Lair of the Beasts

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Enter the Dragon-Hunter

Fire-Breathing Monsters

By Nick Redfern May 02, 2009

Dragons: More Than a Myth? by Richard Freeman
© cfz

Four teenage boys are brutally dragged to their deaths by a reptilian monster that emerges from a dark, fog-bound sea off the coast of Florida.

In the north-east of England, a shadowy cult is rumored to have sacrificed human victims to a dragon-god well into the 20^th Century.

In New Guinea, marauding giant lizards with huge teeth and vicious claws mercilessly slaughter dozens of villagers and send the natives into an absolute frenzy.

And in the Gambia, an enraged dragon destroys a bridge, tipping people to their literal doom.

From childhood we are taught that dragons are nothing more than imaginary beasts – the things of fantasy, myth and legend. Indeed, the accounts cited above all sound like the perfect scripts for the wildest of all Hollywood movies.

According to full-time crypto-zoologist and former zoo-keeper Richard Freeman, however, the legends are all-too-real. Moreover, the events cited above all reportedly occurred well within living memory.

While many monster-hunters are content to focus their attentions on Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster, Freeman has spent the last decade doggedly and devotedly traveling the world in hot pursuit of real-life dragons – the amazing results of which are available for one and all to read in his book Dragons: More Than a Myth?

Eventually,we will take a strange trip into the seldom-traveled world of dragons, where, deep in the shadows and the jungles, beasts such as the Naga, Mokele-mbembe, and Megalania lurk. But first, some essential background on what it is that makes a man a dragon-hunter.

As a young boy growing up in England in the mid-1970s, Freeman regularly holidayed with his grandparents in the picturesque county of Devon – where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, was set.

One summer, when he was nine, Freeman watched and listened with awe and excitement when his grandfather got talking to a retired fisherman in Goodrington Harbor, and who had a startling tale to relate.

Several years earlier the fisherman and his crew were trawling off of Berry Head, where the seas of Britain are almost at their absolute deepest. Indeed, such are the depths of this part of the English Channel that the area is commonly used as a graveyard for old ships, and the drowned wrecks of these once-mighty vessels have made an artificial reef that, today, attract a vast amount and array of fish.

On one particular moonlit night, the crew had trouble lifting the nets and began to worry that they had gotten entwined around the remains of a rotting, ship’s mast. Soon, however, they felt some slack and duly began to haul the nets up.

The men thought that their catch was a particularly good one, so heavy were their nets. As the nets drew ever closer to the trawler’s lights, however, a frightening and diabolical sight took shape. The crew realized with terror that they had not caught hundreds of normal-sized fish, but one gigantic creature.

The old fisherman quietly told Freeman’s grandfather: “It was an eel, a giant eel. Its mouth was huge, wide enough to have swallowed a man; the teeth were as long as my hand.”

Even today, more than a quarter of a century later, Freeman still remembers the words of the ancient mariner, and he is convinced that this was not a tall story designed merely to entertain gullible tourists.

“While it was still in the water,” added the fisherman, “it was buoyed up, but as soon as we tried to pull it onboard the nets snapped like cotton and it vanished back down. I was glad it went. I’ve been at sea all my life but I’ve never been as scared as I was that night. I can still see its eyes, huge glassy.”

And from that moment on, the life of Richard Freeman was forever changed, and the dragon-hunter within him began to take shape.

For three years Freeman worked as the Head of Reptiles at Twycross Zoo, England and, today, is the Zoological Director of the world’s premier crypto-zoological investigation group: namely, the Center for Fortean Zoology.

And while Freeman certainly has a passion for all aspects of crypto-zoology, it is the dragon that fascinates him most of all.

“I started my career as a zoologist – so I had a grounded training,” says Freeman. “But crypto-zoology was my passion. Now, I have had a particular passion – an obsession, I suppose – for years with dragons. But there was something that always puzzled me: no-one had ever thought - for more than a hundred years - to publish a definitive, non-fiction book on the subject. And as I am a qualified zoologist, I thought: why not me?”

Why not, indeed? I asked Freeman about his theories and discoveries with regard to dragons. And his startling answers and revelations will appear right here…next weekend!

Nick Redfern is a full-time monster-hunter and the author of four books on the subject: Three Men Seeking Monsters; Memoirs of a Monster Hunter; Man-Monkey; and his latest book: There’s something in the Woods.