MORE CASES IN THE 90s

Today I'll cover a Baker's Half-Dozen incidents, coming mainly from sources like "Letters." If the details of cases like these tend to match others we've read, then I think we're getting somewhere non-trivial, and possibly ultimately important. So .... 

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 This case comes from FATE Magazine by way of Janet Bord. The witness was a 15 year old male and the location was the Aran Islands of Ireland. He was on a morning walk by the seaside. He saw two fishermen sitting on a bank ahead casting into the sea. On his approach, he saw that they were only three and a half foot tall, and dressed leprechaun/gnome style in all green with brown boots. One of the two had a flat hat and a gray beard. 

They began laughing and talking in Irish (content not described) and then just jumped over the bank, apparently into the sea. The witness hurried over to look for them, but they were nowhere to be seen. On the ground lay a pipe, which he assumed they must have left. He took it home and secured it in a locked box. When he attempted to retrieve it, it was not there. The witness was naturally somewhat fixated by all of this and took a camera and tape recorder out with him on his walks from then on. One day he did indeed see them again. Neither the camera nor the recorder recorded anything despite the try. 

I can't help but to like this one since it "fits" the better documented cases.

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Another case from FATE by way of Janet Bord. This one took place in that credibility nerve-wracking location of Mt. Shasta, CA. This one has a firm date of 1993. 

The witness was a young (I think) woman on a camping trip walk on her own. She enjoyed these closeness-to-Nature situations and felt that they induced a natural meditative state (I'm completely with her on this, by the way, so such commentary is not driving me away from this narrative but sympathetic to it.) 

Near dusk, she heard what she felt to be children singing, and walked into a clearing. There on the ground were eleven tiny (one foot tall) electric blue glowing beings. They seemed to flicker and pulse and were nearly transparent. They had large wings, delicate and lacy, which were larger than the bodies of the fairies themselves. She was holding her breath, but had to breathe out. When she did, the fairies looked at her, leaped up, and vanished. 

Going over to the site, she found blue powder on the ground. Believing this to be "fairy dust", she collected it, took it home, felt that it had magical properties to bring people good if she sprinkled it on them.  ... ummmm. 

Let me try to "save the data" on this incident (hard to do, I know) by discarding her belief that she collected magical dust which grants good fortune to others. The case, even with that, runs hard against the explorer's soul due to Mt. Shasta being called a Sacred Site right off the bat, she seeing winged fairies against our collective grain, and then the Pixy Dust regardless of what its properties might be. I'm forced to go deep gray basket here. 

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Ah. Just seeing that little Pukwudgee drawing makes me relax a bit. (Yes, I'm demonstrating a prejudice that I didn't know that I would have when I began this whole catalog long ago.) This case is from a Native American site which often has very authentic sounding stuff, and which gets critiqued by others. The witnesses were two males apparently in their twenties or thirties, at the Redlake Native American Reservation in Minnesota. These two cousins enjoyed taking long walks along the trails, one of which had an old stone cabin on it. 

One cousin decided to go out and camp at this building and the other was too frightened of the idea and stayed behind at what was on that night an empty home. As the night wore on, the scared cousin got agitated, and left in search of the other cousin. This was about 3am. Forest noises added to his fear and these woods had, for instance, bear in them. 

In the distance there was music, sounding like flutes. This terrified him even more and though driven to go forward, he actually fainted. When he came to, he saw a stubby little man with his back to him, playing on a flute. The music calmed him, and he tried to get to his feet without making noise. But he did. The being leaped up and turned. It had very long hair down to its knees, big black lips and beady eyes. It was three and a half foot tall. It spoke something not understandable and stepped closer. The witness ran wildly away, but luckily for him straight into the campfire area of his cousin. He told his story but wasn't believed. 

They went inside the building to sleep. Later in that night, his cousin woke him with a warning to keep quiet. Together they went to a window. Out in the clearing only six feet away, five of these little people were making music and dancing. At a noise caused by the second male tossing a rock, the five pukwudgee ran into a cavity in the tree and disappeared. 

This is a bit of a lollapaloosa of a story. The Minnesota little people do fit a pattern, but not flute music for Native American hairy dwarves so much. The main witness seems a bit hysterical, but I should admit that people differ in the amount of nervous fortitude they have. Maybe, as detailed and long as this case is, I should give it credit. 

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Wow. Of all places. Roswell, New Mexico. The witness report comes through a source unfamiliar to me, despite that it claims to be generally a UFO gathering site (something called Nonhuman Research Agency by Robert Goerman.) This witness (an adult woman who saw this in 1997) wrote to Goerman but it is not known whether an actual interview followed. 

