SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part two

So, from all of the stuff from the previous dozen posts or more: YES to both of those questions.
But what IS this "FAERY" anyway? 

What do the Witnesses Report?
 We've, by now, seen what they report, but to concentrate on those conclusions:

  I've combined the cartoon illustrations of the more credibly investigated "50" cases and we've seen those displayed for all of us to judge. I'm not terribly unhappy with the impression that they give. If I was just a little smarter. maybe our large family of Little People who cluster around the 2-to-4 foot tall size would be drawn a little less chunky, but, because some witnesses DO describe them as "stout", or like typical gnomes, or even like Snow White's dwarves, maybe my pudgy little fellows aren't THAT far off. For sure there are plenty of exceptions to the dwarfish clan, but these characters dominate. 

I didn't just look at the 50 credible cases in this way. I looked at a lot more. The above represent the "art" for over 230 of the incidents in Leprecat (some of the 50 are in there but there were many others of the best Fairy Census types as well as encounters spoken about with generally better narratives.) When I look at that larger array. I get both more confident of some things, and less  assertive on others. 

When I look at the whole mass of Leprecat incidents, that process (more confident about some things; less assertive about others) continues to magnify. So here those views are:

A. People have objectively real encounters with what look to be entities as often described in folklore. These "Little People" are generally of a two to four foot height (almost wholly so in the best interviewed cases, but spreading out to include entities below one foot and over normal sized in the fuller set of reports.) Small sets of entities which do not fit into this category will be discussed later;

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 Comments on this graph:
    1. This was a LOT of work, and I still can't face you and say "take this to the bank." I've commented somewhat on this effort in a previous post. People just don't take care in their descriptions (usually) so as to make a researcher's logging job easy. The biggest deal here was the common use of the phrase "the size of a child" to describe height. Well, I did my homework on that, and we humans reach three feet high rather quickly. The common phrase COULD refer to someone taller (4 foot?), but context and comparison with cases where an actual number was used seemed to be pointing to the three foot measure. SO: I've dumped all those "size of a child" cases into the 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 column above. I feel OK about that but maybe you will not. 
   2. Given that decision, you can see the resultant peak. This peak and the other columns (with the exception of very tall entities) are dependent upon "classically" described entities of the dwarfish/ elvish/ gnomish/ leprechaunish kind (The Dark Green number, plus the lighter green for classic hairy wild dwarves, and the brown/ [showing black above] for the Native American classic entities.) Classic Little People figures very much dominate the peak and middle of the graph. If you "Go down to the Woods Today" and get lucky, they are what you'll likely see.
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B. Most of these entities are dressed but not in modern clothing. They continue to mimic the clothing as described in the older literature. In the cases involving Native American witnesses, this clothing mimics Native American "frontier" attire. Exceptions to these sentences will also be made later. Of the dwarfish tribe, for instance, wearing NO clothes is abnormal, but not non-existent;

C. Interactions with humans vary widely.  Most often, the interaction appears on the surface to be accidental. Other times, it is more as if the "Other Crowd" sought out the human involved. Whereas there is much talk of humans deliberately seeking out the Fairy World, there is, with one notable exception, no credible case where that intention actually succeeded. The notable exception is the Moyra Doorly experience(s) on the Isle of Arran, where, on a lark, she and her camping mate, tried a recently learned meditation/ "defocussing" technique to see what might happen, for the adventure of it (and having no real hope that anything would result.) In by far the majority of these encounters, even when the interaction appears on the surface accidental, the feeling that I've received about this is the same one that I've ended up with regarding UFO cases: The interactions occur, perhaps even always, on purpose. The moments of interaction are chosen by the Other Crowd and are usually "Display" for some unknown intention. In Simon Young's Fairy Census, he had a query where the witness could respond concerning this, and many witnesses DID feel that their encounter was a display for their benefit, but still not knowing WHY it happened.

D. The title of the painting above is: Are fairies nice? There is almost no evidence in credible cases that fairy incidents can be judged as clearly "nice."  I didn't graph this. Trying to even crudely quantify or even characterize friendliness vs hostility is really rough with these narratives. Here's what you begin to feel about that reading through several dozens of incidents. (a) There are cases of hostility which are just like irresponsible yahooism --- messing with people like the poor mailman and his scattered posts. There aren't many of those; (b) There are cases of avoidance behavior --- seeing you and quickly going away. There are lots of those, and, if we anthropomorphize that, these aren't what you could call "friendly" either. (c) There are cases where there seems to be anger at our intrusion. Again not friendly. (d) There are cases where the atmosphere seems more curious. That's neutral; not friendly. (e) finally there are cases where the entity seems to intend something friendly, a service or even just companionship. These cases can be called friendly, but are far from the majority. The array of differences here makes any general statement impossible to defend. 

The cases do not support the general statement that Faery Folk are friendly. The more common case would be that they are a folk with individual varieties of behaviors just like ourselves. However, they do not seem to merely ape the behavior of their "chosen(?)" witnesses --- i.e., if the witness is a "bad" person, he doesn't automatically get a bad fairy; if good person, not a good fairy.  One MIGHT do so, but these are not some sorts of Justice Machines. 
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I'm quitting for this post now. ... a lot went into it, and there's much to meditate upon.
I still intend to write about some of the less numerous classes  of beings, also the Faery/ UFO question, and go "ALL THE WAY FOOL" with some non-defensible speculations. 

