The Big Study

Every Kid Likes Dinosaurs, Part three.

2012-01-25T14:18:00.000-08:00

This will be the final part of this anomalistic trek, and probably the least newsworthy [I rather liked part two, which was the reason for this whole effusion]. Today, though, we should terminate this with a few framing remarks on the topic and the general controversy.

The first thing that ought to be mentioned is the "feasibility argument" for continued existence of dinosaurs. Regusters was trying to make a geographically-focussed case for such a thing with his carbon-dating of the Niger fossil bone. There is a bigger picture [literally] into which such an argument would fit. That's Continental Drift.

In the Continental Drift hypothesis, all the current landmasses were joined together in an unstable jigsaw named Gondawanaland. This happy state lasted for even a geologically-long time offering plenty of habitat stability to encourage beasts to maximize their genetic potentials in environments to which they became exceptionally well adapted. Some of that maxing-out produced the dinosaurs.

When the Gondawanaland supercontinent decided to rip apart, all that "easy life" of stable habitat began to be more and more severely disrupted. This, and its consequences, is what led to the Death-of-the-Dinosaurs, not some "Death Star collision", which at most provided a punctuation mark on terribly distressed species. It was evolving environmental change, not sudden catastrophe, which put these monsters down.

But, it could be imagined that one big area of the supercontinent did not get the brunt of those changes, at least as hard.... Africa. Africa, as seen illustrated in the simple map above, sits there in the middle of the fracturing supercontinent and rather waddles about in place, while its siblings go sailing off across oceans to crash into one another, meet subduction zones, produce mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, and all manner of nastiness. "Somebody" sitting there at home in Africa, in their happy little tropical environment, might wonder [relatively speaking] what all the hullaballoo was about. Environments even here in Central Africa would still be slowly and dramatically changed, but not perhaps as drastically as elsewhere.

This is the larger scale into which a feasibility argument might nest.

A second point would be that it is not at all obvious that just because you were big and reptilian that around 65 million years ago you had to go. We have some pretty impressive big reptilians who say: "Not so fast, my friend!" [Well, maybe skip the "friend" part]. The continued survival of the crocodilians remains a mystery to the theorists today. Turtles, too, puzzle these guys. There is no ready answer to this which rises above the level of academic BS. I'll contribute to the pile with my view that a). every species was at different stages of being able to adapt to the slow-death-march caused by the supercontinent break-up, and b). these animals lay a lot of eggs and do so regularly [NOT your usual very slow populators], and this gave the succeeding generations greater chances for survival both by positive genetic variations and greater numbers to accidentally find successful food niches, etc.

Were some of the greater than 500 genera of dinosaurs [these are just the ones known] living more like the crocodilians as to frequency of egg-production and maternal egg-guarding, etc, so as to mimic what the crocs and gators did?? Well, why not? The point is that the idea is not a crazy one.

A couple of years ago, one team of fossil scientists reported that they had a find which when dated showed a date well after the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. To their eyes, the Great Stop Sign had not stopped these particular dinosaurs. This was at a US dig in New Mexico [San Juan Basin shown above] and seems to indicate that these hadrosaurs beat the widowmaker by at least 500,000 years. This does not at all surprise me, as our fossil record is so incomplete and our fossil studiers so resolute in wanting to fit things into the textbook cant, that exceptions to the boundary line must exist all over the planet. So, why not Africa? And why not for longer?

Of course you must have the solid evidence... but this is a feasibility study, and the purpose of a feasibility study is to tell the sniggering jackanapes to shut up and get out of the way of people who want to do something.

The skeptical argument that nothing so large could continued to go undetected is baloney, particularly if applied to this swamp area right up to modern times. The picture above is from a regular [non-mokele mbembe] herpetology expedition to those swamps in, I think, 1999. I've also read of similar conditions in another even more recently. Look at what the porters are putting up with! And these sorts of conditions persist across an area at least the acreage of Florida! Yeh, sure, we'll pop over there and solve this thing.

Some people like to use as part of their feasibility argument the legends of Dragons which occur in surprisingly different cultures going way back in time. The argument, obviously, is that they refer to dinosaurs. That's a tough one for me. Dragon legends interest me almost as much as the Little People tales, and in my opinion are more complicated and harder to get clear as to what we're even talking about.

The "dragons" COULD be experiences with remnant dinosaur populations, I suppose, but it doesn't feel at all correct. The dragon legends are too ubiquitous to be real meat-&-juices encounters all over the place, yet completely evade science in all those same areas. Dragon tales could grow from merely seeing the exposed bones of dinosaurs as some suggest, but fossils intact enough to show the true conformation of the beast are really rare without full-fledged digs, so I really doubt it. We know that many early such fossils were just attributed to Giants of some kind.

I think that the origin of dragon legends in true dinosaur encounters is a false lead and is a road to confusion. People like to hearken back to writers like Pliny {above} for support for such as this, but nope. I am a privileged person so as to own a personal copy of the early english translation of Pliny[1634] and am happy to take any excuse to haul it down from the shelves and read it. He does say that he is commenting upon "dragons" in the text. They exist in India and in Africa in places like Ethiopia. BUT, he is obviously, completely obviously, talking about really big serpents of the boa constrictor/python type. Now if anyone wants to make an argument that he's describing cryptozoologically-huge snakes, OK by me. Dragons, no. And Dinosaurs, no.

This is not to say that I'm opposed to someone showing me some legend somewhere which sounds like existent dinosaurs, but generically recruiting dragons for this doesn't work for me.

Something else which doesn't work for me is Creation "Science".

Long-term readers of this blog know that I am a Catholic and hold a great deal of stock in spiritual matters of almost all sorts. [The whole blog is, in its different ways, founded upon the belief that our weary old world needs a strong infusion of at least open-mindedness to mystery, if not precisely open-mindedness to the paranormal and the spiritual]. I have no fundamental prejudice against the claims of Creationists. It's just that almost all of them are bunk. In this shockingly abrupt conclusion, I am in the comfortable company of almost all of the theologians of my church, and absolutely all of the Catholic scientists, of which I class myself as one.

But I AM a scientific type of mentality and I believe in subjecting claims to some tough but open-minded scrutiny. The ultra-right wing of christian beliefs that goes for a 4004BC origin of the world, or any such minimalist date, fails every rational scrutiny. So do the several "deductions" which are forced upon any who would try to defend this. These deductions include things like: humans and dinosaurs totally co-existed ubiquitously; and Noah took the dinosaurs on the Ark. Because these folks attempt to believe this, they have welcomed the news that mokele mbembe still exists in the Congo.

I really wish that if they insist on some of these desired conclusions, that they'd come up with some better scenarios. Time after time people will throw the dinosaurs at Noah in a challenge to Ark capacity. The apologists toss this aside with the most mindless disregard, despite seeming somewhat intelligent in some of their other arguments.

C'mon, guys!! The Ark was big but not THAT big! [I'm giving them a biblical-sized Ark here just for conversation sake]. Do you really think that we could get all the animals on an oil tanker let alone the Ark?

There were some pretty big dinosaurs out there. And they couldn't come just one at a time; there had to be at least two of each if not seven pairs [I think].

Some of these monsters were well over a hundred feet long. And though many were smaller, there were at a minimum 500 genera of them.

And this is just dinosaurs that we're talking about --- think of all the other essentially land-living or semi-aquatic species that Noah would have to be cramming in there.

The only way out for the Creation "Scientists" on this one would be to ask God to do something about it. Saying that they were ALL destroyed in the Flood [which also didn't universally happen; I'm just barely open to a localized upper Mesopotamian area flood ], just won't do as literal interpretation of that phrase in Genesis says Noah took examples of ALL the creatures. God would have to do something far more creative: like condensing everybody down to miniature size once they crossed the entryway portal. That action however didn't make it into the story, so it's not popular.

The relevance for our mokele mbembe story is that now the Creationists have begun tramping towards the Likuoala River in search of dinosaurs.

I'm not sure how many of these "scientific expeditions" have been sent [more than one for sure] but they have come back claiming success. It's everyone's choice, as usual, to decide about their claims. It's my feeling that these guys are going to have to really get the true goods if they are to add anything to our understanding of this at all. They have a bigger barrier to overcome because their own prejudices are so much more blatant.

Here's a drawing of a mokele mbembe allegedly seen by one expedition member. He called it an Apatosaurus. Pretty shocking as Apatosaurus is one of the big ones. Seventy feet long... amazing that everyone else missed it. No tracks of the monster either?

And the above photo [?] is labelled charging dinosaur [!!!]. Actually, I've partly lied. The whole title included the words "Photographic proof at last!"

The level of stupidity in that goes past embarrassment and far into pathos. Lord God save us from your more hysterical supporters!!

With that I leave you to your own problems getting visas for the Republic of the Congo, and wish you Godspeed until next topic [whatever weird thing that turns out to be.]

Every Kid Likes Dinosaurs, Part two.

2012-01-24T10:06:00.000-08:00

Today's rendition of this topic focusses solely on the apparently unwanted outsider in the story: Herman Regusters. There is some unknown [to me] bad "sociology" in this part of our tale, but as I know little of the substance, I'll try to stick mainly to what if anything Regusters found.

From what I can tell Herman Regusters was indeed a NASA engineer and was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory associated with Cal Tech when he decided to take his fling at Mokele Mbembe. His father had been a west African missionary which doubtless gave him a special feeling of connection to sub-Saharan Africa. He met his wife, a psychologist with some medical background, in Ghana, and they were married there in a traditional local ceremony. She went with him on this Congo expedition. Regusters was a technology expert and good at hi-tech equipment and photography. He was also a pilot and had served with the USAF in Korea. Regusters heard of other probes into the Likuoala swamps and their difficulties in "navigation", and the whole project interested him. Having NASA contacts, he was able to float a brilliant idea: why not let me go into those swamps as a test of our LANDSAT and NAVSTAR capabilities for mapping difficult areas?? NASA wouldn't pop for the idea officially, but Regusters decided to go for it anyway unofficially.

What Regusters WAS able to do was to get good LANDSAT imagery of the relevant area. Through that he was able to reject the idea of flying directly to the lake [uncertainties as to depth and obstructions], but rather fly semi-directly [to the village of Epena] and trek the rest of the way.

On the map beside, you can see Impfondo circled in green, where most expeditions were stuck with as a staring point. Epena is at the end of the orange line at the edge of the red circle, allegedly prime mokele mbembe territory. Regusters was already well ahead of the time curve. Regusters, like Mackal et al, also traveled southwest along the Likuoala River searching for the semi-hidden Bai River, which would take them north to Lac Tele.

At the village of Boa, however, he discovered that all the maps were invalid as to the actuality of getting to Lac Tele. This, it turned, was impossible by water. The inability of the Powell-Mackal expeditions to get there was readily explained. Instead, locals informed him that there was a way, surprisingly on foot. Porters were hired and the trip was successful without ever seeing the River Bai. Even then it was not picnic with much hard sloshing and little food on the trail. Regusters said that "anything which crossed the gunsight" ended up on the fire. This included Crocodile, Snake, and Monkey. Asked what Monkey tasted like, he resisted the standard joke and said "dark meat".

Whatever the "advantage", Regusters did in fact make it all the way to Lac Tele and there, at a minimum, found a rather strange perfectly round body of water --- let the unfettered hypothesizing begin!!. One idea which "surfaced" immediately was that it was formed by a meteorite impact, but how had it fought off the encroachment of the swamp vegetation so effectively? I suppose we'll never know that answer.

Other than a mysterious round lake, what else did he find?? One possibility was tracks. He felt that maybe these tracks, like the one pictured above, might belong to Mokele Mbembe. This is probably wrong.

One thing that over-enthusiastic explorers might forget is that their are some plenty big but well-known critters out there. Also these characters often wander about more than you'd expect. We saw earlier on this site how Ivan Sanderson was corresponding with a guy in Africa who thought that he might be on the track of some kind of living mastodon like thing, and Ivan was right behind him on this. He ultimately got a mudtrack, which was not that much different than the one above, and he and Ivan still both thought they had something big. Ivan's zoologist friend at the Philadelphia Zoo had to talk him down off crypto-olympus by telling him that this was surely a pygmy rhino. [I think that's what he determined anyway --- too lazy to go back and look it up now].

Regusters thought that his print might show three toes and thereby a dinosaur-like foot. But our friends the rhinos have a foot conformation which produces such fooler mudprints, and so our intrepid NASA engineer is probably out of his depth on this one.

On another website, someone published a later story [entirely different thing having nothing to do with Regusters] wherein locals told of a battle with a mokele mbembe and when shown a picture like the one below said that yes, that is precisely what mokele mbembe looks like. What this tells us is that legends slide around the countryside and people with no contact with "mokele mbembe" at all transfer the name into other experiences with large dangerous and unfamiliar [to them] animals. It also tells us that you need more than stories.

So did Regusters come up with more than the stories of Mackal et al?

Most interestingly for we casual followers of these matters were several instances where the group felt that they saw an unknown large animal. Case 1: "perturbations in the glass-smooth surface of the lake which implied the presence of a sizable object".

Case 2: Object sighted. "A long necked member could be clearly distinguished in the clear morning air". Submerged and not sighted again.

Case 3: A loud roar from the jungle [this was recorded].

Case 4: "Appearance of a very large object moving through the water." One kilometer distance. Pronounced wake. No head nor neck seen. Smooth dark brown surface. Native observers with team said much too large for hippopotamus, which is also unknown in that area.

Case 5: Loud animal sound. Splash of something big entering water. Regusters' wife sees long serpent-like neck and head emerge from water c. 30 meters from boat. Head held two meters above surface. Dark gray color and smooth-skinned. Whole sighting was only about 5 seconds.

Case 6: Regusters and wife alone exploring north end of shore and forest [place where allegedly two mokele mbembe animals had been killed by locals in past.] Heard heavy footsteps approaching from three different directions. The exploring instinct gave way to more fundamental ones and they ran.

The line drawing above: this wasn't identified in the file materials, but appears to be a sketch by a local person of what he saw at Lac Tele. It could represent "Case 2". [correction: while packing up the SITU file, I came across Regusters' title for this. It is: Sketch of an animal (monster) made by Colonel Emmanuel Mossedzedi, deputy commandant of the Brazzaville Garrison. Later Regusters said that this sketch "came alive" with one of the sightings at the lake.]

The camera shot of above left: this was also not identified in the file, but its location therein clearly indicates that it was sent by Regusters as part of his documentation of the expedition. I have seen this [in color and always left/right reversed] on the internet, and commented upon as if it is a probable crocodile. This could be true as Regusters says that the lake is heavy with crocodile population. [Another correction for the same reason as above: Regusters says that this is the Head portion of Mokele Mbembe submerging into Lake Tele. Taken from estimated distance of 300-400 feet.]

So, what else? Regusters brought back his taped jungle roar and got some pretty good expert opinion to analyze it. That opinion said: interesting sounds but we can't identify them with any animal we know. All of us non-animal vocalization experts must take that for what it's worth.

The only other scientific thing that Regusters did which is germane does not involve Lac Tele directly. It involves rather a dinosaur skeleton fossilized in Niger, of which he was given some "bone" samples to analyze. Why??

Regusters' idea here was not crazy. What he felt that he knew from the geology of that Niger region was that it was not desert [as it is now] c.10,000 years ago, but rather quite wet, and likely verdant. And, it would not be a stretch at all to imagine that it was part of a large ecosystem which stretched from there down into the Cameroons and Congo area. If so, and if some evidence could be found for a surviving dinosaur species in the Niger region in the vicinity of a few thousand years ago, that evidence would state that African dinosaurs had indeed survived the Cretaceous boundary extinction, and as habitat shrunk, may have been left as a concentrated remnant in those Congolese swamps. So, he accepted the fossil samples happily and got a good lab to try to date them.

As you can read in the letter above and below, the testing was not exactly plain sailing. This is well-explained by the analyst and is nobody's fault that a clearer answer was not obtained. All we can say is that the analysis does NOT show a VERY late date for the sample. What is frustrating about the language though is that one does not know whether it says that the sample was in the ballpark of a few tens of thousands of years [which would make Regusters' point just fine], or merely that anything over 30,00 back to multiple millions of years is fair game.

So, there are the concrete elements of this, and the science, as best it happened. In all of that it seems to me that Regusters did a decently good job. However, this was not at all welcomed in either the skeptical nor cryptozoological communities. Why I do not know. Regusters was a cryptozoological outsider. Perhaps he wasn't "generous" enough to his forebears. Perhaps he was seen as an unwanted usurper, much as was Gerald Hawkins by the traditional archaeologists about his Stonehenge astronomical theories, or Luis Alvarez by the palaeontologists with his asteroid-killed-the-dinosaurs hypothesis [in these Hawkins was right, and Alvarez in great part was wrong, but paradoxically the wrong theory is nearly universally accepted by now and the right one still fights to get into the textbooks --- we surely can mess things up]. I have my own experiences with such tribalism [I'm OK if I'm writing about UFOs {since I'm a Tribal Elder}, but roundly criticized if I write about Cryptozoology, by some anyway]. This is horribly ingrained in us apparently, much to the detriment of our species' advancement of knowledge.

Whatever went on here in the Regusters case, it didn't help the cool pursuit of the truth about mokele mbembe. Regusters was angrily miffed by some of it. He wrote to Bob Warth:

"I came to learn, sadly, that I was better prepared for the adventures of exploration and new geographic and biological discoveries than I was for the criticism and negative comments and attacks on my integrity I did receive after my return; especially criticism from armchair investigators, pseudoscientists, and skeptical members of the media."

Regardless of what went on here in this sociological fiasco, any long-term member of the anomalies-researching community [who actually does any work and publication] has been there. I don't know what "blame" exists in this, and to whom, but on the surface of the documents that Bob Warth had in the SITU file, it seems to be to have been an honorable try by Regusters to discover something.

There are animals who eat their young..................

Every Kid Likes Dinosaurs, Part one.

2012-01-24T05:41:00.000-08:00

The topic of whether dinosaurs still exist has been written about extensively on the Internet and books/articles and probably doesn't need an entry by me here. Actually, I thought I'd already written something about this, but the site search says no. But, against all reason, and because I blundered into Herman Regusters' interactions with Bob Warth in the SITU files, "ready or not" here's my turn at this issue.

I'm not going to do an exhaustive review. You can get a full historical background to the idea with a flip of Google. What I'm doing here is an introductory "part one", roughly presenting a little information about Sanderson, Mackal, Agnagna and the Central African idea, and then a "part two" on what Regusters seem to be about and what he accomplished. Maybe there'll be a "part three".

Who knows when the "Dinosaurs still exist in Africa" idea began? Some folks say that earliest mentions date to the 1700s. Since there was no concept of "dinosaur" back then, you can see the conundrum of pushing back the dates too early. The idea more clearly related to the possibility of actual dinosaurs in Africa grew gradually in the first half of the 20th century. The newspaper above speaks of an expedition of the Smithsonian Institution in 1920, which reported mysterious tracks and unidentified animal roars while exploring a central African river. Nothing like the Smithsonian to bring a mystery topic a little respectability.

Ivan Sanderson, naturally, became interested in all this in his youth as an African adventurer in 1932. There in a well-known story, he heard native tales, saw what he considered to be NON-Hippo tracks [nor elephant, nor rhino], and says that his canoe was nearly overturned by some huge beast suddenly surfacing and submerging in the river. Sanderson naturally was forever convinced that something big and unknown was about.

He became increasingly convinced due to writing by the legendary animal "supplier", Carl Hagenbeck, who had collected local tales of a dinosaur-like monster. Sanderson often said: "Hagenbeck was no fool". He was also impressed with local tales like that published by a German explorer [Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz --- a name long enough for three people], who gave a very concrete detailed description of such a beast. Freiherr...whatever... gave the local name as Mokele Mbembe, which has largely stuck.

Sanderson himself published his thoughts on the living dinosaurs of the Congo [actually for him it was a bit to the north in the Cameroons] in SITUs journal PURSUIT early in the game, and also that same essay in his paperbound book, MORE THINGS in 1969. All this originating from his Saturday Evening Post article of 1948. It is a shame, in many ways, that Ivan passed prior to the sudden upsurge of interest [and more importantly ACTION] which burst into this topic in the 1970s and 1980s. Several, admittedly "on a shoelace" expeditions set sail into the Congolese swamps during those years, and, if he'd been alive and younger, he might have been "on board".

Almost all of this "new" activity focussed on the Likuoala Swamps of the Republic of Congo, a "difficult" state politically, with communist leanings and rampant paranoia towards "visitors" in many years. The Republic of Congo is not, for anyone who doesn't know, our old "Belgium Congo" [now named Zaire], but is to its West-northwest.

For some reason a herpetologist named James Powell got interested in these stories in the early seventies and made an expedition, and another in Gabon, both looking not only for undescribed reptile species but specifically for Mokele Mbembe. To my knowledge, nothing came of these except the further collection of local native tales.

In 1980, Powell returned to the Congo, and tagging along with him was University of Chicago biochemistry professor Roy Mackal. Roy [I met him a handful of times and we were on "Roy" and "Mike" basis, so forgive my familiarity], was not exactly a biologist/zoologist but he was plenty smart and well-self-trained. He at the time was known as a Nessie expert. [as he is shown in the accompanying photo at the Loch]. I'm not sure of all the dimensions of this alliance between him and Powell, but Roy had ambitions of getting some serious funding support for a full-fledged expedition in the future, and, for him, this may have been the preliminary "feasibility data" that he would use for that future attempt.

The Powell-Mackal expedition took place under limited visa time constraints and never came close to getting to where they hoped to explore, but created a focussed target of Lac Tele as the likely mokele mbembe stomping grounds. The data harvest from this expedition was the usual native tales, augmented by a clever method by Roy of showing animal drawing cards to locals all up and down the Likuoala River, and noting what he felt to be a pattern of increasing and decreasing "accuracy" as to the possibility of an extant dinosaur-like creature at villages in a certain location. Roy believed that this could possibly point to a location [towards Lac Tele] to the north, essentially, from that area of the river. As said, visa time ran out and no real progress towards Lac Tele was made.

Along came 1981, and Roy, despite exerting a great effort to achieve serious funding and failing to do so, got some visa approval from the Congo government [on the condition that he would take a Congolese biologist, Marcellin Agnagna, along], and set off again for a try at Lac Tele. With him were Agnagna, Richard Greenwell [secretary, and de facto administrator of the International Society for Cryptozoology (actually a fine group at the time, and VERY serious about concrete meat-and-juices crypto-discoveries)], and I third gentleman I didn't know.

Once again it was tough-sledding [or tough rowing if you prefer]. Mackal faced several big problems. A). he had lousy geographical information. The swamps are huge and navigation by more-or-less dead reckoning is almost suicidal. In fact Roy told me that he had prepared for this trek by securing anti-venoms for every known poisonous snake in the region, AND HAD TO USE EVERY ONE OF THEM!! Not my sort of vacation.

B). This is theoretical [read: BS] by me, but I think that he didn't get very good information from the locals. If you look at the map above: you can take a small plane into Impfondo and go by some sort of way to the village of Epina/Epena. [that's a yellow rack in the northern part of the map]. Then you have to decide what you're going to do, purely "roughing it". There seem to be more direct ways to try for Lac Tele than the one Mackal/Greenwood/ Agnagna tried. Again I may be misreading this, but it seems that they went on open water for a while [apparently WSW] and then tried to find an entrance to a waterway going north to the Lac. This didn't work well, as that alleged entrance is essentially indistinguishable from the rest of the swamp. You can get a rough idea of the open swamp by the picture above. [Greenwell, by the way, is at the left, all decked out in his explorer's best. Roy Mackal was an amazingly fit individual, despite the gray hair and beard, but I can't imagine how Richard made it].

The bottomline of the expedition seems to be that although our heroes strove mightily, due to wayward "sailing" and ridiculous Congolese visa time restrictions, not a lot was added to our knowledge about the dinosaur/Lac Tele possibility. This was disappointing but worse than that disappointment was the fact that an American "outsider" was about to muscle in on the gig. This was Herman Regusters, and he's the "star" of part two of our saga. Regusters' expedition also relatively poorly-funded but with a few superior technical "tricks", took place later in 1981 and created "rivalry".

But to briefly finish this part: two years after he went to the vicinity of Lac Tele with Mackal, the local Congolese biologist Agnagna [with obviously no government time restrictions] went all the way to the lake and stayed some time. Agnagna claimed to have personally seen the mokele mbembe out of the water and claimed that it was a reptile, and though not a crocodile had some crocodilian features.

So, with the above picture of Marcellin Agnagna and a drawing of mokele mbembe on his board to inspire us [despite the fact that the drawing doesn't match the idea of crocodilian features], we'll go our merry way until the next part shows up with the very controversial Mr. Regusters.

Till then. "Watch the Skies ---er --- the Water."

A SMALL PART of the SMALL STUDY INDICATING THAT LITTLE PEOPLE MAY BE REAL.

2012-01-18T06:15:00.000-08:00

Back to the Little Folks briefly. Readers really need to take the following "data" for no more than they're worth. As you know, I've gone through two hundred folkloric entity cases from my randomly [well-undisciplinedly] collected files and reported on the contents in recent past postings. The third hundred hit a mental bog and was hard sledding. What I've done here is to skim that 100 and just extract the entity height data out of the stories [there was a lot of "no comment" on height in these unfortunately]. Getting what I could within an already poorly-collected database, I combined those cases with heights with earlier ones to get to 200 cases stating that feature. Those accumulated numbers are part of the graph below.

But we wanted to compare Faerie Encounters with UFO case encounters here, so I needed a UFO data set --- of which there are several out there. I've used one which fell into my lap. Way back in the late 1960s, the French journal Phenomenes Spatiaux [the publication of the fine French group GEPA] published a study by the South American UFOlogist [sorry, I don't know if he was Argentinian or Brazilian] Jader U. Pereira. It was quite good. It was loaded with statistics and had approximately 200 hundred incidents. [The reason why I tried to get to 200 Little People cases on "my side"]. Of course, entity height was one such stat.

I particularly wanted to find a study like this, because it was pre-image pollution; that is the witnessing public hadn't yet been told that UFOnauts could only look one [or two] ways and were relatively "psychologically free" to report just what they saw. As you can see from the illustrations, they reported quite a variety of critters.

The above is the comparative graph that I've tinkered together [hmmm... "Tinkered".... quite the Jungian slip, methinks]. The red bars are for the UFO entities [200 cases]. The green are for the Faerie encounters [200 cases]. The yellow are those same Faerie encounters with the ones added from the two websites which seem to appeal to persons very Tinkerbell-oriented [239 cases total].

Again, please don't make too much out of this. I tender a few humble observations: a). The faerieworld cases are weighted to the smaller sized beings even without the Tinkerbells added in. Almost no UFO case has entities less than two foot tall, while Faerie cases of such critters are abundant.

b). Both groups, however, diabolically peak at about three-footers. It's almost a borderline: three foot and up= "aliens"; three foot and down = "The Good People". Around three foot: Ha Ha, you can't catch me!!!

This "finding" is so soft that I wouldn't let it drive you crazy if I were you --- there are exceptions to all these rules as we know --- but it still has the intuition for me that it is another indication that that two anomalistic phenomena are different. We saw another indication of this [in my mind anyway] on the earlier post about the dominant aerotech nature of UFO cases generally in the WW2-1950s era.