One early morning, the witness and her dog were out in her backyard at a picnic table. It was morning coffee time. She and her dog saw something just at the neighbor's fence. The dog sprinted over. The owner followed. 

The being was a foot tall,  and very stocky. It had big bushy eyebrows and a beard, both gray. He wore a gray woolen shirt without buttons and gray pants. He also had soft brown boots. The dog turned and ran into the house and cowered. The witness stayed. She saw the little man turn and walk with a waddle towards a chinaberry tree. When it got to the tree, it appeared to just walk into it and vanish. Naturally there was no door or entrance in that tree. 

Wish that I had a good investigation on this one (but of course I always wish this, but the details claimed here are nicely in concert with the pattern of our best cases.) 

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No location on this late 20th century incident, and a mediocre provenance: Jeff Wells' Rigorous Intuition blogspot --- nothing against him, but that means another anonymous claim. Despite all that, the case has a simple story. 

A person is trying to get to sleep in his parents' home. He hears something about the size of a large cat running on his roof. This bothers him and he cannot doze off. Instead he is confronted (while still in bed) by an old man, quite small (about four foot tall) and having a very serious old-looking face. The being had dark clothes, and carried a lantern and a sack across his shoulder. Several tings (cap, sack, and lantern light) were red. 

The being walked away to the room entry and stared into his parents' room. The witness yelled "NO!"and the room went pitch black and empty. His parents awoke, he apologized, and went back to bed. The witness festered on this for years. He claimed to read something in Whitley Strieber's book, Communion, that resembled this being (I can't find it) but still has not settled on what this was all about.

I don't like the bedroom part of this (the witness admits that he occasionally has lucid dreams) but the imagery was "fun" enough.

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This is another in a set of 8 incidents which happened to the primary reporter and his family and friends from the area around his home in New Brunswick. The fact that this fellow tells so many incidents, briefly yet clearly, and nearly each for a different but well-known (to him) witness, has given me an irrational confidence in the whole set. (He could have been a New Brunswick MacManus with some effort.)

In this one the witness was the reporter's high school art teacher. The teacher told the encounter to just a few favored students. The year was 1997. The teacher had come home from teaching and, upon entering his living room, there were five or six little men. A couple were sitting on the couch watching the TV and a couple were sitting ON the TV. The teacher dropped his jaw and his bag of groceries. They were classic gnomes dressed in red, blue, and green, all with red gnomic hats. The gnomes laughed at him, jumped around, and then ran off. (Since they could sit atop a TV set, they must have been quite small. I'll estimate this at about a foot tall.) 

Except for the "inside" aspect of this (and even this has historical "brounie" precedence) the encounter fits the Little People mischief-maker pattern.

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This report came from one of those fairy encounter type sites. It is unusually lengthy, detailed, and in its way reasonable. It has an actual location (Platteville, WI) and a rough date of the very late 20th century. The case allegedly had two witnesses and would have been a great UFO-investigator opportunity. But there is almost no "fairy." What MIGHT be there is a "Stray Sod" element. If it wasn't for that possibility, I'd probably skip this.

Two young men in their twenties I believe, decided to drive to the outskirts of town to an old cemetery. They had it in their minds that it would be fun to go in there, get into the right "atmosphere" and maybe see a fairy (they had just been reading Katherine Briggs.) As it was illegal to go into this cemetery after hours, they parked the car surreptitiously and slid into the place at a spot bounded by a large ditch (the cemetery sat below the roadway and the ditch bank hid them.) They sat there quietly for quite a time when they both saw a small dark figure spinning rapidly. It was a human-shaped figure of only five inches tall. It moved "gracefully." Five minutes later the thing disappeared. 

They decided to leave. But upon climbing the bank of the ditch, they weren't where they thought they should be. In fact they were a good ten minute walk from the side they should have been near. Thoroughly rattled they raced back into town to spend the rest of the evening asking themselves what happened. They admitted that they could have imagined the small twirling figure, but not the seeming dislocation of space. 

The tiny dark undefined figure bothered me from first reading. The incident is of interest only if the witnesses really have their act together about exactly where they entered the cemetery and how far they walked until they sat down. Without a field trip, who knows? Could it have been a spatial shift? 

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All of this is soft, but I kind of like the New Brunswick, Roswell, Minnesota, and Aran Islands encounters, all of which meet the general pattern of "known" Little People incidents. They are either one foot tall or three and a half foot tall creatures. The bedroom lantern gnome and the pixy dust leaving transparent winged beings have their peculiar awkward aspects. The dark spinning mini-figure might not have had a reasonable sighting at all. 

There are quite a few possibly entertaining cases from About paranormal. com internet site. I'll try to sift out a few of those next time and then we can get into the 21st century.