But, next time.  

SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part one

I suppose that the honest way to begin these last few posts is to simply admit that I'm prejudiced. I'd REALLY like this forbidden topic to have some "external reality" about it. That is: it is not we humans just making it all up, by whatever conscious or unconscious means our own anomalous minds are capable of. But I can't fool myself into thinking this or that without giving the quest a genuine try. The difference between reading Diarmuid MacManus and Charles de Lint is starkly clear to me. So, several years ago, stimulated by wonder and also the peculiar thought that some were pushing that my own favorite anomaly (UFOs) was "just" Faery in modern dress, I started that quest. 

The first thing that I noticed on this quest was that it wasn't going to be anywhere as orderly nor robust-in-credible encounters as searching out UFOs. For every investigated fairy incident there were probably a thousand such UFO incidents. Even if I admitted (as I did) that the proper way to compare the relative richness of credible information between the two would be to compare the fairy cases to UFO Close Encounters, the overabundance on the UFO side is still hundreds to one. But the path was through this forest, so why not just go and see what, if anything, was there? 

Was there a hypothesis to use as an intellectual clarifying guide? In UFOlogy, the proper hypothesis is this:
   
"Is there supporting evidence for the existence of advanced aerial technology in our atmosphere which exhibits characteristics beyond those of which we humans (Military, Scientists, et al) were capable of at the time of the incidents' occurrence?"

When one phrases the "UFO question" like that (note that there is no mention of aliens, extraterrestrials, nor any causal agency --- you have to add that into your own head if you want to), the serious UFO researcher can almost SHOUT out a robust "YES!!!" Is there any such Faery hypothesis like this? 

To create such a statement one would have to know at least something about that word "Faery" wouldn't one? And then one would have to take the tempting causal agencies out of the hypothetical research question. As, at least originally, a stone-ignorant rookie, I couldn't yet do that. 

           

The above pictures are a small part of what had to happen in order to attempt any slight comprehension of an anomalous field as complicated as UFOs. I had to really immerse for a long time to even hope for any clarity. As I said, the great quality of the cases helped me make little progress, but it was the immersion in the literature that --- well, this isn't "scientific", but when you do that, you begin to get an intuitive feeling for the whatever-it-is. So, particularly here in the pursuit of Faery, my only real hope for an approach was to just dive into all of the literature and hope for the intuitions to come. So, this I did. 

By the way, as soon as I got really into the readings, the most powerful impression that anyone should get (in my opinion) is that it is flat clear to the reader when one is reading a "fairy tale" like an elaborate around-the-peat-fire story vs a straightforward encounter incident. Both of these types of "tales" appear within the same covers of most of these books. Thankfully the separation of these stories is easy --- maybe the only easy thing about this research project. 

As those of you know who have been reading the previous (how many were there?) postings in the blog , the result of all of that immersion was The Leprecat. Leprecat (The Little People Case Catalog) had ten three-ring notebooks of encounter claims. Within those pages were about 500 case references. Added to that, The Fairy Census of Simon Young chipped in with 600 case claims. Janet Bord's book contributed more, etc etc. Though some of this overlapped, this journey encompassed over a thousand claims. Even then, it paled in comparison with my own UFO files (about 4000 SELECTED reports and good ones generally) plus CUFOS' files and the USAF Project Blue Book cases et al. But reading "just"a thousand claims is not "just" nothing. I'm not embarrassed about only reading a thousand claims. But before I start throwing out soft "conclusions", I just want every reader to know from where such comments are coming. The resource base is not ideal, but maybe just enough. (Of course reading the earlier blog posts would also help anyone to better understand. :=} )

DO CREDIBLE CASES EXIST IN ENOUGH NUMBERS TO INDICATE THAT THERE IS A REAL ANOMALY HERE? 

I assessed all of these claims with my UFO researcher cap on, and came up with 50-52 cases (not including things like Black Fairy Dog claims) which I felt deserved my confidence that they were reported honestly, accurately, trustworthily. They had at least some levels of investigation/ interview, and knowledge of witness that bespoke Credibility. That is not a huge number out of all of those thousand or so claims. But, and here comes the first of the feeling-immersion statements: that amount of credible cases is enough for me. Those "fifty" cases are not only impressive to me, but they also match a very much larger pile of cases which, though they lack the strict bona fides which a researcher desires, in their accumulation they add to my confidence that we have a legitimate anomaly here and one which has persisted for many centuries. That's a big claim by me, but it's how reading all of those leprecat reports feels. I wouldn't stand in front of a typical academic meeting and defend too much of this to-the-death, but in front of a sympathetic audience I think I'd have the courage to do it. 

The "50" more acceptable case reports turn out to serve as a foundational core for perhaps a couple hundred more which have no real red flags from the claimants, and which fit well in detail and behavior with the original 50. It takes faith, but there may well be a big enough pile of these claims to support some type of reality. 

WHAT REALITY? DO THE CASES INDICATE THAT THE EXPERIENCES TAKE PLACE OUTSIDE THE "IMAGINATION?" 

