SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part five

On we go. 

Old readership from the early days know that we used a term here called "Out Proctor." It was for the fun of it but it served a purpose too. When we went Out Proctor, we were admitting to ourselves that we were getting into unexplored and confusing territory. The term originated because Proctor WV is a little place near my family's last WV home (New Martinsville.) The folks around there had a local joke that the further you went Out Proctor Road, the more you entered weird and uncharted spaces. We would assume that very far Out Proctor was the home of Mothman and The Flatwoods Monster. For all of us familiar with the blog, going Out Proctor was giving ourselves license for "All The Way Fool" level speculation. 

So today, some of this anyway will be Out Proctor where no apologies are necessary.

Do UFOs Explain Faery?

UFOs and UFO occupants are the fairies in modern dress? Where did this idea come from? To say that Jacques Vallee did it is pretty much true, but doesn't quite say enough. I'm going to say a little bit more (as I believe that the history here is germane.) 

In the late 1960s Jacques Vallee was studying UFOs with Dr. Hynek in Chicago. The USAF Project Blue Book was becoming irrelevant to Hynek (except as a paycheck) and he was becoming more and more irritated with the USAF approach. Hynek wanted a scientific approach and so did Vallee. Along came the Colorado Project and the alleged Scientific Study of UFOs. And it was thoroughly botched. Meanwhile Vallee was getting discouraged about research through fieldwork on single cases no matter how good such a case was. So he decided to try a statistical approach. Being a stats and early computer expert, Vallee was well qualified for doing this (and he helped David Saunders of the Colorado Project decide that such a project was the correct way to go as well. Plus, all of that led ultimately to the massive UFOCAT maintained by Don Johnson.)

All of that should have created optimism, but it did not. In particular, Vallee gave up on the idea that we could explain the UFO phenomenon using a scientific approach. As Colorado and the USAF Blue Book collapsed, Hynek pushed on. But Vallee left the States and went back to his home country seeking a different path. While in France, he is said to have "discovered" the great book of fairy field research, WY Evans-Wentz' Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. 

 
Evans-Wentz WAS a very good lore collector, and presented an impression of the reality of some of this lore as regards actual entities interacting with humans. 
Vallee was very impressed. So much so that he began reading much about fairy lore and (since he is nothing if not a creative mind)  began synthesizing some fairly unique ideas about connections between UFOs and fairies.

Vallee was also influenced by the rather weird idea environment which existed in those days. This was personified by John Keel, who had his moments where one might legitimately label him the craziest writer claiming to be writing about "truth" on the planet. 

For Keel, anything was game, as long as it claimed that things thought to be unrelated were actually related or identical at some sort of fundamental levels. Deserved or not, Vallee and Keel became looked upon as congenial thinkers by readers who preferred novelty and conspiracy to the harder pursuit of facts. Vallee didn't really deserve the comparison, even though some of the trajectory of his new thought seemed to point that way. 

 The new breakthrough book, Passport to Magonia, appeared in 1969 and caused a sensation of both approval and criticism in the anomalies community. The text is intelligent and if you are interested in the subject at all, readible  (I read right through both Evans-Wentz and Passport, for instance, while never being able to stomach the nonsense being spouted by John Keel.) 

Embedded in the book's ideas were however signs that the research wasn't carefully enough pursued . The book at its depths calls for us to believe that UFOs were the same phenomenon as not only fairies, but also angels and devils and ghosts and cryptozoological creatures. You, who have been reading these blog posts, already will note that examination of the actual data does not indicate a sameness of faery and ghosts, and really studying the folklore would have shown that the old cultures believed that these were entirely separate. Plus, despite support from neophiliacs like Keel, there is no good reason to state that faery is the precise same thing as either angels and devils (as seen in the last blogpost about the middle angels.) Nevertheless, the time of publication was ripe, and the concept stuck rather strongly, despite the surface-level-only research of the hypothesis. This does not mean that the hypothesis has to be false. It SHOULD mean, however, that the hypothesis needs to be examined by someone(s) who has spent a very large amount of time studying BOTH fields, both field report sets in depth. There is no evidence that the folklore encounter side of this has been studied with that intensity. (This is why I've bothered to give you this history.) 

Where did "Magonia" come from? 

This is the guy, Agobard of the 9th century in Lyon, France, who wrote about a claim that local farmers were being bombarded by bad weather caused by rogue demon sailors who rode the skies. For no good reason, they would create whirlwinds out of nothing and flatten fields with huge ice falls. Somehow, the locals knew that these no-goods were from a place in the Air called Magonia. Agobard wasn't so sure. He wrote that these stories demonstrated how stupid most people were, that they could believe such rot. ... so it's a little "amusing" to think that our original reference for the Magonia claim is from a fellow who thought that it was nonsense. 

But that still doesn't mean it's wrong.

 As the years have moved on, the "feeling" about Passport has changed, as you see above. And, it has been joined by a herd of other authors.

