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MVP's WTF? Paranormal
MVP's WTF? Paranormal podcast is a different type of paranormal podcast. We cover all things paranormal: ghosts, UFOs, cryptozoology, demons, paranormal TV, paranormal technology, phenomenology, and even the weirdos in the paranormal (including us). And we have fun while we do it.
We consider all things and use in-depth research, critical thinking, experience, and of course, common sense, as we formulate our opinions on the topics. We're raw and uncensored and have a completely inappropriate sense of humor. We're disgruntled military vets...what do you expect?
So grab an adult beverage, or diet coke for our calorie-conscious listeners, sit back, and enjoy. Word of warning: we use foul language. Another word of warning: Did we mention how inappropriate we can be? Last word of warning: Our first few seasons started off rough but we figured it all out as the seasons progressed. So stick with us and feel free to agree or disagree, just have fun and get enlightened!
MVP's WTF? Paranormal
Dragons: Is There Historical Evidence They Existed?
This episode is short and sweet, but very interesting. Everyone can at least agree that Dragons are cool mythical creatures. Whether or not they actually existed, however, is debatable. Join Evan, Mell, Wes, and Tommy as they dive into historical records to see if there is anything that may support the notion that at one point in human history, Dragons were real.
For further reading:
"Natural History of Dragons" - American Museum of Natural History
"Did Dragons Exist? Exploring the Mythical Monster Mystery" - NOW Magazine - Northrup Grumman
"Dragons in History" - Genesis Park
Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976: Allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. This channel is for educational, informational and entertainment purposes.
Please visit our website: www.militaryveteransparanormal.com for access to more information about this episode and others, as well as other research and investigations we've done.
Welcome back to MVP's. What the f***, what the f***? Paranormal Podcast, where we talk about, well, everything the paranormal encompasses. So you ready? Let's f***ing do this. Alright, do we go now? Yeah, alright, okay, alright, welcome back everybody. I'm evan. I'm here with mel west and tommy. This season we're talking about crypto and, no, not the digital currency. We're talking about crypto zoology. This week, we're just discussing the granddaddy of all the monsters the dragon I've seen the cinnamon dragon before from the cinnamon challenge.
Speaker 2:What, oh my God, you guys not seen that cinnamon challenge?
Speaker 3:We did the cinnamon challenge in Iraq and one of my sergeants put this big old wad of powdered cinnamon in his mouth. He didn't think it was going to be a big deal, and then he coughed and the puffs of cinnamon smoke came out of his nose.
Speaker 2:Usually comes flying out the nose, out the mouth.
Speaker 3:Yeah, In grandiose fashion. It was the greatest spectacle I'd saw.
Speaker 1:I don't know why people think that that's a good idea.
Speaker 3:It's hilarious as all get out.
Speaker 1:It's a horrible idea, it's a fantastic idea.
Speaker 2:So dragons, what are you guys' thoughts on dragons?
Speaker 3:Well based on my research. Historically speaking, I think it's impossible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, man. I mean the pictures and illustrations and texts about dragons have stretched back for thousands of years I was gonna agree with this, with the lore behind dragons itself.
Speaker 2:I mean, look at and I'm not just saying asian alone, but every asian society is focused on dragons it's found in almost every culture on earth well, I was gonna say you got uh vikings and everything just coming down the line. I'm not trying to go into your business, west, but yeah, I, why not? Like seriously, I I do think there could have been forms. I'm not saying that they're like uh fire down below or whatever that movie is, but rain of fire there it is, yeah, such a badass movie.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying there was something like that, but who knows, maybe they were all hunted out of existence well, I found, you know, traces of dragons being drawn and on chinese rocks.
Speaker 1:But in the shang tse province, you know, like thousands of years ago, um talks about them in the Sumerian texts, in the Babylonian texts they were worshipped by Aztecs, you know, the Celts talked about them in the, you know, asian cultures, the Chinese, japanese, even Korean. They, you know, they have a little bit different. Look on the dragons it seems like they are more peaceful.
Speaker 3:The Korean dragon. There's a three claw dragon and then there's a forge claw dragon okay.
Speaker 1:Well, that's news to all of us. But all right, carry on it's your thing.
Speaker 3:What do you mean?
Speaker 1:carry on all right, well. Well, I found this really cool story that is hysterical, so this comes from medieval Europe. There's a story about St George.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I also came across this, Did you?