Pereira had several illustrations in his compilation, and you can see some of them in the seven picture panels above. For UFO old-timers they will bring us back to an age where it seemed that witnesses were describing a whole Zoo of UFOnauts with almost no holds barred as to what they looked like, except the humanoid form. The FACT of this nearly universal humanoid form has been one of the elements of UFOlogy which most convinced me of the veracity of these reports, and long ago I wrote a piece on the essential forced nature of such a form based on physical laws and convergent evolution. As I look back on the years, I still wholeheartedly believe that. That does not stop me, however, from looking at Pereira's "beasts" and wondering if among the UFOnauts we are not seeing the occasional folkloric entity in those drawings.

So, once again: WWHOOOO goes there?. Or is the Universe just having a great cosmic laugh at us??

I'm not sure when I'll get back to the Little People as far as the blog is concerned. The Wind of the Mysterious blows its own mysterious way in my life, so all that I can say is that I'm still on that forest path.... listening for what I can still hear of the Druids and thinking somehow that they-of-the-forests and they-of-the-lakes somehow "knew" one another. I'll probably never be able to uncover much of that, but I'm giving it an awkward try. With luck, someday I may have something to share that neither of us will have to be too embarrassed about.

Till then,

May the Forest Path Rise Up to Meet You, and the Moon Shine Bright Upon Your Face, and God and His Adjutant Manitou Always Hold You in the Palms of Their Hands.

The Old Irish Blessing, St. Kevin Style.

UFO Portals??: A small add-on.

2012-01-15T06:57:00.000-08:00

Briefly back again due to someone sending me a very interesting fairly recent case which seems to describe a portal effect. I'll throw out a few bits of trivia and then give the case at the end.

The pictures above are from a fairly recent dust-up where many persons in Norway saw an odd looking feature in the sky, which began to be talked about as if it were a UFO portal. Probably not. The Russians shortly admitted to firing a "new" missile, which seems to regularly be giving them trouble, and it went spiraling haywire. Was it the missile? Or was it something else? Even if it wasn't the missile [it probably was], there seems no good reason to bring UFOs into this.

Also, here is another of those interminable Mexican UFO videos. As above, this was rapidly trumpeted as showing a UFO portal. This one is a bit excruciating, as the camera worker is, to my eye, obviously overboosting the magnification during the filming and creating a ring image with a voided middle. I'm always willing to admit that I'm wrong on such matters, but this is no UFO portal for me.

Not a UFO portal this time, but a still photo [cropped as you see] from one of our best "romantic" locations: St. Michael's Tower on Glastonbury Tor. Glastonbury Tor is one of those places not only involved with King Arthur and Grail Lore, but has a long-standing Faerie tradition. The legend says that on a certain night of the year, in the hillside of the Tor, the hill will open and reveal an entrance to a Faerie King's world. Well, that would indeed be interesting. When I was there, some civil engineering excavation work had made a slash cut well up the hillside. To show you what a romantic I am, I picked up a piece of the unearthed rock and packed it back to Michigan. But even given that, I have to say that the photo above isn't in the proper place for the legendary Faerie portal, has no UFO relationship that I can tell, and I have no idea whatever as to what this lightspot is. Others of course disagree, and someone claims to see a figure on a staircase shaded in the light. Hmmmmmm...not I.

So on to the report which elicited this post: a good friend sent me a notice about this case, and then followed up to get the actual letter in which the witness describes the incident. I'm going to keep respect for the witness of course and not name names. This occurred on December 8, 1992.

The witness was returning to his shop just before midnight when he saw an unusual low-hanging "star". That "star" just vanished. Suddenly, directly above the van, was a 40' diameter disk with a dome and orange areas like exhaust ports. The color of the thing was "rusty red" as if the craft was made of metal which was cooling down from a very hot state. The disk rotated clockwise as it slowly moved across the sky. There was no sound throughout this 5-10 minute observation, which seemed to be quite closeby.

The "exhaust ports" were not "on" initially, but as soon as they manifested, an area of space in front of the disk began to shimmer and take on the appearance of a mirror. As the craft penetrated the shimmering mirror, it gradually disappeared in a piecemeal smooth fashion until it, and the "portal", were gone.

Well, what do you know? Cases like this are not unique in the files but they are VERY rare. There are various hints both in the air and on the ground that such a phenomenon may be going on, but it's an unusual case which describes it as graphically as this. Too bad that we have no other witness, or at least an actual investigator interview.

So that's my contribution to your enlightenment and edification for today. I could well be wearing my WHACKHAT on that one, but it seems that the thing at least has a chance of being a true portal case. Peace, and till we meet again.

A Small UFO Matter

2012-01-13T18:13:00.000-08:00

Hi, folks. Jumping back in here quickly with something that fell in my lap, and I don't want to forget it, so a small posting. This has to do with sightings of UFOs from aircraft. The data come from the internet's best English-language UFO information site: NICAP, hosted by Fran Ridge.

NICAP has many, many good things on it, and one feature is various catalogs of sighting types. Fran sent me and the rest of "the boys" a catalog-in-progress of sightings from aircraft. This is truly in-progress so the data are certainly very incomplete, but so is everything in the field. Also, collections of data like this are very sociologically determined [ex. cases tend to be reported in different eras and in different locations according to strong dependence on sociological factors such as ease of reporting, less stigma attached, and so on]. Therefore, I normally wouldn't pay too much attention to bulk numbers in such matters yet... but these numbers were so striking that I believe that there's something there despite the data's prematurity. So... here it is:

This is my crude graph of the AVCAT numbers. They may be warped by the mere physical procedure of working with well characterized [older] data first, and that a large number more of recent cases could be added, but maybe not. This data set is somewhat vetted for quality. Many of the trumpeted "new" cases might not make the cut, seeing as how poorly things are investigated nowadays. Also, leaving out the very recent era, the data show marked differences elsewhere.

Notice the mass of sightings from WW2 through the 1950s. Although Condon's project in the late 60s gets a "gift", or a challenge [as it did on all types of cases], the spectacular "physical and high-strangeness eras" of the mid/late 60s and the mid-70s get a share of airborne sightings but are not striking like they are when you graph other case types, and are interspersed regularly with dead spots. AND, like in all other category graphs, along comes c.1980-1, and everything falls off the graph edge.

There is really only one thing that I see in this graph that I am nearly sure is solid. I believe that this graph will stand at least as regards the dominance of the WW2 to late 1950s era. The graph calls this age in UFOlogy: The Aerotech Era. It is the time when anyone seriously attending to the phenomenon would be forced to conclude: this is aerial technology. That is, in fact, what every sane individual DID conclude during that time. The USAF did. CSI-LA and CSI-NY did. NICAP, Keyhoe, and Dick Hall did. To reflect on some of our adventuring recently on this blog: this is what establishes core UFOlogy from "Little People" hypotheses. Once the high-strangeness eras begin later [with a possible precursor in late 1954], a mixture of Aerotechnical geniuses and folkloric meddlings is quite possible. But the early manifestation of the UFO phenomenon seems solidly technological.

Many "youngsters", and some oldsters lacking in historical perspective, chide the old-timers for their simplistic ET views. But the guy pictured at the bottom of this post was as correct as the data could be. He lived in that Aerotech Era and he saw it clearly. While it is true that some UFOlogists are stuck in that concept solely, and cannot see beyond what they see as forced consequences of their views, the ET-tech hypothesis for this core phenomenon is still the best. As you folks know, I see multiple things operating here and sliding all manner of phenomena into the UFOlogist's case files, but I'm still more or less with Keyhoe, Hall, NICAP, and the founders of our field, when it comes to things like pilot sightings et al.

All Hail to Old Don & His Best Book!!

Hit & Run: Back with a few brief ... whatevers.

2012-01-10T05:30:00.000-08:00

Hello, folks. Green Light on the blog for a day, anyway. It has been tough to think into things enough to feel worthy of placing anything out here in front of you, but I'll give this a try. Caveat emptor as to whether any of this makes sense. If not, hopefully it will at least be amusing.

The first bit of this is from DATA-NET. I dried up on this newsletter circa the early 1970s, not because the SITU collection ran out of them, but because for about two years there weren't many good cases to report --- and so the blog drifted into other things. Since D-N is easy to page through during "distracted" times, I recently ploughed on and found a few items in early 1973. I'll give you the ho-hum ones first and then the one which I think has more to it.

1]. York, ND. August 27, 1972. Multiple witnesses saw a light moving back and forth like a pendulum in the sky. It was bright red, changed to whitish-green, and vanished. An hour later it, or something like it, appeared again as a bright red light, staying red until it disappeared.

So far, essentially nothing here. A few days later, the lady of the farm was out swathing the fields of durum, and came across a bald spot in the middle of the crop. The bald spot was circular [12' in diameter] and the farming family knew perfectly well that it had not been there before. The bald spot was particularly odd for any area which had been continuously cultivated in the past, as it showed no sign of scorching nor digging and earth-moving; it was simply bald, and looked as if nothing had ever grown there. [Actually I lied earlier, folks, I don't consider this one a Ho-Hum case at all]. On the top of the bald spot, merely scattered about [i.e. not embedded nor in any way impacted in the soil] were a bunch of odd rocks. These things were like furnace slag, clinkers, actually airily light like volcanic scoria. They were certainly not "local". None of these things were even slightly "buried" and so obviously "landed"/scattered there recently, though without any force. There's where our mystery remains, friends. One should only add, that this seems to be another in a couple dozen or so cases that I have seen, where mystery "slag" or scoria-like rocks remain behind. No one has a clue about this. One desperate attempt at guesswork somewhere in the UFO literature wondered whether the advanced technology of the propulsion systems drew energy from chemical bonds in crystalline matter, or whatever, and that any minerals might do, and when "done", the detritus was discarded as slag. Don't ask me for the source of that "explanation"; I've forgotten it. If you want to claim that you thought of it, you'll probably get away with it, as most of us UFOlogists are so old by now, the guy who said it is probably "on the other side".

On to a couple of other less spectacular things but which are probably good bits of the database:

2]. Novi, MI. August 3, 1972. Multiple witnesses immediately reported their sighting to local police. The first witness heard a "peculiar" noise like humming or a drone in the air, which directed her attention. It was an oval-shaped object with white lights ringing it. Others were called out to see. Shortly later three bright lights appeared in the sky, and one of them suddenly shot off rapidly to the horizon. Then another object appeared, very much like the light-ringed disk. This one flew directly over the house. [at some height, however, so this can't be classed as a CE1]. Then, while the original witness was phoning the police, the others saw a huge white light travel across the entire sky, west-to-east. Then it stopped suddenly, made a right-angle turn, and flew off to the north. The police shortly arrived, interviewed the witnesses, and found them credible people, and their stories coherent within themselves and between one another. That's a pretty good Lights-and Objects case to add to our files.

3]. Georgetown, CA. August 6, 1972. Seven witnesses reported multiple lighted objects. They were apparently luminous and either discoid or rectangular in shape --- the witnesses insisted in using the word "oblong", and UFOlogists have known that to be used by witnesses in both ways. Sometimes the objects arrayed themselves horizontally and sometimes vertically. Beams of light, like searchlights, shown down from them. The beam colors were green, white, or yellow. [sorry you modernists, no blue beams]. Sometimes the searchlights were so bright as to light up the entire meadow. Occasionally, the objects seemed surrounded by a mist. The objects came over slowly, hovered, and then shot off rapidly to the East. Sometimes a small humming sound was heard. Behaving according to the Law of the Times, these things showed up at about 1:30am and 4am. Lots of witnesses; just enough strangeness.

4]. West Palm Beach, Fl. September 14, 1972. Perhaps dozens of people saw sky acrobatics from as many as eleven objects and lights. Objects pulsated red, yellow, white, green, and blue. So far one might say: unusual atmospheric conditions causing spectacular color diffractions for stars near the horizon [I have seen such an event in Kalamazoo all around the low horizon]. BUT... Objects were said to rapidly move about, flipping and whirling. They seemed to be actual objects not entirely illuminated but rather flashing their colored lights through, possibly, portholes. "When they accelerated they first turned like a ring and then the whitish color would turn yellowish and then all the lights would go on". When they rose, a red tail appeared at one end of a disk shape. Local Air Traffic Control said they had no radar contact but did see them. They said that they thought they were stars.

Later, another report came in of a cigar-shaped illuminated object. [there's a lot of confusion in this business about the connection, even datewise, between these two things]. The USAF made a statement on this that they thought that it was Venus. Or maybe a "weather phenomenon". This time local radars did track the object. A fighter pilot went up and said he thought what he saw was Venus. NORAD itself apparently was willing to approve the scramble. An Eastern Airlines pilot, however, said that he'd never seen anything like it. Nevertheless, the local USAF spokesman said it WAS Venus. The determining factor he said was that those radars that thought they saw the thing were only "height-finding radars" and not "search radars". If the latter it would have been a different story, he said. Later he was informed that Palm Beach International airport had ONLY "search radars". Whoops. Further research found that Miami International also had the thing on its own "search radar". The last military comment was: "This does put a new light on the situation." And silence again fell.

Re-reading those cases, they're better than I originally felt. Pretty good actually.

The last case for that DATA-NET was an older one: El Infiernillo Observatory, Chilean Andes. May 17, 1967. This is a photographic case and a blow-up of one of the three photos is above. The larger light is the one of interest, and the smaller one is from a second observatory, El Roble. You can tell from this that the bigger light is below the mountain chain peaks [as El Roble is significantly higher].

The three photos of May 17 were sort of a culmination of a series of odd lights [termed by observatory personnel FPE, Fenomeno por explicar, and logged as such; FPE means "phenomenon requiring an explanation"]. A few such events had been appearing since October of 1967. All of these things seemed about the relative size and brightness of "stars" of magnitude zero to one --- i.e. they would be the brightest stars in the sky, had they been in the sky. They did move but mostly hovered in one spot. The astronomers added that they appeared to have "luminous rings of Fresnel diffraction".

The observatory is a professional facility connected to the University of Chile, and information about the incidents came directly from a university spokesperson. These observations, whether an unknown natural phenomenon or something else remain mysteries.

So, leaving that there, let's go on to something that I really know nothing about.

Some of you will have heard that recently particle physicists have created conditions wherein an event took place but was not seeable by any of the instruments. This event was microcosmic but apparently true, as the predecessors and the resultants of the event could be detected, even though the event itself was not. Many persons are profoundly puzzled by this, but, foolishly, I am not [particularly].

Why? Because I've bought into the extra dimensions of the physical force world long ago, and the fact that "things" can vanish in one location and reappear in another without going through the intervening three-space. Electrons shifting orbits do this every time. So, how??

It has to do, of course, with these "superstring" dimensions or arenas of force relations or whatever they will turn out to be. Whatever their nature, they form a complex web of interactions "beneath" our ordinary spacetime reality, and those deep interactions "project" their effects onto our threespace. Really? How?

Well, the question asks too much, but a crude diagram by me might give us just a small chance of relating to what's going on. Frontier thinking in particle science has abandoned "commonsense" ways of seeing reality and now considers the three dimensions of our observable space essentially "empty", until "force" is projected upon it. Space sits there as an empty "canvas" waiting for the superstring dimensional force relations "below" to project upon and manifest forces and mass [in this view just another form of force manifestation]. Material particles are just specific projections to a spatial coordinate where they manifest as a point location of force. The only reason that we think these "points" have size is that they have force associated with them, which produces a distance-of-integrity within which it is difficult to encroach without tremendous energies. "Size" therefore is an illusion.

Size is doubly an illusion when uncounted numbers of the force-point projections associate together to form macroscopic objects. The entire "object" is composed of points of no "material extent" bound together by the character of the force projections involved with these zero-extension particles. We are not only mainly empty space as we were taught when we learned about the distance that our electrons orbit from their atomic nuclei, but in a sense we have no absolute material extension at all. A bizarre universe which takes some meditation to come to grips with. But what does this have to do with those guys who made something happen that you couldn't see?

Let's try my diagram again. The previous comments and the diagram are saying that the real primary causal "happenings" in reality are taking place "down there" in the Dimensions Beneath the World. If meddlesome scientists can get the trick right, the Dimensions Beneath the World will still do their work of force-interactions and subsequent production of a new happening "down there", but not necessarily project that happening onto our familiar spacetime. In other words "It happened, but we couldn't see it".

Could these guys have found a way, no matter how minute to begin with, to block whatever the transmission or projection mechanism is from the Underworld to the Spacetime "surface"? They must be doing something like this or how else did they facilitate an event [which must take place "down there"] and yet not allow it to manifest "up here"? Somehow the "path" to the dimensions of Space was blocked.

That's interesting enough to me, but I find that when one finds that one can manipulate a natural mechanism one way, it usually means that one can also manipulate it the other. In this recent experiment, we "blocked" a physical event from tunneling up its ... "portal?" ... into Spacetime. Might we not then be able to facilitate some physical array to "vanish" in place "down" such a portal? And, since the integrity of the true "thing" exists still in the microworld dimensions beneath, might one not be able to manipulate where its integrity would be re-projected to? That is: vanish here... re-appear there. Is the Portal Technology hinted at by the recent "curiosity" physics experiment? If so, projections coming from there to here might manifest through such tunnels or portals, manifesting force through small areas of regular space. Maybe....

At El Infiernillo, the astronomers said that the light manifestations exhibited Fresnel diffraction. Fresnel diffraction.... an effect caused by a light source projecting through a narrow gap or tunnel opening. .... Fresnel diffraction .... narrow tunnel projecting ... nah, can't mean anything ... can it??

Yours for the fun of the Mystery Chase. Don't know when the next will be, folks, but I'll be thinking of you. Peace.

Everyday Spirituality

2011-12-26T07:34:00.000-08:00

I haven't done one of these in a very long time. They "come to me" when I have a chance to sit out with nature, and unfortunately that doesn't happen here in the middle of the city. For those of you looking for "anomalies" this day, this probably will not interest you. These are merely communing with nature moments. They are, to me, exactly the same thing at their base as some of the other sorts of contacts we sometimes have. But they are "everyday" [if we let them be] and so not very interesting to most. So, forewarned, this is a small moment of life.

It had snowed in Kalamazoo a couple of weeks ago and we'd had two subsequent days of hovering around freezing and thawing. The concrete was bare, but the grass was white. The snow crystals were diminished by the thawing and weren't showing any jewel-like light bursts this morning.

I finished morning prayers and decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood. Occasionally, little lightfields of diamonds would sparkle out as I passed, and they reminded me of the Light of the Creator "down under" the vernier of reality --- always present and powerful and beautiful. Up ahead on the other side of the street came an old man. He was walking his old black dog, as he did every day. We didn't even know one another's names, but there was a different knowing there. He stopped and said that he hadn't seen me for a while, and had missed me. Rather astonishing. I returned the sentiment...honestly. There IS connection between us ... again if we let there be.

Back at my home, I sat outside and watched the quiet neighborhood. And Nature began to speak. The chickadees flew directly overhead. Some diamonds manifested in the snow. A bluejay complained, and one of the smaller woodpeckers let out a beautiful call. Two geese flew towards the south. A lady cardinal peeped away, letting her boy know where she was.

Around the corner peeked an orange cat. It wasn't sure of me and looped away. There just where its head had been flared out a brilliant red-orange crystal light in the snow. The Sun and the ice then began having fun.

I heard a crunch, and saw that the last large icicle had detached from the roof, and lodged at a spectacular angle in the nearby tree. In the Sun's light it blazed like a light column, small internal Suns at intervals all down its length. I stared for awhile, and at the glittering jewel field below. It was cold, and it was time to go inside. A second crash. As I had arisen, and turned to go, the light baton had thrown itself to the ground. It had given its show just for me.

None of this can mean much to anyone unless they experience it themselves. But these communions ARE there to experience. Just be quiet... and let be.

It's wondrous out there.

Happy Spiritual Holidays.

And may the right sort of elves be with you.

FAERIE? : A small data-set indicating the possibility that folkloric entities or something very much like them could be real. Wrapping up the 2nd 100.

2011-12-19T15:45:00.000-08:00

This will be the final go-round for this set of one hundred. They are the "things" which don't fit so well with the other stuff, or are a bit of outliers. Some of them achieve their status only because no entity was seen. Others are the guys you probably would not invite to dinner.

Johann von Goethe [a guy you probably WOULD invite to dinner] gives us the first case:

The incident is debatable as to what Goethe actually saw, and as you can read below, he debated it in his own head.

What we have is "an illuminated amphitheatre" with some anomalistic light phenomena inhabiting it. The area of the amphitheatre was later learned by Goethe to not be anything which would easily explain how this could be. [The painting at the side, by the way, is a painting by Goethe illustrating a romantic valley scene, and is there just for entertainment purposes].

Because we have had many "dancing lights" in our Faerie case files, this experience by Goethe is felt worthy of mention. Following are his exact words from his autobiography: [I'm having some weirdness from the blogsite right about here, folks, and can't tell if the thing is going to reproduce Goethe's quote. If it doesn't, we'll just have to do without it.... you've got the gist of the experience either way]

More briefly: case two/ recent times and location unstated. [Included because a book was cited as a reference for the case]. Upon buying a house allegedly inhabited by brownies in their garden, the new occupants found all manner of chores done while away. Shortly however the phenomena turned more poltergeist-like and not so amusing. Negative things escalated until the couple was forced to move out.

Case three & four: 1908 & 1919, Ireland: Diarmuid MacManus has two incidents of thorn trees being involved with hostility towards humans [one a palpable feeling of hatred, and the other a sudden coming on of illness].

Cases five, six, seven, and eight: all instances of "Music in the air". The dates are 1893, 1922, 1972, and "recent". The locations are California, Dartmoor, West Scotland, and unstated. In case 5, the music was heard alternately from the air and from the water in a remote area. Case 6 a professional fiddler was sitting alone when he heard a voice above and then music for 20 minutes. He characterized it as "fairy sounds". Case 7 featured an American musician terrorized by rhythmic chanting and fiddles and pipes. He ran to the woods where in time his head cleared of the sounds. The poorly anchored website case featured an entire family. It began with two of the daughters seeing 5 green or blue lights flitting about over a mushroom circle. They felt they heard harp music at the moment. Getting their parents, they returned to the circle and everyone saw the blue and green lights. The older daughter says she heard the fairy harp at that time too.

Case 9 [1973/Albany, OH] is as individualistic and slightly whacky as my good friend George Eberhart who was the investigator. A woman was going home when she saw a floating 4' tall ghostly thing fifty feet in the air. Then a bright light sailed in, jumped around, and seeming to act with curiosity, approached her. It was a 20' diameter BOL. It and she turned away from each other, it going across a field and disappearing. She hurried home.

Later after supper and her husband away outside doing something, she saw that he had left the front door open. Around the corner peeked in a little aqua-ish tinted "electric man". [My illustration above is an attempt to give you the gist of this]. It was about 2 1/2' tall and had "sort of" a face which emoted a friendly feeling. It was almost transparent. It without any bodily movement simply retreated back out of sight behind the doorway. A denizen from Whackland in the 30th dimension??

Case 10: 1980s, Crieff, Scotland. A woman and four children were walking on a deserted path one sunday morning, when they saw an old lady approaching. Strangely, she seemed to have no feet. Then more alarmingly, she continued to disappear from the bottom up, making a small sound as she did. Later the sound was interpreted as gaelic for "fairy house". The name of the farm on which this path ran means "place of the fairies" as well.

Case 11: a Diarmuid MacManus case, 1901, Edenderry, Ireland. Two young boys and two young girls were walking in a rural lane in the bright sunshine. The boys were romping ahead, and the girls turned to climb the hill towards a farmhouse of one of their aunts&uncles. This hill, Clonmillan, had a reputation for fairy activity. The girls only got halfway up the path when they called out and ran back down the hill. They boys ran up to them as they beckoned.

About 40 yards away a group of human-sized figures stood completely still in a tight circle, touching shoulder to shoulder. They were arrayed in black gowns/capes to the ground or even into it. No crease nor pleat moved or fluttered in the breeze; they were like a solid statue. The center space of the group was covered by a stretched black cloth at shoulder height. On that "cloth" rested a chest or coffin [also covered in black]. On the top of the chest sat a set of old-style Irish Bagpipes.

Within a few minutes, the owner of the field and his grown son came walking through that field. Passing within six feet of the figures, they apparently never saw them and walked on. The children now began to run home. The boys stopped briefly to look back again, and saw that the whole assemblage had apparently moved ten yards from its original location, but rock still as before. Much later, one of the boy's uncles told him that he had seen these same figures a few years prior to when they had manifest to the children.

Case 12: Also by MacManus, 1939, Killeadon, Ireland. Two young men had finished their accountancy chores late one evening and began a nighttime walk to their homes which were side-by-side four miles on a snow-filled but bright cold evening.

Reaching a crossroads, they saw three men standing. They were tall, well-built, and clothed entirely in black. They stood in a close triangle, facing each other with heads bowed. Mustering their courage, the young men walked past. The figures never moved. Reaching the gate which separated the way to their homes, one man went swiftly in. The other walked quickly the rest of a little backside way to his own place, and found as he reached his own gate, there on the road outside were the same three figures standing motionless. He ran past them as fast as he could go and into his own home.

These cases remind just a little of ghostly apparitions. Perhaps they are. They also remind me a little of the famous ghostly eminence in the alleged spirit photo below, which I include for your amusement only.

Case 13: Also MacManus, early 20th century, Lis Ard Fairy Fort, Ireland. MacManus' family's gardener told this incident to MacManus years prior to his gathering tales for the book. One evening, he was working a field just below the famous Fairy Fort. He looked up to find the bank lined with human-sized fairyfolk [twenty or more]. They were of both genders, the women good-looking with shawls on their heads, and the men with brown or red coats, some with the typical jauntily tilted conical hats, and some bare-headed with brown curly hair. But they also all had a penetrating stare which "pierced right through him" and as soon as his scything was complete, he retired hastily to the farm buildings and human companionship.

Case 14: 1978, unstated location. A family was living in an old farmhouse, which many people thought was simply "creepy". The young mother woke one night with what could have been "simply" sleep paralysis and her version of an Old Hag phenomenon, but this is what she says: she could not move and felt a presence beside her telling her to come with them. What she saw were black robed and hooded figures with nothing where the faces should have been. So this went on for a while with the woman saying no to the invitation and the figures finally turned and left the room. Ultimately she was able to wake her husband and tell him. Like a good guy, he simply went and checked the whole house out, finding the front door standing wide open, despite having closed and checked it before going to bed. I'm pretty unconvinced by this last case, but it's in here due to the black monks.

Case 15: 1975, Catskill Mountains, NY. I include this one from the UFO files, where it almost certainly does not belong. [whatever it is]. Two knuckleheads were out on one of their "camping" forays to drink a lot of beer and blow off stress from their weekly work in the city. [can't blame them for that]. They were awakened by sounds and a bright light. Peering out of their tent, the environment suddenly went pitch black. Scrambling outside, they spotted a milky white structure up in the woods from their campsite. Then something like ghost entities began floating down the hill at them. Scared fudgeless, the men felt they were under some sort of attack. They built a big fire which they felt kept them at bay. The ghosts would "attack" and retreat and this continued on until one guy was near hysteria. They schemed to slowly pack their automobile, done by one guy "holding the fort" while the other raced to the car with stuff. Finally they ran for it, the car started, and they drove off with urgency.

