As we grow up, most of us stop believing in the strange and wonderful creatures of our bed-time stories. Like Santa and the Easter Bunny, our passions for fairies, dragons, unicorns, and sea serpents fade as we acquire more and more cognitive ability.
But maybe our disbelief is misplaced; as “grown-ups”, we all know that both Santa and the Bunny who once frequented Spring festivals in the European countryside both were once real things. It is said that all legends grow from a grain of truth. Do we pass judgment too hastily on the other miraculous critters of mystery?
Historically, faeries (or fairies, if you prefer) are cut from the same cloth as the more-oft believed-in corporeal spirits, angels and demons. Their tale pre-dates every modern religion, yet at least one of these groups of supernatural beings seems to be an integral part of almost every faith.
According to Christian legend, when Lucifer led his rebellion against God, the angels took sides. Those that remained loyal to God remain with Him in Heaven; those that followed the Morning Star were cast down, and became demons. But, there was also a third group of immortals, one that did not take a side. These few, who remained neutral, were punished for failing to support their creator, but not so severely as those who raised their hands against Him. Instead of being cast into the fire, they were exiled to Earth, and they are called the Fey – Faeries.
Most other legends of the fair folk run along the same lines: angels are good spirits, demons are evil, and the Fey are somewhere in between. Remember, Christianity does not have an exclusive on believing in heavenly winged supernatural beings; angels have captivated the faithful all across the world long before Abraham ever dreamed of moving out of his ancestral homeland to serve his Lord.
Faeries are among the oldest of mythical beings, yet more people believe in them today than in the possibility of space aliens (whether or not said aliens have visited Earth). Part of the reason for that faith may be due to a handful of actual fairy photos that were taken around the turn of the 20th Century.
As a young girl, Elise Wright was given one of the earliest ‘point and shoot’ cameras, and she put it to good use. She and her sister returned to their father five photographs that, when developed, showed the girls cavorting with none other than the fey folk!
The photos were of such high quality that scientists and photographic experts in the Wrights’ homeland of England and around the world verified their authenticity again and again. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man behind the greatest rational mind of all time, Sherlock Holmes, vouched for them. In fact, no one was ever able to discredit the photos for a certainty until 1982, when Elise herself fessed up to how they were made.
To today’s discerning viewer, with eyes capable of picking out ultra-realistic CGI from the most modern movies, the photos seem obvious fakes. Yet, such a long-standing item of wonder as a real photo of a fairy holds some of the old magic still; and people believe. Perhaps their faith is not unfounded.
But unlike old fabricated photos, the evidence for some mythical creatures is a bit more concrete.
We’ve all heard the news reports in recent years of real Krakens being found in the Asian Pacific. Essentially giant squids, Krakens are the age-old terrors of the deep, the only creature more feared than the sea-serpents of the days of the first explorers. As recent movies have depicted, a Kraken is capable of smashing vessels, snaring crew, and even pulling a full-size warship down to the depths.
While it remains uncertain whether the real giant squids have ever decided to snack on human passersby, the creatures are, in fact, real. Japanese scientists have verified a corpse found adrift in the ocean as a humongous, but real, squid. More recently, submarine explorers have captured video of living squids, grown to gigantic size.
And, speaking of giants, they’re real too. For over a hundred years, carnival side shows have claimed to have “the tallest man in the world”, but, at one point, marketing marvel P.T. Barnum really did. As cataloged in Ripley’s Museum in Atlantic City (and elsewhere), a number of humans have lived who literally towered over us ‘common folk’, and the Guinness Book of World Records chronicles to this day the tallest living people on Earth.
Tall people might be easier for us to believe in than ‘little folk’, but even more fantastic creatures remain to be seen. Of all the myriad monsters in ancient mythology, there is no beast that captures our collective sense of wonder so much as the Unicorn. And, as you might guess, this creature is also more than mere myth. In fact, this one is more than misinterpreted bones or gigantic variants of known species – this curious creature is actually real, as-is.
In June, 2008, the front page of nearly every newspaper in the United States featured a photograph of the fantastic beast found in Italy. Long presumed to be a relative of the horse, it turns out that real unicorns are more closely related to the common deer.
Described in legend as a cloven-hoofed steed with a single horn in the center of its brow, the deer unicorn is a perfect match. Historically, unicorns were not white; the monochromatic element wasn’t added to the story until the “steed” part because synonymous with “horse”, and the spiritual aspect of legend sanctified the presumed coloration (because there are white horses).
In olden times, however, humans were much shorter and lighter than they are today. In the days of old, long before the age of the great empires, people actually did ride deer. And, it may well have come to pass, that some domesticated and trained deer were ridden into battle, just as horses were prior to the advent of mechanized warfare. Should one of those steeds happened to have had the same kind of miraculous malformity seen in newspapers, then the superstitious folk of the age would very likely have taken the genetic anomaly for an omen – and so a legend was born.
Even the Chimera, a monstrous mix of various animals, has been found in the modern age. The television show “20/20” recently did a feature piece about human chimeras, people who have tissues with different DNA in their cells.
One story was about a woman who lost custody of her kids because she failed a DNA test: while in the womb, she had absorbed her half-sister, and, as a result, her ovaries carried a different genetic code than the cells in her mouth. It was those other genes that were passed on to her own children.
Other people depicted in the broadcast showed more obvious signs of their chimeric nature, including multiple racial skin colorations, with clear lines of division between them. Others even displayed the sex characteristics of both genders.
Humans aren’t the only known chimeras either. There are all manner of creatures that seem to be the combination of other creatures, such as the flying fish, or even the penguin. And there is the duck-billed platypus, which looks like the aftermath of a transmuted person from an ancient Greek fable who really annoyed the gods.
Recent evidence continues to emerge of other strange and mysterious creatures. From the return of the “extinct” celicant, to the puzzling pictures of a supposed “chupakabra”, there seems no end to the possible reality behind the creatures of legend. Fossils have been uncovered of Zaratan, giant sea turtles so big that sailors confused them with small islands. If these oddities, which supposedly lived for millennia, are rare enough, they may still live today. Ever hear of those “drifting” islands in the Bermuda Triangle?
Leprechauns, giants, fairies, dragons, unicorns, leviathans, and even the Aztec winged snakes all have some form of possible analog that exists, or once did exist, in the real world. And no one can deny that dwarfs are real.
So, before you break the sad news to your children that the curious creatures of fable and fantasy are nothing more than fiction, think long and hard about what you’ve learned here. If so many of these monsters may once have lived, and some of them really do carry on to this day, then one must seriously wonder about the other possibilities.
Most of all, you might want to have faith for your own safety. If you don’t, then the Paradoxadon (a monster that only exists for people who don’t believe in it) might get you.