The answer here is the same sort of cautious "Yes." Once one accepts the assertion that witnesses are generally honest in attempting to describe their experiences, then answering this next question is pretty straightforward. This is because many of these incidents are witnessed by multiple witnesses AND at very close range. It requires a VERY flexible and hard-to-buy counter hypothesis to assert that multiple persons have the same up-close "hallucinations" or other weird mental quirks simultaneously. I realize that debunkers love to put out speculative B.S. like this, but if the human race was THIS prone to serious detachment from reality, I do not think we would have made it this far. 

When the University of Colorado's "Scientific Study of UFOs" was funded by the US Air Force in 1966-69, it was faced with the similar problem of assessing "reality" for that subject. The de facto project administrator, Robert Low (picture to our left), thought hard about how to proceed. 

He made the remarkable statement that the UFO problem was really a nested set of three questions: 1. Do credible cases exist to indicate that there is a true anomaly here? and 2. Do cases exist that indicate that the aforementioned anomaly is "externally real", i.e. the subject matters exist outside the mere images in the human reporters' minds? Low said that he already had seen enough evidence to answer both of these questions "YES." 

The third question was: Are these UFOs "extraterrestrial?" On that he felt that such an answer was too far removed from science's methods to allow any honest response. 

If I stand beside Bob Low (which I would consider an honor), and substitute "Faery Folk" for UFO in the three nested questions, I will answer the questions in the same way that he did. "Faery Folk" claims, whatever their deeper reality base, are a justified anomaly, and whatever-this-is is "externally based." BUT what the deeper agency is which lies underneath these encounters, must remain a question. 

If the audience will allow me to stop my assertions at that point, then I'll acknowledge my further ignorance BUT MAKE SOME SOFTER SUGGESTIONS about the deeper realities which could underlie this stuff. This is where the "Immersion Intuitions" take over from the more cautious approach. 

THE REMAINING QUESTIONS IN THIS AREA.

These are some of the ideas that I'd like to foist upon you in the rest of this post and the next:

1. What do the witnesses see as far as the entities and their behaviors are concerned?
2. Is there any substantial change in entities and behaviors across the decades?
3. Are the entities winged?
4. What did the Olde People of the old cultures think that these things were? 
5. If really pushed, what would I say that my own preferred hypothesis was? 
6. Do I think that Faery and UFOs are the same thing, or even closely resemble each other? 

I'm going to leave off this post with the entity galleries from the cases that I felt had stronger investigation/credibility. Staring at them for a bit sort of answers some of the questions above. I'll have more to say about each of the questions next time, but for now --- the fun of the pictures will do.

 Till next time ....

Tolkien ENTS in the 21st Century?

Leprecat has rolled over into the 21st century and it contains another load of encounters. I'm looking at the first decade of the 21st century in this, and the next couple of posts. What was oddly present in those incidents at first glance were THREE claims of large tree like entities. That was almost too much, even given the weirdness of this field of study. Now, there are a lot of "normal" gnomes/ elves/ dwarves etc,  and another large pile of varying oddballs and a dollop of wings, but the "Trees" are just too far out to delay commentary --- so, today the trees, and the wings to fill this out. Later the more normal fairy folk and the unique characters.  

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 THREE FAIRY CENSUS cases: #s 57, 54, and 39. I'm not promising you a lost Tolkien story here, just a few glimpses, then you have to write the rest of the novel. 

A. HAMPSHIRE, UK. 2007. The reporter is a male in his 50s. There was one other witness and they were walking a dog. The witnesses were walking in the woods in mid-afternoon, and had just entered a clearing. There came a profound silence over the atmosphere and the dog glanced up. There, rushing across the field in their general direction was a tree. It was about ten foot tall. As it passed in its closest point, both witnesses could see that it had the smiling face of an entity formed in the bark. It then raced away. Both witnesses agreed as to what they had seen, and felt that some "nature spirit" of some sort must have just crossed their path. 

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B. HAMPSHIRE, UK. 2000s. The witness here is a woman in her 40s. The setting was from a field surrounded by woods. Though others were in the vicinity they were busy elsewhere and did not see this. She was relaxing on the bed of a flatbed trailer and looking towards the woods. About 90-100 feet away, a creature jumped out of one of the trees. It was twelve feet tall and apparently made of "sticks" or some such appearing material. "It was like a skeleton made of sticks." The thing landed and stared at the witness for several seconds, then jumped straight back up into the tree and strode through the branches and away. The witness called over a friend and they went to the spot of the landing, finding nothing there but a smell of nature decay. The witness was flummoxed as to how to categorize what she'd experienced, saying that it didn't seem like ghost nor alien, and didn't have wings. Despite the latter, she felt that it was most like Faery. 

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C. DEVON, UK. 2000s. The witness is a female in her 40s. The environment is a house on a road in a seaside town at 10:30pm. The road was well lit but empty and nothing was stirring. The witness was looking out her window towards this road while talking on the phone to her husband. Along this road came, walking very slowly ("in a measured way"), a "tree-man." His walk was slow enough so that he took about two minutes to pass from the original point of visibility to being blocked by a neighbor's hedge. Her words of description are best here:

"Seven foot tall, slim. I could clearly see a trunk like body from the waist up, branch like arms and a quite haggard face with short branches coming from the top of the head and sides, but not like a true tree, they didn't seem to taper to twigs.
" Haggard/wizened face, seemed old. Bark-like heavy grooved texture of body and face, long branch like arms bent at the elbow area, unnaturally straight and thin arms, long hands. A few leaves scattered on the body and arms. 'Stumpy' branches from head." 

