SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part eleven

The big question that is still sitting there is the one that's almost untouchable: IS there another reality alongside? Do we have any direct evidence? Is there ANYTHING that I can say without sounding like a complete lunatic? 

About 2 weeks ago, I thought that there wasn't much to say. But after a  long meditation, maybe there is. For better or worse, let's begin by asking a few questions.

If there is a world alongside, can we see into it? If we were inside, could we see out? If there is a world alongside, can we walk into it? Can we walk around inside it? Does light work there? Does Gravity? Would we feel generally normal? All of that sounds goofy to be asking, but is it really? We might just have enough hints on some of this stuff after all. 

Diarmuid MacManus & The Stray Sod.

Our hero (MacManus) comes through again.  The first case was from MacManus' minister. He had a visitation to make and set off walking to the place. The walk was able to be shortened quite a bit by crossing a very large field. Though big, it was open and you could see the two large trees near the middle and the rough path leading to the distant exit stile far away. The priest opened the entry gate and started crossing the field as he had done dozens of times before. But when he reached the far side, there was no stile, no path, no cleared area which would allow him to even climb out.

Completely puzzled, he did the obvious: searching all along the hedged area for the missing stile and open patch. Nothing. As he went on he ultimately circumnavigated the entire area: no stile but also no original entry gate either. No matter where he arrived, there was the same impenetrable wall of thick plant staring back at him. He had, as the Irish say, stepped upon the Stray Sod and was trapped within its trickery. An hour or more later, he came to the spot where the exit stile should have been, and there it was.

What should we take from this? Although the field was familiar, and the entry was normal, certain pieces of the area, (the initial entry gate, the joining patch, and the exit stile) were gone. One's best hypothesis would be that this was imitative of the real field in the normal world, but NOT the real field. It could be walked into, but not walked out of until something changed to allow that. The priest also said that when he initially came to the spot where the exit stile should have been and found it changed, he heard a chuckling as if someone far off were laughing at him.

MacManus' second case was that of a young woman who was a housekeeper at a great house but was going to take the long walk back to her family in a nearby village. In order to get to that village, she had to cross over the hill called Lis Ard Fort, known as a "fairy fort" by the locals. She did that, and stood at the summit a while enjoying the view outward towards her own village in the distance. Down the hill she danced until she came to a ditch at the bottom. She headed for a gap in the ditch, but when she arrived she blanked a second and was walking in the precise opposite way. She composed herself and turned and walked to the gap. The same thing happened again. It kept happening. Frightened now, she searched along the ditch, always coming up against some "barrier" which refused to let her pass. This happened for hours. She began feeling a sense of hostility radiating toward her from the Fairy Fort.

Feeling hopeless, hours went by. People from the village got concerned and sent out parties. She saw the lanterns coming. She was standing shouting waving, but they showed no sign of seeing her, even though they passed within twenty yards. Finally hours more gone by, she realized that the barrier was gone, and scrambled quickly out and went to her village and family. This case is almost identical to the first with one added piece of information. She could walk in and ultimately walk out. Light, gravity, and other forces seemed to be normal. Time passed normally. The area was as she knew it. The "addition" to reality was the barrier; and the addition to our understanding was that she could see out of the Stray Sod though others could not see in.

MacManus' third case was one in which a man left a party at one house of an estate to go across a large field to another house for the evening. It was past midnight, and the walk began as usual, but very quickly the entirety of the environment changed. He was immediately aware that he was no longer in the familiar field. He as a good Irishman suspected fairy involvement, so he employed the old legend idea of turning his coat inside out. It didn't work. Nothing changed and he couldn't find any sign of a way out. He walked around and worried himself into a nervous sweat. Finally hours later, a glimpse of a way out occurred, and he hurried on. The opening was in the direction of the first house, so he took the opportunity and straggled back there, showing up at the door "in a state."

Again, walk in, walk around, environment changed but not changing the way things like light and gravity work. Could not see out until the very last moment. Time operated normally. This one seemed clearly like a separate Stray Sod bubble out of touch with the normal world. None of MacManus' three cases were of very large places-alongside, even though the priest's field was a very large multi-acre area.

So, MacManus, as usual, helps. What else do we have? 

We have Ron Quinn's three cases for starters. In two of those cases the witnesses were presented with mists, small islands and bridges to get there. In both of those cases they walked across the bridges out of curiosity and voluntarily. The island acreages were similar to the fields in the Irish cases, but within both islands the witnesses saw faery folk (with whom they did not interact.) The witnesses could also see our normal world from the fairy island shore. Light, gravity, and the forces seemed normal. Time passage was also normal. The third case was an entry (again entered voluntarily in the sense of accidental) but this experience included significant change of visual atmosphere once crossing over. The crossing was into a similar physical environment (mountainous) but distinct from the normal. The main addition to our understanding here was that this environment alongside was a very great terrain --- no small field nor island.