Well, that's just flat weird. Almost as weird is the fact that a prominent UFO researcher grabbed onto this case and turned it into an Abduction with missing time. I've read rather lengthy "private" transcriptions of the case and can find no legitimate argument that there is any missing time at all.

I don't know what this case was. I'd guess that abduction is just about the poorest option for it. "UFO" isn't very good either. That leaves me with "knuckleheadism" vs outside hooliganism vs the paranormal. Outside hooliganism is pretty tough here. Very elaborate and floating hologram like action. I'd go with knuckleheadism, but the interviewing of both witnesses doesn't reduce to that very comfortably. If it IS paranormal, WHAT was it???

Once again WHOOOOOOO goes there????

I'll try to soldier on with the third 100, folks, but who knows when I'll get there. Merry Christmas!!!

FAERIE?: A small data-set indicating that folkloric entities or something very like them could be real, Part Eight.

2011-12-16T14:18:00.000-08:00

I guess we could call this a "bulk data day". As such, it's probably a bit more boring than most, but I feel my old prof's duty to demonstrate that I really did read a lot of cases of these things, and thereby have not been entirely BSing [yes, I will admit to a CERTAIN amount of BS, but not TOTAL BS]. These cases in the lists below constitute what we might call the "ordinary core phenomenon" or "The Faerie Encounter pile". The critters encountered here are in a way the "guys we'd expect to see". I've listed 52 cases below, and that is the majority of the cases that I'd suggest cluster together. No other attempt at clustering can come anywhere near this amount. In the first 100 there was a cluster of Tinkerbells due to the one website, but even it would not have rivaled this littlefolk "pile". My instinct is: that if there is a "true" Little People phenomenon, it in major part looks like the cases below.

Baker's Dozen #1 contains a nice split of 1&1/2 footers and 3-4 footers. Two cases are tinier. They are, as you read, the older cases in this 100. Green and red dress dominate. Note the case where the farmer watches a riotous sloppy bathing activity, but upon the dwarves leaving the bath has not been disturbed. Note also the case where the dwarves seem to leave our world by spiraling down into a hilltop.

Although we have a dreadfully inadequate supply of pretty elfin creatures in these accounts, there was at least one with beautiful dancing faerie girls in sparkling dresses.

Baker's Dozen #2 contains a similar abundance of the "small" but neither tiny nor normal creatures. It is possible that only one case represented really small Faeries (depending how big the Rhododendron bush was [if we were in New Zealand all bets would be off on that]). Dress colors and style are more diverse here. Several MacManus cases here, so a stronger credibility. Music and dance not the majority. but this is establishing itself as a strong theme. Notice the Native American case at #21 --- possible hint of clothing matching local culture. The Anglesey case is pure Olde Style, with gifting back for service rendered. If I had to guess, I'd have picked Anglesey as one of the likely places where this might still happen.

The dancing and merriment element in these cases is very striking. Whenever there is a group, this feature is likely, though not universal [that would be too much to hope for wouldn't it??]
Baker's Dozen #3 contains [possibly] entirely cases of 1 to 4 footers. The two smallest encounters have "gossamer" dress. Once again, green and red predominate, joined by brown. These cases continue the "significant minority" of encounters where the entities simply vanish. Note the instance [#39] where the witness was told by the conversational gnome that his job was to convert dead plant debris into new life. Note also that in case #34, witness thinks that the experience is UFO-related [despite entities looking like dwarves from Snow White].

Although that last set had some uglier entities than typical, REALLY ugly characters are rare. This sort of troll-ish imagery may not have much support. See, however, case #38, wherein the entity seems to be composed of sinewy "tree-roots". This is a rare [to me] good old forest bogan at work. But even there, the witness said that the critter was "oddly cute".

Bakers Dozen #4 contains the most recent cases of this set. Again, apparently all of these are 1&1/2-to-4 foot tall. Green slightly edges other colors as the style of choice. Although some dancing and merry-making, less so than in previous sets. Note case #42 has faerie with lute acting like childhood "imaginary friend". Case#44 is like the "Georgia border" sighting which occurred at the same time the Kelly/Hopkinsville case did. The Bend,OR case [#50] has a "skin-clad" being leaving footprints.

Above is my rendition of the Wollaston Park, Nottingham, UK case of the mini-car merry-makers. [Case #46]. This experience was reported to elders by a group of young kids. Some of the elders took the kids separately and quizzed them about this "unbelievable" story, and amazingly the kids' stories held together. [one child differed on the hair-color of the dwarves]. In this tale, a very large number of little folk were racing around all over the park having a blast driving small autos. No adults were in that area of the park at the time. The kids saw these fun-loving mischief-makers not only driving like mad-men and pretending to chase the kids, always backing off so as not to catch them, but also up in the trees, emerging from and going back into holes [not stated but presumably holes in the tree trunks]. If this case is true, then it's all merry rock-&-roll good times in Faerie.

But it still isn't telling me what I'm dealing with....

Hoo....WHOOOOO goes there???

FAERIE?: A small data-set indicating that folkloric entities or something very like them could be real, Part Seven

2011-12-10T16:30:00.000-08:00

The Leprechauns are at it again tonight, folks; it took this side of forever to get the blog pictures to load [one loaded twice without being asked to]. Perhaps they're driven a little nuts by the Lisa Roy picture of the pretty winged fairy, but "man up, guys!", well "leprechaun up" and get back to Ireland and ask her for a date, leaving my computer [or this blogsite] alone, if you please!

So, if the Little Folks will allow, I'll try another entry in our series.

The picture above is of my least favorite UFO?/Fairy?/ what-in-the-hell? incident in the literature. My only intellectual foxhole is to just hope that it didn't happen.

1979, Rowley Regis, UK: 7am on a dark morning, and the husband already gone to work. The lady of the house saw an orange light in her garden which turned white. She heard a "zzzeee- zzzeee- zzzeee" sound and three small somethings flew past her through the open door. Both she and her dog seemed "frozen". Fear passed and she felt an unusual calm, very reassuring. She then seemed to float into the next room, where three very small beings were tugging at the christmas tree. They were 3'-4' foot tall, and dressed in silvery-green tunics with silver buttons. They had pointy hats surmounted by something like lamps. [Alien wardrobe stylists doing a poor job of imitating Puck's Jack-o'Lantern?]. They had transparent fishbowls over their heads, which featured chalky white skin, no noticeable ears, or noses, and large jewel-like black eyes ... great. They had beautiful rounded rainbow-colored wings, made up of dazzling dots [like an extraterrestrial pointillistic painter, I suppose]. They outshone any Earthly color in their vividness.

They spoke to the lady in a unified threesome choir. They asked about many things in the house, said they were not from Earth, but visited many places here. They were a bit miffed that no one here seemed to want to listen to them [but as she said: "their talk tended to religion", that shouldn't surprise many of us --- ask some of our own door-to-door evangelists]. They asked for water, elevated a metal tray without touching it, and picked mince pies off it. They were quite disapproving when she lit up a cigarette, and left when an 8' long "luminous plastic" miniature ship showed up.

The lady's reaction: she felt "blessed". As someone trying to make sense out of these things, my reaction differs, like 180-degrees. This thing has everything in it that you don't want: winged things who look like aliens and act like contactee conversants. A craft too small for three three-&-a-half foot tall beings whose getaway isn't even described, and a fine mince pie to relegate the whole thing to Joe Simonton "pancake" country. This entire episode is either pure baloney or a deliberately hashed together display by whichever of our two groups of clowns [ETs or gnomish mischief-makers] is having a good hoot at our expense.

Well, sometimes silence is golden, so I'll move on.

1965, Greenville, TX: A wife and husband were watching TV and he, as usual fell asleep. She helped lug him to his bed and decided to lie down herself. Unfortunately for her sleep plans, there in their doorway stood a little man. He had a fishbowl for a helmet, but [thankfully?] looked human. His complexion was ruddy but fairly normal all around. His suit was a gray "spacesuit" with zippers everywhere. In his hand he held a crystal ball. The lady felt that she was receiving reassuring communication from him but not verbally.

She tried to shake her husband awake more than once, but he was out-of-it. The being seemed unsure or at least unhurried as all it would do is look at her, then at the ball, then at her, etc. From another room, her sleeping daughter coughed. The being turned to look towards that room, setting off the "Mother-Bear" instinct and she roused and began rising from the bed. Within two of her steps, the being vanished.

Was this a fairy getting back at the aliens for imitating them at Rowley Regis? I jest of course...I think ...... don't I?

1977, near Corozal, Puerto Rico: An old farmer was enjoying a mid-afternoon lazy view, when he was interrupted by a sound and a flash-of-lightning. At its end was a "long blue candle" resting on the ground. The "candle" approached and came to rest beside him. It then turned into a little dwarf [groan....]. Yep, three foot tall, long pointy ears, round ugly face, big nose with ape-like nostrils, small mouth with full lips. His skin was muddy-colored, and he wore a jacket with a little tie. I mean, really, you gotta love it.

He had something hanging around his neck which he began to use like a stethoscope [knees, feet, ears, chest, back, temples], and he even checked carefully inside the farmer's mouth. [One wonders what was going on in the farmer's head during all this "attention", but maybe he had just taken out an extraterrestrial health plan]. [Sorry, folks, but sometimes a bit of one's own silliness is sanity's only defense].

The being stepped back, then, and informed our stalwart witness that he [the being not the farmer... but I'm beginning to doubt any assumptions at this moment] was an extraterrestrial and how nice he thought Puerto Rico was. He then, without bothering to change back into a blue candle, zoomed off through the branches of the avocado trees. At least he made the same sound that he had when he was flying around as a candle.

For what it's worth, because enquiring minds want to know, he then had a [we guess] human doctor give him a physical and was pronounced in good health.

You know, I'm not even going to try to explain those last three incidents.

Instead, I'm washing my hands of them and going on to friendlier territory: Big Fairy Black Dogs. AND, just to get one thing straight: I think that the Pookhas have gotten a bad rap. At least in gentle old Ireland, they seem like congenial companions on the road, indeed.

I don't know where the vicious black hound of hell comes to play in this [the ancient illustration to the left is of a case which claims that a "blasphemer" was turned into a black dog --- and that might give us a hint of another bending-out-of-shape of old concepts by an unforgiving "christian" over-culture], but if there are authentic "bad" black dog fairy encounters, they seem to be England's problem, not Ireland's.

"My" pookhas are Diarmuid MacManus'. He has seven cases in his super book. All of the events were told him by persons to whom he had real personal contact and therefore high credibility. In the midst of all the rest of this craziness, the Irish Pookha is an Island of high strangeness that brings a lot of confidence in its reality to me.

MacManus' collected tales are all very similar. So I can get away with telling just one in some detail, and you can go buy the book and have a really good time reading of fairy encounters of all types and of rare believability. This case occurred in 1952 in Redcross, County Wicklow, Ireland. An Irish lass [a friend of MacManus'] was walking home on a mid-summer's night at 10:30pm. She was returning from the neighboring farm, where she had borrowed some buttermilk. It was still light at that season, and the night was quiet. She heard behind her a soft padding of feet. Almost at once, a huge jet-black dog had come up beside her and was striding along at her pace. Not knowing what else to do, she continued to walk resolutely towards her home.

After a while, she began to feel that the dog was no threat at all, and was merely friendly. She tentatively reached over to give it a pat ... but could feel nothing. Thinking that she had somehow misjudged, she tried again ... nothing, and the dog strode on. Now thoroughly puzzled, she concentrated fully on this petting task, and realized that her hand must be passing right through the shape alongside. The dog then moved out ahead about fifty yards. It paused, turned it's head to the left, and .... vanished. Completely astonished and not a little afraid, she hurried home [now close-by], and told her family. To her surprise, they all readily believed her as they all already knew of cases of these things.

No one can say why a Black Fairy Dog would act this way. One guess is that they are being protectors. From what? Who knows who or what may have had mayhem in mind that mid-summer Irish night, who never came into our young lady's path because of the presence of a very big black dog walking alongside.

Idling away my hours, I made a little map of where MacManus' pookhas manifested. It's on the left. Since with one exception the pookhas were ranging sort of along a straight line, I wondered about fault lines. Fault lines are not my favorite theory for trying to explain all such stuff, but intellectual honesty requires an open mind. The geological map of Ireland does have many interesting features, tis true. But the faults align themselves at almost the most wrong angle to match these points. Ireland is like a stacked cake whose layers stack northwest to southeast roughly. I looked a gravitational anomalies also [see the map below], but they don't fit either [most + anomalies ringing the Atlantic coast, and there being no obvious general pattern with the inland sightings].

I believe that this old folkloric critter is still with us today. MacManus' tales go into the 50s and, while I was looking for something to use as illustration for this post, I accidentally bumped into an article on a website about the subject which was followed by several posts. I read them and several were personal accounts of recent encounters with our [usually-interpreted] friendly beast. They were tales told briefly and without self-indulgence, and seemed to be straight stories from folks who were believing what they were saying. If any of them were to be investigated and found to have sufficient strangeness within, then such tales would bring us right up to the present.

Just for the amusement factor: One element of any Big Black Dog tale needs careful scrutiny if one is to bypass the "it was just a really big dog" hypothesis. That is because there are some REALLY big dogs. I included one non-black dog in the collage, because it is the Irish Wolfhound, who in the right evening lighting conditions just might look dark enough. Fortunately for our leading hypothesis, when the Big Fairy Pooch vanishes right in the middle of the road, that ends the particular difficulty.

FAERIE?: A small data-set indicating that folkloric entities or something very like them could be real, Part Six.

2011-12-08T13:08:00.000-08:00

Let's wade in the deep water again folks, and see if we or anything else will float. This set of 100 is like the last in the distressing fact that it seems to be composed of many different things. Some of these things might be closely allied, but some don't feel well related at all. That might not be bad if we were sitting with a box of hardware separating the hammers from the chainsaws from the pliers, but this "ain't at all like that". My view of these piles is that we are on shaky ground indeed when it comes to working criteria for neat labeling. But we soldier on.....

Here's a [very] crude attempt at "something": About half of the 100 case files mentioned a fairly firm estimation for the height of the humanoid entity encountered. It would have been really nice if more had done so [and cases where the little folk came right up upon the witness "pinching" or "attacking" him, or dancing around him, certainly have no excuses for omitting that detail, but lots do not not say]. Still, given that the Pookhas and the disembodied music and the terrible trees don't count in this humanoid height business, 44 of the actual humanoid cases isn't awful.

So graph away I did. Despite what I said yesterday, the graph MAY indicate that my intuition wasn't completely off on the mere matter of height groupings of these characters. There may in fact be a cluster of 3 to 4 footers, another of about one-&-a-half footers, and a group of very small folk. I believe that for at least this simple "measurement", these estimations should be pretty good. Most of the entities were very close, and it takes a pretty poor estimator NOT to be able to distinguish between someone who comes up to your chest vs someone who comes up to your knee vs someone who comes up to your ankle. But, if this is "good" and if this would statistically hold, then I still don't know much, because the groups don't [so far] show much difference in either appearance or behavior.

Really vaguely, the bigger the entity the more likely it is an older looking , usually bearded male. In fact you almost are never getting solitary female fairies/gnomes anyplace except the Tinkerbells. Females, much the minority elsewhere, appear essentially in couples with males, and/or in dancing. All of these folk may be brightly dressed or not. Some colors prevail [red and green and brown ] but not universally. "Handsome" entities are almost always small. All of them will just vanish on you, but they also might just run away. Nobody, so far, ever causes any real damage.

All of this may change in a blink when I add more cases. So, there I'll leave it and proceed to thumbnail a small number of particularly confusing cases.

The interconnections between these cases exist on so many levels/directions, that I can't wrap my head around them and give you an orderly presentation. In a way that's a blessing, as in such a state of ignorance one is probably out-of-line to present a pseudo-structure at all. So... in lieu of that, I'm going to thumbnail a few cases which seem vaguely like they are in the "muddy middle" between UFOlogy and Faerie, and you can chew on them and do a sorting for yourself.

1). 1901, Bournville, UK: A boy of ten was returning home and was near the garden of his house. There he encountered a "building" which should not have been there. It was about 5-6' wide, 4' high, and 3+' deep. It had a stack or turret on the top. And it had a small square door.

The door opened and out stepped two small entities. They resembled my drawing to the left above, which I took from the witness drawing. Their clothing was a tight-fitting coverall of grey-green and they wore helmet/caps of black with two projections sticking out the top. The boy thought that they looked sort of "military". One being approached holding its arms wide. The witness interpreted this as a warning to move away, and did so. The beings returned through the door and soon followed a bright flash, and the bottom of the hut glowed in a circle of light. The hut rose up in an audible WHOOSH and streaked away across the rooftop in a curved flight.

Well, a clear case of a UFO, or was it??

2). 1958, Bellingham, WA: A man was sitting in his home reading when he was disturbed by a loud THUD on his roof. He scrambled up to investigate and found a small body lying in the snow outside. It was a four-foot tall little man with light pinkish skin, apparently bruised in his upper body [he was naked from the waist up] and breathing hard. As he was lying there stunned, our not-so-good Samaritan decided to go get rope and tie him up. When he returned with the rope, he saw that the little fellow was standing up and smiling at him. He walked up, shook the witness' hand pointed to the nearby forest and left the scene. Shortly there was a swishing noise from that direction.

Hmmmm... Little people, right?? The witness interpreted this as an alien who had an escape saucer hidden in the woods, which swished away, even though he couldn't see it.

3). 1959, County Carlow, Ireland: An equipment driver was removing a large bush on a farm, using a bulldozer. This is always asking for trouble in Ireland. As he ripped up the bush, he and three other workers were startled by the emergence of a three-foot tall little man in red rush out from under the machine. The Little Man did not stop running for 100 yards whereupon he leapt a fence and continued on into the next field. The commentator said: " Only the Irish locale kept this from being treated as a UFO incident, even though no UFO was seen".

Sheesh! I guess we are really that stupid.

4). Bells Corners, Ontario:

This took place in the fields behind the house of a very rural family farm. At 10:45pm, the lady of the house looked out her window and saw a patch of bluish light 25 yards behind the house. She immediately went to investigate rousting out her son to accompany her. The Mother walked right up to the luminosity but her son stayed cautiously away [despite being an adult]. What the lady saw was a small entity [drawn by me in the accompanying illustration -- caveat emptor on my art], with a strikingly chalk white face and skin, tightly wound wooly blonde-brown hair, and no noticeable facial features other than large jewel-like "faceted" eyes, which may even have been the source of the patch of illumination. Her son insisted in near panic that she return to the house, which she then did. By the time they were back inside, no light could be still seen in the field.

Oh, well! THAT's a UFO case. No you say? It comes from someone's UFO files.....

5). no year and locale on this website case; I include it as it illustrates a point that in clumsier ways many other case reports are making: This was from a young man who was on a camping trip. His buddies had hit the sack but he stayed up for a while. Looking out of the tent, he noticed a strange blue light flitting about in the woods [Uh Oh, blue is supposed to be the favorite fairylight color; and yes I remember the last case]. Shortly, the blue light ball was joined by several others and they began dancing about as if they were playing with each other. At closest glance, he felt that within those lightballs were tiny figures. Then he made a noise and the things flew away in a hurry.

Lightballs... fairies... no, UFOs... no...

6). The Olden Days, Great Lakes area: This is the beginning of a 19th century Native American tale. I offer it here because this tale sounds like an encounter. Perhaps a true encounter served as a basis for constructing a more imaginative folklore story.

A young hunter was walking in an untrammeled field, when up ahead he saw a circle flattened in the grass [Oh no! Not ancient crop circles!!]. He walked all around it but could find nowhere where someone could have entered and made the circle. Curious in the extreme, he decided to hide nearby to discover perhaps how the thing was made.

Soon, coming from the air above, were the sounds of sweet music. Far away in the sky, a small cloud appeared. It moved ever closer and downward to the Earth and the circle. The cloud became a "basket-car" in which were the twelve fairest maidens ever sen by the young man. They landed directly in the center of the ring, sprang out, and began to dance around the shining round basket-car which had brought them. The young brave was so taken by the fairest of the dancers that he rushed forth to grab this princess of the stars, but they all sprang back into the light basket and soared away into the skies.

Well, now that's about as much as I can take. Are beautiful fairy sky dancers coming to Earth in lightballs and forming crop circles within which they perform their faerie merriment??? Yep. That must be it. You see a lot of that sort of thing going on nowadays.....

Well, I was going to do three more, but the leprechauns of this blogsite decided to dump my illustration for that section, so I'll quit and do another batch in a couple of days.

I notice that as I'm typing their messing with the placements of the sentences... Faerie revenge? Maybe I actually AM discovering something with this crazy approach, but you can't tell it from my vantage point. Maybe they'll behave better next time.

FAERIE ?: A small data-set indicating that folkloric entities or something very much like them could be real, Part Five; the second hundred cases.

2011-12-07T10:05:00.000-08:00

The Sun is shining in Michigan and the day inspirational of speaking of the strange and the wonderful. Fortunately for me, I've just managed to complete the logging of the second hundred Little People case files and may have something modest to say. The following will NOT, however, rival that shining Sun for Light-giving. But we do what little we can, so here goes. The above is a nice Faerie kingdom picture by James Christensen, which illustrates all the beings we could ever wish for.

These hundred cases were in most ways like the previous hundred. There were some notable exceptions.

A). because there were not a lot of cases taken en masse from a dedicated internet site for fairy encounters, and because those that did come from the internet were from sites not predominantly geared to younger girls, the number of tiny winged Tinkerbell-type encounters diminished from 17 to only four. There were still a fairly large number of diminutive little folk, but wingless they be. What exactly this is telling us about"sociology" I can't in honesty say, but it must be telling us something. Before writing off Tinkerbells as a purely culturally-induced artifact conjured up in the minds of young females, though, I'll remind everyone that a fair percentage of the previous Tinkerbell reports were from [allegedly; you can't really say with these website things] older women remembering incidents of their youth.

B). A minor [statistically] but major [phenomenologically] difference in the sets of 100, was the emergence of seven knock-out Pookha cases from Ireland. These glimpses of the huge friendly fairy dog are owed entirely to Diarmuid MacManus, as cases from his great book are included in this set.

C). Recognizing the changes in numbers caused by losses of Tinkerbells and gains of Pookhas, the rest of the numbers are very much in order. 20th century experiences dominate the case files, showing, to me anyway, that such encounters can still be expected to occur. The "smalls" absolutely dominate the reports. I am sure that there is a powerful filtering bias operating here, but I'm still surprised at the lack of normal height Fairyfolk and the almost complete absence of extra-large folk entities. One needs to meditate on this a lot more before sticking ones foot in ones mouth in any attempt at "solution". But I'll say a little bit more VERY tentatively below.

D). I have been forced to change my early opinion of the "smalls" already, due to the trend in the data. I'll probably change it again; this is called "doing rudimentary science" and letting data drive the conclusions. I suspected that I'd see a large clump of "smalls" of the 1 1/2-4 1/2-foot stature, who would "peak" at about three foot tall and generally be "garden Gnomish" or "Leprechaunish" or "Trooping Fairy" in nature. These guys would be the typical brightly-dressed bunch with old faces and beards, who'd mess with you if they felt like it. And, on the other hand, there would be the very tiny, less than a foot, "fairies", who would be seen typically in dancing circles and very fine raiment and rarely if ever interacting with humans. These I had split from the "smalls" as the "tinies", and assumed a fairly clean disconnection. Well..... maybe not. Some of these cases may show that the overlap might be more significant than I thought both up and down. Maybe the third [and fourth?] hundred will sort it out better.

E). The problem of the lack of "norms" [in height -- 5' to 6'+]: a guess--- these experiences are being shunted off into report-collections of apparitions. Some might even make it into cryptozoology collections. Having said that, though, I am still surprised that there are not a significant group of full-sized "Pans" or "forest elves" [there is no evidence of people reporting human-sized "elf-like" beings yet in my files] or "mountain trolls", etc etc. What we get are "black-hooded monks" and similar figures of dread. [and the occasional merfolk]. In fact, the smaller the beings get, it seems the more filled with joy they are.

F). On the absence of extra-talls: I'd expect the random giant here or there; no soap. I'd even expect the odd hero/demigod; nope. Perhaps all of this has migrated to cryptozoology, where at least very large near-apes abound. If Nessies and ABSMs are Faerie denizens, even that would be a surprising "specialized pair of choices" of appearance by the otherworld denizens. Why not then a greater variety of shapes? As to size: There has been a lot of writing both in scholarship and fantasy-fiction about "diminishment" in Faerie. Maybe that's even measurably literal.

G). On whether any of these cases are true: taking off my conical Faerie hat for a moment, and putting on the space-helmet of the UFOlogist, there ARE a few things that can be said. The UFO researcher judges "good" cases on the twin grounds of "strangeness" and "credibility". And we should do exactly that here, of course. When you look at "fairy encounter" claims, the Strangeness issue is almost always immediately laid to rest. Basically all fairy encounters are the UFOlogical equivalent of very close Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Any thought of mundane explanations of the narratives themselves is immediately moot.

Credibility is where it's at here --- entirely. And Faerie lacks SIGNIFICANTLY in comparison to UFOlogy in this area. Modern fairy encounter claims are rarely investigated by any independent investigator who interviews witnesses cleverly and thoroughly, publishes results in detail, and becomes known as to competence by other investigators in the field. Almost every story from the internet is purely believe-it-or-not. Most others are as well. Thankfully there is the occasional Diarmuid MacManus. One case investigation by him is worth several dozen other basically anonymous reports. If it were not for MacManus, and the old great gatherers led by WYEvans-Wentz, I'd give up on any effort to make sense of any of this. But they are thankfully there to establish some sort of foundation on which to tentatively stand.

Later this week I'll begin to thumbnail specific cases and you'll be able to see what I see, and hopefully much more. Till then... watch the skies.. no, the bushes.

Faerie? : A small data-set indicating the possibility that folkloric entities or something very much like them could be real, Part Four.

2011-11-30T08:13:00.000-08:00

Part four of our tour: more encounters from the pre- and post-1900 era. Still mainly to view the landscape and not try for many soft conclusions yet [a time which possibly might NEVER come, but some pattern seems vaguely arising to me]. Let's see what we can see today.

Let's begin with a case which everyone in the business is familiar with, but since it is in my files and we're not selecting for anything but that, [and not every blog reader is well-read in Wee Folk literature], here it is: 1). Mid-19th century, Isle of Man: A member of the house of parliament [TC Kermode] gave his story personally to our great foundational scholar, WY Evans-Wentz. He and another young man were walking along their country road, going to a party. his buddy told him to look across the brook that they were paralleling if he wanted to see the fairies. There in a flat area between two hills was "a supernatural circle of light". This light was almost like a stage into which traipsed couples and threesomes of Little People [apparently circa 2-3' tall] who lined up and began marching ["trooping?"] within the circle. Kermode wanted to get closer, but his friend simply wanted to get to the party [fairies were "old hat" to him, I suppose]. Kermode stopped to watch for a while but his impatient friend rapped on the roadside wall with his walking stick and shouted out. The light vanished with the fairy procession.

2). 1757, Wales: a well-known cleric, when a young child, was playing in a field with several other children. There at football-field distance away, were several dwarf/gnome-sized creatures, apparently in couples, all dressed in red and flourishing white kerchiefs. One of the males spotted the children and rushed at them, nearly catching them. The child described the gnome as having an "ancient, swarthy, and grim complexion". The other gnomes were shouting at the chaser the whole time in a language which none of the children could understand. Dr. Edward Williams, the cleric, summarized his encounter in a charming way: "I am forced to class it among my unknowables". One suspects that we will have to do the same as to this whole menagerie of beings.