If that isn't the telling of a smallish version of a Tolkien Ent I don't know what is. I read this last one and said "This is too good to be true." But what is my criterion for that knee-jerk? This tale is wonderfully and precisely told, without hubris or romance. It lacks just the face-to-face investigation and credibility check to be a foundation stone. But it doesn't have that, so .... SAY anyone in Devon!!! would you please go interview this lady?! Do the search for truth a favor. Find out if she is as true as she seems. 

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Having gone through those three encounters, it was impossible not to be reminded that the UK's most famous recent fairy case (The Moyra Doorly incidents in Arran Isle in 2000) have embedded in them a case of "sticks" fairies. 

These are my cartoons for Ms. Doorly's menagerie.  Note that the critter on the right is like a tree-man made of branches or naked sticks. The description of these beings was not quite exact enough for me to imagine what their structure amounted to, so it's a big guess. The two juxtaposed possibilities below indicate two competing possibilities out of many.

Whatever these things were they were reportedly UNpleasant. By the way, for reasons unknown to me, there is some extra interest "out there" in internet land about "The Arran Enigma" as my blog gets more hits on an old posting of that title than these recent ones (about 100+ last week.) If you're interested in that old post (I think that I still stand by what I wrote), it's searchable on this blog, or just plow backwards in time to November 8, 2011. 

.... and, as an add-on to that: on the mail-in site "Fairy Encounters" came one of those no-name, no-location, vague-time period (2000s) stories of a witness seeing a "stick-man" in a grove of walnut trees (believed by the witness to be "associated" with that grove). The Stick Man was a humanoid formed entity made entirely out of sticks, and perhaps six feet tall. 

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OK. Fun. Maybe even True. Now just to fill out this post: were there any winged entities in this time period for Leprecat?  Well .... Three.

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A. Staffordshire, UK. 2000s. Fairy Census Case #121. 

Single witness in her teens. She felt that this was a display given just for her. She was on a bridge waiting for a friend. She caught movement out of the corner of her eye. (She says that she then looked up squarely at them, so OK on this point.) They were small (size not stated but the impression is: very small, tinkerbell small.) There were a small number of them (again not stated.) They all had wings. The wings were like butterfly wings. They sat on branches and hovered in the air. They were "small beautiful people" and smiled at her. "They looked mostly like how I would imagine them." She looked away after a few minutes and they were gone. 

You can imagine that I have some troubles with this. But there is one "sticker" for me in the narrative (which probably makes no sense for anyone else.) Just as an afterthought, she says about their color that they matched the desert patina that her dad found on a skeleton when he was a younger man. ... odd thing to say. Odd if she was just spewing out a hypnogogic Tinkerbell encounter. I can't make anything of that, but it just haunts a bit.

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B. Rhondda, Wales. 2000s. Fairy Census Case #190. 

The witness is a female in her 40s. The scene was her garden about mid-day. The narrative is somewhat disjointed but it seems that she felt that there was an unusual feeling in the air and she didn't hear any sounds (OZ again?) She saw the outline of something "at the bottom of the garden." This outline was golden and transparent. It shimmered and had long wings. Then there was a second being, smaller with a flash of blue green color. The witness admits that this could have been a dragonfly, but doesn't think so. 

Following this, she felt an invisible person pressing against her on the seat. She felt that she was receiving a sign, a deliberate display. Despite the vague "outline" type of description, she then compared the fairies to paintings of a particular artist who painted definite detailed winged beings (actually the picture for the Staffordshire case is a fairy painting by this man, and I probably should have reversed those two images.) The witness then claimed to continue to see fairies many times thereafter. 

She then completed her narrative with the eye-opening comment that her family has had a house brounie ever since 2000, but does not give any further commentary. So ... incredibly blessed or just incredible? 

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C. "No Location" nor even vague date. About.com posting. 

The witness is an adult male who says he owns a large country house connected with a farm. The witness habitually took long walks. He is a birdwatcher and collects bird nests as a hobby. He spotted a couple of abandoned nests and hauled a ladder back out later. In one of the nests were a large number of very small winged people dancing in a circle. They were only an inch tall with clothes made out of leaves. 

He says that he watched this activity for an hour then went back to his house to fetch his wife. He says that his wife also saw this. These mini-fairies stayed dancing in that nest for the entire winter and could always be seen. (I trust that the readers are getting quite antsy about this by now --- one example being the absence of even trying to get evidence.) At the beginning of Spring, they were gone. 

... I apologize to all of you for my attitude on this, but the multimonths worth of almost casual going to see long term resident visible fairies with no attempts to photograph them or bring other people to see them, puts me into a deep funk about this claim. 

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So, under the "shade" of a magnificent ancient gnarled oak (photo by a fine photographer named Brian Robert Marshall, who did the striking thing above, with some color adjustment by me), what can we say that we heard today? 

I heard some extremely interesting narratives about entities resembling smallish Tolkien Ents, but not so impressed by the winged fairy cases. All five of the tree-man cases seem "attractive." None of the three winged cases strike me that way. (for different reasons.) 

When I began researching Leprecat, if anyone would have told me that at some point in the walk in the woods I'd start seriously considering Tree-men as denizens of Faery, I might have even laughed out loud. 

Next time? Probably not so strange. But Faery always intrigues me regardless.

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. 