In the fairy census there is a good narrative about a hiker pushing aside some forest bushes and noticing a different type of forested area beyond, which was explored for some time, and found very large just as a mountain area should be. Again no time rate issues.

The Trickster phenomenon indicates that transaction of objects out of our normal space to another may even be common. The few faery-world witness cases seem to show that these thousands of small object translocations do not have to disappear into tiny cubbyholes of almost dislocated spacetime, but might have a whole other world into which they migrate. But this is, without need to say it, pretty speculative without more cases of witnesses "going" into there, walking about, and coming back to tell us about it.

There are a fair number of encounters wherein the experience is of a house or even a village out of place which, later, cannot be re-found. I have a list of maybe two or three dozen of these. I'm tired though ... and I don't feel like making ANOTHER lengthy study of a separately defined anomaly, and so, as I know that you know these things already, I'll just leave it as a claim: there are lots of reports of things like cottages et al (even visited inside) which later can not be documented as existing.

But, I am going to revisit one special case ... Helen Lane.

I'm going to repeat my telling of this encounter because it is not only inexplicable but the mere fact that it happened threatens to discombobulate almost any model of reality one chooses to lean upon.

I have several brothers. All of them are great fellows, and all of them are somewhat different. One of them is "grounded" in the real world of work, teaching, service, hammers-and-nails, small town orientation, etc. more so than most people I know. He is not a fool, and is not to be fooled. He goes very slowly to conclusions outside of the normal. His wife enjoys the thought of the unusual much more than he, but she is also an intelligent, substantive woman. I know them very well. There is certainty that the incident that they recounted to me was exactly as they experienced it, to their honest perceptions.

It was July 1998. My sister-in-law's grandmother was dying and she, my brother, her mother, and other family members had gone to the old home area to be with her in the last days. People were spread out, residing with other extended family members et al, some quite a few miles apart. My brother and sister-in-law got a call saying that the time was probably near, and late in the evening (c.11pm) began driving to pick up her mother at another location and then drive to the nursing home. My brother was driving. The trip to the mother's temporary residence was through a relatively non-built-up stretch but which contained suburban structures at intervals and was normally quite well traveled, even at night. (My sister-in-law grew up in this exact area.)

This night there were no cars at all. Out ahead, alongside the road, they could see someone walking dressed in white. As they passed, in a hurry to pick-up the mother to get to the grandmother's location, they saw that this was an older woman in a white nightgown. As they proceeded on down the road, they had a wave of guilt as they felt that this was almost surely an old lady, probably with Alzheimer's, who needed help. They picked up the mother and a cousin and retraced their drive down the still empty road. Up ahead again was the old lady. This time they slowed, asked a question, and the "simple" reply indicated that they must take the woman in and try to help her. Her comment to them was: "Oh God bless you. I am trying to get home". She sat in the rear of the car between the mother and the cousin, and was generally "normal", saying that her name was "Helen Lane" and giving an address and phone number.

My sister-in-law's family had originally lived in this area [some still did] and they knew enough about the place to find the street address. That did not work out due to there being no numbers on any of the houses, and not wanting to wake up the entirely unlighted neighborhood by trial-and-error. They drove instead to a fire station that the family knew was active at all hours. Still no traffic. The fire station was brightly lit as expected. They knocked at the door--nothing. They circled the building looking in windows and knocking--nothing. This was a major establishment as it served, among other locations, a wealthy area of town. But, feeling a little creepy now, they drove on, for up ahead was a police station that the family knew well. [by the way, they had also somewhere in this sequence tried the phone number and only gotten an irate individual who said he'd never heard of Helen Lane and that they'd woken him up].

The police station that they headed for was run, as Chief of Police, by another of their cousins. They didn't expect him to be there at midnight, of course, but they had confidence that the station would handle the old lady and her problems. [she had said a few "childish" things by now which convinced everyone that they were dealing with Alzheimer's]. The police station was there, as it should be, but still with no traffic. It was brightly lit but showing no activity. Through the large front windows, one person could be seen. Greatly relieved, my sister-in-law took Helen Lane up the steps while my brother watched closely. Within there was only this one person. She was a middle-aged woman dressed in civilian clothes. There were no policemen to be seen anywhere. When they came through the door, the woman said "Hello Helen." My sister-in-law told the story, in brief, and the woman said "We know Helen. We'll get her back home". Taking some information on paper, she said not to worry about anything, it would all be taken care of.

As I said, my sister-in-law was familiar with this station. It was far too empty. No dispatcher, no desk sergeant, no policemen of any kind. It just felt wrong---but who knows? They let it go and went back to their car and on to the nursing home where the grandmother had just died. The next morning, both my brother and sister-in-law wanted to lay this to rest. They called on the police station and asked. The Chief, their cousin, was in a position to find out. He told them the following: 1). the station had no record of their visit, nor any particulars; 2). there was no record of the existence of any person named "Helen Lane", as far as their files were concerned; 3). the station should have been busy and active with several uniformed officers on duty; 4). no such person as described as being behind the desk has anything to do with the station, nor does anyone know of such an individual being in the station.

