My memory has always been akin to an exceedingly eclectic but generally well-organised, well-maintained filing cabinet whose innumerable drawers contain all of the myriad facts that I've acquired throughout my life, including the 40 years that I've spent researching and writing about cryptids, mythological beasts, and fantastical fauna (flora too) of every imaginable, and unimaginable, kind. Occasionally, however, a fact file somehow becomes misplaced, misfiled, or just plain missing. And so it was with the slim but stimulating file of the feathered lions.
Opening on my laptop a cryptozoology-themed folder of chronologically-arranged files consisting of reports, articles, and other info downloaded by me from the Net during the year 2016, I started looking for the file that I needed for my new investigation, but there were a very sizeable number of files in it, and I had no idea of the specific date on which I'd downloaded the file in question. So I automatically rearranged all of that folder's files into alphabetical order instead, by file title, hoping to spot the file quickly by way of its title's subject. The titles were organised into columns, and while casually casting my eyes across and down a few of these columns before beginning the full painstaking scrutiny of each file title in each column, my eyes alighted upon one particular file title, and opened wide as they did so – 'Larry Hagman sees feathered lions'! Of course – Larry Hagman! Even before opening the long-overlooked file, its title alone was sufficient to usher forth the basic information that it contained, but obviously I still opened it anyway. And here is what I read.
The newspaper article had been published back in 2012 (thus explaining why I'd not thought to look for it in the 2016 folder, the reason why it was in there and not in the 2012 folder being that I'd only learnt about this article and downloaded it on 7 June 2016, but I'd long since forgotten that small yet crucial fact!), by London's Daily Mail, on, of all days, 9 December (my birthday!), which was just over a fortnight after Hagman had passed away, on 23 November 2012.
Although Hagman initially dismissed this idea, it became firmly lodged in his mind, until eventually he gave into temptation, and obtained some pure LSD tabs from none other than the late American rock singer/songwriter David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills and Nash fame, after he'd attended one of their concerts and had gone backstage to meet them afterwards. Even so, it still took Hagman a month before he finally summoned up the nerve to take one, and thereby experience his first trip. Here is how he described it:
Just a few moments after I'd swallowed a tab, part of the room I was in became a cave that was guarded by two feathered lions as well as octopus-like creatures with long, writhing tentacles.
So there it is, such that it is, simply a Hagmanian hallucination of the plumed and tentacled trippy kind, but nonetheless notable as the only reference to feathered lions that I've ever encountered (other than certain legendary lions with avian wings, documented by me in my book Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery), albeit from a most unlikely source, and generated in a very unexpected fashion. Yet even though this case may not contribute greatly, therefore, to our shared global lore on fantasy felids, it is nothing if not interesting, and memorable – which is why it has compelled me to track it down almost a decade later, and document here on ShukerNature the exotic creatures mentioned in it.
Finally: all of the very eyecatching illustrations of feathered lions and cave-dwelling octopuses included here were created by me specially for this article yesterday, utilizing the MagicStudio image-generation program.