LEPRECAT Four, part 3

 A Few More Incidents From The 1950s

 

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A. rural Australia. mid-20th century: This is a claim from a book of a known author who is sold on the general cosmology associated with spirit realms, nature entities, energy forms etc. (at least I think that this is the chain of provenance here.) The resource book is a somewhat rare thing entitled DEVAS and MEN. I think that the editor(?) of this compendium of fairy/deva writings in theosophical works is Geoffrey Hodson. I also believe that the author of the relevant essay in this book is a lady from Australia named Clara Codd. Both of these people were well-known authors in the theosophical community. The incident described below is a personal report to Clara Codd after a radio program. The witness was impressed by Codd's theories and so wrote a letter describing her own experience, wondering whether it was related. 

It was a moonlit evening and the witness was feeling the atmosphere and went into her garden to enjoy the magic of the stillness. Standing there, she was surrounded suddenly by small flying beings that she viewed as Nature Spirits. They were a foot and a half tall, and floated about in light airy flight. From their head and shoulder areas came a glowing light or aura which streamed outward and down. This aura had the surprising result of making the viewer feel that the fairies had energy auras shaped somewhat like wings. As the moonlight passed through them, they scintillated like green, gold, and blue jewels, like "living opals." Then they floated up over the laurel bushes and disappeared. 

That was beautiful. Wish that I could shake my prejudices on this .... but I can't. Gray basket. In my defense, I think that if this case had a named witness, and a known person who not only passed the story on but had interviewed the witness and gave her some bona fides, I could quash my prejudices about the theosophical philosophy element.
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B. Canby, OR, 1950.  This is a case which came into the UFO community, but unfortunately 1950 was a time much too early for a normal UFO investigation. The big UFO organizations did not even exist in 1950, and were years away from enough robustness that they might have gotten a good investigator into the area. Other than the USAF, the only other public name associated with UFOs was the man who had made the report which awakened the entire country to the phenomenon: Kenneth Arnold. The witness to the following report wrote, amazingly, to him almost immediately after the event. Arnold then went to her and did a personal interview. (WHY can't UK fairy cases be done this way?) 

The witness (name and address known) was working on her lawn. On a neighbor's lawn nearby came a little person. It was just a foot tall and was facing away. The being then turned and she got a good look at it. He was a very tan-skinned male with hair colored like his skin. He had on a plaid shirt and what looked like work trousers.  He was stocky. On his head was a black skullcap. The witness tried to get another witness but the little man waddled away. When he reached a parked vehicle, he simply walked straight underneath it without ducking, and then vanished. 

Fairy? Who knows? No UFO in sight. And ... due to the UFO style investigation, very probably a real event correctly reported. Thank you, Kenneth Arnold.
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C. Somewhere in England in the 1950s. Ouch to the vagueness. This is a case from The Fairy Census (which did a fine service to the raw field of study, but due to vagueness and "witness distance" such as this, isn't a lot of help for anything but rough statistics and maybe sociology.)

I've included this incident here because the short narrative is modestly presented, fairly clear, and has a few interesting details. The witness was a young girl, perhaps entering-grade school age. She, her parents, and four siblings were out for a walk and she was running ahead of the herd. Thus she became sole witness. There on or at the path was a very small being, which she called an elf. She did not think of it as a fairy as it had no wings (her point of view on definitions.) The being was eight to ten inches tall and dressed entirely in "greens." The being apparently was not old looking nor stocky (i.e. not a gnome.) During this period where the two stared at one another, the witness felt that a profound silence had persisted.  (OZ Effect?) Then she snapped out of her state of amazement and called for her family, but by the time they arrived the "elf" had gone. "Naturally" none of her family (except her mom) believed her. 

Once again: too bad about the weak provenance. This could well be a good encounter.
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D. Lancashire, UK. mid-20th century. Well, this is another report out of DEVAS and MEN. Apparently it's a little better provenance in that a witness is named as is a rough location, and the source publication ("The Herald of the Star", a theosophical journal.) I'm of the belief or assumption that this story came from a letter to that journal. The reporter is fully in synch with theosophical jargon and uses it freely in the letter. The story is told as if the witness was living it as he wrote (dramatic effect?) I think that for your help in making your decision here, just putting his own paragraphs in here is best.

Make of this what you will. I read very small beings (4 to 6 inches tall) of a shape-shifting nature, but looking like little people. They have capes, coats, collars, and pointed caps. Knee britches. Red faces. Slanted eyes (giving me the feeling of very small elves.) They communicate somehow, and are in charge of caring for the trees. If they had wings, they'd be right from Disney central casting for a Tinkerbell movie (and probably quite a delightful one.) I do not get any information as to why Sergent thinks he so easily sees them while the rest of us do not. Maybe he has the luxury of the Second Sight and all of this is psychic. 

He says one odd but interesting thing, something that someone merely elaborating on their philosophy doesn't have to say: "Much of what they do on the ground appears to have no purpose at all, BEING MERELY IMITATIVE; they copy the movements of the humans without understanding their purpose." In the bigger picture that Sergent describes, this comment makes no sense whatsoever, but for any of us who read a lot of fairy encounters (or UFO CE3s for that matter) there's something that resonates here. I don't want to rock and roll with speculation here --- the purpose of opening up Leprecat is to see if a case for reality of Little People existence can be made --- but there's an "itch" which lingers on many encounters --- the idea that the "others" lack something when it comes to true creativity or novelty. (That's what the Fairy phenomenon feels like; the UFO CE3s feel rather like the nonsense there is part of making the display deliberately confusing and unpatterned.)