3). Mid-19th century, UK: The famous historian, Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, had an experience when he was very young in which he saw "legions of dwarves" two feet tall keeping pace beside the carriage in which he was riding and trying to climb up on the horses, laughing all the way. His parents saw nothing at all.

4). Mid-19th century, Yorkshire: If that youth experience might be waved off as some oddity of the very young, S B-G's wife had an encounter when she was 15. She was walking down a lane when she came across "a little green man, perfectly made, who looked at her with beady black eyes". [I am almost certain that the phrase "little green man" refers to him being dressed in green in such stories]. This frightened her badly and she ran home.

5). Late-19th century, UK. And S B-G had a further encounter in his family. One of his sons was fetching peas in their garden when he came across a member of the Good People wearing a green jacket, brown knee britches, and a red cap [just about our ideal garden gnome]. He had a weathered old face, gray beard and stark black eyes. His stare unnerved the son and he ran inside. Doubtless, Sabine Baring-Gould had little reason to disbelieve him.

4). Probably late 1800s, Wicklow Mountains, Ireland: This one will stretch you on how far you want to go. A farmer and his wife worked their farm just after their marriage and along came a winter's snow season. The man saw a Wee Folk outside and "brought him in and sat him on the dresser". [peculiar to say the least, but I'm not of the times....] . The farmer was telling this story to some folklore luminaries visiting him [including Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats]. He said that the being stayed with them for about a week. His wife promptly interrupted him to remind him that it was two to three weeks. [!!!].

The being was described as 15" high and very friendly. He was dressed almost entirely in red: cap to checked coat to skirt to stockings. The being had to be fed by spoon by the farmer himself. His meals consisted of bread in milk, it seems. His appearance was young and fresh at first, but rapidly he began to appear old and wrinkled [yep, I remember the Changeling legends]. He was no secret locally, and tipsy knuckleheads from the town pub would come over and they would laugh at him there on his dresser.

One day the farmer saw another like being outside. That being was dressed in a grayish theme and looked more feminine. When the farmer remarked upon this to his wife, the Little Man who had never spoken, cried out: "That's Geoffrey-a-Wee that's coming for me!!". At that, he leapt down from his dresser and bounded out the door. If this story is true [two interviewed witnesses and several well-known interviewers], then just about anything goes as far as the typical historic folkloric fairy stories go. Encounters passing in the lane are one thing; stay-around family house gnomes are another. And the changeling-similar thing.... it is almost a line-in-the -sand over which the mind resists crossing.

5). Well, we might as well follow that with another "heavyweight" case, which could be the "poster child" for Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia. Late 1800s, Portmeirion, Wales. Many of you will have heard this one, also. A young woman and the household servant, a brute of a man nicknamed Dafydd Fawr [which I believe means something like Strong David], were walking back to their home. She wanted to get there before night and hurried on, as he walked a slower pace with a big parcel of meat that he was carrying from the neighbors. She got to the house promptly, but Dafydd did not arrive until three hours later. What happened?

Dafydd said that shortly after she left he observed a meteor flash through the air, and soon after that a hoop of fire descend. Standing on the bottom on the fire hoop were two small beings, each grasping the side of the hoop as if balancing themselves and one another with their other arm. As the hoop touched the Earth, they jumped off and began to draw a circle on the ground [It is not said how this was done, but the circle seems to have been a place of light.] The hoop of fire apparently left back up into the sky at this point.

The well-dressed Little Folk watched as a large number of diminutive men and women appeared out of nowhere and began dancing round and round the circle to beautiful music. By this time Dafydd was totally entranced and the three hours flew by in what seemed to him to be minutes. Then the "meteor" again flashed, and shortly the Hoop descended. It touched the Earth near the circle of light and dancing, the original pair jumped onto it, and rose away. At this the circle of light and the dancing fairies vanished, leaving Dafydd alone in night's darkness. Well ... wow I guess is all you can say. Where does that lead us? The simple mental state would be to forget it and lead a quieter life, but is that "honest"?

6). 1850, Martindale, Sandwick Rigg, UK: A short yet high strangeness incident. A man was walking the country road at night heading for his home. The moonlight gave him plenty of light to see up ahead a troop of Little Folk engaging in their reveries. The witness referred to them as "Dobbies" [so Harry Potter fans can take heart]. He was not put off by this and kept walking closer. Whether it was due to them spotting his approach or not, the dobbies began to climb up a ladder and disappeared into the sky. You can almost feel your cranium begin to pop after these last few incidents.

Well, no relief for the open-minded weary yet. Here we go into Ron Quinn's tales of upper NY state. I don't know Ron Quinn personally, so I'm going a bit on faith here. He seems to have had his own Little People encounter in 1942 as a kid of ten growing up in New York, and vacationing upstate at the time. ( We'll call his experience case#7, upstate NY, for this post.) His critter was roughly like the picture that he drew for his book cover above, but not colored so brightly. The gnomish or leprechaunish being was a foot tall, and balancing on his window ledge tapping it with his walking stick. He had a crumpled dark hat but his clothes were generally gray. He had a broad friendly smile. His shirt's sleeves fell loosely and he had a wide belt and boots. Quinn opened the window in order to try to touch him, but he jumped down and bounded away with great leaps. No doubt this inspired a lifetime of interest in things like bigfoot, ghosts, UFOs, and, of course, Little People.

In 1989 this incident was reported in town newspapers across upper NY state with the inclusion of Quinn's address for anyone to comment upon the tale and tell him about their own story. He said that he received "dozens" of such encounter claims, of which about thirty were selected for this book. I've picked seven of them that I like for different reasons. And there is a non-Quinn throw-in which seemed proper to place alongside.

8). 1976, Mongaup Valley, NY: A mother was just in the process of leaving for a special family get-together, but the young son of one of the woman refused to get in his mother's car. He would run towards the woods saying that he wanted to stay and play with his friend "the little man". Absolutely refusing to budge on this, the child talked his mother into going into the woods to meet him. Relenting, she did. When they reached a clearing, there stood a 2 1/2 foot tall gnomish creature, who was she said the ugliest individual she'd ever seen. She and her son left the scene, and reaching their car, drove out rapidly to meet the rest of the family. Upon arriving at the meeting place, she jumped out and excitedly told everyone what had happened. No one believed her, despite the young son backing up her story. [as an aside, the woman thought that the gnome may have been trying to warn her of something. On driving back to her home, she wrecked her car just near the woods where she'd had the encounter, hospitalizing herself. Take that for what it's worth].

9). 1976, near Liberty, NY: A man was out on a bird-watching trip. While walking a woody path, he heard voices up ahead. They sounded as if they were arguing but in a language he couldn't understand. He saw that they were two little men about two feet tall, and dressed in dark green. Each had a beard and a wrinkled cap. One was really yelling at the other vociferously and pointing into the hilly woods. Shortly a third man similarly sized and dressed emerged and they all began arguing and pushing each other about "like the three stooges". Then they walked into the woods and all he could hear were their voices trailing away.

10). mid-1940s, Catskill Mountains, NY: This story's only witness is so young that perhaps it shouldn't be included, but it could be that this is just why it should. Regardless it is entirely too charming to resist. There was a family gathering at a relative's home in the woods of the Catskills. The adults were mainly inside while the children were playing outdoors. While the others did whatever they were doing, Jill, a little girl of 5, became fascinated with the flutterbyes and no one noticed her chasing after them into the woods. Ultimately, the adults checked back in to find that she was lost. Many people searched many hours in vain and dusk was coming, bringing a great deal of despair with it. Then, suddenly, a be-smudged Jill came running happily out of the woods unharmed. What had happened?

Once Jill had followed the flutterbyes for awhile, she lost them and realized that she was lost herself. She tried to find her way back to her aunt's house, but only got deeper into the forest. She thought she heard someone calling for her, but it was too far away, and she couldn't get a direction on it. Finally she came into a small clearing. Feeling very tired, she took a candy bar from her pocket, sat on an old dead tree and ate a little. She felt lonely and started to cry.

She looked up and saw standing at the edge of her clearing two small living "dolls" with silvery hair to their shoulders. They were dressed in shiny green clothes and had caps. She offered them some of her candy bar, but they didn't respond. Beginning to cry then she asked them if they knew the way to her aunt's house. They nodded and motioned for her to follow. As dusk came on and the forest darkened, the little "dolls" became accompanied by small balls of blinking colored light, which illuminated the way. They all seemed to be going faster and faster as they went, and Jill was surprised at how fast she was moving [she said : like a sped up movie]. The "dolls" then abruptly stopped and pointed to the aunt's house. Jill happily turned to thank them, but they were gone. And she ran to embrace her parents.

There is something about that narrative that is just so "right" that if it's not true we should find a way to make it true. Yes, I know that it doesn't work that way. Tinkerbell-Talk: wishing makes it so.

11). 1929, Lackawack, NY: Nothing can follow little Jill's story, but this is close. A man was walking the mile or so from his friend's house on a dirt road running through the woods. There was an unusual Silence to everything, an uncannyness which made the woods seem to be closing in around him. There was a weird light off the road, pulsing on the ground among the trees. Too curious to just walk on, he carefully left the road and negotiated the tangle of plants between him and the light. On the ground was a dome of light four feet in diameter and a foot and a half high. It was yellow-green. He wondered if it could be some weird fungus effect, and went closer, reaching below the illumination to feel the ground. Nothing unusual.

The dome suddenly brightened greatly, scaring him into cover. Within the area of the dome, two beings slowly materialized. They were one foot high. They stepped out, looking like "classic" Little People of the folktales. They stared in his direction, unnerved him and he stumbled backwards with a crash. Quickly the Little Folk jumped back into the glow-dome and everything vanished. The witness was left trying to relax and collect himself. Upon examining the spot the next day, nothing was disturbed at the spot of the glow.

12). 2003, Richmond Park, Kingston-upon-Thames, UK: This isn't a Ron Quinn case, but this is where it fits. Two persons were strolling in the park in the evening when a flexible Orb of light began "pouring" itself over a wall. As it hit the ground, it bounced a little ways away, encountering a tree, against which it seemed to "rub" up and down. Disengaging itself again, it bounced in front of a moving auto, finally disappearing off the road. As it disappeared, a figure the size of a small boy manifested, but with an abnormally large head. Then came a flash of light and everything vanished. Lightforms accompanying "portals" between the worlds??

13). 1977, Catskill Mountains, NY: a different way of "crossing"? A hiker/hunter had spent many hours in these woods; he knew them well...he thought. About one hundred yards into the forest that summer's day, things began to get strange. For a few seconds, while passing a large rock formation, he felt a tingling go through his whole body. Soon after he began noticing that the environment had changed. The previously overcast sky was now sunny clear. It seemed to be tinged with green rather than just blue. The country was now more open than it should have been, certain plants grew which shouldn't have been there, large granite outcroppings that were not part of his hiking areas. There was a narrow canyon cutting into those cliffs.

Convinced that he had somehow gotten completely lost, he trudged up the canyon. Then he heard pretty music ahead. Peeking around, he saw four little men sitting on boulders by a waterfall, playing flutes. Another one gathered water from the fall. Our hiker had a camera [which almost never happens] and remembered to use it [which is one in a million]. The water-gatherer returned, the little folk got up, and moved off further up the canyon. Our hiker retreated the way he came with his pictures. Wandering about for around a hour, he suddenly spotted his car. Another tingling then hit him, and turning, the strange environment was gone. The tint of the sky was back to normal, and overcast again. His watch said that thirty minutes had passed, but he felt that it was at least three hours [before getting too excited, note that this is the OPPOSITE of "missing time" folks]. Back home, no one believed a bit of his story. The film came back all pictures perfect, except of course for the ones taken in the "other reality canyon". They were all dusty smudges tinted in a light green.

OK, people, you've just gone further than "Out Proctor" with that one.

But since we're there, let's go again. #14). mid-1950s, Neversink Reservoir, WA: a hiker was walking the shore of the reservoir when he saw a bridge which he hadn't noticed before. It seemed to extend out into a large fogbank from the shore. More than mystified, the witness saw that the bridge was made of something like brass, with handrails and designs upon it which looked like some strange form of writing. He walked across into and out of the fogbank to discover a small island there [which absolutely should not have been]. This island was completely surrounded by the mist. Unfamiliar plants and animals populated the place. Thirty yards further along the shore were three small men. They were three foot tall, bearded, with long hair flowing down their backs and white robes. The central figure carried an object, but the witness wasn't close enough to see what it was. The group then walked away into the trees. Our witness, deciding that he'd risked enough, found the bridge again and moved swiftly across. Once on the shore again, the bridge and the mist slowly faded away. The little island, however, remained, as did a "new" mountain which had somehow manifested between two prominent peaks. Then that mountain and the island disappeared leaving the witness with the world that he understood. [Quinn then briefly mentions another case which is quite like this one but from another area. His language here is unclear and I don't follow precisely which incident happened at Neversink, and which happened at "Lake Washington". Suffice it to say, the second case involved a hiker, a bridge into a mist, a small island, and strange animals and one solitary old man inhabiting the place. In both cases neighbors stated that they'd seen unusual mists with something inside them the mornings of the events.]

One last case from this 100 which doesn't easily fit elsewhere, but definitely deserves mention: #15, sometime during the 20th century, Provo River valley, UT. Two Ute native Americans were fishing on the river. They came across several human-like beings occupying rocks along the shore. They were small children sized, about three foot tall or less. They were drying out their long black hair and making noises like cries of "walla-la-loo-lo". The fishers tried to get closer, but were spotted and the beings dove beneath the water. The water began to rise suddenly and the witnesses became alarmed and panicked and ran.

These beings are said to be well-known among the Utes and are called "pawapicts" and also, in English, "water babies". There are also related traditions to this sort of creature involving beautiful women who lure men into the water to their deaths, Celtic "siren" style.

The final incident above was the only Native American encounter in that 100 cases, but serves to remind us that such encounters abound in those traditions. Also some of the motifs, once you strip off some of the imagery, are surprisingly similar to Celtic world beliefs. The general theme of the trickster is one prominent one.

Now, an indefensible thought: Native American spirituality sees the world as created by a supreme figure [a Creative God, if you will] named as Manitou. Manitou is, among other things, the Bringer and the Guardian of Life. There is a lesser known, or believed?, or spoken about, concept called "manitoug". A "manitoug" is a spirit entity which represents some portion of Nature --- a forest, a mountain range, a species. A manitoug is a "living" entity of the Spirit World, but one which might interact with our material world and ourselves. It is a manitoug, to some persons' way of seeing it, that one "meets" in vision quests, when Bear or Raven or the Spirit of an Ecosystem shows up to give council and warning.

I mention the manitoug because such entities would be folkloric beings of the Spirit or paranormal realm. And if such existed at a grand scale, might not others exist "all the way down"? A manitoug of a "fairy glen" for instance...of an oaken woods...of a rhododendron bush? It is an indefensible thought, but .....

Another: the fairies seem often to hang onto the old megalithic sites. Who knows why? But someone else did too--- the druids. It makes no difference at all whether pre-Christian druids originally made these structures. It is pretty obvious that they used some of them. Why? Simply because they are "awesome"? Because they have an uncanny "air" about them? Or because "somebody else" was there? Or, are all three of those the same thing?

And, of course, most mundanely of all this astoundingly non-mundane stuff: what does all this mean for the "muddied middle" of the pile of ET-Air Force-style UFOs and the pile of the magical glen dancing world of brightly clothed Faerie? The illustration above is for a recent case taken place near a Native American settlement in northern Quebec. ET? or Faerie? Let it be a non-humble man who thinks he clearly can decide.

Faerie? : A small data-set indicating the possibility that folkloric entities or something very much like them could be real, Part Three.

2011-11-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

Part Three of our wild trip into the woods: the primary thing which has arisen for me is that these old folklore creatures did not cease to manifest sometime in the dim past. Thankfully, persons of lively interests and open-minds have tried to keep the encounter stories from simply being forgotten by a "culture" rapidly pursuing the next hamburger, and have at intervals attempted to collect clusters of such accounts in the spirit of Charles Fort, at least in that regard. Admittedly these folks believed in the stories that they were collecting more than Saint Charles seems to have [for most things].

One group who collected and believed was the Fairy Investigation Society. This organization is pretty confusing to me and I cannot find a proper "history" of it. It may have been founded in England in the first half of the 20th century and it may have ultimately shrunk and transplanted to Ireland. Whatever, it allegedly actively collected "fairy encounter" stories from hither and yon, but I can't find a good source of any rich number of the things. It would be extremely interesting if someone had access to their files and would let the rest of us see them.

A hint of the FIS's cases occurs via Nandor Fodor in his Between Two Worlds. He presents these: 1). 1st half 20th century, Gloucester, UK. Person had walked away from her house into the Birdlip Beeches woods and was lying back drying her hair. She felt something tug on her head, and turned to see a very ugly small being about 9" high. It was a fine example of a wrinkled misshapen bogan thrashing about and struggling to escape from her entangling hair. It was the color of yellow-brown dead aspen leaves. It's voice was high and squeaky and it complained vociferously about her hair strangling it and that she had no right to be there, "troubling honest folk". It finally freed itself and vanished. The witness later mentioned this encounter to a professor at Bristol University, and he surprised her by saying that the Birdlip Beeches were one of the few areas left where one might encounter Fairyfolk.

2).1st half of the 20th century, Putney, UK. The woman who became the secretary of the FIS told Fodor that she lived in a house whose garden was "overrun with fairies and gnomes." Recently, she said that her son had run into the room which she was in and excitedly told her that a "pig" was in one of the rooms. It turned out to be a fat gnome sitting in her chair. It looked upset and made non-understandable grunting noises. Later she saw the gnome trying to climb a blinds cord and prat-falling. She laughed and it vanished.

These cases are interesting enough to hope that the FIS files have not been lost/destroyed.

Fortean Times in 1993 published a handful+ of cases which originally came from the British Weekly John o'Londons of readers' letters collected in 1936. This date seems suspiciously similar to the beginnings of the FIS, so maybe there was a bit of an upsurge of interest in fairy encounters around then. [I can be well off on that, as I haven't the FIS origin date at all clear]. We can safely label all the following as "1936 0r earlier 20th century":

3). Cornwall/Devon border: Witness saw a small man dressed in black "strutting about". Shortly he shape-shifted into something like a black, long, furry "roll". Minutes later she came upon two more roundly shaped pixies who were apparently operating a two-man saw...but it was invisible. She stumbled on stones in the path and the beings vanished. Inspecting the site, she noticed that one of the two pixies must have been either airily lightweight or suspended in the air, as there was nothing but a gorse bush under it.

4). Wigan, UK: Several times the witness saw in a field of daisies seven or eight pairs of little people dancing, suspended about three feet off the ground. They were dressed in brown with long pointed caps and pointed feet. They sported impish grins. One fairy was different in that she was dressed in a shiny pink beautiful gown and had an aura of pink about her.

5). Southwest London: Witness and her daughter saw 18" beings [none of these cases state wings for any of the fairies], wearing flimsy gowns, all female. On three occasions the female fairy wore a pink gown. Sightings occurred eight times in the garden near flowering bushes and a small stream. Other times the fairies wore bluish dress.

6). Cookham-Dean, Berkshire, UK: This witness didn't want the grief of being called a nut, so, unlike others she just gave her initials [familiar problem, eh?]. Out picking blueberries [I can't think of a better way to encounter a fairy than in a blueberry patch], the woman was straining with the bush to get at harder to reach berries when the branches suddenly parted and something came out. It was a "lean, brown man, dressed in brown with pointed cap and scraggly beard." The being was solid from waist up, but "transparent" from waist down. As he ran away "like lightning", he entirely disappeared.

7). Hertfordshire: As spectacularly strange as that last was, this one is almost mundane. A man was driving down a rural road with nothing going on. He spotted a roadside tree stump up ahead. Sitting on the stump was a small [18" high] round-face being with a pointed cap which slouched over to one side. Before being able to secure a better look, the being was no longer there.

8). Nottingham: A young girl sat staring at the fireplace in her room. A cobweb had formed across the bars of the grate and on it sat a very small [4-to-6"] elf. It had very large ears and a body which shimmered green. It always had a broad grin on its face. I say "always" because the creature kept reappearing in the same position. The girl would try to approach, but the bogan, I'd call it, would immediately disappear. It was never seen again after the girl brushed away "its" cobweb.

9). Western Wales: This is charming even if it's nuts. An older woman saw out in a field a congregation of the Little Folk. They were all gathered around a little fairy woman who sat on the centered stone. She was giving them news and a protest in Welsh. The fairy woman was warning her kind that the meadow in which they were residing would be no longer livable for them, as the owner had purchased a "chariot which would run without the need for horses". That man shortly bought the first car in the neighborhood. [I always knew that there were deeper reasons why I've hated cars all my life, and now here's one more].

10). Three experiences by a man in our favorite Isle of Arran: a]. Ten fairies playing in the gorse bushes near grazing sheep. The sheep ignored them unless they got too close. b]. Silvery voices alerted him to a troop of fairies scurrying along a path. They seemed vociferously angry about something. c]. There was beautiful music coming from a group of rhododendron bushes. He cautiously snuck up upon a scene of wonderful dancing. The fairies noticed him, unfortunately, and sped away. One small female turned, looked him straight in the eye, and gracefully whisked away like "Pavlova herself".

Not bad. Wonder how many incidents the weekly received and were not printed.

I'm getting a bit tired this evening, so let's end this part with a few cases from Janet Bord's Fairies: Real Encounters With Little People. This book is the "guidebook" of modern works in this field vis-a-vis actual encounter incidents. To my knowledge there is nothing comparable.

Here are a small number of the modern incidents from the 1950s-early 1960s:

11). 1951, County Wicklow, Ireland: Two girls were walking in a country lane. A little man, two to three feet tall was standing in the road near an old thorn tree. [Thorn trees are said to be fairy haunts by some]. The girls walked by, noticing his youngish looks and his clothing, all black with a black cap. Looking back, and suddenly afraid, they opened the gate to the nearby field and ran across it. Turning again, the little man was gone. There on the top of the field's gate sat a strange object which looked like a kitchen clock. Another enigmatic projection from Faerie?

12). 1952, Dartmoor, Devon: A woman was walking near a stony path on a hillside when she saw a small man, three to four feet tall, who seemed to be regarding her. He appeared old, and was completely dressed in brown, including a flat cap covering brown hair. His smock was tied with a cord [apparently monkish style]. Her son was in the vicinity so she was unafraid and climbed upwards towards him. At a forty yard distance, the little brown man disappeared behind a boulder. Upon inspecting that location, she and her son could not see anyway that he could have vanished.

13). 1961, St. Asaph, North Wales: A man was walking his dog when they encountered a small being three foot tall. The dog growled and was ready to attack if further provoked. The being was dressed wholly in green and had an ugly brown face. It had suddenly appeared when the walker had tapped his walking stick on a metallic roadsign "as if the tapping had summoned it". The creature exuded an air of malevolence. After a moment or two, it simply vanished.

14). Early 1960s, Mynydd Llanginidir, Wales: Amateur botanists had been exploring the mountain. The men set one day to loud arguing just as the farmer who owned the property dropped by to see how they were doing. One of the two swore that he had just seen "hoards of tiny people" playing around one of the collecting sites. When he showed the farmer a map location for this site, the farmer told them that this place was known as "Fairies Bog".

I think that I'll let this post stand for now. I'll try to wrap up the "first 100" soon. What these tales tell me is that we can conceivably still interact with this reality under the right circumstances, despite our unhelpful [in so many ways] "modernity". The Moyra Doorly experiences as we saw earlier take us right up to the present and fit well within the context of the cases that we have been reading. I have never had such an experience in my life, sadly, nor have any of my family [though mischief-makers have invisibly made their presences known, especially to our female members]. But I have one very good friend whose mother had two little people interactions while a girl, and another very good friend [the redoubtable Jerry Clark himself], who has a very good friend who encountered dwarf-like critters in an indoor urban setting. And all that is good enough for me.

Tomorrow or the next day, I'll try to complete this series. Some of the featured cases will be a cluster from a very intriguing set of incidents reported by Ron Quinn in his all-to-short book Little People. Till then, keep an eye out for that mysterious presence.... just there... see... just darting around the bushes, the trees, the flowers. Just don't disturb the dancing.

Faerie? : A small data-set indicating the possibility that folkloric entities or something very much like them could be real, Part Two.

2011-11-22T11:06:00.000-08:00

UFO Aliens. Folkloric Fairies. Non-terrestrials all, but who is who?? As I plough through my various files, I find a very strong thread of technological flying machines extending from WW2 to 1952, and then a big interruption of this technological "sanity" in 1954. There then begins a "dance" [in the files] between the far-in-advance technologicals and the relatively simpler but strikingly whacky folklorics. Is this "dance" a dance between two very unlike groups of entities? Or is it a dance staged separately by each for us? Or are the dancers the same beings wearing different masks? I have not earned the evidentiary right to answer such questions. I will just say that my files are polluted with these matters, and it is my belief that it is a cross pollution between two ontologically different groups. That is just the feeling that I have. Call it intuition only, or call it intuition buttressed by a very long career studying the UFO and military intelligence documents and seeing therein a consistent technological phenomenon making, for me, perfectly good sense as advanced physical technology. I have no convincing proofs. But I can do one small service: show you a bit more of my Little People files and some of the "polluted middle", and let your own intuitions go to work. One last thing: my studies and my files tell me that a large number of these sorts of encounters are true.

In my opinion one of the best places to begin the oversight of this pollution is in Kelly/Hopkinsville, KY in 1955. All of you already know this "UFO" case. It, on almost any criterion, is a great case. It has multiple witnesses, several investigators [including the military], and good character bona fides on at least most of the family by the local sheriff and other town members. Something very strange happened that evening. But what?

Many of you know the Kelly/Hopkinsville case. If you don't just google it; it is all over the internet. In a thumbnail, one evening, with a large family celebration going on, one man stepped outside and saw a rainbow colored round object coming to Earth in the woods some way off. Another man joined him and the two saw weird silvery glowing creatures approaching from the forest.

Scared at the weirdness, they went inside only to see the creatures keep coming on. A type of siege ensued with creatures going all about and climbing on the roof. Shots were fired at nearly point blank range to no avail. This strangeness continued most of the night. In the morning, upon going outside, no evidence that anything had been there was discernible except for empty cartridges, and damage by the bullets to farm property. [I'm telling the story off the top of my head, by the way, so a small detail could be off here or there].

The police were informed and the family gave witness. The military sent an investigator [he was from the Army base] to also write up a report. The two drawings on yellowed paper [on the left of the accompanying illustration collage] are his, [It is possible that the Army guy just took the drawings made by Bud Ledwith who was on the scene rapidly] taken from the witness descriptions. Following that, many news outlets also came by, and most importantly, an engineer/scientist named Bud Ledwith, who had worked in the Moonwatch Program, and knew Allen Hynek well. [He was working at a nearby radio station at the time].

