Everyday Spirituality

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.