Is the last case any good? It's cute. That's all I'll give it. If poorly credible cases are going to make a hit with me, they better match a significant pile of better credibility cases. 
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E. Eliot. ME. 1950s. A case from a journal about anomalies. The editor is a known individual who is enthusiastic about such things.The strength of the matter is that this is a situation where the witness lived near enough so that the writer went to her place for personal interviews. The result is that the witness is named, located, and even quoted from the interviews. The weakness in the case is that the witness claimed a substantial history in communicating with persons not of this planet associated with UFOs --- i.e. she is what UFOlogists call a "contactee." I have shrugged this off (to begin with) because the instances with fairy beings seem separate from the UFO stuff in practically every way. 

The experience goes like this: the witness' daughter was about six years old and sick one winter. She had arranged a recliner bed near a window so the girl could look out at the winter scenes. The girl called for her mom to come and see the fairies. Upon arriving at the window, there, near the snow covered limbs of a spruce tree, were 6 or 7 floating fairies. They had wings and were about a foot tall. The wings were diaphanous and they wore richly colored dresses of "velvet." Red, Blue, Green, Purple, Pink; there were more than one in red. These were Tinkerbells therefore but tall for such gossamer winged females. 

The mother accepted the experience easily (given her propensity for odd experiences, but mainly because her daughter had imaginary playmates from an early age, and the mother interpreted this as those playmates coming to keep her daughter company in her illness, and for whatever reason allowing the mother to see them this time.) The mother tries to fit this into her belief system but doesn't really succeed --- her commentary about UFO contacts and this experience reaches no harmonious contact of thought, but sits on the page as two separate rambling monologues. The mother also mentions that later in time, her granddaughter told her of seeing little ground people (no wings) dressed in green and brown, who she called "lepricons". Again, this has no integrated rationale with her contactee claims. 

So, awkward. Could be a good case with a bit of a wonky witness. Too bad there was no follow-up with the child in those later years. THAT could have been very interesting. 
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So, not a lot of comfort zone today. Two claims embedded in theosophy, only one of which MIGHT have had a witness known to the publicizer. The Eliot, Maine case is rather nice in a lot of ways, but the witness needs more vetting. At least we have a personal interview and quotes. The Fairy Census case might also be OK but like almost all its ilk it lacks any closeness to the source. Only the Kenneth Arnold investigated case has personal interviews and timely quoting and investigating. That case looks like a Pacific Coast Native American entity in more modern dress. Maybe that's our one decent incident today. 

Next time I'll try to insert claims from UFO case files which seem (at least to me) to be outliers and not properly belonging in the UFO field. Fifties cases. Veteran UFO researchers can guess one of those that will be mentioned --- a great "UFO" favorite of some, and, although a favorite in some sense, NOT a UFO favorite for me. 

Till then stay healthy and stay safe at home as much as you can.

"So. What do you think, Carl?" 
"Is anyone taping, Mike?" 

LEPRECAT Four, part 2

Here we go again down that path into ..... ?

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This set of cases is a little different from most in that only two of the seven encounters above are from the British Isles. We have three Native American incidents, and some of these have some potential for being good ones. So, let's give them a chance.

A. Perryville, Alaska. 1950s and earlier. We've mentioned other cases in this southern Alaskan area before. The source is Alaska Magazine, and resulted from an encounter by an Aleut resident who had a close run-in with a short hairy being a decade or more before this listing. It was during an interview that he had with the village elders that they told him that these little hairy men (sort of the gnomish version of Bigfoot) were well known in the villages, as they still were seen coming secretively into the villages and doing things like stealing fish off drying racks. 

I'm open to the reality of this claim especially as it fits in well with cultural beliefs even though it is not integrated into some sort of fairytale legends. Also, we met with a British Isles version of this sort of hairy boggart, with the only difference being that the Cornwall version was wearing rough trousers.
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B. Provo River, Utah Valley. mid-20th century. This report comes from a Bigfoot newsletter (The Track Record)  via a newspaper story out of Provo, Utah's Daily Herald. The case is OK but not great on provenance in that the witness is named and presented as a known person (locale members of the Ute tribe) in the area. He and a second witness observed the following. 

The two were fishing on the Provo River when they came to a spot in the river where a large flat rock lay. On that rock were several little human-like creatures. They were between two and three foot tall beings, "the size of a three year old child." They looked like smaller versions of natives but hairier. They have a name in that area: "Pawapicts" in the native language, and "water babies" in English. They were making crying noises, and the traditional "Walla-la-loo loo" call. The witnesses tried to get closer, but the Pawapicts dove into the river and did not reappear. The water levels then seemed to unnaturally rise. This alarmed the witnesses who then fled. 

Interesting incident well-fitted into the locale views of the beings ... but in need of a better investigation, interview, write-up or whatever.
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C. Boy River, Minnesota. mid-20th century. This is going to sound like a frivolous form of provenance for an encounter but (and maybe I'm far wrong) I think that this source is quite good. I got this incident from a chat site. But not just any chat site. It's a site for Native Americans writing about things of interest in their culture. I read a lot of the site, and am impressed by the frank and earnest feeling that I get from the posting exchanges. Others may differ but my feeling here was that the account was honest. 

