This post, given its subject matter, would be right next to nuts [some would say well within nuts] if it stood alone. I will not blame people who still believe that it's nuts, but, for me, the topic is far from a stand-alone reason-glitch. An earlier post indicated why I, as a researcher habituated towards the valuing of witness testimony, read several, to me, impressive works which described a great deal of this. Particularly important was Evans-Wentz' Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. The possibility of the existence of such entities as described comes from his and several other encounter-type works. I have had no personal experience [maybe] with the "mischief-making" Middle Kingdom entities, so my belief in the possibility of this relies on less direct information than some of the topics of previous posts. But let me float one experience that I absolutely trust which may have something to do with this. In my big family I have a complete set of orderly minds, but one of my sisters is particularly so. She's not obsessive, just very disciplined. She likes to keep her house that way as much as possible---and of course with others involved it's a bit of a losing battle. Still, there are areas of her life where she knows
exactly what's going on. Two of those orderly areas are her closet and her dresser drawers. As I say, not out of obsessiveness but just out of "why not?", she keeps things in conveniently findable places. Well, it seems that "somebody" thinks that's funny and likes to mess around. She will go to her closet to get the piece of clothing that she knows is "right in that spot". And sometimes it's
not. As an orderly person who likes answers [as well as the piece of clothing] she'll then go on an item-by-item hunt through the entire location, only giving up after 2 or 3 full tries. Then it's off to places like the laundry room in the understandable suspicion that she had forgotten that she washed it recently and forgot to put it back. Nothing. Returning hours later [or less] to the closet--no one else in the house--there will be the piece of clothing, not only in the closet, but dead center in the closet, right where she thought it should have been in the first place. Well, it's up to you to dream up how this happened, but the one non-viable option is that she's nuts and can't see something right in front of her face. Oddnesses such as this have happened many more times than once in that house, always on the same theme. If you cruise the internet, you will find an uncountable number of anecdotes just like this. Mischief-making.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course, candidates for who the Mischief-Makers are abound in our past cultural memories, even if we have tried to forget them. Puck, with his "puckish" mischief, Will-o-the-Wisp, "pixy-leading" unwary wanderers astray, gremlins, elves, and leprechauns having their, generally harmless fun. A good friend told me that his mother when she was a child had pixy-like visitations in her mother's room, when her strict mother would give her the modern equivalent of "time out". Little men would appear and gambol about on some shelf ledge near the ceiling. They would dance, somersault, laugh, and generally be entertaining. These characters wore green clothes and were about a foot or slightly more high. The child's laughter brought in the mother and her disapproval of the un-understandable levity and laughter [of the child]. Once gone the little men returned and started up again. The girl begged them to leave before her mother returned and was angry. They replied that if they left they would never return. The girl said please go. The mother heard her daughter talking to "no one" and re-entered. The little men were gone but had left the high shelf,
which the little 8-year-old girl could not reach, in disarray. Climbing up to the shelf, the mother found that her hat box containing her best hat had been stoved in. The girl was spanked for this, even though she could not reach the shelf nor the box. Mischief, mischief, mischief. Stories like this are all over the place. One more: Ron Quinn was in upper New York state doing a radio interview [probably about UFOs] when he was asked about any personal encounters. He said that he had a "little person" encounter instead. This produced a flurry of call-ins from people saying that they had such encounters also, but never told others because, till then, they didn't think anyone would listen to them without laughing. Quinn with the cooperation of the station was able to interview the callers and this resulted in a rare book on modern US Little People incidents. One of these is more or less in our theme. 1949--a farmer was approaching his chicken coop when he heard a ruckus inside. Inside the chickens were excited and even some feathers were flying around. As there was nothing else he gathered eggs and left. The following days saw a small decrease in the number of eggs he expected. Thinking perhaps they were being stolen by a rodent or something, he found that there was a loose board in the coop's wall. Using heavy stones, he made a makeshift block so that the board couldn't be moved. Nevertheless when he returned they