Somehow, not exactly known, Ledwith's very positive views of the veridical nature of the family testimony made it to CSI-NY and two of our finest-ever UFO researchers, Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher. Isabel and Ted collected all the data associated with the incident and several others in what seemed to be a mini-creature flap going on. Exactly how long after the information collected by the military and Ledwith Isabel and Ted got involved, I don't know, but it was they who put together the bigger picture. This is published in the well-known but rare-to-own monograph called, I believe, Close Encounter at Kelly and Others in 1955, by the Center for UFO Studies in the 70s.

As was said, although the family literally felt the physicality of the experience, no such physical evidence persisted. The whole thing smacks not only of the Uncanny but also the paranormal. These were country people who don't miss shooting things at close range. These are outdoors people who would laugh at your face [if you were lucky] if you suggested that they couldn't recognize an owl [certain "intellectual" clowns have recently suggested that this was nothing mo0re than owls protecting nests --- note the "unusual" owl crawling on all fours behavior in one of the drawings --- these sorts of people are societal criminals deliberately confusing the search for truth with their hung-up garbage].

Throughout her life, the central female figure in the Sutton family was engaged in reflection about that night by prominent townspeople. The sheriff said that there always came that time in those reflections where she would just go silent with a look of awe on her face. The Kelly-Hopkinsville event happened, whatever it was. My belief is that it was not "biological"; that is not part of the evolution of lifeforms of the Universe of physical laws. Why? Even setting aside for the moment the apparent unhittability by rifleshot, and the floating slowly about the landscape, the form of the creatures is "unlikely".

These things, if biological, are not water creatures and are sizable. They look sort of like they should be like mammals or something which would have a chance for a large brain and intelligence, and if they are to be guessed as UFOnauts must be quite brainy. But their heads are absurdly gigantic in proportion to their bodies. This next thought doesn't HAVE to be true, but if it is not someone needs to do some real thinking as to why not: Those heads could never come through a birth canal of anything remotely shaped like the creatures drawn. Could the females be wildly different in shape than the males? If so, there is nothing on Earth remotely comparable in terms of divergent sexual morphism in large animals. Could the things be birdish and come from eggs? Eggs have real structural size limits and so the heads would have to be small and do a tremendous amount of growing while "outside" exposed to natural threat. Growing and remaking skulls to accommodate growing brains would take a very great risk-taking time using soft malleable skulls. Anything's possible, I suppose, but these things REALLY don't look like normal evolutionary biology to me. The only hope I'd believe would be that they were artificially grown. If so, why bother with the out-sized ears if you had that technology? Nothing about these critters says anything but "bogan" "bauchan" "trickster" to me.

And the Bogans were out those nights elsewhere. Isabel and Ted found several other cases, none of which sound UFOlogical, scattered both near and far in the US, on and around that night. The drawings above are from some persons driving near the Georgia border [I think this one was] and passing a group of "gnomes" standing as if mock-working on something on the road. It has also been suggested that these were owls. Large owls. Large owls manifesting very un-owl-like behavior like not budging as a car passes close by. Yeh, Owls... that's the ticket.

This cluster of very strong but very non-UFOlogical experiences serves to somewhat anchor my opinion that many explanation-resistent folkloric type encounters still go on, and that some of them fall into UFO case files. Let's look at a few of the others.

I start inauspiciously with an apology: the drawing above is my own, and although it COULD be representative of the case intended, the amount of descriptive material in the case is insufficient for me to defend my whimsical details. I based my colorful drawing on Otto Binder's black & white line drawing, but Binder's description didn't indicate the details that HE put into it. If Binder had more info than he printed, then maybe the illustration is not too bad. Well, here the case is anyway:

A). Person was fishing in upper NY state. [1960]. He heard a humming and an object came low over the water and landed. Two small beings left the thing dragging a waterhose, and stuck its end into the creek. Both creatures began playfully jumping around as if gravity wasn't much of an issue. While they were outside their "object" [this isn't described] they began "creating colors" out of the air as if exchanging information, or whatever, with one another. Well, whether my drawing is accurate or not, I kind of like the idea.

B). 1956, Chester, CA. A deputy sheriff of a local community was out bow hunting with other family members. Hearing movement on the slope, he turned to see a 4' tall man clad in green and gold. He had fine [i.e. not gnomish] facial features under a red and gold cap. Brown leather boots. He leapt away in twenty foot jumps. The deputy, who hadn't been drinking, retreated to camp where he remedied that oversight. [from MUFON Journal].

C). 1965, Luumaki, Finland. People were out picking berries. One heard an odd bubbling sound from higher up the hill. Looking closely, there was a small man staring at him. The 3' tall being began walking towards the witness. It was stoutly built with skin-tight green coverall and a carrot-red face. One of the other berry-pickers saw this from a greater distance. The being abruptly changed directions, walked to the edge of a bog, and vanished. [from the UK UFO magazine SPACELINK].

D). 1973, Bedarrides, France. A person was out collecting mushrooms. There at the edge of a clearing was a 4' tall man clad in beige coveralls and black beret. Soon he was joined by another who could have been a twin. They looked at and laughed audibly at the witness and ran into the woods. Shortly thereafter the witness saw a blue-gray oval rise from the woods, make a whistling noise and shoot off, its rising greatly disturbing the dead ground-clutter leaves. The researcher on the case said that he had at least six other cases of beings laughing at the witness. [From the MUFON Journal].

E). 1968, Coleraine, Quebec. Several kids playing near a cemetery saw a 4' tall dwarf on three consecutive days. Bald head, black beard, naked chest. The skin was red and scaly [lizard-like]. Some kind of craft colored red, white, and blue then rose trailing smoke. On a subsequent day, the kids' uncle alleged to have also seen the creature. [From Saucers, Space, and Science].

F). 1950, Canby, OR. a woman working outside in her yard saw a 1' tall man. He had a heavily tanned face, coveralls, and a plaid shirt. He was stoutly built and wore a skullcap. The being waddled away, walking right under a nearby car. [HUMCAT].

G). 1905, Perm, Russia. While visiting a cathedral, a young man [12] was walking in a dark corridor, when confronted by a red light of fiery color. This "aureole" was uncanny in that it radiated no heat and just hung there. Inside the lightform, a black 3-4' creature jumped around and stuck out its tongue at the boy. It had large owlish eyes reflecting red, a small beaked nose, large pointed ears, and a huge mouth. The boy, showing courage created by his belief that this must be someone tricking him, rushed at the lightform only to see it keep its distance from him. When he reached a position that he could see that no such trick was possible, he began shaking [and, presumably, ran away.] [Letter to Dr. Hynek].

H). 1942, Prouvy, France. A woman came into her garden and found herself face-to-face with three dwarves. they were c.4' tall, bearded, with large round heads. Their eyes were large and luminous yellow. They were dressed in metallic shiny monk-like cowled clothes. They were absolutely motionless. She ran to call her husband, but they disappeared. [HUMCAT, from an unpublished Ms.]

I). 1925, La Mancha, Spain. A man was confronted by a dwarf. The being was c.4' tall and wore all-green clothing. It held a blowpipe-like thing in its hands. It was standing atop a vertically-oriented disk, which was rolling along the ground like a wheel. It passed soundlessly six feet away. [Ballester-Olmos' Spanish Close Encounters catalog].

J). 1956, Derry, NH. A man was out in the country gathering Xmas greens, when he saw a 2' tall dwarf colored green. It had a large-domed head, floppy ears, and a face and skin with folds like at fat bloodhound dog. Its eyes were snake-like. Both arms and legs were stumpy. After watching a few minutes, the witness decided to move forward. The dwarf then broke into a scream and charged. The witness beat it out of there. [HUMCAT; Letter to Walt Webb].

K). 1973, Springfield, IL. This is a tale from the Timmerman files. This is an elderly lady who was walking her dog outside her house and getting an object she needed, when she saw a slow-moving light in the sky. Shortly, a little man [<4'] just appeared floating in the air beside her. He had on a black coverall with a pointed hood. His face was ghastly pale. His feet seemed pointed. He smirked at her. Unnerved, she decided to brazen it out and kept walking as if he wasn't there. Shortly he just vanished. [Interview by John Timmerman, CUFOS].

L). 1920, Nontron, France. A bunch of young people returning from a dance, when near a small woods, noticed a lighted area in the sky. That area was a group of beings of small stature moving through the air producing musical sounds. The scene was pleasing to view and not frightening. You could see the beings' legs move about and fiery colored balls move along with them. [HUMCAT from an unpublished Ms.].

M). 1914, Caerphilly, Wales. Two children were going home on the side of a mountain when they encountered a large but localized white mist. At the edge of the mist were two small entities [apparently child-sized or a little smaller] who were white all over. These beings had, comically, very tall chef-like hats, and, much less comically, piercing eyes. They advanced on the children who ran. [HUMCAT from an unpublished report to Contact UK].

N). 1974, Chingford, UK. Two men, one a BUFORA UFO researcher, watched through binoculars a "woman", almost as a silhouette, with long blond hair, a long black dress, and a featureless face. This figure never moved. Then a second like figure was seen moving among trees. The first figure then vanished. The second did likewise shortly. The first then reappeared 150' away standing motionless. It then vanished again.

Less than an hour later, the witnesses again saw two figures dressed this time all in white. One was again motionless while the other darted about in quick movements. These movements were not biological but gliding/floating type. At this time they were distracted by a lighted object rising up over the trees. It seemed lens-shaped with central white light, blue light revolving about its edge, and two other lights blinking. It passed directly overhead making a throbbing or thrumming sound. [HUMCAT; from a personal report to Allen Hynek].

O). 1922, nr Estoraoa River, Portugal. A young man was walking and crossing a bridge. He spotted a 6+' tall figure dressed in a monk's habit but having no facial features. The figure passed to within about 6' of the witness giving him a "sense of strangeness". This is related to the next incident.

P). 1976, nr Estoraoa, Portugal. Many years later, the brother of that witness and his wife had their own encounter. While walking they were approached at a distance by a 6+' tall figure, appearing slightly transparent and gliding more than walking. It was dressed in a one piece long garment, dark-colored which reached the ground. Their dog cowered and slunk away. No noise was discernible as it passed. [HUMCAT, from Joaquim Fernandes].

Q). 1936, Kazakhstan. A teenage girl was going home in the snow. Ahead in the air a dark object was approaching. It was a man-like figure, normal height, dressed entirely in black, and seen only in profile. It had on a helmet and a napsack, and held its arms tightly to its sides. Then it suddenly changed to come directly at her. Now she saw that it had no features, only a black surface. It emitted a rumbling sound. The girl panicked and ran. Turning to look, the thing had vanished. [HUMCAT; from Rubtsov in FSR].

R). 1968, Ulfshale, Denmark. A lady went outside at night and noticed a light shining through the hedge. It was some "thing" gliding over the near hillside. It looked like the silhouette of a powerfully chested man in a dark monk's robe and cowl. The object itself was dark with a shining aura around it. She crept out further and saw three more of these things passing over a brook. They seemed identical except that the lead "thing" had a dark red aura. She estimated the things as 9' in height. [SUFOI Reporter].

S). 1952 or 53, Rouge Valley, OR. A family was driving along when three weird objects glided in front of their car. They braked to a stop and watched as the things crossed the road, slowly heading into the trees. They were 3 to 4 feet tall, completely white, and featureless. The bodies were egg-shaped, with neck extending and rounding off to no head. They looked most like the strange comic creations called "shmoos" by Al Capp in Li'l Abner. [this is, admittedly, putting the mind well into the twilight zone]. [HUMCAT; letter in a magazine].

T). Lastly, for this set: 1948, Yuste Monastery, Caceres, Spain. A sheepherder had to seek shelter for the night in a distant cabin, due to the sudden arising of a bad storm. He heard voices outside and opened the door. There was a short "man". The herder invited him in and the person walked by without speaking. The herder took a closer look and saw that the visitor had goat-like hooves instead of human feet. Screaming in panic, he caused the [Pan-like?] creature to run from the cabin. Shortly, he thought that there was a fireball which rose into the sky. [Ballester-Olmos catalog of Spanish close encounter cases].

That is enough of that for now. All the cases in today's post are from my files which originally were included in the UFO filing cabinets, rightly or wrongly. Many other "UFO-ish" sorts of things [such as the incidents illustrated just above] could lengthen this list until it was very long. The point is, of course, that many such things exist which either "muddy the middle" between the Faerie World and UFOs, or are "purely" FaerieWorld candidates which the witnesses knew of nowhere else [but UFOlogy] to report them to. What we can make of all this boggles my mind at least. But more from this first 100 set will follow when I can manage.

Through all of this, I get the image of the neglected denizens of the Faerie Kingdom watching the naive ETs come in here with their technological disks and thinking: Well, how can we have some fun with this? It's probably a Middle Kingdom HOOT --- and not with luminous owls.

FAERIE? : A small data-set indicating the possibility that folkloric entities or something very much like them could be real.

2011-11-21T02:52:00.000-08:00

It has been about a week and a half since I've been able to post something here, and I apologize. Life has been crowded with certain unusually stressful family care situations, increased UFO book editing pressures, some rare book purchasing, selling the old family house, and generally being gassed. This Little People topic, also, has not lent itself to easy, off-the-top-of-the-head posting. But, one hundred of my case file encounters have now been logged, and I guess, ready or not, I'll unload them. I can't make any good sense out of this topic yet folks, so it's going to be: let it fly, and it's up to you to see if it's of any value to you.

Let's get the boring preliminaries out of the way first. As said, this material comes from my case files collected from published encounter claims over several years of "collecting". As with my UFO files, these cases were not collected systematically, but merely as I ran into them and thought them interesting. The sources are quite varied. About a quarter of this particular hundred were taken off one internet site where people write in their "fairy" claims. About a like number were taken from my "UFO" files, and picked out because they didn't ring particularly true as UFO cases. Others come from books and magazine articles. The only things that they have in common is 1). they struck me as interesting potentially-true encounters; and 2). they seemed to have a "folkloric entity" feeling to them. So, this is entirely idiosyncratic to me and as such hardly "scientific" to start.

The crude data arrays are to the left. The majority of these characters are "smalls" [1 1/2--4 1/2 feet tall]. They are the "Little People" we expect. About a quarter of these are "tinies". They are almost the only critters said to be winged. "Tinkerbells", if you will. They come almost entirely from the internet site "Fairy Encounters", which seems to attract mostly young girls who want to see fairies. I waded through a very large number of these claims some time ago, and weeded out a couple dozen which were reported by adults and seemed to have some redeeming characteristics. There were very few normal sized creatures in this list, and just one, I believe, extremely large one. Perhaps the folkloric big entities are all masquerading as Bigfoot or Nessy-like creatures. Normal-sized humanoids may be shunted off into the "apparitions" category and not make the Faerie listings. There were a few fairyish things which had no entity seen but included for other reasons. [fairy music, etc.]

The files for this hundred are almost entirely 20th-21st century, which is of some interest to me, as it may be saying that the phenomenon continues to today, regardless of being ignored. Had it been true that I had just collected material out of WY Evans-Wentz, Wirth Sikes, or even much of Janet Bord, the previous centuries would have been more widely represented.

As usual, with my language-constricted reading ability, all the citations are in english, and as a consequence, mostly US and UK, in about equal amounts. There are 16% European citations, though, mainly from UFO files. Ireland has very few cites as yet. There should be a few more of those in a second hundred if I ever get it done.

A general comment [therefore not universally true] about states of consciousness: Many cases of Faerie claims occur, as reported, at bedtime, lying down, dreamily staring at something, etc. This phenomenology [in these cases reported upon here] tend to concentrate heavily in the Tinkerbell-type tiny winged fairy reports. Reports of "small" dwarf, leprechaun, gnome, etc sized denizens of Faerie typically do NOT occur in these states of consciousness, but rather "normal" consciousness at least as far as the reports indicate. What this says about reality, I will leave up to you.

Despite my comment about states-of-consciousness and the Fairy Encounters site that I made above, there still were quite a few reports that I found interesting. In VERY truncated form, I'll describe some of them. They will be a selection picked to illustrate a wide range of possible experience. All of these were from the 1970s through to circa 2005. Almost all are from the US with as sprinkling of UK, and one Belgium and Germany. Almost all these stories were written in by the observers when they were much older.

1). Four young girls find tiny footprints in rural Colorado. They make a fairy house to encourage activity. Only a glowing silhouette is seen, and an arrangement of sticks like a person.

2). Three teenage girls were in countryside in Wales to paint landscapes. Saw slim thread with something riding on it. It was a very tiny "egg" within which was a "man" with a purple-colored dwarf's hat apparently joy-riding the "egg" as a minicraft. Two of the girls drew the same thing separately.

3). Two girls were playing in the backyard at night. A "firefly" showed up. It turned out to look like Tinkerbell and it stayed briefly, smiling, and assuring the girls not to be afraid.

4). One girl used to sit out in nature a lot, and built fairy houses. Nothing for a very long time. One day she saw a rainbow-colored glowing tiny winged creature flying around where she usually sat. It stayed there a while, the two looking at one another.

5). A girl and her brother were out to play in nearby woods. He ran off to pick apples. She just sat, not going after him, picking flowers. In one flower a flutterbye [I refuse to use the modern degradation "butterfly"] flew out and danced away. It appeared as a tiny fairy. It led her on until disappearing. There was her brother fallen from a tree and unconscious. She stopped the bleeding in his head. They rested and got back home safely.

6). Two guys decided to go fairy-hunting in a place deemed likely by others [one of the reasons that I am particularly suspicious of this one]. They go to a rural cemetery just as dusk falls. This reminds me of knuckleheads looking for trouble, but OK. There they are hiding behind cover in order not to be spotted by police when they saw a rapidly dancing 5" high person. It danced continuously for 5 minutes and disappeared. Making ready to leave, they found that somehow they were at the very opposite end of the cemetery with no recollection of having gotten there [this is the element of this that I found interesting enough to include this one]. This constituted a ten minute run to get back to where their car was. There are plenty of reasons to discard things like this, but the reporter didn't make himself sound too flattering in his tale, and the spatial slip is reminiscent of the Irish concept of the "Stray Sod".

7). A woman told of constantly finding that things were "going missing" and then reappearing later exactly where they should have been and where she had looked for them [thoroughly] . She attributed this to fairy-tricksters of some kind [never saw them] and finally began to just say "Come on you guys this isn't funny anymore!" and the item would pop up soon thereafter. "Fairy" or not, this phenomenon is all over the literature [usually buried under Poltergeist phenomena] and I have a sister who is burdened with these same sorts of temporary diversions.

8). A girl living in the English countryside regularly visited a friend and experienced the beautiful garden there. She began to sketch a flower when a flutterbye landed on it. But it wasn't a flutterbye afterall but rather a golden miniature person [female] with wings. It left the flower and flew up and posed a few inches from her face. Then it flew up and away. No one believed her, but she returned often hoping to see another, which she never did.

9). Two girls used to play in the woods when they began to tell one another that they thought they were seeing creatures out of the corners of their eyes and then retreating behind the trees when the girls would turn on them. Unlike other claims on this site, these were "smalls", and the girls compared them to "Santa's Elves" in size. While this would go on, the environment would be like a dreamy, fuzzy state, which would snap back to "hard reality" only once they got back home and inside.

10). A teenage girl [16] was walking down a country lane when she saw a flutterbye-sized tiny girl with wings singing beautifully while seated on a hedge. She flew up and beyond the hedge not to be seen again. The 21-year-old reporter never told anyone of this due to not wanting to be mocked.

11). An 11 year old girl was upstairs in her home while her parents held a party downstairs. Watching the raindrops on her window, she saw within one a tiny almost see-through female playing inside the drop. After a while, she decided to try to get her Mom to see it too, but the fairy disappeared. The reporter was 38 at the time of the telling.

12). A woman was sitting on the edge of her bed in a dimly lit room. Then time/action seemed to slow down and small half-inch diameter balls of light of different colors began manifesting. She was able to concentrate on one which was quite nearby. It was a tiny winged creature fluttering so rapidly that you could not resolve exactly its appearance, and whose motions gave it the more distant impression of being a ball-of-light. She felt that this went on for perhaps twenty seconds, but the rate of time made it seem much longer.

13). A young man was walking his girl in a "romantic" forest setting. They heard a strange language-like cry, and suddenly were no longer on their forest path. The environment was wrong, now featuring water-sounds burbling on rocks. They turned and were confronted by a beautiful normal-sized girl all dressed in green. She then turned into a green ball-of-light and flew off. They had to walk a ways to get back to the path leading to their house.

14). Four people in a temporary house [a camper] were outside watching a meteor shower, when two retired to bed. The other two, mother and daughter, stayed up with the family dog. The dog began barking at the back gate. Mother and daughter turned to see a large ball of white light about 20 feet from the gate. It disappeared while they ran in to wake up the father. They interpreted this as a fairy lightball.

15). Two boys and their dog were in the woods camping. The dog ran off. One boy followed. He heard beautiful music and looked to see two-inch tall men and women with wings doing the singing and partying. Shortly thereafter his friend arrived and watched too. Then after ten minutes of this, the dog came romping out of the woods barking. The fairies immediately disappeared. The next morning the friend described everything he had seen, but said that it happened in his dream.

16). Two young women [sisters] were home alone baking cookies. As they looked out their window, a small man looking like a "leprechaun" but not dressed in green, floated up over their neighbor's fence riding on what looked like a motorcycle. It raced across their yard and floated up over the next fence and away.

17). A young man and woman were driving in a scenic hilly area. They saw a large ball of white light, which disappeared into the woods. They got out and looked for it in vain. All they heard was some giggling. They continued their drive and there again was the light; this time in the middle of the road. He couldn't stop and went right over it. They stopped and jumped out. Looking under their truck, there was the ball of light making giggling noises. Apparently it then went safely away, as the young woman expressed her relief that the playful fairy/lightball was unharmed.

18). A young man at a time just prior to Halloween, had heard some tiny playful giggling in his garden which he couldn't locate. Then just on or right after Halloween, he and a friend saw two bluish glittering winged figures. They were nearly transparent as if made of gas. These two experiences tripped off memories of him having a childhood "imaginary playmate" whom he hadn't remembered in years. The imaginary playmate had been a fairy.

19). A girl was in her bedroom on a full Moon night staring out the window. Into the yard came a fuzzy figure made of light. It was a woman in a silvery long gown with bright golden hair and a crown. She was winged with glittering diaphanous silver. She stopped, looked at the Moon, turned into a ball of silvery light, and disappeared. The woman, in her thirties when she reported this, stated that she didn't know whether to call her encounter as being with a fairy, a ghost, or an angel.

20). A young person [sex not determinable from the report] was unable to sleep one night, and had an odd urging to get up and go outside. Once there, the urge continued and the witness was almost put to the ground without willing it. Immediately, Alice-in-Wonderland-like, the grass seemed growing tall all around [as the person shrunk]. A large group of fairy personages came talking and smiling and circling about. They then suddenly scattered away [the person had a blade of grass laid over one hand completely covering it]. Increasing to normal size, the witness wondered if it was just a dream. In that hand was grasped a small blade of grass. Once back in the bedroom, the brother said that he had watched it all from the window.

So be it to give you a largish dose of modern alleged fairy sightings. Note that there is quite a bit of scope phenomenologically here, but not far outside the expectations of a Fairylore sighting. I, as a UFO researcher, find the frequency of Ball-of-Light phenomena interesting, especially as many of these things found in UFO files don't sound very UFO-like. Also, though this is a "Fairy" website, one expects "Tinkerbells" but one also gets several larger critters. The majority of these things happen outside in woods or garden settings, or looking out one's window into a yard or garden. The changed environment cases smack of various forms of the OZ Effect in UFOlogy. Poltergeist phenomena and apparitional things seem to crop up. The Realm of Fairy, in fact, threatens to expand to potentially contain many other paranormal claims. These cases as presented also have a very powerful gender slant to them, which speaks to a strong sociological filter. Doubtless it is OK for girls to report fairies but not guys. Guys of course can make up for this by reporting Bigfoot.

Consider this Part One of this madness. I will move on to the other sorts of sources, such as UFO file cases, book and magazine article cases, in the following parts. Those types of sources tend to produce far higher percentages of "Smalls" rather than "Tinkerbells". The cases tend to have some chance of having had an investigation as well. We will meet several "cousins" of the character above, as it turns out that they make garden gnomes for sale looking like this for a reason. Till then.....

ELEVEN

2011-11-09T17:04:00.001-08:00

I like Eleven. Eleven feels good to me. The Olde People seemed to like Eleven too. You can always find good and bad about anything in this great big world, but generally speaking, the Olde People rated Eleven high. Idealistic. Visionary. A Teacher. An Inspirer. A Spiritual Person. Someone attracted to the Unknown. Yes, Eleven would be a good number to be.

And....Eleven is a PeaceLover and a PeaceMaker. Much to live up to there.

We, our Old World, are about to be flowing over with Eleven of course. It is Eleven/Eleven/Eleven coming now, as it does once a century. Maybe a special day??

Some folks are certainly gearing up for it. Big idealistic, romantic, and often slightly dotty celebrations are being planned. All hoping that the whole world might become Eleven. Even just one day would be nice.

Applause for a World of Interconnectedness! But I thought that we already were. It's our lack of respect and concern for that interconnectedness that's the problem.

A Kundalini Yoga Festival in India...wish them all the best. The music at least should be inspiring to the properly oriented soul.

Harmonizing the New Consciousness... hmmm... doubt that we have a new one, but Harmony is our friend.

Entering into the Love Portal of Oneness .... double hmmmm. That seems about a thousand percent over-the-top to me. But whatever makes you a Lover, I guess.

Las Vegas has their own ideas of course. They are on the bandwagon with Platinum Wedding Specials. Somehow I doubt that Spirituality and the search for the Unknown plays much of a role here.

Eleven, noble as it is, seems to be taking a beating in all this ... ummmm...."activity". There are many people "out there" on the internet, who are sure that Eleven is creeping up on them. They whisper that they are seeing Eleven everywhere, and it is somehow coming to get them and us... for good or evil, I haven't been able to decipher. Seems almost like a Rapture concept. There are people who say that Eleven is everywhere, if you just try to look for it. I am, apparently, supposed to see Eleven in the painting above. .... I just can't quite....

And to all that I just.................................. oh well.

But none of that can break me apart from Eleven. Because you see, The Creator allowed The Universe to welcome me into its wonders 71 years ago on Eleven/Eleven. [Pssst... It's my Birthday]. For that astonishing gift, I absolutely Love the Great Maker. What a privilege to lead this life and explore this Universe.

Some people will, of course, try to diminish anything. Before any Xtian Hypernuts try to demean my Elevenish "numerology", just remember that it was we Eleven guys that hung in there. Hah!! I'm even Biblically approved!!

... and I'll take the role of the Eleven Pipers Piping their joyous Christmas song as well.

We Elevens have to do our things. We have to get into our colorful world traveling, exploring balloons and see what we can see. No comments about Hot Air please!! And no shooting us down. We're the Good guys. Someday we might fly so high that we'll reach that heavenly land where all the colored party balloons go, carrying their birthday love and magic. As Bob Dylan said: "You can be in my dream, if I can be in yours".

So, on Eleven/Eleven/Eleven this old professor begins his post-seventy walk into the sunset. I don't know how many circuits of the Sun that I have left, but the ones I've had have been filled with wonders. Don't let your Sun Circuits go by without the same.

I hope that we can walk a little further together along the Deep Forest paths, wherein as the druids believed "Truth becomes perceivable". It has been a good life.