Speaker 1:It's hysterical. I did so. St George lived during the 3rd century AD and his story gets told throughout this group of texts called the Golden Legend, which is like biographies of the saints. According to the story, one day he was traveling in, I guess, modern-day Libya when he came to this town and the town was being attacked by this menacing dragon that lived nearby. And the dragon raged fire across the countryside and whatnot. Anyways, the town people started offering sacrifices to the dragon each day. First they offered him two sheep, then they offered him a man and a sheep, and finally they offered the town's children and their youth, which is kind of messed up, but anyways, the sacrificial victims were chosen by lot and on the day that St George arrived, it was the king's daughter who was up to be sacrificed.
Speaker 1:The saint saw the princess beside the pond and asked her what was going on. Upon hearing the story of the dragon, st George resolved the fight and rescued the princess. When the dragon appeared, saint made the sign of the cross, charged at it on horseback and speared it with his lance like a total badass. Having wounded the dragon, saint george asked the princess for her gird, which he used to tie around the dragon's neck. Once this was done, the dragon was then tamed and followed the pair back to town. St George offered to kill the dragon if the townspeople became Christians. They converted, and so he beheaded the dragon. End of story.
Speaker 2:That's all I have to say about that.
Speaker 4:That's the right on man. You said it all yeah, ready then that's interesting isn't
Speaker 1:that wild that is. Oh, girl, give me, give me your girdle, let me tame this dragon. That's weird.
Speaker 2:I thought it was much more funny than what you guys led on to be dang I got a bunch of bad jokes in my head right now, so I'm trying not to fair enough. Hey, what's that? What's that music group about dragons? Don't dragon these balls across your face.
Speaker 3:You think I don't know. Okay, so in south dakota, uh, part of the Hell Creek Formation, which is like a fossil discovery area, they did in 2006, I think, or 2004,. They did find a fossil that is very dragon-esque. It was determined in 2006 to be a Pachycephalosaurus.
Speaker 1:Some sort of dinosaur, I imagine.
Speaker 3:The skull actually does look very dragon-like, and so they allowed children the Children's Museum of Indianapolis to name it. And so, guess what? They named it Dracoryx hogwartsia.
Speaker 2:Get the fuck out of here, nice.
Speaker 3:They also archaeologists discovered a fossil of a 240 million. It's a 240 million year fossil of a 16 foot dragon in China. It's aquatic. They called it a dragon because of the neck. It's called a Dinocephalosaurus. The neck had like 32 separate vertebrae. It has this very long tail. But here's something else. Scientists in Argentina discovered a species of flying reptiles that they dubbed the dragon of death and they probably flew around Earth with dinosaurs around 86 million years ago. It's a pterosaur.
Speaker 3:But it would you know it had wings? You think about that, you know. So that's kind of close, but I think, Evan, you touched upon something that I think a lot of people are missing, and that is that hieroglyphs from cultures that never communicated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how did the Mayans and the Romans both draw the same thing?
Speaker 3:And these were different cultures that had no communications or interactions with each other at the time that these glyphs were created. And that's got. I mean that has to mean something. And so a lot of people think that, well, you know dragons, it's all mythical and stuff like that. However, there are scholars, specifically Phil Senter, uta, maddox, id, haddad they argue that natural history is what started depicting them as very fantastical.
Speaker 3:But it was only in the 18th century that natural historians determined that dragons didn't exist at all. Up until then, they did believe in them. In fact, they did a translation of the dragon section of the Schlangenbuch, which is the Encyclopedia of Natural History by Conrad Gessner. He was a Swiss physician and naturalist and this was published back in the 1580s. He was, and with his encyclopedia he was trying to compile everything ever written about every animal species on Earth. He included dragons. Damn, there was a dragon section. He was getting these written scripts and stuff from various cultures around the world to include Greek, egyptian, indian that described flying serpents, and so he asserted that, hey, dragons could, could fly. Augustine of Hippo, he described dragons as Earth's largest animals. It may not be like Game of Thrones kind of dragons.
Speaker 1:I mean, we know that, you know the pterosaurs existed in the dinosaur age. You know which were. You know the pterodactyls and all the big, giant reptilian birds that flew around the earth. That was a thing. Those are real, we know that for sure. What's to say that you know, some of those things didn't kind of survive through the dinosaur apocalypse and kind of evolve into what we they knew came to know as dragons later on, right right. And speaking of you know, on the on the part about the fossils and stuff, you know that's a big argument for a lot of people against the existence of dragons is, well, there's no fossils, there's no bones, and there's been a lot of people come up and say that it's possible that maybe dragons being such big, large creatures, it's possible that they had bones, you know, akin to the bones of birds, which are hollow and therefore wouldn't fossilize.