were moved. He proceeded to set traps. About a week later, upon entering the coop, he was stunned to see two small men [one foot high] carrying two eggs each and running for the loose board. One was startled enough that he dropped one of his eggs and broke it. His wife thought he was nuts when he told the story, as, other than his wild excitement, all that could be found was the abandoned cracked egg. The thieves apparently never returned.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Such stories began to interest me due to what seemed to me [and still seems] to be a ridiculous diversity of alleged "occupants" involved in UFO cases coming in the door, many of which seemed to have no UFO involved at all. I thought that it would be smart to look into other sorts of entity encounters and see if they cast any light on the UFO mysteries. Well, light is hard to come by in this business, but reading the other encounters made my intuition that UFO case files are actually the repository of several different things, seem more believable. Certain "UFO" stories seemed pretty "good", but not like UFOs to me. On the left, Rosa Dainelli's CE3 seems like a classic Mischief-Maker case. The Rowley Regis case seems like winged fairies or pixies in both form and behavior. The Case of the Kelly-Hopkinsville glowing/can't-shoot-me harassers seems like goblins. How much of this material "pollutes", but interestingly so, the UFOlogy case records, who can say? But it might be far more than UFOlogists would like to entertain [let's face it, ONE such case is more than most UFOlogists want to entertain.]-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alongside are three more examples which illustrate things uncomfortably in the twilight zone between core UFO aerial technology and magical folk entity manifestations. We have hairy dwarves in metal spheres in Venezuela. We have a jewel-like structure with an enigmatic entity standing in the forest in Gerena, Spain. We have a little see-through blue-electric being happily smiling at the door of a trailer home in Albany, Ohio. UFOlogy? Not obvious to me. I have come to believe that my case files contain encounters from many different sources, all of which are "not respectable" as far as "commonsense consensus reality" is concerned. My files are in worse shape than I thought---filled with several kinds of ETs, Mischief-Makers, and probably an unquiet spirit or two. Can I sort them out? I'm not confident. Still, why would you want your world to be less rather than more interesting? Oh, by the way, my own [really weak] possible mischief-maker experience: back in the days of the "Walnut Trees" experience posted earlier, I got up one day dressed and went for a long walk. Unusually, my foot began to hurt a great deal, high on the ball of the big toe. Limping back home, I took off shoe and sock and there was a large hard kernel of corn almost embedded in the foot. How this had gotten into my shoe,sock,and all the way up to my toe I couldn't easily figure out. The socks were thick, the shoe tightly laced...it had to be in there already when I put them on, and inside the sock. I scoured the back yard where I'd been the previous day looking for that sort of corn that some people put out hoping to attract ducks or other big birds--nothing. I decided that I'd have to leave it as a mystery, and probably a mundane one, but a thought kept nagging. Grandma used to call those hard painful growths on the balls of your feet "corns". A mischievous joke? A little levity from our friends? Well, who knows?----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------P.S. folks, these posts have been fun for me on almost all levels, but the unexpected workload is exorbitant. I can't do it everyday--plus I'm not smart enough anyway. I'm going to cut back. Maybe every other day to begin. We'll see what I can manage. GOD bless and may the mischief-makers go easy on you.
This post, given its subject matter, would be right next to nuts [some would say well within nuts] if it stood alone. I will not blame people who still believe that it's nuts, but, for me, the topic is far from a stand-alone reason-glitch. An earlier post indicated why I, as a researcher habituated towards the valuing of witness testimony, read several, to me, impressive works which described a great deal of this. Particularly important was Evans-Wentz' Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. The possibility of the existence of such entities as described comes from his and several other encounter-type works. I have had no personal experience [maybe] with the "mischief-making" Middle Kingdom entities, so my belief in the possibility of this relies on less direct information than some of the topics of previous posts. But let me float one experience that I absolutely trust which may have something to do with this. In my big family I have a complete set of orderly minds, but one of my sisters is particularly so. She's not obsessive, just very disciplined. She likes to keep her house that way as much as possible---and of course with others involved it's a bit of a losing battle. Still, there are areas of her life where she knows exactly what's going on. Two of those orderly areas are her closet and her dresser drawers. As I say, not out of obsessiveness but just out of "why not?", she keeps things in conveniently findable places. Well, it seems that "somebody" thinks that's funny and likes to mess around. She will go to her closet to get the piece of clothing that she knows is "right in that spot". And sometimes it's not. As an orderly person who likes answers [as well as the piece of clothing] she'll then go on an item-by-item hunt through the entire location, only giving up after 2 or 3 full tries. Then it's off to places like the laundry room in the understandable suspicion that she had forgotten that she washed it recently and forgot to put it back. Nothing. Returning hours later [or less] to the closet--no one else in the house--there will be the piece of clothing, not only in the closet, but dead center in the closet, right where she thought it should have been in the first place. Well, it's up to you to dream up how this happened, but the one non-viable option is that she's nuts and can't see something right in front of her face. Oddnesses such as this have happened many more times than once in that house, always on the same theme. If you cruise the internet, you will find an uncountable number of anecdotes just like this. Mischief-making.