This comes from members of the Mille du Lac Ojibwe  tribe of upper Minnesota. A family was out on the shores of the Boy River "ricing." This is a family affair where they go along the river shore looking for wild (North American-style) "rice", picking large handfuls of the stuff and beating them on flat rocks to separate the grain. This is called "Knocking Rice." Up ahead, apparently around a river bend, they heard others knocking rice. They continued on and saw that it was not another tribal family but the Memegwesiwug, the region's Little People. There were two small hairy "indians" dressed as they were but with hair on their faces. Suddenly a canoe also appeared, and in a few more seconds both the Memegwesiwug and the canoe vanished. These sorts of stories are scattered across the northern tier of Native American cultures from New Brunswick to Vancouver.
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D. Neversink Reservoir, Catskills, NY. c. mid-1950s. This is a Ron Quinn case from his gathering of cases from Northern New York, but the reporter here had this encounter in the Catskills. Quinn allegedly knew of a similar occurrence in Washington state (I think the location might be wrong ... see later), so this one particularly fascinated him. 

A hiker was having an autumn walk alongside the reservoir. It was country that he had walked many times before, and was very familiar with this area near the Peekamoose mountains. After a while he saw a fog bank hanging over the water. Approaching, there was a bridge sticking out of the fog to the shore. He hadn't been aware of such a structure before, so decided to explore it. The bridge was three feet wide, brass, and decorated with nice geometric designs. He walked across into the fog, losing sight of the land, and then out the other end onto a small island. And here is where one is challenged in one's beliefs.

The whole island was encircled by this mist. (The witness estimated it as about six acres of land.) Animals which the witness could not identify were roaming about (I'm upset that these were not described), and the trees and vegetation seemed unfamiliar too. The bigger deal for him, though were the Little Men. Three such beings stood at the shoreline about 40 yards away. They seemed to be trying to gaze through the mist at the opposite shore. They stood three feet tall, had white robes and long silky hair. They were bearded, and the one in the center carried some sort of object which the witness couldn't identify. The three men looked his way but seemed not to see him; then moved off towards the trees. The witness was becoming creeped out, and turned back to the bridge and crossed it. 

Back on "his" side, he watched the fog dissipate AND the bridge disappear. The Peekamoose mountains appeared beyond the island, but seemingly now containing a "new" mountain of which he hadn't noticed before. It was relatively sharp peaked and had clouds on its slopes. Then the transition completed itself, with the mid-reservoir island and the "new" mountain also fading away. When the witness returned to his home, he asked if anyone else had seen anything unusual on the lake. One said that there was some fog out there, but that was all.  

As an aside, Ron Quinn related a second story of this type. He felt that it related to Lake Washington in Washington State, but I have an itch that this was possibly quite near the earlier story at the Lake Washington Reservoir in NY State, north of the Catskills. Whichever (and it is at this point probably not important), this experience was reported by a doctor also out for a shoreside walk. He too came across a morning mist and a small bridge extending into it. He too crossed that bridge (as probably would we all) and came to an unknown small island with odd animals. In this case it also was inhabited by one old man. The doctor saw him sitting on some rocks by the shore looking outwards. Before the witness could do anything else, the old man faded away, and the witness returned by the bridge to see the rest of the "illusion?" fade away as well. This time a neighbor some distance away thought that he had seen the mist and thought that there was a small island inside it, all of which faded out. 

High Romance. What can you do with it? The general story fits what the Olde Irish call The Stray Sod --- areas of land which should not be there, but sometimes can be entered. So .... a hint of one of our favorite concepts? A parallel existence mostly mimicking our own? The Land just there alongside? The Land of Faery? 

I can't help liking it. Can't help rooting for it. Can't help keeping it respectfully off to the side of the strong evidence pile ---- where, I guess, a "World Alongside" belongs.
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 E. Derbyshire, UK. mid-20th century. Back to the real world? HA!!!! Only in these strange waters could one view an encounter with one of The Little People as a return to the real world. But this shows/reminds us how far from normal shores we come in these explorations. More fun .... more adventure .... more warning about excess enthusiasm.  :={

This is a case report from The Ley Hunter. I respect fellows like Paul Devereux who edited this journal (though not until a couple of years after this report), so I'm not prejudiced against it to start. BUT, the claimant here insisted upon going under an assumed name. Since this wasn't the internet age with its ubiquitous and unhelpful name-hiding, I'll assume that the editors of The Ley Hunter knew who this was. But that's an assumption and doesn't aid credibility. 

The encounter takes place in Alderwasley, which is a small village in Derbyshire. It is a mere five miles from Matlock Bath, which was considered by a 19th century writer as The Heart of Fairyland in this area. I'd like to think that helps the context but ....? Whatever the truth of that, the encounter took place on a hike in the woods and hills near the village (I get the strong feeling that if anyone REALLY wants a folklore entity interaction, they better get a hiking hobby and some isolated hills,woods, streams, lakeshores. Here in Kalamazoo, Michigan I'm out of luck in that. )(the isolated part.) 