What are we to make of this? Some people would like to say that this is "just" another instance of the "Phantom Hitchhiker" phenomenon. Well, if it makes anyone feel better to give it a name, then God bless you, but that's hardly very helpful. This case seems to be telling me that my relatives "slipped into" an alternate reality for an hour or so, wherein the circumstances were very close but not identical to our "real world". I have to believe that the details as stated happened--multiple witnesses, including some that I'd trust with my life. If they did, then it SEEMS that they were driving about in a world which was in imitation of ours but not quite identical. As my brother said: "we know the woman in the police station didn't exist." Well, what DID exist? What-the-heck went on here? This experience hardly stands alone. The illustration above is meant to picture a roadway encounter in the early 20th century, where after a brief interaction, the man dressed in olde-time clothing just vanished before the witness' eyes. In the UFO literature, cases of this "same-but-not-same" environment crop up now and again. And the mysterious "empty" road is common. I have no good "model" for this reality. I find it difficult to incorporate these displacements or slippages into a coherent way of thinking about anomalies. And there seems to be more than random accident here; more like an "intention". My brother said: "I think it was a test." Maybe, Bro, maybe.

This event, which I heard about from my family long before any study of Faery and Stray Sod, seems incredibly useful to me in understanding some bits of our current inquiries. My family members seamlessly drove into a reality of which they recognized nearly every aspect. Other than the emptiness of the usually busy road, everything was so much as it should be that there was no thought of something strange going on. Light worked; Gravity worked; the car engine worked; everything still worked. BUT it still was not our reality. Somehow a near perfect matching of familiar reality was in place, but my family and their car were not in our space. Their experience doesn't seem much like being in Faery, but if "someone" wanted it to be, then ... how much more would they really need to add? (By the way, the rate of Time seemed normal here too.)

I know that you cannot buy the Helen Lane mystery with the assurance that I can. Maybe the MacManus and Quinn and Fairy Census and all the other displacement tales can fill in that credibility gap. I hope so. Because for me, the Helen Lane event broke the barriers of stubborn skepticism. Also, it about exhausts what I can usefully say to you about all this "other dimensional" stuff. I could utter pseudo-scientific vagueness about the Quantum Front of the Universe-to-come surging into the Uncollapsed Sea-of-Indeterminism (Ouch!) and the possibility of more or less Likely universes being "crystallized" (our own but also slightly less endowed realities) or twin universes with variable particle spins, which only become interactive via exotic force situations in boundary interfaces, or Block theories of Time and re-running of fixed matter relationships a la filmstrips, etc etc until we all went completely insane or at least went out for a drink.
 
But I'm not falling for that. The truth, if ever we find it, resides in only one area: The Case Reports, The Actual Experiences of Real People. Never drift too far from that. Anyone can dream up neat sounding BS.

I have been blessed with just the happy amount of great anomalistic experiences. A good UFO close encounter (which is irrelevant here since advanced aero-tech is part of normal universal behavior), a great Trickster (my watch) translocation, and Helen Lane (plus poltergeists et al) from my family. Helen Lane and the translocation(s) pretty much end discussion for me regarding the existence of another space-time. The translocations and the Trickster pretty much end discussion for me that at least some of these experiences are "intentional" and not by us.

NAUGHTY?

or NICE?

I think that I'm done now. Maybe for a long time. Whether anything more gets published in this blog is unknown to me, as other work (a review chapter on CE2 electromagnetic effects, plus a possible piece for Simon Young, plus a book maybe) encroaches, which work has been long put off. If anyone has a particular request, and I think that i have anything worth saying, maybe that will move me to resuscitate this enterprise again.

As I leave, you might be interested in one of the wilder "World Alongside" claims published and updated earlier on this blog. Way back in 2009 I did an entry called The Man Who Found a Door in the World --- it was from a letter and packet of geological information sent to Dr. Hynek. Later in 2015, I received a little more information on the case and published a second blog entry titled Are There Doors in the World? It at the very least is fun. "Search it" on the blog and have a good read.

Blessings to all of you, and stay close to the "data" (the reports) on your quests --- they will inoculate you against the tiny minded reductionists whose words blow hot against the Soul. As to that: someone told me once that my name could be scrambled to become Charles Wisdom. I thought that was pretty inappropriate and over-inflated (picture pun on this shortly). So I tried one for myself. My spelling wasn't as good but I got Wilde Shamrocs. For this time-displaced Irish Catholic Boy, that felt just about right. The two persona then had a conversation with our cousin, the West Virginian philosopher, Mountain William.