What's on the other side of the Portal?? .... and, you know, I keep seeing these Elevens ... :-).

So, as the old Irish panhandler that I am, who'd sit down and beat out a rhythmic tune for whatever the public might give him, I leave you with:

------------"This Old Man, he played Eleven; he played Knick Knack up in Heaven........"

ARRAN Enigma

2011-11-08T16:19:00.000-08:00

We are a long way from home on this post, but I think not "Out Proctor". Doubtless many will disagree with me on that assessment. I have begun to penetrate into my "folkloric entity encounter files" a little way [grinding out the logging], and ran smack into the Isle of Arran. Those of you who follow this sort of thing will know why.

This is a small island, somewhat unspoiled even today, off the coast of Scotland west of Glasgow. Even though I have not been there, it is one of my favorite kind of places. It is of the old Celtic heritage of folklore and has some citizenry still today who refuse to discount the legends casually. In fact, there are still a few about who will tell of seeing the unusual now and then even in these so sophisticated times.

One of these "moderns" was Moyra Doorly, who albeit "just a visitor", has recently told of encounters rarely so astonishing in any age. And yet, credible. Or are they? The good UFO investigator in me wishes to learn what I can. In this case, it was to try to see if these encounters happened in a credible context. It meant studying a bit about Arran.

It takes no writer's imagination to see Arran through Faerie eyes. The place is spectacularly "right" for a troop of Little People to suddenly come traipsing up an already magical glen to stun one into wise silence as they pass. There are areas of such picturesque quality all over the Island, making it, perhaps unfortunately, a tourist destination for those hardy enough to enjoy walking in sometimes rough nature. But are, or at least were, the Little Folk there?

Arran fits my prejudices for just the right place. There are still megaliths there. There are circles and standing stones and chambered cairns and even vitrified forts. Faerie haunts all.

There is even a place called Fairy Dell and one called Fairy Glen. There seems to have been a place for giants and witches and monsters by name. And a vanishing Faerie Island. Well, great, but you can't fool me, says I. I afterall am a UFO investigator. What else you got??

There have actually been scholars who have gone to Arran to learn the people's beliefs, and experiences, with the Faerie Folk. Some of this extends back, thankfully, to the late 1800s. Our favorite oldtime researcher, Walter Evans-Wentz, didn't get to Arran apparently [though his findings elsewhere in the former Celtic world agree thoroughly with what we get from Arran], but other wandering researchers did. A book which was available to me was W.M. Mackenzie's The Book of Arran published by the Arran Society of Glasgow in the early 1900s. What this and other sources indicate is that we are not dealing with Tinkerbell. Wonderful as that charming romantic vision is, the "real" Faerie Folk are quite different.

Sources tend to divide the "Good People" into three types: Brownies, Bauchans, and Bleaters. Reading accounts of these creatures, the only conclusion that strikes a harmonious tone to me is that they are all members of the same class of entities. Brownies [like the poorly dressed gentleman to the left] are a bit nicer typically; Bauchans are a bit nastier; and Bleaters are merely whining depressives. Some shape-shifting manifests particularly in Bauchans, but they are essentially humanoid-formed folk of normal to small [but not Tinkerbell tiny] size.

Other folkloric entities may manifest [giants, witches, pool monsters, merpeople, fauns, walking trees, and balls-of-light et al] but whether you wish to include them under Faerie is your choice.

Here's a late 19th century faerie encounter example: a farm family in [apparently, this is not completely clear in the narrative] the Tormore/MachrieWater area had attracted a Brownie. This Brownie was frequenting the household and did small chores for the family. It however did not like strangers. A breaking point occurred when one individual was invited to dinner. The Brownie became invisible to strangers at such times particularly, although the household could sometimes see it. As the poor guest was trying to eat, the jealous Brownie would force [apparently paranormally] the food to leave the spoon and return to the dish. The farmer finally noticed what was happening and rose in anger to hurl a poker from the hearth violently at the corner of the room where the invisible Brownie lurked, yelling for it to get out of his home. This worked for at least that dinner. It was not said whether the brownie ever returned to the farm.

Here is another from the same area: A "religious man" [minister?] was walking home late between MachrieWater and Tormore when he approached an area of ancient standing stones. There he was confronted by a bauchan, but of unusually large size. It was very menacing but the man stood his ground. The man knew of some faerie lore and so demanded that this oversized Bauchan assume his true worldly size and shape. The thing did, taking on the form of a dead person that the walker thought he recognized. He quizzed the "man" about a murder, which the thing said it knew all about but would not tell. The walker then said that he wanted to be shown a hidden treasure. The Bauchan agreed to that---just meet it the following evening in a separate place without the little protective items that he was carrying. Upon telling friends back home, the advice was Don't Go. He didn't.

There are many other tales. Some are obviously the "fairy story" type rather than the "entity encounter" type, but Arran at least fits the description of a place with a long tradition of both lore, belief, and experiences. And that brings us to Moyra Doorly.

Moyra Doorly is a very intelligent and talented woman. She has an adventurous turn of mind, yet a scholar's ability to study complex things. She explored various paths of meditation and spirituality, ultimately choosing Catholicism. Her unique approach to seeing the interactions between the mind and the environment led her to become an expert on the nature of "Sacred Space", such as one might find in a cathedral, or perhaps even a forest grove. She is a serious substantial person, and that is why I have some faith that her reported experiences on Arran were real ones. {She, by the way, did not locate the exact place whereabouts these experiences occurred to her and her friend Peter, and I do not blame her. The experiences, though ultimately frightening, do have a sense of the spiritual about them, and unleashing random thrill-seekers upon the place seems wrong.} To the accounts....

Ms. Doorly and her friend were on Arran apparently to "get away" into a more natural environment distanced from the "noises" of the modern world. They had, in fact, been practicing various meditation techniques and had acquired some patience and discipline in their application. These were not pursued in an attempt to bring about "faerie experiences", but, as it happened, the meditative state did just that, by surprise.

Moyra Doorly describes her meditation technique as "seeing without looking". it is a sort of defocussing upon the nearby "central" object and looking beyond it [like attempting to focus not on the thing itself but as if looking several feet into the background.] She and Peter had been practicing this sort of meditation for some time before any such elfin encounters came. And, as said, they were not intended for such.

The first instance came in the garden of their small house. A "soft silvery light" suddenly appeared and through that a procession of small figures walked towards her from the stream bank. It was led by a faun.

"The faun was small--about 3ft (90cm) tall-- and seemed pleased with himself. I saw short legs strutting with pride and heard tiny hooves clip-clopping on the paving stones. He had horns too, about 6in (15cm), and a wrinkled face. He could have come straight out of a book of fairy tales or myths".

The faun and his procession brushed past her and she panicked and ran into the house, relieved that reality still ruled there. Peter then was able to see them, too, and described the faun and the procession the same way. The group had stopped further down by the stream and seemed to be having an argument about something. The other little beings were present but only the faun could be seen clearly by our witnesses. And so experience #1 ended.

Other encounters began to follow, and, needless to say, were riveting in interest. Ms. Doorly and Peter learned the old ways of "encouraging" Faerie encounters, and began placing out little food offerings and making small round pebble "shrines" at streamside as welcome signs. Peter even played bagpipes [a questionable strategy to my ear, but traditional]. Ultimately a small "elf-boy" became a somewhat regular visitor.

"I remember standing in the sitting room while a small figure dressed in mottled greens and browns looked up at me with an expression of sinister mirth. If he had been a child, his height would have put him at around six years old, but he bore no resemblance to any child I have ever met. His face, which was unusually long and well defined, seemed the face of one who had lived a thousand years."

Things gradually turned darker. Moyra had an experience while walking along the stream with another sort of Elfinkind procession. These were tall and slender and with dull greyish hair. They wore striped green and brown clothing. They seemed to float rather than walk. Smaller chattering dancing imps accompanied them. She found herself walking with them in what seems a bit of a trance-like state.

"We were soon inside a hall which looked as if it had been hewn out of rock. [uh oh....]. There was a long table where preparations for a meal had been made. Again the imps tried to make me change my clothes but I refused. The stripes stood very still, as if in anticipation. Perhaps they were waiting to see if I would sit at their table, which I couldn't bring myself to do. Then I heard the words: 'You are the first person to come this way for 200 years. Come be with us'."

That seemed to shake her out of her fuzziness and she turned away. Suddenly the hall was gone leaving her beside the stream. She later described the atmosphere around these "stripies" as a "languorous, dreamy air". Upon returning to the house, she discovered that Peter too had encountered these beings and also had been asked to stay with them. This shook the two of them thoroughly enough that despite the excitement of these glimpses into another reality, they decided to no longer encourage contact, and took down the stream pebble shrines.

For the remainder of their stay, it was still difficult not to find oneself wishing for another encounter when walking in the woods. One day another one happened. Moyra heard singing in the forest. She also had seen balls-of-light which local people called the Faerie Lights". [Small 4-6" diameter BOLs]. But these had no close encounters. That autumn however brought an unpleasant encounter with what might be referred to as walking small trees composed of bare withered looking limbs. These entities crowded about and transmitted the opinion that she didn't belong there and should leave.

Her last encounters were vaguer. Presences in the forests mists, almost focusable but not so. They were in part like will-o-the-wisp in the sense of inducing some confusion, and part poltergeist in creating cold spots in the air. They were not directly hostile, but not welcoming either. Thus ended, as winter set in, these astonishing experiences. Did they happen?

The experiences of Moyra Doorly and Peter may well have happened just as they have been reported. From a UFO case perspective, we have a multiple witnessed set of encounters, by credible intelligent persons, somewhat at least naive to the experience actually had. We have a setting within which such tales [in a general sense] have a long history. The stories as told are very UFO-encounter-like in that the witnesses simply tell their astounding reports without any embroidery, such as messages of revelation, enhancement of oneself, major theoretical claims beyond the narrative, etc. Despite the high strangeness of the accounts, they go no further. Once the action is told, it simply stops. This is one mark of a "good" UFO report typically.

Moyra Doorly may have given us a very rare modern account of the continuing existence and experience-ability of the Faerie Reality. Her entities are very "brownie" and "bauchan" to me, just as they should be for the Arran environment. The faun, or Pan, is very "bogan" [in other terms for the bauchans]. These creatures, though trending a bit more to the negative, are not at all always so. Sometimes they are merely mischievous just as their cousins the Leprechauns are said to be. Don't mess with them, and if you don't you probably need not fear. Stripies are bit like the depressive Bleaters: tall, wan, and langourous. The "trees" are manifestations, in my guess, of the great variety of nature appearances that the bauchans can assume. This could even include the Loch monsters or Merfolk or ABSMs. All this last is, of course, BS.

If I were younger, I admit that I would be tempted to go. Give it a try. See what one could see. At a minimum one would have a spiritually-cleansing time with Nature. Where to try?? The map above marks many places on Arran of interest. Some are Megaliths [marked with Ms], and some are sites of Faerie encounters or legends. Some are "just" deep nature sites, which might be richest of all.

One could take a walk up Catacol Glen. [above]. Even if you saw no Elfinkind you'd feel you were in Faeryland anyway in a place like this.

You could continue to your right on to Loch Tanna, a remote lake in the mountains with a megalithic cairn in the approach. Prime real estate for Faeries.

Further to the south is Loch Iorsa, where a farm maiden was accosted by a tall woman who looked worn and tired and asked for shelter. The maiden was afraid but let her come in. Once asleep, the maiden noticed that the woman had goatish feet. Hastily getting herself together, she tried to surreptitiously leave but was only partly successful in doing so. The woman chased her all the way to a family farmhouse where the presence of the others protected her. Truly an unruly bauchanish behavior.

If I had to choose in this general area of Arran, however, I might take a chance on going to the left down the Catacol Glen. I have no Faerie stories for there. But in those deeper isolated areas along the Catacol and Diomhan exist the two endangered species of trees [Whitebeams] native to the island. Rare colonies of Ptarmigans also live there. Here is an area where Old Nature is holding out in a last stand. Maybe it would see an old environmentalist college teacher as a sympathetic soul, and we, and her "associates", could have a few talks.

Alas, "old environmentalist" is correct, and I will leave it up to you younger folks.

But there is really one place on Arran that I'd rather try: the forested area north and west of Lamlash. All my prejudices seem operating there.

To begin with, there is a place called "Fairy Glen". One suspects that it has the name for a reason. [The picture at the left is of the tourist walking trail there].

There are megalithic sites scattered throughout the locale. There are chambered cairns and a fine old remnant of a stone circle. [See Lamlash Stone Circle below].

My readings about the Faerie World, from the old peoples' perspective, say that these megalithic remnants represent two relevant things: they are ritual sites [perhaps just utilized by druids who did not themselves construct them originally] of a very spiritual nature-oriented early belief system, and these old monuments have been associated with faerie haunts everywhere in the Celtic world. Lamlash Circle is, therefore, for me a signpost.

But also: [From the Book of Arran] " Three men were returning home in a cart, when, at the top of the hill on the road between Lamlash and Brodick [The location of Lamlash Circle], the horse stood still and snorted, and showed signs of fear, and as though it saw something it did not want to pass. After much urging on the part of the driver, the horse made a bolt forward past a certain spot. The men looked back to see what had frightened the animal, and saw a number of small figures, twelve to eighteen inches in height, on the road behind them. The fairies [apparently not happy with the intrusion] did them no harm beyond taking the door off the cart. This occurred in the last fifty years [sometime in the 1870-1890 era], and the relater heard it from one of the men who had been in the cart".

Well, that is a close enough hint for me. A little hanging out time around the Lamlash Circle would do me good anyway. Then maybe back into the less touristed western woods, or southwest a bit to Benlister Glen and its magic little waterfall, and then ... we would see.

DATA-NET: Addendum.

2011-10-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

A couple of other things that I blew in my coverage in the last blog. One of them is quite interesting [to me at least].

There was mention of the continuance of New Zealand landing cases in the 1970 DATA-NET case reports. In a coincidence, I stumbled across a set of images of the Ngatea trace, which we mentioned here a few posts back. It was in a rather rare Australian UFO newsletter. So I thought I'd let you see that for what it's worth [above].

There was also a lengthy presentation of VJ Ballester-Olmos and Jacques Vallee's study of Spanish landing cases. Really surprised me to see such a thing in DATA-NET. The Ballester-Olmos group study was comprised of 100 cases in the Iberian peninsula up until 1970. Five of those cases were at the end of the study from 1970. My favorite among the 1970s was from Cazalla de la Sierra (Sevilla, Spain). In that case four witnesses saw an object which looked two-dimensional, [two meters high and one meter wide], like an illuminated "door" inserted into our space. Dogs were disturbed by the thing and one man almost decided to open fire on it. After watching it for a few minutes, the "door" just vanished.

Well, that was neat, but the best thing to come from the study was confirmation of Poher and Vallee's "Law of the Times". [Please look up the earlier blog post on this way back somewhere][try February 10, 2010, I think]. Graphing the cases according to when the encounters occurred, out came a peak at the 10-11pm area with a secondary peak at about 3am or some such era in the early am. Vallee went on to make a few assumptions about what this portended, and calculated a huge "close encounter" phenomenon happening [mainly unseen and unreported] peaking early in the am. My analysis differs from Vallee's and I see the curves as being two separate peaks [ET agendas?] as you can see on the older post.

Regardless of whether Jacques or I or Rumplestilskin is correct, publishing Ballester's study inspired the DATA-NET crew to analyze the DATA-NET reports in bulk using all the cases which had a definite time of day. Their curve for 138 cases is shown below. Again the surprising double-peaked curve arose, hitting the "just before midnight" peak on the nose, and being closer to dawn on the secondary peak. Because DATA-NET did not include ONLY close encounters like the Poher/Vallee/Ballester studies did, this could cause some drift. But still I see the trend here again as remarkable. The "Law of the Times" might be one of the biggest proofs of the reality of the UFO phenomenon that we have. And the fact that the main graphs are for close encounters, we see that the issue of mistaking ordinary things for anomalistic ones is basically a non-issue.

Three cheers for DATA-NET and The Law of the Times. Having seen a UFO myself I didn't really need it, but it's nice to see anyway. {And that Portal by the side of the road wasn't bad either}.

DATA-NET & Others: 1970 was a very bad UFO year ... or WAS it??

2011-10-26T11:17:00.000-07:00

As I've been trudging through DATA-NET, it has been dawning on me that I am in one of the sparsest years in the UFO history annals. The era just post-Colorado is infamous for being "low-grade ore", despite having a lot of investigator interest [with MUFON just starting and Hynek rounding up his Invisible College.] So.... how bad really was this year??

Glancing at my list of cases in my files back home in Michigan, yes, the numbers do seem to be down, though not catastrophically so. Looking at the number of cases that came to John Timmerman that I used for the Grass Roots UFOs book... yep, same thing. Less numbers. Were the cases themselves of lower quality??

I don't think that you could say that. The illustration above is of the famous Haderslev, Denmark policeman encounter. [ the Maarup case]. This was one of the first cases in which the UFO community was struck by the "impossible" telescopic light [extendible/retractible] emission of some of these things. "Solid Light" some named it. Sort of the macroscopic predecessor of Darth Vader's light saber. DATA-NET had several entries about this, including a second encounter by Maarup in which he got a series of [as usual, not very helpful] pictures of another object up the road [different night]. A poor-quality filmstrip of those shots is below left.

As I wandered through DATA-NETs year, I came across five instances of what the witnesses thought was "instant vanishment". Unfortunately, these represented lighted objects at night which just seemed to turn off, which therefore might be exactly what they did, but the witnesses seemed to think that whatever it was just wasn't there any longer. These sudden disappearances took place in Lemoore, CA; Walthamstow, UK; District Huambo, Angola; Murray Hills, Ontario; and New Milton, UK. Another case from Renmark, South Australia, probably was just a fancied-up flare.

There were several other cases of very peculiar light. Arles, France emitted "spirals" of light [patently abnormal for what should be a radiant phenomenon]. Knoxville, TN emitted "streamers" of light, and several independent witnesses gave wildly different descriptions of the object. Chicoutimi, Quebec displayed a hovering machine with four "arms" [landing pods??] in the middle of which extended a telescopic light beam. These games with Light are features which immediately remove the incidents from terrestrial high-technology and put them far up on the strangeness scale.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Several "odd" things were reported further as the DATA-NET survey went on. One was the Pell City, AL cylinders case. [The cylinder on the left isn't meant to illustrate it, but it's an entertaining artwork].

A husband and wife were driving between Pell City and Leeds when they saw a cylinder with flattened ends in the sky. It was a solid-looking white color. It moved east to west when another one appeared in the west moving towards it. That one altered its course to approach the former head-on. When they "collided" [actually it was just like a "touch"], the cylinder coming from the west just disappeared, leaving the first cylinder continuing on it's westward journey. This is one of those UFO cases where one just throws up ones hands and moves on.

A few more, not quite so strange: Kristiansand, Norway--- A chauffeur was driving when he became dazzled by a blinding light and stopped his car. Getting out, he saw a ball of fire coming at him about thirty feet from the ground. It stopped directly in front of his car. [well, I take it back; this one IS strange]. Suddenly he was hit by some projection of force and knocked down. Shortly he heard the crash of glass, his windowshield. He got up in time to see the fireball speeding away. He said that it was 60' in diameter. As he described the thing, it was clear that he was discussing a DISK of fire about 9-10 feet thick diminishing to a thin edge. It even had a tower on top and an opening in the bottom.

Cholla Bay, Mexico--- The witness was strolling on the beach when a light was seen coming across towards him. The light turned out to be a "saucer". No noise. Dead calm night and water. The thing hovered about 200-300 feet up. It then switched on a broad lightbeam which it could control to become pencil sharp at the point where it touched the surface. Then for no seeable reason a cloud formed around the craft. The beam shut off and another shot upwards from the top. It moved away slowly, being seen by a fisherman as it did so. Other green lights gave it an eerie glow as it left.

Compton, South Australia--- Witnesses saw a brightly lit object four nights in a row. On one evening the thing was surrounded by red rays all about as it hovered near the ground. On another night the thing seemed actually to land. In the night between, a neighbor of the original witness attempted to phone out to another neighbor [presumably to tell them to come out and watch]. Just as the last number would be dialed [several times], the light would mischievously go out.

Vader, WA--- mysterious big footprints. Uh oh..... On both sides of a weekend in December, a family had weird experiences. On the Friday there were large [15"] footprints through the snow all over. Gravel was pushed down by the weight. On the following Monday, they and a neighbor saw a domed disk in the sky. Later in the week the lady and her kids were spooked by a dark shape in their bedrooms and fled the house with the children. On returning the rooms looked rifled but nothing was stolen. ?What to make of any of that?

Toiyabe National Forest, CA--- One of the lead persons in the DATA-NET HQ was on a trip camping and talked with a forest ranger at his look-out station in the forest. This fellow was on record as saying that he had seen a very large cigar-shaped object discharging smaller disks. Other rangers had called in confirming this. When asked by the DATA-NET guy later, the ranger completely backed off, saying that he couldn't say anything about it. Pressed further, he seemed about to say something several times, but ended up with "I could lose my job". However, he himself pressed the UFOlogist for information about cases, especially landings. The DATA-NET guy asked him if he had seen occupants. He hesitated and said "we are under strict orders to say nothing". Shortly a voice of a buddy in another room interrupted with: "Yes, you have said too much. You always talk too much anyway". Finally, in a last private moment he said: "I know damn well they are real".

This brought back memories of the forest rangers in the Washington State forests [Yakima]. They when they were willing to talk, had countless high strangeness tales to tell. Do the UFOs spend special interests in the deep woods? If so, Why??

I decided to look at some of the other cases in 1970 as well. My own files are a bit slight of numbers there but still contain >50 cases of which I find >30 pretty interesting. One of the most outstanding, which has been mentioned in this blog earlier, and which was also mentioned briefly in DATA-NET, is the Doreen Kendall [pictured at left; the case is pictured above] encounter from Cowichan, British Columbia. This is an outstanding CE3 incident wherein a nurse at a hospital saw a domed disk with a transparent bubble and entities inside "pause and display" itself outside the facility window. This pause-for-effect business reminds me of the Moreland incident in Blenheim, NZ with approximately the same appearing craft. The fact that other staff members saw the craft as it moved away makes this a powerful and puzzling CE3; maybe one of the best.

Other 1970 cases which one might want to look up are Namdalen, Norway [with a strong OZ effect], Itataia, Brazil [a CE2electromagnetic and physiological case], Jabrielles-les-Bordes, France [a very close encounter CE2physiological/paralysis case], Wild-&-Wooly Imjarvi, Finland [skiers confronted by craft, extremely strange light phenomena, and weird entity], Helleland, Norway [with a close fly-over and partial car-lift], the Saladare, Ethiopia Marauding fireball, which we looked at not long ago here, and a handful of Spanish landings.

A case worth singling out, since we haven't before, was the Lake Anten, Sweden incident.

The Lake Anten incident is probably one of the better CE2trace cases.What we have here is a case of multiple independent witnesses seeing a maneuvering red globe of light [forward and back horizontally, up and down vertically], which seemed to drop low towards the ground as well. None of these witnesses were very close to the thing, but there were 13 of them in three different viewing angles.

The morning following the sighting several people went over to the area where the object seemed to come close to the ground, and discovered a ground trace looking like three burnt circular depressions in an equilateral triangle about ?* inches on a side. The picture above is of the area. The diagram that I saw seems screwed up. {?*}Numbers of diameters of the marks [40cm] and the side of triangle measurements don't jibe. I'm going to crudely eyeball the side dimension at about ten feet.

The investigators were on site pretty quickly and they did a good Scandinavian-quality report. They took soil samples and gave them over to an institution for nuclear chemistry to test. The test graph is on the left. The soil from the ground marks showed a weak but definite gamma radiation peak at 660kev [the graph here reads "600kev", but the UFOlogist who typed in the number seems to have blown that, as the words in the report say 660.] The nuclear tester hypothesized that this was from the decay of a Barium isotope, which was formed from a Cerium-137 unstable isotope. No chemical analysis of elements [looking for Cerium] was stated though that would have been a good thing to do. Whatever...the radiation signal here is a rare thing in UFOlogy, and makes the hoax concept a less viable solution to the case.

Just for the fun of it, I decided to look for 1970 cases in the Timmerman files from Grass-Roots UFOs. Again 1970 was down in numbers and I used very few of those 27 {?} cases in the book. The reason for the "?" is that some cases were definitely stated to be 1970, and some stated things like "1970 or 1971". In my counts of cases by year, I gave all such things "1/2" a case credit. Anyway, there was an encounter from Sterling, IL where a young boy was out playing and a small rocket about as big as he was came slowly cruising by. Naturally fascinated, he grabbed on to it trying to hold it back and wrestle it to the ground. The rocket was impervious to his efforts and continued its very slow pace [him hanging on valiantly] until he realized that he was doing no good, and he released his hands.

In Grand Island, NE area a husband and wife were driving on a road with a little elevation alongside a valley. Out in the dark valley they could see car tail-lights going across on some other road. But there was also a "shouldn't-be-there" curtain of reddish light that hung down across the valley towards which the automobile tail-lights were heading. Mystified, the couple watched the lights drive right into the Red Veil, but not come out the other side.

In Baltic, SD a woman was awakened at about two am by a whirring sound outside her window. She courageously got her dog and went out to survey the grounds. Then, from an unseeable source somewhere above her, came strange uninterpretable sounds, but like someone talking to her. This really terrified her and she brazened it out, but was walking extra fast back to her front door and inside the house. Then another voice erupted which she didn't believe was directed at her but at the first voice. "Just giving that one guy heck, probably for scaring me out of there".

Furnace Creek, CA --- the case I call "Don't make the Ball mad!"

Two young men in their twenties were walking back to the small house they roomed in while working on the staff of a desert hotel. Their shift had ended at 2:30am. They saw a cactus-like shape off the left side of the road, where nothing should have been. Then there was a green flash without sound. Then it flashed again. Then once more.

This was getting freaky. A red ball of light appeared fifteen feet behind them. It floated about at head height and was the size of a beachball. They ran.

The BALL followed. One man fell, scraped his knee, scrambled up and followed the other into their house where they slammed the door.

The BALL stopped at the boundary of their yard and waited. It pulsed. When it grew large it would be transparent and faint. When it shrank it would get to the size of a grapefruit and blaze so brightly that it lit up the mountainside behind it. This red light was so strong that it made the dust particles in the air inside their house sparkle, adding a fairy-like eeriness to the experience.

Now inside and with a closed door, macho behavior began to return. One guy said: "why don't you go out and try to communicate with them?" The other guy replied:" why don't YOU? You're bigger than me." What was going on in the second guy's mind was that the Thing was getting impatient with them staying inside.

After four minutes of waiting, the BALL backed away. Across the road, it began creating a vortex at the base of the hill.

"The rocks started rising in the air...They'd shake from side to side. There were hundreds of them, the largest being the size of melons. They started going around in a circle, like it had complete control over them. Then the thing went way up in the air and it looked kind of like a tornado and it was all red. The only noise that you could hear was this clickety clack clickety clack when the rocks hit together."

Then the light went out and everything crashed down the mountainside and onto the road. The BALL blinked back on again at the top of the mountain and meandered away.

One of the men spent a sleepless night staring out from the bedcovers. The other spent it staring out the window. The next day both of them quit their jobs and got out of there. Hard to criticize that particular reason for unemployment.