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course, candidates for who the Mischief-Makers are abound in our past cultural memories, even if we have tried to forget them. Puck, with his "puckish" mischief, Will-o-the-Wisp, "pixy-leading" unwary wanderers astray, gremlins, elves, and leprechauns having their, generally harmless fun. A good friend told me that his mother when she was a child had pixy-like visitations in her mother's room, when her strict mother would give her the modern equivalent of "time out". Little men would appear and gambol about on some shelf ledge near the ceiling. They would dance, somersault, laugh, and generally be entertaining. These characters wore green clothes and were about a foot or slightly more high. The child's laughter brought in the mother and her disapproval of the un-understandable levity and laughter [of the child]. Once gone the little men returned and started up again. The girl begged them to leave before her mother returned and was angry. They replied that if they left they would never return. The girl said please go. The mother heard her daughter talking to "no one" and re-entered. The little men were gone but had left the high shelf, which the little 8-year-old girl could not reach, in disarray. Climbing up to the shelf, the mother found that her hat box containing her best hat had been stoved in. The girl was spanked for this, even though she could not reach the shelf nor the box. Mischief, mischief, mischief. Stories like this are all over the place. One more: Ron Quinn was in upper New York state doing a radio interview [probably about UFOs] when he was asked about any personal encounters. He said that he had a "little person" encounter instead. This produced a flurry of call-ins from people saying that they had such encounters also, but never told others because, till then, they didn't think anyone would listen to them without laughing. Quinn with the cooperation of the station was able to interview the callers and this resulted in a rare book on modern US Little People incidents. One of these is more or less in our theme. 1949--a farmer was approaching his chicken coop when he heard a ruckus inside. Inside the chickens were excited and even some feathers were flying around. As there was nothing else he gathered eggs and left. The following days saw a small decrease in the number of eggs he expected. Thinking perhaps they were being stolen by a rodent or something, he found that there was a loose board in the coop's wall. Using heavy stones, he made a makeshift block so that the board couldn't be moved. Nevertheless when he returned they were moved. He proceeded to set traps. About a week later, upon entering the coop, he was stunned to see two small men [one foot high] carrying two eggs each and running for the loose board. One was startled enough that he dropped one of his eggs and broke it. His wife thought he was nuts when he told the story, as, other than his wild excitement, all that could be found was the abandoned cracked egg. The thieves apparently never returned.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Such stories began to interest me due to what seemed to me [and still seems] to be a ridiculous diversity of alleged "occupants" involved in UFO cases coming in the door, many of which seemed to have no UFO involved at all. I thought that it would be smart to look into other sorts of entity encounters and see if they cast any light on the UFO mysteries. Well, light is hard to come by in this business, but reading the other encounters made my intuition that UFO case files are actually the repository of several different things, seem more believable. Certain "UFO" stories seemed pretty "good", but not like UFOs to me. On the left, Rosa Dainelli's CE3 seems like a classic Mischief-Maker case. The Rowley Regis case seems like winged fairies or pixies in both form and behavior. The Case of the Kelly-Hopkinsville glowing/can't-shoot-me harassers seems like goblins. How much of this material "pollutes", but interestingly so, the UFOlogy case records, who can say? But it might be far more than UFOlogists would like to entertain [let's face it, ONE such case is more than most UFOlogists want to entertain.]-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alongside are three more examples which illustrate things uncomfortably in the twilight zone between core UFO aerial technology and magical folk entity manifestations. We have hairy dwarves in metal spheres in Venezuela. We have a jewel-like structure with an enigmatic entity standing in the forest in Gerena, Spain. We have a little see-through blue-electric being happily smiling at the door of a trailer home in Albany, Ohio. UFOlogy? Not obvious to me. I have come to believe that my case files contain encounters from many different sources, all of which are "not respectable" as far as "commonsense consensus reality" is concerned. My files are in worse shape than I thought---filled with several kinds of ETs, Mischief-Makers, and probably an unquiet spirit or two. Can I sort them out? I'm not confident. Still, why would you want your world to be less rather than more interesting? Oh, by the way, my own [really weak] possible mischief-maker experience: back in the days of the "Walnut Trees" experience posted earlier, I got up one day dressed and went for a long walk. Unusually, my foot began to hurt a great deal, high on the ball of the big toe. Limping back home, I took off shoe and sock and there was a large hard kernel of corn almost embedded in the foot. How this had gotten into my shoe,sock,and all the way up to my toe I couldn't easily figure out. The socks were thick, the shoe tightly laced...it had to be in there already when I put them on, and inside the sock. I scoured the back yard where I'd been the previous day looking for that sort of corn that some people put out hoping to attract ducks or other big birds--nothing. I decided that I'd have to leave it as a mystery, and probably a mundane one, but a thought kept nagging. Grandma used to call those hard painful growths on the balls of your feet "corns". A mischievous joke? A little levity from our friends? Well, who knows?----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------P.S. folks, these posts have been fun for me on almost all levels, but the unexpected workload is exorbitant. I can't do it everyday--plus I'm not smart enough anyway. I'm going to cut back. Maybe every other day to begin. We'll see what I can manage. GOD bless and may the mischief-makers go easy on you.