CW: My dear WS, don't you think that you're a bit rough on the academics?
WS: Perhaps, some of them are OK. But others ....
MW: Seems to me that most of them are like fancy cars with four flat tires.
WS: Yeh. They could use a little Fresh Air to get them moving.
CW: But what if you're just full of Hot Air yourself?
WS: That might not be so bad.

Sail On, Friends

SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA part ten.

OK, folks, I need a little more "tolerance" than usual this day. Throughout the past 50 entries, the contents of this topic have seemed to push towards the concept of a "World Alongside" or some sort of parallel reality which our reality has brushes with. It would of course be "nice" if there was any evidence that any such thing could make any sense. Theoretical physics has BS'd quite a lot about that sort of thing, and frankly for me their ideas have been utterly unhelpful .. and as far as I can tell unhelpful to them as well. The only thing we can take from the theorists is that considering such thoughts shouldn't be considered a form of insanity. 

Since the "professionals" don't give us much help, what's left? Hmmm... how about empirical facts? THAT might even be considered "scientific"? 

What facts do we have? (The last 50 posts include quite a few; I have however positive proof that something like this is true.) "Once upon a Time" ..... 

There was a fellow who had a simple habit, which actually wasn't a terrible thing, and though he did it every day, he probably wasn't really Obsessive-Compulsive. He had this open place on his sink top which was a really good spot to empty his pockets at the end of a day. He always had the same stuff (wallet, watch, keys, Cursillo cross, coins) which he could leave there until re-stuffing pockets the next morning. 

One morning he woke up, got his act together, and began to stuff pockets. Whoops! No watch! Where the heck was it? Well here we go --- search the whole sink top. Search the drawers. Search all yesterday's clothes. Multiple times. Search the floor. etc etc. There had been a Doctor's appointment, a lie-down-in-the-grass, a car ride from a friend. It was "obvious", it had just fallen out and gotten lost. 

The next morning --- no watch again. What a pain! Let's search it all again. This time the whole wardrobe --- maybe it was a different pair of pants a different shirt. Search the whole sink top again. Nothing nothing nothing. Ugh. Go about the day. 

Next morning ... well, hell. Search again. Heart not in it as much this time. No watch. What a pain in the butt.

Fourth day. Going without a watch was getting inconvenient. 

Fifth day. Well, there needs to be a decision. Without a watch for five work days.

Made the commitment. Bought the new watch. A simple pocket watch. It'll work.

Next morning.  Two watches --- the new and the old.   COME ON!!!!!   Somewhere in reality someone was laughing really loud (even though I couldn't hear it. --- and yeh, the guy was me if you didn't already know.) 

This Trickster event went exactly as I have related it (though not with the "drama" caused by shrinking a week into a few sentences.) I'm uncomfortable placing this experience in front of you. Why? It's really TOO good isn't it? No paranormal event should be this clearly strange. I'm no magnet for weird experiences (other than my UFO sighting, there haven't been many), but this Trickster event occurred exactly as I've described. I don't try to ask "Why me?' but I have to say that this little experience proved to me that there is in fact some "other place." 

Another Place? 
So, I "know" that things do vanish and reappear. And I have extra reasons to be certain of that, as one of my best friends had a story similar to mine, and one of my sisters is victimized by this phenomenon of the disappearing and returning object often. If you haven't been so blessed, then you can gain confidence by going to one of the internet sites where people tell their tales. Normally I wouldn't put a lot of stock in that, but the numbers of such tales are just about uncountable. Even though I reject 95% of these (I've read several hundred now), there are plenty which seem responsibly reported and not at all told by foolish wannabees. 

This phenomenon tells me a few things. Physical objects from this reality can move somewhere else. They don't just become invisible. They aren't "there" at all. I ran my hand through that disappear/appear spot a dozen times --- there was no mass there. This thing (the watch) was gone. Gone where? The mass, the essential quality of matter, left that location and, since it later came back, had persisted in its existence until it returned from "there" back home. 

So there is a "There." What is it? That question is still too big. Let's look a little longer at smaller matters. 

Small things can go somewhere. Is that a mere cubbyhole in the Universe, or is it something more substantive? Creeping up on that question, we could ask if anything of substantial size ever seems to disappear or mysteriously appear and preferentially both. And ... I'll bet that you have an opinion about that already. But to try to substantiate that bigger claim, I went looking for those larger scale displacements in space. And we can find them. I'm going to toss out a bunch of listings next. Just have the fun of running down through the claims. The list is one I put together from the Paranormal Database (of the UK and Ireland) site.

 
All of those things are potential candidates for things coming or going to "another place." They are also indicators that such an other place would be of significant size. They indicate in fact that this other space is voluminous enough to swallow cars, buildings, roads, maybe even forests and valleys and mountains. ... maybe even what the Old Irish folks called The Stray Sod. 