There in fact seems to be no limit to the amount of Keelian Speculation turned into entire books. The ratio of the claims to the evidence quoted in support of them is a powerful inverse relationship. We are trending towards a society desiring to spew forth exhaustively without the bother of fact. Facts are, as the saying goes, are a real bother as they restrict the full flow of the imagination. 

I felt that it was necessary to explain this sociology and history to wipe away any un-useful  preconceptions about the evidentiary status of the "fairies = UFOnauts"  speculation. This popular hypothesis is not based upon a strong evaluation of case histories, but rather an intriguing possibility. 

What Does The Evidence Say? 

As I studied UFO cases for 40 years rather intensely, and when the Magonian thing came into my perception, a natural thought was "why not?" A second thought was: if I've found "comfort" in reading credible UFO witness reports, why shouldn't I give fairy encounter witness reports the same level of not only critique but also (when earned) confidence? So, a few thousand UFO reports in, I shifted to creating the Leprecat in hopes of giving these ideas an honest attempt.

You've read the past blog entries. You know what the evidence says. And that is ... 

FAERY and UFO Entities are NOT the same thing --- not the same thing at all. And why do I say that? 

The UFO CE cases cannot prove this conclusion by themselves.
The Fairy encounters cannot prove this conclusion by themselves. 
BUT, reading a few thousand UFO cases AND reading several hundred faery cases --- that pushes one, in my opinion, inevitably to that conclusion.

But it's "feeling"....

Here is the concept"UFOs":

Here is the concept"Faery":

How do these two realities feel to you? 

Feel free of course to disagree, but to me these are utterly different. One of them is vitally alive, full of Nature, dynamically unpredictable and quirky. The other one is to me robotically cold, full of technology but not "life", unpredictable but simply mysterious. One "hates" technology; one thrives on it.

Utterly different --- a big statement, but I think that the constant reading of the faery cases should bring everyone to this. The only similarity that I find in the two is that they are both unsolved anomalies. That is apparently enough for John Keel and the unthinking Keelians, but good only for a Ship of Fools. 

But am I being too rough minded? 

Now, I guess, is the time to lay out my most controversial opinion which relates directly to this: the alleged identity of UFO abductions and Faery Baby-stealing Changelings. This constantly restated "obvious connection" is really bad on two levels. The first is: if we sat together and read several so-called abduction cases and then read several changeling claims, we'd be rolling on the floor if anyone had the opinion that they were anything like one another. Having done that, I begin to doubt the intellectual integrity if not the entire intellect of anyone who sees these two things as having ANYTHING to do with one another. 

But the second level is even more "amusing."(with for me a bittersweet side). The pushers of the UFO=Faery theory like to believe that the "Abduction Phenomenon" dominates and characterizes UFOs. But, I've known, rather well, the leading ufologists who were involved with creating the abduction story. This does not make me popular with some of my UFO researcher friends but, as I've hinted to you in old blogposts, my experience with the two most influential proponents of massive abductions, missing time, and messing around with reproductive systems (and "hybrids") has regrettably demonstrated to me that much of this mass phenomenon is investigator created --- unconsciously on their parts, but due to (Bless them) really bad research nevertheless. I DO think that there have been a small number of on-board experiences, but the "millions" and the alien agenda, no. I've read the unpublished materials, know the techniques, watched the emotions of the researchers. This opinion is not superficially arrived at. 

What then about the other side of this identity? The initial thing to understand is that there are NO credible reports of "changelings." There are tons of fairy tale type stories, but no witnesses. AND, there is a real probability that even the fairy tales are based upon something other than fairy. When I was teaching human genetics at Western Michigan University, I naturally came across the chromosome trisomies (ex, Downs Syndrome and the worse ones) but also rarer things like so-called "gargoylism" and some related (thankfully rare) horrors which "turn" the appearance of babies into short-lived old and deformed looking children. Reading that terrible literature, the thought automatically came that the way a less advanced culture might deal with such a horror would be to blame it on some other nasty beings. I even began to write this concept up in an academic way, but found out in mid-flight that a good folklorist named Susan Eberly  (I think that is her name; it's been a long time) had already seen the connections. 

So, the big braggadoccio  synchronicity: Mass UFO Abductions messing with reproduction and producing hybrids plus fairy changelings --- neither are factual. 

But don't SOME UFO cases look like Faery? We've already talked about that. VERY few do. If 99% of UFOs look nothing like Faery, and 99% of Faery looks nothing like UFOs, should one percent (and one percent unsolved mysteries) rule the day? Obviously not, but let's look anyway.

 What about Rosa Dainelli's imps? 

A 1954 "UFO" case. But I think maybe not. 
 Why not just put it in fairy files? The so-called UFO was never in the air.

What about the hoop of fire with fairies standing on it seen by Davydd Fawr in the 1800s? Was it a UFO? Why? Looks like Faery to me. 

You and I could dig out some borderline cases here and there. A few might be faery; a few might be UFO; but why claim that they are the same thing --- especially when all else are so different? 

And .... since we are completely Out Proctor: a final goofy speculation by me.

People constantly puzzle themselves about what the heck the UFOnauts were doing all these years just messing about when we are not that complicated? 

What if WE were not their main research interest? 

Till next time?