The witness was really enjoying the day, reveling in the sunshine and the good air, and happily exploring the hillsides. He sat down on a grassy bank not far from a old low mound. Then beside him, he saw a small "person." It was a "dumpy-looking chap" less than four foot tall INCLUDING his tall pointed cap. He was dressed all in grass-green. The witness was not alarmed but very curious. He tried to communicate. Communication took place but not verbally --- It sounds from the write-up that this was "telepathy" mind-to-mind. The witness wrote two things about the conversation: 1. the being told him that its job was helping the breaking down of dead materials for the utilization by the plants (essentially fungus-etc function of making dead plant matter available as plant food.) 2. He wasn't a nature spirit or elemental but a "human being." ... my guts tell me that even if everything in this story is accurately told from the witness' view, that neither of these assertions by the entity were true. Example: it's almost absurd for the entity to claim it is a human with its appearance and paranormality, so that makes it a liar. AND to break down all the decay matter in a forest to make plant food is a megaton task, which we in science know how Nature does it without elvin help, and we'd be wasting millions of gnomes mining away in the dirt. Flippant? Eh. Maybe. 

The case is a fun case. Wish for FAR more on the credibility side. But it could be real even if the gnome lied.
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F. Somerset, UK. mid-20th century. A Terrible beginning to the provenance, as this is a letter to FATE Magazine. It saves itself a little in that the correspondent names herself and gives an address. It also allegedly has two witnesses. The letter is unusually intelligent for FATE correspondents without being braggadocio or self-enhancing. Again, the "feel" of this one isn't bad. 

The letter had three separate incidents. One was when the witness was alone in her mother's garden and reading under a tree. She looked up and spotted a little man running from her yard onto another lawn. The creature was about a foot and a half tall, dressed all in brown, and sturdily built. She thought of it as a gnome. The second experience was not by her, but a male friend of the family. He was doing some gardening for her mother and saw the same gnome, or at least one looking the same. 

 And now what we all have been waiting for: Tinkerbell.

The third incident was when she and her mom were together in that garden cutting roses. Her mom brought her finger to her lips, then quietly pointed toward one of the roses. The witness saw a "perfectly shaped" miniature woman (about six inches tall) who sported "brilliantly colored diaphanous wings like that of a dragonfly." This fairy's clothes were also semi-transparent and you could see her pale pink skin through them. She carried a wand on the tip of which was a light like a small star. She pointed this at the rose. Her hair was long and silvery, also sort of diaphanous and surrounded her head like an aura. 

The witness and her mother watched the fairy hovering about the flower, wings fluttering rapidly "like a hummingbird's", and then she disappeared. 

Boy I'd like to have an interview with the mother .... I'm not supposed to buy Tinkerbell stories. No little winged cute beings in diaphanous clothing and carrying wands. My betters in this business (including Jerry Clark) have told me this. In this case at least, the weak provenance of the encounter allows me a convenient way out, but I rather liked the two gnome incidents as they at least fit the main pattern. Buying half the incidents reported and rejecting the other half doesn't seem kosher. 

But I suspect we'll run into Tinkerbell again.
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G. Guanajuata, Mexico. mid-20th century. This provenance also is weak --- what we're too often lumbered with in this topic area. It comes from three websites. The poster is "Gabriel L." on two of the sites, and there is a reference to him on a third by an acquaintance near-family in-law side. So at least this fellow exists and lived in Guanajuato, where the family originated. Gabriel says that very close relatives have told him that they have seen the "duendes" which is a term used for both ghosts/spirits and gnomes. In the third reference however, it appears that Gabriel himself had an encounter with this sort of creature when he was very young, but didn't want to mention it in his report on his sister's incidents. He wanted to talk about these family matters but not take too much heat himself, it appears. 

So, here is his sister's incident: she, several times, was awakened in the evening with enough noise that she would go down to the kitchen to see what was going on. She would "interrupt" the duendes when she arrived. They'd be running about, including scrambling on top of the table, seeking out every loose scrap of food they could discover. They were great if you wanted noisy left-over eaters, but a rather ugly crowd of one foot tall (or so) gnomish critters wearing old and patchwork-repaired dirty clothing. They had long beards and were old looking. The sister was always scared or at least shocked at sighting them. They were only occasionally around but she saw them several times. 

Gabriel's own experience was when he was only five or six. He and some friends were chasing a squirrel when it ran down o hole. Gabriel was left to guard the hole while his buddies went to get some buckets of water to flush it out. A duende then came up out of the hole. It pointed elsewhere and said: dig over there instead.  Gabriel did so and found a box with some coins in it. When his friends returned, he had just gotten the box open, but had to watch it and the coins turn into dust. 

This latter has all the signs of big story telling. The tale of the sister does not particularly, as it is quite like some of the poltergeist+apparitional encounters in Old England. But when one adds Gabriel's other tale, this begins to stress the nervous system. I'll place this in a deep gray box for the moment. 

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This set of encounters has its definite weaknesses, especially (as usual) in the area of poor provenance. Of them I like the first three --- the Native American cases. If Ron Quinn's two Stray Sod cases were from witnesses that he knew (and they could have been but it's not stated) they'd be not just likable but of whacking great strangeness. The three foot tall (including pointed hat) green-dressed gnome is surely nice in theory, but I'm left hoping that The Ley Hunter board knew the reporter. If they did, it is probably good. These five cases are in the patterned three to four foot tall range. The two smallest entities (in the foot tall range) are in the weakest provenance situations. 

... and then there's Tinkerbell. Really need better provenance here. But who's to say? 

Till next time --- stay healthy.