Mike,
ReplyDeleteI deal with some of these issues in my next book, Hidden Realms, which Visible Ink Press will publish next year. The following isn't in the book, but since you mention oddities of quotidian life:
Here in my office, located in a large room in the back of our house's first floor, I labor amid my work-related books (which are numerous) and most of my CD collection (likewise oversized). With each of these, I have had one curious experience for which I can imagine no prosaic explanation that seems plausible to me, though of course I can prove nothing un-prosaic either.
The book-related experience took place more recently, within the past month. As background I need to relate that when I was married to my first wife 30 years ago and living in the Chicago area, I bought and read Stanislaw Lem's novel The Investigation. I found it riveting and -- until I read John Fowles's A Maggot a few years later -- judged it the finest, most thoughtful literary treatment of anomalies and their meaning that I had ever seen. In the early-1980s divorce and division of property, my copy of the Lem novel vanished. From time to time over the years (and the move to Minnesota in 1989), I would lament the book's absence. I wanted very much to reread it.
Not long ago, I was writing something and needed to check a source. Walking down one of the rows of books, I happened to glance down and notice one volume inexplicably jutting out from the bottom shelf. (I say "inexplicably" because this shelf happens to house the books I most rarely consult.) I reached down to push it back in.
I don't need to tell you what the title was.
Jerry, all of us who know you have secretly suspected that you are the center of the weird universe, and it becomes clearer each day. My sister to whom this is happening all the time will be happy to send her "imp" to Canby. Affectionately, your buddy.
ReplyDeleteMy Dad just told me a tale similar to the disappearing closet item story. I cannot recall all of the details but it went something like this: He and my Mom were watching their granddaughters play in the living room. My Dad goes into the kitchen to grab his car keys from the counter. They're not there. He asks my Mom if she's seen them and she can only remember them being on the counter. He asks the girls if they have seen the keys, to which they reply "no", which makes sense because they've been with the girls the entire time, plus, it would be extremely difficult for either one of the granddaughters to climb up onto the counter and reach the keys, which were sitting against the wall. Having looked in all logical places and probably some that didn't make any sense, my Dad walks frustratingly back into the kitchen to find the keys sitting in exactly the same place where he had originally left them. My Mom is his witness. The girls maintain their innocence. Could a Newbury fairy be to blame?
ReplyDeleteAs far as cutting down on your posts goes, you've definitely spoiled us all with the frequency of your entries; each of which propels me into a kind of information feeding frenzy, requiring adequate time for digestion. If anything, less frequent posts might cut down on my indigestion, then again, so would staying away from Don Hermann's pickles. Back to reading Dr. Evans-Wentz's "Fairy Faith"...
This blog is about adventure, which like Luke Skywalker we crave in this constricted world, and which, despite what Yoda might deem responsible behavior, is what our spirits' require to soar a bit and become in touch and creative. The subjects of the blog are beyond price in that each of them may be real--and real in some magnificent way. I hope that more people let the constrictions slide away, and open up to these things [maybe not Ouija, that's a little scary], and partake as Obiwan says in a far larger world.
ReplyDeleteMike:
ReplyDeleteMy mother had exactly two experiences of "fairies" rather than "often" having them. She was in her mother's bed because she was sick, and that bed was more comfortable. My mother was perplexed, still, in her 50s--it should have been a fever-dream, "but then why was she beatin' me up?" (She was always very alive to the impact of physical punishment on a kid, which to me added weight to this being real rather than conflated memory. I knew her.)