Speaker 3:What do you mean? Can you explain that a little bit more?
Speaker 1:So the bones and bird bones have like these hollow channels in them. They're like, they're almost hollow tubes that have like these little structures built throughout them. So when a bird, you know, dies and it doesn't the bones usually just crumble to dust and don't actually set up long enough to fossilize. They can fossilize under extreme circumstances, but most of the time they don't. So if dragons had the bones similar to birds and they, you know that, were hollow, hollow bones, we wouldn't find fossils of them oh, I get it.
Speaker 3:I get it okay. Also, in ancient greeks and sumerians, dragons were described as giant serpents that would crush people with coils, kill with venomous breath. Right, yeah, for the majority of history, they were thought of as being like any other mythical animal, sometimes useful, protective. It wasn't until Christianity was spread throughout the world that dragons changed and they had like a more sinister interpretation.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, that's what I was reading.
Speaker 3:In the Bible, christians at the time they believed in a literal existence of dragons. In the book of Job, specifically chapter 41, there was a Leviathan. So when Christianity spread, then these dragons were no longer useful and protective. They represented something evil.
Speaker 4:I was reading into all that too, mel, and the way I was picking it up was essentially right. The, the church, used dragons to control the populace is how I read into it they, they took something and demonized it and they were like look, only the church can protect you, you know? And? And that's how the European dragons became the way that they did, shooting hellfire and all of that stuff, and that's where St George came in, evan, you know the dragon slayer.
Speaker 3:St.
Speaker 4:George and the girdle, the fucking pimp himself.
Speaker 3:They used him as the dragon slayer to convert people over to Christianity.
Speaker 4:That's hilarious. I'd like to see any of us go charge a fucking dinosaur with a cross and see what happens. I will fear no living creature as long as I keep this near me.
Speaker 3:Take that you way in spawn of Satan Die devil bird.
Speaker 1:He had a lance as well.
Speaker 3:When you're looking at from a paleontologist or an archaeologist's point of view. There are fossils, there are hieroglyphs, and they weren't though always in the sky. They were underwater, yeah, and they weren't though always in the sky, they were underwater.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that seems to be a big one. In the Asian cultures is the water dragons, especially in the Japanese.
Speaker 3:Japanese culture.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they have a dragon called what's it called? Watatsumi. That's the dragon king and the great god of the sea and the oceans. It looks pretty badass.
Speaker 3:What do you guys think about the idea that they were actually real? I don't see why they're just not as it's depicted like in game of thrones or house of dragons right like, not as big as those types of dragons. Agreed now I know that there's a video out there allegedly where a town in China in 2017 found the skeletal remains of a dragon. I believe that's a hoax.
Speaker 1:I've seen that video too, yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, they went to great lengths. It's pretty massive what they did, but it looks like there's still meat on the bones that they laid together. Y'all probably should have washed them and let them dry out first. Um, do we know where the idea of a dragon started from? The mythical? Yeah, I dug deep.
Speaker 4:I dug so deep into that tunnel and, uh, the answer is nobody fucking knows. That's the answer. Nobody knows, it's just been lost in the times.
Speaker 3:Oh, well, what about the dragon of of babylon? Is that I mean, do you think that's where it might have started? Do you even know the dragon of babylon?
Speaker 3:I don't guess I do so in 1918, there was a German archaeologist called Coldaway or something like that. He excavated Babylon, which is Iraq people, and he thought and he observed that there was a depiction of this mythological, fantastical dragon of Babylon on the 6th century BCE Ishtar Gate Poldave. He was a very well-respected excavator and archaeologist and he was brilliant. But he came across what he found to be ancient remains and it kind of depicted the so-called dragon of Babylon, a once living creature very much like a dinosaur kind of like in terms of anatomically, but it might have just kind of stopped short of being a dragon. And that's the first like in terms of any sort of academic study In cryptozoology. Dragons went then into cryptozoology from the basis of the Ishtar Gate.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So does he think that he possibly discovered the first, the first, you know?
Speaker 3:description or illustration of a dragon Sixth century BCE.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:If you look up dragon of Babylon, it's the Mushu.
Speaker 1:Mushu.
Speaker 2:It says eventually Daniel poisoned it before you're thrown into a fire pit I mean this is sixth century, I mean 604 to 562 bc.
Speaker 1:So what do you guys think the chances are that all of these people back then, just you know, made the shit up here.