I tried to do due diligence and comb my own files and the Leprecat for other such anomalies. I wasn't surprised to find a fair number of them. Carl Jung had his own incident. So did Ivan Sanderson. Fellow ufologist Peter Rojcewicz had his case. Diarmuid MacManus investigated three good ones. Ron Quinn told two cases. FATE magazine had four pretty good ones. I stopped logging these at about 80. ... I think that there is enough here to entertain the thought that such a large place might well exist "somewhere." Is it a World Alongside?

 
Can I add anything to this without the speculations getting embarrassingly far from any data at all?   SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, indeed. Like a minor St. Thomas (very minor) I'm coming down to the gritty core of this, and am faced with the inevitability that I can't get much further. 

Is there ANYTHING that the case narratives can add? 

I don't want to cut this off today, but I can't think what else to write. It has a feel that there is a little more in these reports though. I'm going off into a Cave for a bit and see if there is anything else to share with you without wasting your time. Till then .... 

 
 

SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part nine

Wildmen, ABSMs, Yeti, Sasquatch et al

There are surely plenty of reasons to see the issues surrounding "Wildmen" as analogous to those involved with the water cryptids. So, maybe, "Bunk", misinterpretation, biology, and faery are the categories of choice.

Well, you know my view of the "bunk theory" BS. There is no way that the vast numbers of reports on this subject by all manner of witnesses can be hoaxers or con artists or fish story tellers. So, to hell with that category and on to the others. 

 Misinterpretations? Sure. Some incidents could be people not realizing how big some rare humans are, and encountering them just at the wrong moment and the wrong environment. And that's saying nothing about the more likely brush with an adult bear. But many interactions are way too close for this.

A more serious alternative hypothesis would involve the genetic abnormalities causing extreme hair growth. If you put this sort of gene into a very tall person, and have that person banned from society after his condition manifested. Like the famous "boys raised by wolves", such a (admittedly rare) combination would make a VERY good Wildman of the Mountains.

 It seems just possible that such a situation could lead to a cultural legend. Thinking WAY outside the box, if the genetic issue was dominant genetically, and not an early killer, a small tribe of hyper hairy humans could multiply. Other genetic clustering has been known to occur
(ex. the large numbers of albinos in a native Panamanian culture in the Darien Province.) 

But this scenario shouldn't also selectively produce giganticism, so we really should look elsewhere. Because of the numbers and the quality of at least some of the reports, the core alternative theories should reduce to "Bio" vs "Paranormal." 

 All people here know that I hold the Ivan Sanderson archives, and that Ivan was, perhaps, the most intensely interested biologist in all things ABSM.  Ivan ALWAYS wanted a biological  answer to these things, NOT a paranormal one. It was he who wrote the classic ABSM book, covering both the Americas and the Asian areas. He gave the paranormal idea essentially no space. 

He covered all the classic evidence (such as the Shipton Yeti print above.) He mapped everything he could. He theorized on the "standard" shapes and structures of the dozens of reports that he had in his files. He chased The Minnesota Iceman hoax all around the country hoping that it was a true carcass.  (That's what Ivan is staring at in the picture two up.) Until Grover Krantz showed up, Ivan was about as scientific about this possibility of these critters being biological as anyone in the world. 

 When I began to get a little serious about looking at ABSM mysteries, Grover Krantz, PhD anthropologist from Washington State University was really getting rolling in terms of analyses of west coast cases. I sat enthralled by his approach (and fired off a few photos like the above when I thought it wouldn't bother anyone listening.) He was offering a rational hypothesis which involved mapping human populations and bigfoot hotspots, structural analysis of certain footprints which showed (he said) things that a footprint hoaxer would not know, and (as he is holding up above) a reconstructed skull of the extinct anthropoid Gigantopithecus, a possible biological candidate for Sasquatch. Krantz' complexity had so many angles going for it, that I took a long step back from my skeptical first impression, and said to myself: this just maybe could be true. 

The first parts of my own forays looked promising. There were plenty of PNW Native American references to such a creature, and some could easily be interpreted as biological.

Irrationally, just shifting the name in my head from Bigfoot to Sasquatch made me feel more seriously about the creature. Dr. Krantz added to the enthusiasm by kindly sending me several cast copies of key cases that he had in his labs.

I would have had a better BBall career if I'd have had that kind of handsize. The hand cast was sort of fun, but the Bossburg Cripple cast was the one that Krantz claimed had structural odd aspects which for him eliminated the hoax hypothesis. What was even more intriguing to me was the casting which was done from such fine particle sand that the cast showed clear signs of "dermoglyphs" (what you and I call fingerprints, or toeprints in this case.) Dermoglyphs on a faked footprint seemed VERY hard to imagine to me. 

I began mapping the classic resources' cases vs the population densities of the northern Rockies and coast. It sort of worked and sort of didn't. At this point things were promising enough to do the work of diving into the Asian versions of the ABSMs. 