So, was 1970 a bad UFO year? Not, I guess, if you were listening in to the whole world, and not just the USA scene.

But if you were so stupid as to make the BALL mad, it could have been a VERY bad year.

Did PLATO Speak to EARTH in the 19th Century??

2011-10-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

Unless we believe that some trance control medium channeled the Plato above, I don't think THAT Plato attempted to communicate, but maybe the Plato in the picture below did. Yeh, the odds are pretty low, but let's see what happened anyway.

This will be another somewhat disorganized post as it's too complicated for any clear understanding by me. But it's interesting enough to give it a try.

I bumped into an old 19th century article about Transient Lunar Phenomena [TLP] in the lunar crater Plato by accident, and that started a miniature look-see. The story has a little useful history.

Sometime back in the mid-to-late 1700s, a German amateur astronomer [but a good one] named Johannus Schroter began an almost obsessive attempt to map the surface features of the Moon. He did a pretty good job considering the equipment of the time and his work inspired many others to get on the bandwagon. [Schroter is on the left].

While he was at his mapping, he began to notice peculiarities which occasionally showed on the surface, most often around the crater Aristarchus. Due to this, Schroter could legitimately be called the Father of TLP studies. Although Aristarchus dominated the TLP observations, and has continued to do so till this day, there were a few observations of anomalies in or around Plato listed in his work. These were mainly in the year 1788.

But it was a different sort of an inspiration which would instigate the "Platonic Mystery" which we'll talk about later. This was the apparent disappearance of an entire crater [Linne]. A key character influenced by that story was the famous American astronomer, William Pickering [shown below], of the Lowe Observatory of Echo Mountain, CA. The apparent disappearance of an entire crater off Schroter's and subsequent lunar mappers' charts boggled much of the astronomical world at the time and put energy into the process of close-mapping the Moon. Pickering was fascinated by the alleged changes and began to note differing "glows" or amounts of lunar albedo surrounding what was left of Linne, and then of other craters, and came to a hypothesis that the Moon had primitive life forms which grew and "migrated" seasonally. These ideas by Pickering were in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Pickering did not contribute much to the Plato mystery until about then. In 1904 he noted that a bright hazy object was seen on the floor of Plato after ten days of observations showing nothing unusual. Then three days later the bright spot was replaced by a black elliptical shadow. Simultaneously, a large white area appeared to the NNE. Pickering stated that this confirms beliefs that the crater shows "conspicuous changes". [as an aside, he also saw a very bright "object"/light on Mars in 1894].

Even though the stimulus for this posting was due to events in the 1870s etc, I put in these later notes to show that interest in changes in Plato continued long thereafter.

Another prominent example of that is the famous "Hook" of Plato seen in the mid-20th century by major British lunar astronomers HP Wilkins and Patrick Moore. This feature, which was rarely seeable in the shadow-forms of presumably the Plato ridge mountains, created a long mystery hunt reaching almost till today. In this case it may be that a solution involves a combination of just the right Sun angle and a coincident matching up of the extended shadow with at curved rifted "valley" inside the wall.

I'm not sure if these two renditions are both Moore's or if they are one of each, but the existence of peculiar linear streaks on them puzzles me. What are they meant to represent??

So....back to the mid-1800s. What happened then to get all this roiling?? Our main story character is William Radcliffe Birt [sorry, I couldn't find a picture]. Birt as a young man worked for the famous astronomer John Herschel and got thoroughly fired up with observational astronomy. When he was 55 years old [1859] he became obsessed with mapping the Moon. I don't know why. In two years he was presenting his first manuscript to the Royal Astronomical Society. It's subject: mapping the crater Plato. A description of the day might say: " There are many other bright spots and streaks on the floor of Plato; but the streaks seem to resemble those which extend from some of the principle craters, ... and brighter patches appear to be merely enlarged portions of these streaks...." [1863, from a summary by a colleague].

Birt and others hoped for some support from the British Association for the Advancement of Science and received a small stipend in concert with setting up a "Lunar Committee" in 1864. This allowed him to engage in continued regular observation and mapping. But the BAAS got tired of this and cut off funds. This was in spite of what came to be known as the "Linne Affair", which should have excited anybody.

The Linne Affair struck astronomy in 1867. It happened due to the fact that early Lunar mappings by people like Schroter and Johann T Madler had shown the crater Linne to be one of the most conspicuous craters on the plains, but sometime in 1866, the director of the Athens Observatory, Julius Schmidt, discovered to his amazement that it had simply disappeared. The crater seemed to be replaced by a shallow white patch. [NASAs modern photography of the site seems to indicate that Linne is a very shallow crater and not at all like it was described by Madler et al]. {Madler is to the left; Schmidt is to the right]. Later astronomers decided that the only solution to this was that all the early observers were mistaken, and that nothing could have happened.

Nevertheless, lunar observers at the time were usually quite sure that significant changes on the Moon were possible and it was in that spirit that Birt and associates like the Reverend William Dawes [to the left] pursued the changes on the Plato floor. Stupidly the BAAS withdrew their support just as Birt completed an extensive study of mysterious changing light phenomena in Plato. These observations came out into the public in 1872.

Birt found now-you-see-them-now-you-don't spots, streaks and stated that the floor of Plato darkens during the Lunar day. This latter phenomenon could well be an illusion due not to Plato's darkening, but rather to the surrounding plain lightening up faster [due to "soil" constituents/reflectivity] as they received the "daytime" Sun. But the spots and streaks are not so easily solved and people still argue it out today.

Birt and his colleagues following [he had to quit in 1877 due to bad health] produced maps and data tables demonstrating their beliefs in a changeable Plato. The map below is indicative of their work, and just a glance shows not only craters within the big crater, but also light spots, patches, and streaks, very prominently. These people were obviously convinced of a great deal of action down below.

Birt's writings for the April, May, June period of 1870 are as spectacular as any. In these he defends the quality of the observations by remarking that most of the phenomena were multiply witnessed, often by four different observers. He stated for instance that during the period in question ten spots within Plato grew in illumination while others nearby DID NOT. The same thing was found elsewhere in Plato, at a different time era, but in reverse [i.e. spots or streaks dimming while others nearby did not]. These simultaneous and different brightenings or dimmings convinced Birt that this could not possibly have anything to do with terrestrial atmosphere conditions, and the nearby locations of some of the differently acting spot areas showed that this was not due to some simple Sun-angle illusion. In fact, what Birt did was present a picture of Plato in 1869-1870 gradually showing differing brightening and dimming light areas just as in some slow irregular pulsing of different floor areas. Birt himself may have imagined something "patterned" going on, as he too thought that crater floors might have some changeable vegetation of some kind.

As you see in 1877 the Cornhill Magazine published an article entitled "Is the Moon Dead?". It was quite smart, and began with a strong general education take on the science and best guesses about Lunar formation. Near its end it mentions Madler and Schmidt's Linne disappearance as proof that the Moon is "alive" in at least a geological sense. The darkening of Plato's floor was rejected as illusion, and with that the idea of lunar vegetation. It leaves the reader with the idea: changeable floors, yes; life, no.

None of that deterred Birt's colleagues and followers from their observations. By 1879-1882, they felt that they had a whole datapile of new lightenings and dimmings of spots and streaks. Reading closely, you also hear of what sounds like a "cloudy" or hazy mist which occasionally obscures the floor.

Modern astronomers, of course, would like to turn all this into nonsense. They admit that even with NASA lunar fly-bys the great dark basin of Plato can look pretty mysterious [I particularly like the photo, made by an amateur, but obviously a terrific one, which you see on the left.] Occasionally you still get articles from astro-professionals attempting to beat up on the old guys' observations. I recently read one from the British Astronomical Association attempting to explain everything by shadow elongations [spots, streaks, false lightenings, whatever]. They never even addressed the original observations of Birt in 1870 and AS Williams et al a decade later.

What we are supposed to take away from all this is: of course nothing odd of any sort can be going on in Plato. The Moon is dead, in every sense: Get it? There aren't any TLPs of any real puzzlement. Get real. What are you, some uneducated morons??

In 2009, a respected amateur astronomer witnessed a strange unaccountable "ashen glow" blanketing the entire Plato floor.

Uh oh....

Maybe something is still mysterious about the Moon afterall.

And it's almost Halloween.

THE SKY IS FALLING: Return of the Blob.

2011-10-24T05:03:00.000-07:00

My friend-in-anomalies Frank Reid sent me this notice today. "The Real Life Blob: Is mysterious translucent jelly found in Cumbrian Fells from outer space?". Hah!! We've been THERE before on the blog!.

Here's one of the pictures of Scottish blobs lying at their leisure. Everyone is puzzled. The theories have been spread around from "meteors" [pretty weird meteors to get through the atmosphere without damage to their nearly insubstantial content --- they seem to be almost entirely water --- I guess that they'd have to slowly float down without anyone ever seeing such a thing], to the remains of eaten frogs [despite no parts of frogs found] to something associated with deer rutting season [despite being a completely information-less comment] to something associated with algae [despite a scientist saying that he could find essentially no algae other than minor contaminant in a similar batch which was discovered in 2009]. The article claimed that sporadic incidents of this stuff could be traced back as far as the 14th century. Like our famous "angelhair", it is said to simply disappear completely in time.

This is the second picture of the blobs. They seem to be the only relaxed entities in the story. We looked at various forms of blobness way back in, I think, February of 2010. If the technology will allow me, I'm going to try to insert a few blob cases which were posted then.

A). 1955: Baltimore, MD--"a fuming spherical mass drifted over Baltimore and landed in the city". Thus began a note to Wright-Patterson AFB and Project Blue Book. Many people congregated about it including the police. People tried to puncture it, but it healed up. One guy tried to squash it with a tire, but couldn't damage it. Police cordoned off the area, and after several hours, the thing degenerated and left behind a yellowish residue. Analyzed at the morgue, the residue contained Metallic oxides and animal tissue. Blue Book was told that the answer was "a detergent bubble filled with exhaust gasses from a diesel locomotive in a railway yard." !! [this is one of the goofiest "explanations" in my files of an "answer" not meeting the reported characteristics of the event]. But, there you are.---

B). 1950: Philadelphia, PA--Four policemen saw an "airborne object" which sailed above the city before landing in an urban field. The thing was six feet in diameter and glowed purplish and misty. One of the policemen tried to pick it up, but some of it adhered to his hands, dissipated, and left a sticky residue. The officers watched for 30 minutes while the blob slowly disappeared. Lest one believe that the story was just made up, the policemen reported the event to the FBI and the relevant document still exists. At least no one tried to explain this one as containing train engine exhausts.----------------------------------------------------------

C). 1979: Frisco, TX--A lady woke up one morning and walked outside. There on her lawn were three purple blobs. They were small, about breadloaf sized. As she watched, one of them "just faded away". The other two persisted. They "looked like smooth whipped cream, purple... I stuck this stick into the object. It went in easily, very easily. I punctured it. On the inside it was the same thing--just like real whipped cream, and it looked like it was melting". When the police arrived, an officer tried to pick one up. He said that it was "pretty warm". He put the blobs into boxes and they were sent to a the local Natural Science Museum. The curator said that the blobs were emitting an acidic liquid and contained uranium [!!] and a strange pattern of specks of lead. These weirdos were then sent on to NASA in Dallas and placed in freezers to preserve them. The NASA spokesperson said: "It's kind of like plum-pudding. It has round solid chunks in it that remain after the goo goes away. We don't know what it is." Uhhhhhh...what?! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

D). 1966: near Ellicotteville, NY--The NICAP subcommittee field investigators said at the beginning of their report: "[This] is a report, which for the first time we have encountered, dealing with something seemingly more fantastic and even more out of science fiction". Uh Oh. [the case refers to my drawing that accompanies this section]. Two buddies were riding motorcycles along route 219 in NY. One several yards ahead of the other. The lead cyclist saw an object coming on an intersecting course from the right about 10 feet off the ground. He judged that it would pass between the two of them. The thing was a watermelon-sized oval glob, dull green in color. Turning he watched the thing pass just in front of his friend, swerve into him, and attach itself to him !! Wrapping itself around his lower leg, the friend tried to kick the thing off, losing his shoe in the process. The glob became more interested in the shoe, and left to go after it. It seemed to briefly inspect the shoe from above it, rise in the air, and fly away over the hillside. The close-up description was: smooth surfaced and jelly-like in "feel". Translucent dull green. Oval in shape while in the air, but flexible in contact. May have made a soft whirring [dare I suggest "purring" ?] sound. Produced a large red mark on the person's leg with a white oval center, 4 to 6 inches in size. Around this were 5 or 6 [how can they not have a single count?] puncture marks. {maybe I should give them a break on that if the marks were really small and hard to see}. The victim of the "Attack Glob From Magonia" never became ill, and the red/white area went away in a day, leaving only the pin-pricks. Yep. Just another day in the life.--------------------------------------------------------

Both the first and second case were referred to in the new article. In fact, and I had no idea about this, the Philadelphia case was stated to be the inspiration for the Science Fiction film "The Blob". Well, our blobbish friends from Magonia got more famous than I knew.

Maybe someday soon we'll figure out the Scottish Highlands Blobs. But, re-reading the other cases, algae swells and deer ruttings floating down in Innercity Philadelphia don't seem to cut it. Could Science have failed to provide answers to everything?? Lord save us! Whoops. Not allowed to mention the Lord in Science.

THE SKY IS FALLING: a Walk on the Wild Side with DARPA and the Air Force, Postscript.

2011-10-13T04:21:00.000-07:00

As we saw over the last few posts, one of the things that people were trying to use to write off the Connecticut fall[s] of 1960 was the soviet satellite Sputnik IV. Well, it was still up there alive and well. However "what goes up must come down" [unless we're talking about anti-gravity], so Sputnik IV ultimately did too. Below is the SAO/Moonwatch article announcing proudly a surprising success witnessing the act.

So... good for them. When did that satellite come down? Ah, the night of September 4th-5th, 1962.

Wait... When did the Hartford fall happen? September 4th? Now just a cotton-pickin' minute!! YOU laughing at me again, Universe!!??

THE SKY IS FALLING: a Walk on the Wild Side with DARPA and the Air Force, Part Three.

2011-10-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

Let's try to wrap this up today, folks. It will not be a satisfying wrap-up for some pretty good reasons. Whereas in the two previous posts, we were on pretty solid documentable historic ground, today there will only be some of that, and the rest of the story will melt into mystery. But let's do what we can. I'll try to be clear as to when I'm guessing.

I think that it's useful to begin with a refresher on the main cast-of-characters. Our "star" is, of course, T. Townsend Brown, the eccentric inventor and gravity experimenter, whom we talked about a great deal yesterday.

Our supporting cast is led by Dr. Robert L. Brown, who is the real enigmatic person in this story. He was a legit astronomer at Southern Connecticut College, an accomplished satellite finder, and a member of the SAOs Moonwatch program.

Fred Whipple was the famous Harvard astronomer, meteorite expert, and Director of Moonwatch. Allen Hynek was his occasionally dunce-like second.

Robert Friend was the Major in charge of Wright-Patterson's Project Blue Book at the time.

Victor Cherbak was the head of the Air Force's secret project Harvest Moon/ Star Track for satellite tracking at the time. Dr. John T. Wasson was a physicist employed by the Air Force's Nuclear Studies Branch of its Atmospheric Circulation Lab.

Thumbnail refresher on the event: September 4, 1960 something is seen coming down in Hartford, CT. Some other witness hears it and goes out to find some object disintegrating and burning the lower part of a shed. Fire is extinguished, and pieces are collected, mainly on the criterion of being still hot. Police are called in, they bring Professor Brown, he says "not a meteorite" and says artificial. Reporter publishes story nationally via AP.

CIA may have gotten wind of this early. They have newsclipping on incident. Who knows what they are doing or thinking about it, but within the month they call the Director of the Smithsonian Institution and request that Carl W. Tillinghast, Director of the SAO, write up the entire incident and send the write-up to the CIA, attention: William Sturbitz [I believe the Smithsonian has misspelled his name, it is Sturbitts, and he is pictured above]. The CIAs interest in this is never revealed.

Meanwhile the Air Force Project Blue Book has gotten the news and views this as UFO in nature, and sends Dr. Wasson to the SAO to get the material. He is shocked to find that someone named T Townsend Brown has shown credentials allowing him to collect all the stuff. Wasson finds ways to scrounge what he can, interviews, photographs the site, and goes back to do some tests. [Wasson on the left].

Those tests leave doubts as to what's going on, and Major Friend and Blue Book want more material to work with. [I'll do my best to describe the test results below]. Major Friend is somewhat boggled by the disposition of this material to Brown [as are we], and attempts in the following month [second week of October] to acquire more, and more information generally. He meets with T Townsend Brown and discusses the situation. Brown refuses to give him more material, claiming that it's all being used. [note how Brown can just blow off the Air Force on this, however politely]. Brown does promise to send him complete reports of his investigations and to keep in close coordination with the Air Force. This document is cc'd to four people: Fred Whipple [SAO], Professor Robert Brown, Lt Colonel Gene DeGiacomo [USAF Cambridge Research Labs] [presumably the person that he is "coordinating" with], and Commander R.P.Luker.

A second letter is from TT Brown to Whipple. It is apparently a butt-covering letter, more for Friend's consumption than Whipple's. In it he reminds Whipple that Whipple himself said that the material was not meteoritic and "of no further interest" to Moonwatch. He reminded that Whipple that he personally delivered some samples to Cambridge Research Center at Bedford [this is Project Star Track]. He cc'd the letter to Friend and Commander Luker.

Then there is an exchange between Robert Brown and TTBrown. It contains eye-openers about the materials, which will be gone into later. The cc's there are Friend, Cherbak [Star Track], DeGiacomo [Presumably Star Track --- DeGiacomo was a Cambridge Labs guy who had some interests later in the X-15 project], and R.P. Luker. All of this frustrated Friend as he was politely stonewalled.

Friend is forced to go to Washington DC in December to combine a trip to attempt to foil one of Donald Keyhoe's strategies of affecting congress by using the siegegun UFO case of Red Bluff, CA by meeting with the "congress-manipulation" Pentagon team, led by Lawrence Tacker, and other visits having to do with this Hartford Fall. {Bob Friend and his Blue Book team are pictured below. Hynek isn't there; probably at Moonwatch. Bob is standing in the middle}.

But what in the heck, still, was going on?? OK, here comes what the unkind might call BS, but maybe we can tolerate as speculation. The guy above is Commander Robert P. Luker, in a picture taken as a young officer of a submarine between the wars. I have no idea of his career trajectory, but at the time of our incident he was in the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Pentagon. ARPA/DARPA was our deep black projects creation and filled with military/CIA double operatives. Doubtless Luker was Navy/CIA too. Somehow, TT Brown had to know Luker. ARPA's big project was Defender. Part of Defender was theory and possible application of anti-gravity propulsion as we talked yesterday. Brown himself was a Navy Lt. Commander. These points-on-a-line are not difficult for me to imagine connected. Having just received patent approval for his system, I am going to speculate that Brown is well on the radar and on talking terms with ARPA personnel interested in Defender.

I don't feel badly about that one. Next? It bothers me. The news comes out in the papers of the Hartford fall. TT Brown is IMMEDIATELY on it. How? Well, he must read it and instantly go to Luker to get permission to go to SAO and take the material; and Luker gives him the muscle [insisting that TT Brown cooperate also with Star Track]. Well, OK, as to that bit. But two things: WHY does Brown think that this stuff is important from reading the newspaper? And how does he convince Luker that it may tell us something about anti-gravity? THIS is profoundly strange to me.

Has TT Brown gotten other information prior to going to Luker? Has someone told him that the materials have odd properties, or at least that they are likely from a spacecraft? No real answer but I'll take a swing at this later. It was only during his December trip that Friend was told by Luker that Luker was interested in the fall because it might be part of Sputnik IV [a BS statement] and, oh by the way, one of the samples seems to be losing mass for no apparent reason. Well....OK...it would be nice to get the tests. But we don't get them, or at least Blue Book doesn't.

Well, let's see what Wasson's and Wright-Patterson's tests say at least. Whether Wasson himself did any actual tests on the material he was able to acquire isn't clear. It seems likely that he did not. He did however report on the details of the fall, including the disintegrating mass burning with a violent [coned] green flame. He described the sorts of materials found [see the panels above and below] and how they were collected. Presumably he sent this stuff on to Wright-Patterson where it was lab-tested by WADD [Wright Air Development Division]. They MAY have done some preliminary tests which we don't have, and may have complained about the quantity of material, sending Friend off on his beggar's journey. Somehow WADD finally got around to some serious tests in April/May 1961 and it is those results we have in Blue Book.

What did they say? The analysts categorized the "collection" as Stones/Slag/Carbonaceous/ and Aluminum. You can see why the meteor idea was dumped quickly. The analyst appears to me to have worked on what interested him. He wasn't interested in what he called "stones" or "slag" so he didn't test them. As we have had numerous "slag" falls in the UFO literature we'll give him an "F" for that.

His analysis of the "coal" and "coke" like samples was uninspired. He noted that one coal-like sample contained Barium in amounts up to ten times or more higher than the background samples taken. He makes no intelligent comments on anything he measures here.

His analysis of the pieces of aluminum isn't much better. Aluminum immediately gives the lie to any "natural" explanation and points directly at the "manufactured". After flailing amount with more lack of clear speaking, he says that the Aluminum samples are also extremely high in Barium particularly on their surface layers. He makes a guess that the samples are 50% Aluminum and 15% Barium.

He then scribbles some pencil notes about radioactivity. There was absolutely no gamma radiation activity. However there was a significantly high beta [electrons] radiation emission. He makes a guess about isotopic presence to explain this.

This analysis inspired Blue Book to evaluate the case as "furnace slag", despite the fact that almost nothing about the case description nor the labwork would allow that. Doubtless, Blue Book was happy to stop thinking about it.

But we can't stop thinking yet. This whole business still stinks. What was going on with TT Brown? Maybe [red-alert: full scale BS ahead] it is the other Brown [above] we should be looking at.

Dr. Robert L. Brown was a closet wonderer about spacecraft himself. When the Hartford fall occurred, RL Brown seems to have already concluded that this "stuff" was not only NOT meteoritic but also NOT an Earth-orbited satellite. It was a different sort of orbiting object, and artificial. How might this have an effect on TTB? Well, that's tough. But what if TTB upon reading the paper called RLB and talked to him? What if RLB said that he thought that this could be linked to a UFO? TTB now would be ready to roll. But how would this get Luker convinced?

Again red-alarm speculation. Brown believed that UFOs ran by having surfaces which were superchargeable with electricity. He thought that this anti-gravity effect would be maximized by exotic materials, perhaps exotic alloys. An off-center Patent Office scientist named Carl Frederick Krafft believed exactly that, and speculated about how such new alloys might be formed. He published some ideas on these matters including an essay on " Anti-Gravity and Saucer Propulsion" in 1956. [or thereabouts].

We don't have enough ammo for our gun here. But something about that fall made TTB think it had something to do with UFOs and possibly anti-gravity. Somehow he was able to use his reasoning to get Luker to authorize him to take the material and work on it. But, something else happened. Hartford was not the only fall that RLB received. He got another ball-shaped, flaking mass from Woodbridge, near New Haven, CT. RLB believed that this fall was from the same "craft" that produced the other one, just on different orbits. He believed he had just proved that an unknown orbiting object existed.

Maddeningly, he does not give the date of the Woodbridge fall. His language sounds as if the dates could have been close, but the social commentary about the witness makes one believe that it occurred after. This is too bad, because IF it had occurred earlier, RLB could have told TTB something that would CERTAINLY have created action in both TTB and Luker. This Woodbridge object seemed to be losing mass.

RLB had a colleague do some preliminary weighings and they noticed this at Southern Connecticut College. He and TTB talked, and RLB sent the sample to TTB. TTB then began his own measurements, finding the same diminishing mass. RLB speculated about some kind of oscillating mechanism, but TTB said that their measurements did not indicate this, but rather a simple downward trend. He then unloaded a last mind-blowing salvo: other materials in close contact with this object "took on" the characteristics of this mass-losing anti-gravity effect. !!!

So, you want more, do you?? Too bad, that's all there is. Could there be missing reports in DARPA files about this?? Come on!! The government would never hold back on us. The thing is, maybe only Brown, his research buddy, JF King, and the other mysterious man in the picture below, may have known the whole story. Was that Woodbridge "particle" really losing mass??

All we can say is that Blue Book knew without doubt that the whole thing was furnace slag. Yep. That's it.

You KNOW they're laughing at us....
Now, the last thing I need to know about this, is why JF King's anti-gravity patent earned a couple of years later looks a lot like an Adamski saucer??

NO. I don't want to know. ..... pass the Excedrin.

THE SKY IS FALLING: a Walk on the Wild Side with DARPA and the Air Force, Part Two.

2011-10-10T16:25:00.000-07:00

OK folks, here we go again. Yesterday we had a bit of a mystery involving a somewhat mysterious falling object collected by the Hartford CT police department and local astronomer Robert Brown of Southern Connecticut College and the Moonwatch program. The material seemed unusual to Dr. Brown. Then we unexpectedly ran into a MAJOR mystery when T.Townsend Brown strolled into Fred Whipple's office at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Moonwatch Headquarters, presented some kind of credentials, and confiscated everything. What the heck was THAT all about?? I'm not sure that I can answer the question, but here's a hard-won try. Let's begin with the question, what was Townsend Brown doing at the time??

Brown was doing what he basically always was doing: chasing his early intuition that gravity and electromagnetics were interrelated, and that use of one [the electric force] could allow you to control and shield or cancel the other [gravity]. Brown was going for anti-gravity.

This dream had begun well before WW2 when he was a child whizkid at college. Just prior and during the War, he had several stints with the Navy in research capacities and one at least with aerotech envelope pusher Glenn Martin Company. He never stuck with any of the positions long [except the wartime Navy one wherein he rose to Lt. Commander], and always reverted back to setting up his own "Foundation" where he could pursue his obsession.

In one of those iterations, he found enough support to develop a model "electrolevitation" demonstration [see a picture of the device above] which he felt was proof of principle of his electrogravitic concept. Interestingly, Brown always used low-aspect metallic disks for his models, imitative of UFOs. Running alongside his interest in anti-gravity was his fascination with the UFO phenomenon. Very probably, the two mysteries were related. Even if they weren't, Brown felt that his discovery was the way that WE could get one off the ground.

While in Hawaii, Brown allegedly showed a device to Admiral Radford or one of his staff. While in southern California, he demonstrated it for General Victor Bertrandias [pictured below]. Both high-ranked officers were impressed. In 1953, he sent in a proposal to the USAF entitled "Project Winterhaven". This was an extremely elaborate project meant to not only test his electrogravitic principles but to build working propulsion units, communication devices, and detectors of distant events like atomic detonations. Its flow chart of related working institutions included The Franklin Institute, the University of Chicago, the Stanford Research Institute, several corporations such as Lear, Brush, Jansky&Bailey, Hancock Manufacturing. The department of Defense would foot the bill, and, oh yes, they would be able to consult with the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. Einstein was there at the time so that would be handy on something involving "Unified Field Theory", which this was.

How did Brown have the Brass to float this thing?? In a roundabout way, he had Old Albert to thank.

