought, that dragons seem unsatisfied to lurk only in ancient legends and the pages of story books. It seems like they are returning to what passes for the 'real' world. Richard Freeman
NOTE: Waverley Abbey was the first Cistercian abbey in England, founded in 1128 by William Giffard, the Bishop of Winchester. Located about 2 miles southeast of Farnham, Surrey, it is situated on a floodplain; surrounded by current and previous channels of the River Wey.
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