 This too seemed good. Above are "A"a page from a very old Chinese "encyclopedia" showing the Hairy Wildman; "B" the famous Shipton ape-like "Yeti" print; and my photo of an alleged hunk of Snowman chest hair handed around to us at a cryptozoology meeting. The persons controlling that sample promised a fairly quick scientific analysis. IF that hair proved unmatchable with known animal hair, we'd be pretty close to certain that Yeti was not only real but textbook biology. 

Things then began to go both right and wrong. 

A puzzling (to me) wrong thing was that the hair sample was either not analyzed or the results never published. I'm sure that not only I but also the entirety of the International Society for Cryptozoology were watching eagerly. ... but silence. 

What went right was the Ivan Sanderson library. In that library was an amazing and very rare resource.

 
I hadn't paid any attention to these things; they were in Russian afterall. Five monographs. I got interested when, buried in the SITU files, there emerged translations of almost all of these --- Ivan couldn't read Russian either, so he had people do this service for him. I didn't know it at the time, but later someone told me that he knew of only three copies. 

They were commentaries and diaries of joint Russian military and scientific explorations across Asia from the Black Sea area to the China borders looking for evidence of the Hairy Wildman. As needs no mention: Quite interesting.

Asian Wildman reports clustered in several areas, but once again, no carcasses. (I can't remember where, but during this same time I read an explorer who had gotten into a closer relationship with a High Lama than other authors that I've read, and this writer-explorer was told a more frank comment. The Yeti, it was said, surely existed, but not as a mere biological beast, but as a spirit which appeared as a sign of spiritual and practical needs. I found this interesting at that moment but was more on the trail of biology at the time.) 

There even seemed to be support (in the Russian volumes) for an "Almas" site/region and maybe supportive of the relict primitive human/neanderthal theory prior to Myra Shackley who more fully expostulated that idea. But hidden in these pages were all manner of references to Wildmen which sounded much more paranormal than biological. I hadn't gotten into that much as yet, but there was a definite tug that way. 

The biological argument requires you to quit just humming a happy tune about single good cases, but to think like a biologist. This Bigfoot you think that you see cannot be a stand-alone Bigfoot. There must be a reproducing population. That means not only "two-by-two" or even "seven-by-seven" as Noah would demand, but probably 60-100 to keep things genetically right. 

.... and if you're looking for "80" huge hairy apes wandering about in your close vicinity, and you're not seeing them nor their remains, it occurred to me that I needed to check my enthusiasm. 

Ultimately people who had a lot more energy and stamina than I, produced all sorts of maps as this. Sasquatch sightings in Washington State. I would have hoped for a lot more clustering. There is some of that, but the map does begin to look as if these wandering biologicals might show up just anywhere. And then there were the "other" sightings.

Hmmmm ..... reproducing populations of gigantic humanoids everywhere in the country which has any water at all? AND a major concentration around Cleveland!!! Well, I jest.... Somewhat. 

I don't have to buy into all those reports which made up that map, and in fact my instinct is to throw 99% away, but even then --- responsible witness reports of something like this occurring practically anywhere? "Biology" ain't in it.

I basically was in a give-it-up mood for several years. Leave it to the experts. The study of Faery has pointed towards another view, but my beginning-to-sway moment began from an unexpected source. There was a guy who was working on my house on a regular basis. I got to know him well. He was a roughneck and always had been. While working one day in the basement near the archives he noticed all the books on the "odd subjects." He wasn't much interested in UFOs, but he picked books on Bigfoot off the shelf. 

He wanted to read some of this, but what he really wanted to do was tell me about his younger life in Oregon. He had grown up in the area of Sweet Home Oregon (I don't know if his father was employed by the lumber companies but that's likely.) They used to take hiking and camping trips into the mountain woods. When my worker was grown and on his own, he and his brother continued this. The brother's main interest was in sampling his illegal pot plantings up there, and my worker admitted that he wasn't objecting at all to that at first. As time went on, my worker decided that the time in the mountains was wasted if all he was doing was smoking marijuana and zoning out, so when they went, his brother would go one way (towards the pot) and he'd go another. 

As these outings proceeded, he felt that there were regular signs of the presence of Bigfoot, and that he had even seen one at a distance. Then came the close encounter. He had prepared the camp in an honorary way with a recumbent dream-catcher at the campground table, plus left a portion of food behind. When he returned, the food was gone (no real mystery) but there in its place was an eagle feather. (Native American cultures consider the Eagle feather a sign of honoring the recipient as a person due respect. My worker didn't know that, but he wondered if the gift-giver was thanking him for respecting the woods.) 

Suddenly there not far away was the Creature Himself. A classic Bigfoot. 

He thought that he was being communicated to somehow, and the respect was mutual. Still, even with this, my worker, a tough-guy male, still held onto the idea that this was some kind of human-like biological creature. 

So I asked him: how did this meeting end? He replied that the creature just turned away and vanished. I asked: Vanished? Or just walked away? He said: well, he just seemed to vanish. 