Hypotheses can fan out in all directions for these experiences. But the illness ought to be latched firmly onto the rest of the story. It just might be a relevant data-point.
Now let's see if the comment demon lets me sign my name: Frank John Reid.
Illness or not, if the memory of the unreachable hatbox is correct, that signature fact cuts through the rest of the debate and debunking. I'll correct the "often". For me one "black swan" is plenty anyway.
ReplyDeleteMike--
ReplyDeleteOur good friend, the late Richard Hall, apparently encountered the Mischief-Maker in Brentwood, Maryland, in the mid-90s. He circulated an e-letter about this some time back:
Brentwood Weirdness
While recuperating from hip replacement operation at home (visiting nurse once or twice a week), I consolidated my day-to-day activities in the livingroom, slept on the couch, used a small microwave oven to heat up canned/packaged foods, etc. When necessary, I hobbled to the kitchen or the bathroom using a walker. Frankly, I have repressed memories of what happened because it was so baffling and confusing, and I could not even imagine a "rational explanation" and I am not sure of the exact sequence of events any more. At some point in there, I was going past my normal bedroom to the bathroom and glanced in and saw clothes laid out on my bed (which I hadn't used in weeks).
Puzzled, I went in and looked around. Yes, I was occasionally on some kind of narcotic painkiller (though I never used up the prescription) and would like to believe that as an "explanation," but I can't because those things just made me sleepy; they did not distort my perceptions. About the same time, as I often did keeping erratic hours dependent on dozing and waking while watching TV or listening to music, one night I fell asleep on the couch with my glasses on. Next morning the glasses were gone. Naturally, I assumed they had fallen on
the floor but they were nowhere to be seen. Besides, I slept on my
back (I had to) and was rather immobile. But the glasses were not anywhere on the couch either. I kept searching compulsively, looking everywhere, but with no luck. They stayed missing for about a week.
Then one day I opened the refrigerator door (probably looking for juice or some beverage) and there they were on the top shelf sitting in a pan of birdseed. WELL! Although I do feed the birds in the winter, I do not do so in the summer and as I recall didn't even have a supply of seed at that time. It tends to become moldy, especially in my climate, if not used. Second, I do not store birdseed or carry it around in a pie tin. Third, I had opened and closed that refrigerator door numerous times before, and the glasses and/or pan were NOT there. The top shelf is roughly at eye level; my "cupboard was bare" anyway, and I could hardly have missed seeing them. In fact, my immediate reaction when I saw the glasses was one of astonishment. They were the first things that caught my eye when I opened the door. Although I am a "disciple" of Charles Fort and am convinced that lots of strange and inexplicable things happen in this world that are rejected by science when they can't immediately be pigeonholed, this one is SO strange that I am forced to question my own senses. Yet, I know it really happened. -- Dick
Such events seem to be sine qua non for Fortean researchers, except I haven't had mine yet... --Rob Swiatek
Rob, Dick was so analytical that it is surprising that he had the experience, but I'm happy that he did. It shows me that even our old "hard sell" Hall had a lively romantic in him that he didn't show enough. Dick fought the good and guarded fight for UFO respectability so intensely, that it was tough for his "kid" to surface. If we lived in a kinder and less fearful world, we could all have regular recess jailbreaks and fly with Dick's birds and the other denizens of the air in our research and our intuition. I really hope that Dick accepted this personal anomaly that his mind KNEW had happened even though his reason told him no. He needed more of that, and he'd earned it. You'll have your pixies and reality shifts too, Rob, I'll try to send some Irish imps to Virginia. It would help, though if you changed your name to O'Swiatek. GOD bless and peace [with a few leprechaun interruptions].
ReplyDeletethe small beings , usually looked like a baby walking like a boy, can be had for a price, to enrich the owner by stealing valuables from other people. its called Tuyul in indonesian. The price is usually an offering regularly made to the tuyul itself , basically a spirit worship. In some cases the asking price is one of the child of the owner , if newborn usually dies, if young child usually got sickly or mentally retarded.
ReplyDeleteand this is real witchdoctor service, not a joke post.
also available are charms for making one look beautiful to old age, usually planting something inside the skin, or charm to woo a lady , everything can be had if you are willing to pay the price. and usually these charms are regional or territorial, meaning they lost effectiveness if taken out from the current terrirtory, as if there are different spiritual ruler for each territory..
Myabe this sound far fetched to westerner even those who believe in supernaturals, but in asia this kind of spiritism is very common.. and very dangerous too