Ever since the Theory of Relativity had taken over physics in the early half of the 20th century, physicists had been giving themselves headaches about whether the forces of electromagnetism and gravity were relatable mathematically. No one spent more time on the problem than Einstein himself, and as he would say, unproductively. Still, Einstein's struggles with this were making some heavy thinkers believe that the concept was not ridiculous. There even began to be a little public fascination with this during and after the war. Electromagnetism was successfully described by quantum electrodynamics and the siege guns of the theoretical physics community began to eye a possible synthesis with gravity again. Some of this thinking seeped into military and technological industry enough that a serious wondering about all this was surfacing.

That brings me to one of my favorite all-time guys, Ed Ruppelt. Edward was just a young Iowa farm boy and ace fighter pilot, who went to Iowa State University and got an engineering degree. Post-War jobs were slim but not in the Air Force, so our hero went and signed up for engineering intelligence work at Wright-Patterson, where he was analyzing Soviet MIG reports. This is of course where he began BSing with Jerry Cummings about the UFO reports that were Jerry's job. The relevance to our story is the Fort Monmouth NJ case which broke the backs of the Project Grudge negativists who still inhabited the AMC intel desks in Dayton. I've told that story elsewhere. For our purposes, there is one significant detail. When Cummings went to the Pentagon to personally inform General Cabell about the case, he entered a room full of not only the General and staff, but also at least one representative of Republic Airlines Corporation. Why?? He, a "Mr. Brewster", was interested in the "Unified Field" concept as it might apply to propulsion research, and, we must assume, that he, and others, thought that this could have some relation to how UFOs flew.

Really?? You can't mean that the airline companies were taking it THAT seriously?

Well, yes they were.

When Ed Ruppelt left the service after 1953, he went out to southern California to look for work in that mighty military-industrial complex. He found a job almost immediately with Northrup Aviation writing what we would call "tactical" appraisals of how certain aircraft can be used in modern warfare. Presumably these would give Northrup ideas about "products" aimed at real Air Force problems. Although Ruppelt's work was apparently just fine, he wanted something more exciting.

In his files Ed had a torn out Aviation Week article that you can see at the left. "Martin Team Pushes Anti-Gravity Study", October 18th, 1951. This is almost the date of the Fort Monmouth case and Jerry Cumming's conference with Cabell and Brewster at the Pentagon. [Glenn Martin ... hmmmm .... that was where Townsend Brown worked... uh .. no... I don't want to go there.]

The second page of the Av-Week article shows the guy behind the Martin project : George Trimble. I am very reluctant to assign this fellow to the funny farm. Note that he is a member of a NACA sub-committee, and those appointments are not handed out to fools. Something was going on there which a lot of people thought had promise.

Martin was far from alone in the aerotech industry. Several companies had decided to make some efforts in this direction. The newsclipping below [I know, it's terrible] shows another company's wizards talking about their new anti-gravity project [Convair-General Dynamics] .

The buzz was on in the aerotech side of things. Go back up to the first page of the Av-Week article and note the markings on the page. [Well, darn it, I clicked on it and I think that the red was too light to show]... well, Ruppelt marked on the page himself. What he marked was essentially the paragraphs after the bulletpoint "Man's Leg Iron". In other words Ruppelt was interested in the anti-gravity research. And he was interested in it for a long time --- he saved this article from the time of his entry into Wright-Pat until 1955. Why 1955?? That's when he sent Glenn Martin an application to join the Martin team.

OK. So the aerodesign companies were going nuts for the Unified Field, anyone else?? Yep. Just about everybody.

At Wright-Patterson AFB, the Air Force set up a project within the engineering side of the base to monitor developments in the field, possibly facilitate some things, and, "who knows what other black project might have been spawned". I was really trying to hold this particular blog study under PhD thesis length, so someone else will have to illuminate the "skunk works" side of things. The scientist in charge of the Wright-Patterson desk was Joshua Goldberg {seen above in his "mature prof's picture"; he was just a fresh PhD at the time}.

Goldberg's office was to [at least in part] fund university theoretical work on Unified Field theory, and hope that the suspected breakthrough would arise to allow actual development of functional devices.

Meanwhile, the powers of the intelligence community and Big Science decided that the US needed a really big black science frontier agency. Thus in 1958 was founded DARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency --- the "D" was added later for "Defense"]. This movement has been directly linked to the shock everyone was given by Sputnik. DARPA immediately gobbled up funds and research areas formerly heading for individual services and practically caused a war right in the Pentagon. When the dust settled, many of the fundings were shifted back, and another agency also created [NASA], and DARPA went on with the remaining projects. The centerpiece of the DARPA agenda was Project Defender. This had everything to do with ballistic missiles, satellite weapons, both theirs and the development of our own. This project bloomed in the summer of 1960 ... hmmm... just before the material fall we're talking around. Embedded in its ideas for both protection against and development of these space weapons were several "unusual" interests: force fields, antimatter, and ... uh oh ... antigravity. {you are not cleared for this information. Hit delete immediately. If you have printed the page, eat it}.

Meanwhile, back on a slightly less spooky front, a second generation business manufacturing firm owner, Agnew Bahnson, was pursuing his own obsession. Well, you don't have to guess what it was. He had used some of his leftover wealth to build his own laboratory facility to experiment upon gravity, electromagnetics, and whatever else he wanted to seriously play around with.

Somehow this behavior got him in the know with other wealthy characters like Isaac Babson, and heavyweight scientists like Bryce Dewitt and John Wheeler. A letter between him and Dewitt is on the left. The bottom line of these relationships was a coming together of a motherload of the world's best theoretical physicists, plus Goldberg's Air Force money and Babson's money [and I'd bet the forerunner personnel of what was about to become DARPA but I'm not supposed to know that] to create the famous Chapel Hill Conference of 1957 on "The Role of Gravitation in Physics", which is a deliberately chosen soft [non-controversial] title to mask that a lot of what they were going to talk about was Unified Field Theory and, horrors, anti-gravity possibilities.

The conference happened as you can see from the book title below. To my knowledge, all the talks are public. For our purposes, it shows that such discussion was rollicking about everywhere.

And right in the middle of it was our boy T. Townsend Brown. While all those heavy greymatter guys were arguing about whether anti-gravity was possible, here he was claiming that he'd already done it.

The diagram above is part of his patent on his device, Note the year that it was presented to the Patent Office: 1957. Right on time for the Chapel Hill Conference and the beginnings of DARPA.

And what did Brown want to do?? Well fly a UFO with it of course. Brown was always interested in propulsion first and other applications later. And as we've seen, he had already placed an elaborate proposal with the Air Force for doing just that in 1953. I'll make a "wild bet" that this proposal was still on file.

But where? Wright-Patterson with Joshua Goldberg? Or at DARPA?

Whatever the situation there, right after the big Chapel Hill conference, Brown and Bahnson make a deal. Brown will come to Bahnson's lab, and with Bahnson's money and facility he will demonstrate his anti-gravity principle. Agnew Bahnson is in Hog Heaven at the idea, and when the results come in, he feels that Brown did not disappoint. These are the famous Brown-Bahnson electrogravitic demonstrations of 1958-1960 .... hmmm ... THAT date again. The picture below is of Brown, Bahnson, and Brown's co-worker happily enjoying the rush of being on the frontier.

Brown "knew" he could do this. Bahnson knew that he could do this. Bahnson had a backdoor connection with the big wheels in the field and possibly even Goldberg's office. Brown had a proposal in to the Air Force. Who else knew? Who took him seriously? And what did it have to do with the Hartford fall?

In 1960, the patent was granted.

Then along came Robert P. Luker. [Betcha can't guess who HE is]. Part three/Final hopefully tomorrow.

THE SKY IS FALLING: a Walk on the Wild Side with DARPA and the Air Force.

2011-10-09T11:42:00.000-07:00

This is an organizational nightmare, so I'm going to break it up into three smaller posts in the hope for a chance of clarity.

Being back home in Michigan, and as the writing and most of the organizing of the big UFO book is over, I decided to face the fact that my files associated with government actions, stupidities, and meddlings were in a colossal mess and begin to do something about that. I came across a file folder which we did not use in the book. I'd collected it at the Smithsonian Institution in 1988 [?]. I'd forgotten completely about it and had no clue. My label said: 1960 CIA investigates object fall. Well, how about that?! Just goes to show you what having too many resources can do for you. I'd never read it closely.

Inside was a memorandum for the record about a phone call from the CIA to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution about something which fell from the sky on September 4th, 1960 in Hartford CT and burned [in a small way, it turned out] a shed. A famous satellite watcher astronomer was involved with the case, and chemical analysis was said to show that the thing was neither satellite nor meteorite. As the Smithsonian Institution was the parent of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory which was now involved publicly, and since the Director of the SAO, Carl W. Tillinghast, was tasked with creating a public statement about the incident, the CIA was requesting a copy of the [blow-off] statement. Hmmmm. What the heck was THIS all about??

On the evening of September 4th, separate individuals saw a greenish-colored [mainly] bright object passing overhead. They were attracted to it by the fact that it made a noise. These visual in-flight observers did not see it land. Another person, however, also alerted by noise, went outside and discovered a smallish object which was reducing itself to pieces and ash and setting afire the local shed.

The witness immediately [with neighbors' help] put out the fire and picked up a moderate pile of various fragments which were still warm. They also called the police. The police arrived not only with their detective, but with a reporter in tow, AND a well-known local college professor, Dr. Robert L. Brown. He, it turned out had much to say.

The press story with out and national almost immediately. This was the time for Soviet and US satellites and everybody was seeing them and was interested. It was also the time of Moonwatch at the SAO, and the time when people were seeing UNexplainable "satellites" either following ECHO about or running in "wrong" orbits in the skies. [I think I posted on this a long time ago, but it may have been an IUR article].

Inspections were made [the picture on the left is the Project Blue Book document showing the shed with burned areas on the bottom]. Note that this case ultimately went to the UFO project. Also, the other witnesses were located by the police.

Professor Brown was avidly interested. He had been the first US citizen to actually spot Sputnik I and was well known to the SAO. In fact he directed one of Moonwatch's observation stations. His group had seen anomalistic "somethings" approximately one week earlier. His press comments flatly eliminated meteors as a culprit, but suggested some Soviet satellite fragments might be involved. Brown was also imagining some other more mysterious artificial object which he did not go into.

What he surely DID do however was to bring the "fall" to the attention of Project Moonwatch and its director Harvard astronomer Fred Whipple and assistant director J. Allen Hynek. Yep. THAT guy again. Those two knuckleheads are shown below at the SAO Moonwatch offices around the time of this story. [the actual photo is one of those posed pictures that they did when they cracked the orbit of Sputnik I. --- two happy, obviously professorial buddies].

It is then that this story takes an abrupt left turn. T. Townsend Brown shows up. My jaw just about hit the floor when I got to this part.

Well, us folks in UFO history research know a great deal about T Townsend Brown and it's rarely good. This guy had almost as many angles and mysteries about him as George Hunt Williamson, and I still don't quite understand him. Please go to the internet and read a little about this guy; I can't write the necessary book here. I'm going to list a bare minimum: rich man's son; child science prodigy; had some ideas which impressed a lot of people; came up with idea that electricity and gravity were related and could be shielded or cancelled; early "president" of NICAP.... by this time fired but still active with his esoteric science ideas.

So, somehow Brown read the press story and IMMEDIATELY got permission to TAKE CONTROL of the samples!!! He walked right into Whipple's office the NEXT DAY, and presented his credentials. Whipple, a severe skeptic about almost anything, agreed that these samples were not worth anything to Moonwatch [doubtless Hynek disagreed, and equally doubtless contacted Major Friend at Blue Book].

Brown gathered up the samples and copies of the police report, promising that he would keep Dr. McCrosky of the SAO informed [he is the scientist pictured below] and was on the phone with Colonel Victor A. Cherbak of the Bedford, MA Cambridge Research Center at the time --- i.e. right there in Whipple's office. [Cherbak is above left]. Who the heck was Cherbak??

Cherbak was the first director of Project Space Track [at the time called Project Harvest Moon]. This was the Air Force's secret analog to Moonwatch, set up to track all Earth-orbiting satellites. T. Townsend Brown: immediately getting access and possession of "anomalous debris" of some kind and talking to the USAF's secret satellite project director by phone in Whipple's office --- almost makes my head hurt. Was no one interested?? But THAT can't be, because Brown had to get that permission somewhere high up. And, at least Blue Book was interested.

We know that Blue Book was interested because when they learned about the case they immediately asked in. They acted on the 8th as you can read below. Little did Major Friend know that Townsend Brown had beaten him to the punch by two days.

Even invoking Air Force Regulation 200-2 which covered the collection of photos and physical evidence, among other things, couldn't help him if the "stuff" was already gone. Plus, the military is usually as slow as molasses on these things anyway.

Nine days later Dr. John T. Wasson [an extremely good atmospheric physicist] was sent to Hartford and SAO-Moonwatch from the USAF Atmospheric Circulation Laboratory, Nuclear Studies Branch. He was a bit surprised to find that the SAO had given everything they had to Brown. In Hartford itself he had more luck as the witnesses had kept some of the stuff themselves, although brown had taken at least half of that too. But at least Wasson could take his oral reports, his pictures of the site, and some meagre samples and make a Blue Book report. And what did his report say?? More importantly what was Townsend Brown doing? That's for the next two segments.

As a little treat: the picture below is of Professor McCrosky at the left on one of his satellite tracking field experiences [Hawaii, I think], and the young bespectacled man in the middle is UFO researcher/legend Walt Webb.

UFO-DNA is back on-line

2011-09-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

To all who pursue the UFO field seriously: this is really good news. The terrific case resource UFO-DNA has returned to active duty after a hiatus. If you have access to a good research collection of books and journals, this accumulation of references to case commentary locations has been very helpful to me. When coming across a case new to me, I habitually go there if I have only a slim single piece of information. Many times the site lists several books, journals, collections where comment on the case resides. Piling my desk with five or six references, all of a sudden I begin to feel like I am getting clearer on the incident. Extremely valuable and kudos for all the hard work by the creator.

http://thecid.com/ufo/

A Small Moment In UFO History

2011-09-29T07:53:00.001-07:00

I've been too rushed to post for about a week, so I thought it a good idea to put some little something up before I trek back to Michigan, as who knows if there will be time there or not.

The fractional government document above is a section of a Pentagon UFO report from the earliest days. I photocopied it from Dr. Hynek's personal papers, as he had an original. I then selected out the majority of it to use in a paper. Notice that it is "clean": no markings on it nor scribbled out witness names. Most of the on-line documents from the Blue Book microfilms are not like this, but clean microfilm copies do exist elsewhere. But the reason that I'm making a post is the image below.

This is the image you get from the typical on-line source. [It's the full page without me "selecting" just the gist of the report]. And it's messy. It happens, however, that it's the kind of messy that historians like.

This case was one of the early military reports from the 1947 "beginning" wave. Wright-Patterson was not yet receiving the reports. This case from Maxwell field, involving four witnesses, was sent through channels to TAC at Langley Field, and from there onto the Pentagon. It took one week to get from Maxwell HQ to Langley [officers at Maxwell were probably not yet sure of what they were supposed to do with something like this], and then four more days to get into the Pentagon. I.E. "Received AFBIR-CO 11-July 47". That means that the report went to Air Force Intelligence [AFBIR at the time] and was received at the desk of the Chief of the Collection Division [CO]. That chief was Colonel Robert Taylor III. He passed it on to his top assistant Lt. Colonel George Garrett. How do we know that, other than "logic"?

Look at that "wonderful" grease marker circled 5 at the bottom of the page. You might think it stupid, but that circled 5 makes me smile. That indicates that this paper was the exact copy that George Garrett spread out on his desk that fateful day in late July/early August [along with several others] to begin making the first ever estimate-of-the-situation. This case, Maxwell field, was his "fifth" case in that estimate. The Kenneth Arnold, EJ Smith cases etc were others.

That moment in UFO history created a snowballing effect leading to Brigadier General George Shulgen's asking all services and commands whether we had developed anything like this, and then separately asking AMC at Wright-Pat the same thing. Wright-Patterson's reply became the now-famous "Twining Memo". This exact sheet of paper led to the USAF admission that the flying disks were real.

Stare a bit at it folks. Sacred document. History right there before your eyes.

DATA-NET: A Clutch of Classics.

2011-09-21T14:51:00.000-07:00

As I've penetrated a little further into the SITU DATA-NET collection, I've gotten into the early 1970s UFO desert, which is well known. This was a true diminishment of cases, as the post-Colorado era was, paradoxically, one of the most intense times for high quality people being active in the UFO research field. The point there is: if the good cases had been there, someone would have jumped on them. This desert lasted from latter 1969 to most of 1972. DATA-NET so far in this era reflects that, in that there are few impressive cases to report. The New Zealand mystery traces have been an exception. DATA-NET's editor was I believe sensing this too. The pages of the newsletter began including old cases. Whether these were being generated by the editor or by the correspondents, I can't say, but there they are. It is some of those old cases that I'm going to thumbnail here [rather than "current" [1970] events].

Since I have no illustrations for these old-timers, I'm going to post some non-connected old time alleged UFO photos, just to give you something to look at. The thing to the left is a photo taken in 1947 on the California coast. Don't ask me if it's a good one, I don't have a clue.

Olden case#1: July 3rd, 1947; St. Maries, ID. Ten witnesses watch as eight "tub-shaped" UFOs come slowly down and "land" on the ground. They are luminous and the size of small houses. As they approached the ground they stirred up leaves and flattened them beneath them. Later, the witnesses approached the vacated spot, but could find no trace that the UFOs had landed. Pretty wild stuff especially for so early.

Olden case #2: July 3rd, 1949; Longview, WA. While officiating at an air show, former Navy guided missile chief, Moulton Taylor, spotted three flying disks above the field at an estimated 30000 feet. He alerted the crowd to them and everyone watched, many through binoculars. Taylor maintained throughout his life that he and his aerotech buddies would speculate on whether these were extraterrestrial craft whenever they got together later.

Olden case #3: April 24th, 1950; Arrey, NM. This is the famous Charles Moore balloon scientists' observation. There were five witnesses in the research team. They saw a white elliptical object traveling very fast, visually and through theodolite. Sighting lasted 55 seconds. They estimated the thing at 300,000 feet and, therefore, 100' diameter. [these estimates would mean little if the observers weren't the best in the world, so we need to pay at least a little attention to them]. Moore reported the sighting to the USAF and never received a reply. As Moore's group worked as a Navy team, this probably began the interservice antagonism where the USN was very unhappy with USAF cooperation on UFO analyses. This ultimately led to a separate USN UFO desk for a while in 1951-1952. Many balloon researcher reports went to the Navy for a while.

The odd thing at the left is an alleged UFO from New York from 1950. Pretty weird looking but fun.

Olden case #4: July 6th, 1950; Louisville, KY. An employee of the Louisville Times, out trying to film birds, sees a UFO and shoots off 50' of movie film. Allegedly the film shows a "bright disk" which hovered, and then disappeared by either shrinking or moving directly away. I have no idea what this film looks like, nor did DATA-NETs editor who was pleading with the readership for facts. As far as the case goes: if the description is real, if the object moved directly away from the witness, that seems like awareness and deliberate display. If it "simply" shrunk out of sight, that's even stranger.

Olden case #5: September 26th, 1950; Philadelphia, PA. One of the crazier things in UFO files. People saw a large [six-foot diameter] "blob" float down and rest so lightly that it didn't even bend tall weed stalks upon which it rested. My memory of this case is that the thing was purplish. The police were right there to watch the whole thing. One policeman tried to grab a bit off it, and the stuff dissolved in his hand. It had "substance" but was incredibly light. By the time the FBI got there, it was all gone. ... who the heck knows what it was....

The picture on the left is from California in 1951. It's one of those things which reminds you of Adamski but is not one of his. Maybe it inspired his "creativity"?

Olden case #6: May 22nd, 1951; Over Chicago, IL area. An American Airlines pilot and two of his crew saw a very fast blue-white "star-like" object pacing their plane, as if "playing tag". It would approach and then get further away. This went on for 20 minutes until they neared Chicago. Most distinctive was the object's behavior of drawing an up-&-down vertical line, and then a forward-&-back horizontal line [as if making a cross in the sky] several times. The Captain said: "I hated to see it leave. It was a very interesting sight."

Olden case #7: May 28, 1951; Rainy Lake, MN. A large number of persons witnessed a "crystal ball" moving rapidly about in the air. It then darted off to join with another one in their antics. They continued to make fast non-inertial motions until they drifted away. This is near General Mills research balloon territory, but the flying off and joining up does not indicate a balloon. Rather it reminds me of the in-air balloon chase cases where Joseph Kaliszewski would report spherical white globes or disks rushing up [or down from height] upon their balloon and dancing all about it. According to him, this happened on more flights than not in this era. The General Mills cases are in fact among the strongest on record.

Olden case #8: January 25th, and earlier, 1952; San Jose, CA. Within about one week in the area, two independent witnesses, one on ground and one in-air pilot, reported unusual red lights in the air near the city. No particular motions of the lights are mentioned in the DATA-NET article, but one odd behavior was: when the pilot turned to them and shown his plane's lights on them, they "went away". One assumes he means flew away rather than disappeared, but either way it indicates a responsive behavior.

The picture on the left is a famous old one from the Bolivian-Peru "jungle border". Dates from 1952. Good ol' cigar-shaped flying fuselage. Don't know if anyone had enough info to take it seriously, but it's awfully early.

Olden case #9: February 22nd, 1952; Keysville, VA. Only one witness on this one. Observer says that the thing was an elongated silver cigar which moved slowly in a horizontal line across the sky ... well, not QUITE a horizontal line. The thing would move, then disappear. Then reappear a little way ahead, move, and disappear. And so on until out of sight. The Space-jumping Amateur from Whackland??

Olden case #10: April 16th, 1952; Hamilton Ontario. Many witnesses, independently, saw a "great whirling smoke-ring" moving rapidly across the sky. It was black and seemed to have little or no "depth". It was estimated as being 600' in diameter. Before disappearing, it changed color to blue. One witness said that he concentrated hard trying to see stars through the apparently open middle, but could not. One witness said that the thing finally just vanished. {In honor of this "smoke-ring" I include a picture montage below of UFOlogy's most famous Smoke-ring, which was argued about by the Colorado Project, ultimately making them look like fools.}.

Olden case #11: November 1st and 19th, 1953; over London, UK. These are two separate but essentially identical observations by the British military [and public, I believe] of white, circular objects hovering over London for 15 minutes before moving off. They were estimated at 60000' altitude, and larger than an airliner. The kicker is that both cases were tracked by radar. If these cases have good bona fides [I don't know], then one might say that the Brits got their own taste of our Washington DC merry-go-round a little over a year later.

Well, that's it for the moment, folks. Hope that there was something in all that which stretched your mind a bit. Till next time...God be with you.

DATA-NET: On The Road Again In Queensland.

2011-09-17T06:30:00.000-07:00

This is an incident from the April 1970 edition of DATA-NET. It's one I'd read before at CUFOS. I've not seen it mentioned anywhere else, though surely it must be [I mean as a case report rather than just a listing in Mark Rodeghier's catalog of "electromagnetic" Vehicle Interference Reports. Mark cites this same entry from DATA-NET as his source]. The case, to me, is astonishing, and cries out for more coverage. At a minimum there must be an investigative interview somewhere, perhaps in an old Queensland Flying Saucer group newsletter [unfortunately pretty rare in my resource collection]. Thankfully, the DATA-NET article is long for that publication's typical entries.

Here's the case: On the evening of March 19th, 1969, a woman was well into a 1300 mile drive from Cairns to Brisbane, Australia. With her were her children, understandably asleep. She was nearing Gladstone [having just passed Marmor and Mt. Larcom] in Queensland with 500 miles still to go. There is nothing in the narrative, by the way, which says that she drove this whole thing in one go, nor that she was in any way unalert. In fact much of the experience takes place outside the car, as you will see. "Highway Hypnosis" is, thereby, an unlikely ingredient in this story.

The first thing that is astonishing is that she begins to hear a "distant" and intermittent "radio broadcast" despite her car having no radio. This excited her with a sense of wonder. Following the piecemeal "news", there was a musical tune of some kind. This now worried her a bit, as she wondered if the experience might be premonitionary, and she slowed the car, fearing a possible accident [though there had been no traffic for awhile.]

She kept on at a reduced speed of 40mph for a time and then noticed a light pacing her car off to the side past the trees. It turned and came towards her. She thought: "could this be a flying saucer??" That scared her and she slowed nearly to a stop. The light pulsated as it came on.

The lady, now thoroughly afraid, stopped her vehicle and decided to turn around to go back to the nearest passed town, Mt. Larcom, and stay the night. Just as she was to return, another vehicle came up from the lane that she had been on [i.e. from behind her original path going towards Gladstone]. Our lady flashed her lights and the oncoming car stopped.

It was another single woman. This new arrival seemed to know a lot about UFOs and had a very relaxed confident manner about the UFO presence. She convinced our first lady to turn back around and they'd drive in tandem onwards toward Gladstone. As they began to proceed, the UFO came closer until it was over the other woman's car. Now alarmed herself, she and our first lady braked to a stop and both got out and talked. The UFO-savvy lady said that if they turned off their lights it would go away. Our lady watched the thing closely. It was about automobile-sized and had several porthole-like lights. The second lady relaxed a bit when the UFO moved to the side, and wanted to watch what she said "was something wonderful that we probably would never see again". Our first lady was not so sure, as she wanted to get going on her trip home, and she was noticing a strange pulsing of her new companion's car lights when the object itself pulsed. They drove off finally, our first lady driving in the "wrong" lane as there was no traffic and she distrusted the way her companion's car was pulsating its headlights.

The second woman apparently never understood what our lady was talking about [re: her headlights] and seemed somewhat non-plussed from then on out. Our lady reported that the object continued to fly along beside them at about 100 yards distance as they drove towards Gladstone. Apparently, the thing would send out a "streak" of light horizontally [though not it seems directed at the cars], and simultaneously her companion's car lights would broaden. Then, even more astonishingly, the object would send out a streak of light upwards, and her companion's car headlights "would streak up".

Then she says this: "It appeared to be a pattern. A lengthening of the vertical shaft of light, followed by a horizontal lengthening, alternatively." Our witness is apparently describing the famous and highly strange UFO-associated phenomenon of "solid", cut-off, extendible light beams.

As they drew near Gladstone, the UFO rapidly soared off into the sky, looking like a star at height. The UFO-savvy lady took our witness' name and address and said she'd contact her. That never happened, sadly, or we'd have a lot solider case with two independent witnesses on record. Our lady stayed overnight in Gladstone and drove on to Brisbane. There she reported the experience, and was apparently visited by the Australian military. They wanted to inspect her vehicle, and later told her that she needed a new alternator for her electric system. She had no idea what that could have had to do with her UFO encounter as it was the other lady's lights which were pulsing. The DATA-NET correspondent seems to have visited the anonymous witness and made a recording of his interview, which was the basis for this report. He describes her as "an ordinary housewife who speaks with no frills, and is apparently telling the event exactly as she remembers it happening". He reports that she has talked to very few people and seeks no publicity.

So, what have we here? My intuition is: a very good high strangeness UFO encounter with critical "missing witness" testimony. Still, it seems a case worth keeping in the pile of "good" UFO incidents and it is a shame that it remains a hidden rough gemstone waiting for the rest of the testimony.