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.