I looked at him silently for a few seconds. "Vanished? Does that sound like anything biological to you?" He got silent for a moment. It was as if, just then, he realized that he had no "simple" explanation for his experiences. 

... and I realized that I didn't either. 

Maybe we have some unlucky human freaks here and there. Maybe we have the occasional fantasy-prone bad witness. Maybe Myra Shackley is right and there is a relict population of neanderthals in central Asia. 

But what of all the others? What of the unfindables? What off the vanishers? Who do we know that acts like that? Either the mass of this is some huge social phenomenon or ... you know what. 

I'm really trying to finish this folks. But there's still a little left to do. Then we can all go on to the rest of our normal lives.

SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part eight

Stumbling around in the Realm of the Cryptids

Why this one now: the only possibly important thing for me to write about at this point (relating to Faery) is the argument that there might exist a parallel reality from which these entities could emerge. That requires some real reading/research, however, and even with spending most of a week on it (Jotts, Glitches, Reality Shifts et al), the task is overwhelming. So: not quite yet. Instead I'm going to post some thoughts about Faery and Cryptids off the top of my head.

I can't claim status as a cryptozoologist. But I'm not stone ignorant about that field either (above is the shelving unit for my book library on these matters and there are a few file cabinet drawers.) I can't claim to have earned a "professional opinion" on all I'm about to type, but I can promise you that I've given most of the "big" crypto topics an honest try. 

  
 I've had a lot of exceptional help. As many know, I've been privileged to be tasked with the preservation of Ivan Sanderson's famous three-ring notebooks wherein he collected much of his raw materials for his own launching into these things. (above are most of the cryptozoology ones.) Here and there you can, by surprise, turn up other bits and pieces of crypto-joy in the larger SITU files. This, plus having close friends involved (Jerry Clark, George Eberhart, Henry Bauer), .... well, it's been an honor and a lot of fun. I'm only mentioning these things because I want you to know that the following "crazy" remarks about several of the cryptids haven't just sprung forth out of shallow imagination. 

Let's just jump in the deep end ....

Sea Monsters, Lake Monsters.

Everyone's favorite cryptid (well almost), Nessie, and all her lake and sea serpent cousins? Bunk? Bio? or Faery? Let me start with the Oceans ...

Sea Serpents: I gave this one a good try on this blog between May and July of 2011. There were 14 posts covering Ivan Sanderson's Sea Serpent files notebooks, which looked at 114 different claims. The claims were mapped crudely at least, and the best cases, in my opinion, were highlighted in the texts. The analyses made at least one thing very close to certain for me: none of the claims of sea serpent carcasses hold up. (There's a skeptical fellow going by the e-name of Markus out there who is a relentless attacker of such claims, and though I lack affection for that mindset, I know enough of the biology to realize that such debunking in this topic is legit.) 

Having said that, there are also some terrific witness reports on swim-by observations of very odd sea creatures. 

Some reports are  surely the products of hysterical people, and even a fantasy-prone person here and there. Even if one is very liberal with such opinion, very few cases sound like that at all. Some of the cases DO sound like mis-identification of course. If everyone knew about Oarfish etc the data pile would be cleaner. But there are way too many "close encounters" with good witnessing to honestly claim universal debunking statements anywhere. Some serious numbers of the cases are "good anomalies."

 So, what are they? Biology or something stranger? I don't think that Biology is the correct answer. Biology should have carcasses. I've heard all the decades worth of anomalists dancing around this, but No. These things are a big deal --- not just in size but interest. We've had centuries of real interest in these things. NO carcasses. 

Maybe I could "forgive" that lack if we were still in the 19th century. Not now. In the 20th, the probable only real bio-monster (the Giant Squid) has been found, and found pretty much several times. Maybe a similarly gigantic octopus cousin could still hide out as a region-restricted bottom liver. So, OK if that character finally shows. But we are "radar-ing" the entire oceans now. We NEED to know submarines from underwater serpents, and apparently we are just fine with the knowledge that no such physical serpents freely roam the seas. But some serpents DO seem to occasionally roam. If not "physical", what? 

  There was one crypto-case which I spent a lot of original research upon: the alleged Pacific North West crypto-orm called by the local cultures "Wasgo", "Sisiutl", "WasX", and other names. This was a particularly rich possibility. The Wasgo not only had recent witness claims, but Native American PNW legends concerning it, many sorts of representative artifacts, and even ancient rock carvings. Something was obviously behind all of that. (The picture by the way is of my own artifact of the Wasgo: a ceremonial mask created by a famous mask-maker which I purchased while on a trip to Alaska --- at Skagway.) 