Speaker 3:I think what I find fascinating is the fact that the various cultures who had no interactions are all depicting dragons. But I don't think what we see from like game of thrones, with them being like, almost like with winged and pegasus thing. I don't think it was that. I do think it was more serpent like, if anything yeah, I agree, but I do think there's a possibility of them being real.
Speaker 2:I I mean, I just thought so much this with the wings, but you see how small it is. I could see it being like this small.
Speaker 1:My ancestors sent a little lizard to help me. Hey, dragon, dragon, not lizard, I don't do that tongue thing. You're intimidating or inspiring Tiny, of course I'm travel size for your convenience.
Speaker 4:The fire breathing didn't come into play until Christianity. Christianity the one that brought that forward.
Speaker 2:The Leviathan, which says it stretched like 300 miles in length.
Speaker 3:Like it may have had venomous breath.
Speaker 1:Not necessarily fire, but yeah, it could have been something similar to like the bombardier beetle that shoots like this hot gas out of its front end. Yeah, that's what.
Speaker 3:I'm. It had hot breath.
Speaker 1:It has some hot-ass breath. Listerine ain't gonna help anywhere. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the road I'm leaning towards as well. You know, they were probably, you know, real creatures, but not what modern media has depicted them as but I do like the idea more of hollywood dragons, because those are fucking badass yeah, the flying dragons yeah they're fucking cool hell yeah so with crypto, do they think that they have wings for the most part?
Speaker 1:I think it varies on who you talk to. Really Half of the crowd thinks that they did and the books that I have. They talk about strictly terrestrial dragons, which would just be non-flying, just land-living dragon types, and then they talk about water dragons, which also don't fly, and then they have a small circle of people that do talk about the winged dragons. I haven't seen too many people talking about them actually spitting fire like they do in movies.
Speaker 3:Well, that's in Western culture, though See. In Asian culture dragons symbolize strength, courage, prosperity, prosperity. And it's very benevolent, whereas in Western culture it's something to fear, it's dangerous, it's not a good thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's creeping on the townspeople and burning your fields and your cattle.
Speaker 2:Think how many times these stories have been passed down, whether it's movie or uh, you see depictive drawing stuff like that. It gets passed down. Your kids will know that it's considered a dragon and goes on, and goes on. But like there might be stuff like ie, what is it? The endangered sea turtles where you give about 200 years from now?
Speaker 2:thank you, wes, for smiling at me god bless you um and uh where the sea turtle will no longer be exist. You know I'm saying it will be extinct by then. So then they had to go off of our drawings and our pictures in order to see that I don't get what, just that type of thing?
Speaker 3:no, I don I don't?
Speaker 2:You know what I'm saying? So what I'm saying about dragons is the same way I'm saying about sea turtles. They could be extinct and during our time we never got to see them, but back in the day these things could have been flying around. It could have been just like birds, Just like a normal thing, like an everyday thing and because they're're extinct, we just don't see them anymore.
Speaker 2:Just like I said, give it 200 years from now, and there might not be any more sea turtles, so that new generation, 200 years from now, will be like well, there's this thing called a turtle, but we don't have them anymore.
Speaker 1:This is what they look like I like to think about dragons, kind of like the Megalodon, like it's hard to envision a fucking 100-foot-long shark out there cruising in the water just murdering the shit out of everything. But that was a real thing. Like we know, it was real. There's been some wild, crazy, huge megafauna creatures on this earth throughout history. Yes, doesn't seem too far-fetched for me to believe that there was some giant serpents. Possibly some of them could have flown. No, just like mermaids, right?
Speaker 3:Yes, so I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's interesting, it's cool. That's why we're here. It's interesting.
Speaker 3:It's cool. I'm more prone to believe in the possible existence of dragons than mermaids.
Speaker 2:Fair enough.
Speaker 1:Alright, well, until next time. Wesley, you want to take us out of here?
Speaker 4:Oh shit, damn on the spot eh.
Speaker 3:Peace Mic drop. That's the worst ever. That fucking sucked dragon balls. No, absolutely not what?
Speaker 4:no, that was great, absolutely not absolutely not that was fucking perfect go.
Speaker 1:That's not how we go out.
Speaker 3:There's got to be a lesson in all of this, evan.
Speaker 1:Well, if you need a real lesson, I would say, take a page out of St George's book. And if you're fighting a deadly dragon, grab the nearest hottie's girdle, strap that thing up and tame that son of a bitch. This has been MVP's. What the Fuck Paranormal? Go fuck yourselves everybody.
Speaker 4:Absolutely not the fuck. Paranormal. Go fuck yourselves everybody. How? Absolutely not, absolutely not. What the fuck.