Dragons? Might be that human collective memory recalls encounters with leftover dinosaurs. After all, the book of Job SEEMS to indicate a land based creature, behemoth, and a sea based creature, leviathan, existed. It's strange that apparently nearly every culture has legends about dragons with serpentine qualities. Even today, there are stubborn claims to sightings of
mokele-mbembe. Not just by indigenous people of the Congo, but westerners as well. And of course long persistent reports of the Loch Ness creature, and in the northern waters of America and Canada, Champ. So either they are or once were real, or something in our past collective memory is why we're fixated on dragons. Perhaps, too, such large creatures heavy breathing in the right atmospheric conditions could exhibit steam as we do in winter months. And that gets interpreted as the animals breathing fire.
Werewolves and vampires? Fantasy created by our minds when we had no or little light producing sources to push back nighttime darkness and our fears resulting from darkness. Then got twisted into tales to frighten children into behaving. Then again, to produce the genre of horror tales for entertainment. I don’t think they have any relation to aliens. Notice how vampire and werewolf stories, movies etc occur at night? This echoes our fear of darkness when we lack means to illuminate it. And night-life does harbor scary sounds. I'd also put the Jersey Devil in this category.
Big foot, Might be a similar collective memory for cultures that lived in the snow mountains (Yeti) and dense forests. There once was a very large upright standing and walking ape,
Gigantopithecus. These cultures' Bigfoot and Yeti accounts are likely collective memory of the last hold-overs before they went extinct. Again, no connection with aliens.
Aliens, I can only say that things I have seen myself, remove doubt about their existence. A fighter chasing an egg shaped object at tree level. Cigar shaped craft, complete with portholes, belching smoke and seemingly in trouble struggling in the sky before disappearing. Triangular shaped craft slowly passing overhead and flickering its lights. I've never seen the beings, just the craft. And based on what I know about Project Blue books, I always knew the government was lying. Cases like the boys in Kentucky who shot at a craft. BK investigates, claims it was just Venus. But never explained the bullets, which had obviously impacted something hard. They ignored explaining that but took the bullets with them. That's just one of the many shady things that destroyed credibility of many people. Like fox Mulder says, "The truth is out there."