If I was going to find a real crypto-beast and a biological animal, this was a bigtime shot. I put everything together that I could. The beast seemed to be very like a zeuglodont,  a primitive whale with front legs but none at the rear --- an odd fact to be replicated in a myth and esoteric palaeontology identically. The research seemed to push the mystery out towards others, like Ogopogo. I liked the data. No matter how good it was, however, it really didn't distinguish between the paranormal possibility and the biological. I published this in the Journal for Scientific Exploration and am proud of the piece, but I really can't say that I solved the mystery. Here was the best case of a "sea monster" that I could ask for, and I was still juggling two hypotheses --- and no carcass and no high technology supportive evidence. What I DID have were local stories from the Native American cultures which pictured encounter incidents with the Wasgo very much like a fairy incident AND a list of common tribal crests which listed the Wasgo amongst the most popular choices of spirit icon entities. I am as sure as I can be in such a situation that the Wasgo exists, but not at all sure that it can be bio-textbook physical. 

=========================================================================

Nessie? ... and her cousins.

"Not a legend but a fact ... " I rather agree with that. 

 There are enough reports. It surprises me in fact that writers keep repeating over and over the same ones without realizing that others have continued to see things in the Loch, and some of the witnesses are, to me, certainly more impressive  than some of the standard photos. 

 
I'll break Loch Ness tradition by saying that I strongly prefer many of the witness reports (ex. the ones from the monks at the old monastery or some of what Alex Campbell reports or the witnesses that Ted Holiday audiotaped --- I had the privilege of listening to Holiday's old tape with several of them in the company of a good friend and Nessie enthusiast, Will Matthews) to other film classics even including Tim Dinsdale's black triangular hump-above-water filmstrip. In heresy, I am almost unmoved by the "film evidence" even including the flawed hi-tech sonar stuff. But the witnesses tell a very different tale. ... and I'm sold on them. 

 

 So, again in heresy, I find myself sitting in this boat with Ted Holiday and the priest who is trying to exorcise a local loch. As to exorcism for paranormal Orms, I don't know about that. But the paranormal part seems ringing true here ... even more so than in the oceans or the Vancouver Strait of the Wasgo-Sisiutl.

On the right is a page of one of the rarest books in the world. Sorry for the quality of viewing but we can't have everything from a book of only two known copies. (The book was "discovered" by some great detective work and industry by Theo Paijmanns.) 

One of its few chapters describes local (north Scotland) interactions of folks with their lake monster, The Mhorag. Here is an old group of stories about a Nessie cousin. These stories indicate a beast well known to people, but one which is clearly paranormal. Mhorag is a ragingly dynamic "Kelpie." Not a biological specimen. 

If we cross the world, we find these things all over --- and all over in impossibly small bodies of water. But we moderns continue the dance of trying to believe that these are textbook physical. Thankfully I am not an honorable member of the crypto-tribe. That allows me to step back a bit and say: Stop the absurd Dance of rationalization. The academics are never going to buy any of this anyway, so give it up. 

==========================================================================

Mermaids: everyone's favorite cryptid.

I'm going to be brief with this segment and then skip until the next post (as we're getting long today.) I gave this one an honest try also. 

This topic is not rich in data. Although there were 119 claimed incidents that I was able to dig out and log (the blog posts on the four main entries are from 2015, with two earlier ones from 2011 and 2013, and a scatter of comment inter alia), the quality of those reports was nowhere near that of the sea serpent or lake monster narratives. As usual, no legitimate carcass cases --- I am sort of relieved about that given "who" we're talking about here. More sadly, in my opinion VERY poor credibility in the narratives or very poor detail. I've forgotten the 19th century folklore collector who I'm about to quote, but he, operating along the western shores of Britain said: you can get a tale about mermaids almost anywhere, and none of them is like another. I am not sure that I'd go that far, but there are very few close encounters which are also attested to by credible reporters, and whose story has some reasonable second party to report and attest to anything about the case. 

I can say to you that if you want to make money, mermaids are probably the way to go --- the relevant posts have created more old consistent traffic here than any other topic. People like mermaids whether they ever existed or not. For me, maybe they exist, but if so are with absolute certainty paranormal --- the impossible evolutionary biology gets you that conclusion without going any further. (This is not the "land half joined to a water half", it's that the joining halves bear no physical sign of any historical relationship to one another.) 

=========================================================================

So, for the water entities: 

A. Giant Squid and maybe Giant Octopi? Yeh sure, put them in the bio-texts.

B. Ocean and Lake Orms? Nope. Over-sized "kelpies" it is.

C. Merpeople? I have no clue. For hypothetical consistency, I'd rather go with anthropomorphic Naiads for candidates for Faery denizens but I have essentially zero encounter claims for those. 

What about "Hairy wildmen"? What about Saurians or Too-Big Flyers ... and What All? 

I'll try a bit more next time. This is the 50th consecutive post on my exploration of this Faery topic. Although I'm still "in the Woods", I at least can claim to have earned my foggy opinions.

... and a sudden fog came down, and there ahead was a lantern light beckoning. Should we follow? ..........  off in the distance, the sounds of children giggling.