Breathtaking CG images of flying dragons? Must be another one of those "Walking with Dinosaur" documentaries! Before I could hit the next button, something caught my eye.....a plain clothesman discovers a dragon carcass. I noticed the characteristic protruding snout and crocodile-like teeth - it looks.....real? But could this REALLY be real? This was a Discovery Channel programme after all! But there were no reports in the papers about the discovery of "dragons"? Was Discovery keeping mum about the biggest historical discovery of the century...until now? Boy, oh boy! This trailer got me all excited! The teaser programme title flashes across the screen : "Dragons : A Fantasy Made Real"! I MUST catch this programme!
Dragons have always held a special place in my heart! Having grown up on a diet of fantasy books with dragons running amok, it has even crept into my subconcious! The drawing above was conceived while I was on a train running through the gothic lands of the Czech Republic in 1995. I put my ballpoint pen to paper, and let my creative ghost possess me. The dragon showed her pretty head in no time. I scribbled the words "O'ver gothic lands...in search of truth"....in search of truth.....
When the "possibility" of dragons having existed presented itself in the "documentary" channel, I was overwhelmed! My eyes were absolutely glued! Ok, the acting of the main characters was so bad, but it lent me more reason to speculate that the filmmakers may have requested the real-life museum curators to re-enact the scenes leading up to their discovery of the dragon carcass in Romania!
And the scientific theories tossed about didn't sound too incredulous. Of course, they were all theories, but I was in no position to dispute them! What did I know about natural history and evolution? I'm but the girl in the street (but Siva and Airani would have considered me the "very gullible" girl in the street)!
Even after the show was over, I was confused as to whether the experience was real! I was like the hand in the drawing above, grasping onto something, in search of....the truth!
But alas, the internet killed my fire! It was all a wonderful fictional story strewn together by the creatures of 'Walking with Dinosaurs"! Sigh! Even the biology consultant for this documentary, Dr. Peter John Hogarth, believes they are but mythical creatures!
Read this interesting interview with the good, non-believing doctor...
http://animal.discovery.com/convergence/dragons/expert/expert.html
The only consolation from reviewing the Q&A was that there were others, like me, who actually believed that it could have been true! The filmmakers had intentionally kept it ambiguous to draw suckers like me into the programme! :P
Sifting through the Q&A, 2 of them stood out :-
Wes_C__Addle: Why is it conceivable to think that dragons existed simply because of legends from different societies throughout history, when things like pyramids also exist on different continents and were apparently conceived of independently of each other? Isn't it possible that dragons were also conceived of independently by the people of the world?
Dr. Hogarth: Yes, I think it is, when you get dragons as far afield as New Zealand and the Inuit of northern Canada, which had no contact with each other. I think it's conceivable for such diverse societies to imagine vast fearsome monsters. There are similarities — the dragons of classical Islamic legends and dragons found in other cultures — that are so similar in detail, and so many of them are connected up if you can trace back to their ancestries at the source. People are much the same the world over, and if there is a need to come up with a legend of how we exist, then they could have been thought of independently in different societies, although some are connected, and sprang up from a common source, where there is continuity.
draconshe: If dragons never existed, then how do you explain nearly every culture in the world having some form of dragons?
Dr. Hogarth: I think nearly every culture in the world has some sort of belief system in how the world is made up and how it works. And if there's something you don't understand, there's an instinct to make it understandable with something you can explain. If you see lightning in the air and you don't understand lightning, you explain it as a monster shooting out fire, throughout the world. So people try to explain things in terms of physical monsters, rather than by how the weather works and how lightning works, which they really don't understand."
Ahhh.......the human imagination and belief are such powerful things!
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