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 THREE

Encounters in LEPRECAT 3:

 ------A------   ------B------   ------C------  ------D------  -------E------
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A: The Noatak Alaska case is actually a set of three experiences had by a husband and wife between the years 1938 and 1947. In all three incidents the Little People are described the same way: bundled up like small eskimos in caribou skins and hairy faces with head hair worn in bangs. These beings are widely known in the region as the "Inukins." The encounters were 1.) a violent wrestling match over water drawn from the river, 2.) an attempt at theft of drying salmon on an outside rack; and 3.) a forest stalking trickster act on a group of hunters by a group of the Inukin making noises and using birdcall communications. The weakness in this case is that all I have is a newsclipping. IF the reporter is trustworthy, then the reports are much better, as he claims to have personally interviewed witnesses and gives quotes.
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B: The Eslov, Sweden case is extremely interesting to me in that it is a Little People case where the investigator was one of the best UFO investigators we have (Anders Liljegren of Sweden.) The witness is a 24 year old (at the time) man returning to his farm late at night (c.10pm). He was approaching his farmland he became aware of a troop of small men (c. a little over a foot tall each). They were trooping in military order and about 10-12 of them. Their clothes were  one-piece dark green with caps to match. They had large bearded heads. They came by him only a few meters away so he had a good long look. Their facial expressions were "hard and cruel." He could easily hear the sound of their footsteps on the frozen ground and smell a strange odor. They continued out into a field. The witness saw a blue-violet light in a foggy patch, heard a whining sound,  and "the whole sight was gone." 

 Because this is Liljegren, and is such a classic trooping gnome incident (AND from rural Sweden!) I rate this incident highly. 
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C. Juminda, Estonia: this case comes from another excellent UFO investigator Sven Schalin of Sweden. It is extracted from a letter sent by Schalin to superman UFO researcher Ted Bloecher when he was at CSI-NY. Ted put this extract in his HUMCAT (humanoid catalog) but I was not able to find the original letter at CUFOS. Because of that, I don't have the sketch of the creature that was in that letter, and have just inserted a Frog/Lizard man drawing above (which doesn't have any precision to the case but is roughly in the ball park.) 

The action goes this way: Two men encountered a strange creature along some path. They chased it and the chase lasted a hundred feet or more. The thing's height was 3 and 1/2 feet tall about two feet of which were legs. The head sat without noticeable neck directly on the body which was brown-green with lighter colored hands. The mouth was an enormous slit covering almost the entire face. As the being walked, it did so in an odd mincing prance as if being careful. Then with an amazing flurrying of its feet, it took off at great speed, disappearing somewhere ahead along the path. 

Well, what can you do with that one?  Good researcher, direct interview with living witness, but a total outlier (to my knowledge) on form. A one-off Boggart? 
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D.  Ballynanty, Ireland: I'm apparently swamped in the individual pixillated bits. This case feels like I've already presented it, but all a quick read-back showed me is that this blog seems to drop things (pictures mainly) out of already published things. Leaving that to the "Leprechauns-at-work" theory, I'll just go forward with this anyway. I got this case off an internet site which I find has apparently misrepresented it. It placed the action in the 20th century, but now I find (via Janet Bord) that it's really pre-1900. Well, let's forget the date problem and go ahead and describe the case.

Here a writer about Ghosts states that he has a relative to whom this happened: two men were in a horse-drawn cart when the horse shied. It stood there shivering while the road seemed teeming with small fairy people. They attacked the cart, pulling at the driver as if to force him off the carriage. He put up a mighty fight and so the fairy hoard did not succeed. Meanwhile the servant man just shrunk away cowering. The attacked man grabbed the reins and forced the horse to move forward. After successfully doing so for some distance, the fairy folk relented and let them alone to continue away. The most striking thing he remembered about the incident was that the touch of the fairies grabbing at him was numbing cold. He immediately began praying, to which he attributed his ability to escape. 

A Wow of a claim. It needs a better provenance by a long shot however.
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E. Doxey Pool, Devonshire: Rock and Roll Time.

Two pictures of Doxey Pool (Romantic and Natural versions.) Not a particularly large body of water, but one with a legend. 

Doxey Pool is one of many watery places in the UK which allegedly houses a Water Spirit/Sprite nicknamed "Jenny Greenteeth." Jenny is not your nicest of folklore characters, sporting a reputation for grabbing the unwary and hauling them under to a watery end. "So children, if you go near the pool, don't get too near or Jenny Greenteeth will grab you!!" Wonderful use of folklore as fairy tale to warn children against doing stupid things. ... and quite unbelievable as such. BUT ... 

In 1949, a woman (named in the references) was out at the pool deciding to go for a swim. As she stood on the banks, the materials of the edges of the Pool seemed to be coming together in formation of something huge. Weeds and Mud and pond debris formed itself into a giant (19 foot tall) pond entity which rose Brown and Dark Green from the surface towering. It pointed a finger at the woman, then slowly dissolved into disarray back into the pool. 

Well, what do we do with THAT? The authorities to whom this was reported seemed to think that the witness was reporting what she believed, but naturally they could NOT believe it. Having no explanation, the story has been written off as "imagination." Talk about a claim needing a good investigator!!
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    ------F------       ------G1.G2------        ------H------      ------I------
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F. Kerry, Ireland: This is a case from the "recent" Fairy Census conducted by Simon Young. For me it is one of the better incidents in the Census. The case is very earnestly told by the son of the person who was the primary witness. The father was a young man of 15 when he was deeply engrossed in reading a book. Looking up, towards the local abbey, he saw three little men, appearing like classic leprechauns. Two of them were having a "boisterous" but friendly wrestling match over the possession of a bag. The third was older, and stood watching the laughing twosome. this person turned ultimately and glanced at the witness. As their eyes locked, everything just disappeared. The Little People were dressed in green and brown monkish habits tied around the waist. They were about four foot tall. Fifteen years later, the witness returned to the site with his mother and saw the older "leprechaun" again. This time the glimpsing was quite brief. 

The case would be pretty good if it had more than a long distance e-letter to substantiate it. The "action" involved is right on point as far as expectations are concerned, and the words of the writer are modest and sincere.  So, I like the case, but need faith about the provenance.
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 G1/G2. County Limerick, Ireland. This is an encounter that I stumbled upon two different times and forgot the first time I did. (More proof that this job is too big.) I drew a cartoon the first time, and apparently in too much of a hurry. When I came across the case again, it dawned on me that the actual words did NOT say that the Little People had caps on their heads (almost all the ones I'd just logged had headgear.) Also the gnomish characters were described as having "hard, hairy faces." So I tried again. I'm talking about this here to warn everyone about how my enthusiasm didn't always help with the patience needed to get the details right.

The case is of a young man who met a fairy along a rural road, and no one believed him. He went back to the spot and saw the fairy again. Still no one believed. The next day he went out again, and saw two more. Emboldened by then, he walked up to the little men and offered his hand to one, which was taken. He began to walk off, but the Little People saw his friends spying from the bushes and immediately disappeared. 

This could have been a socko case, because hidden in it is the rare multiple witness factor --- but no one interviewed anyone but the primary claimant. When added to that is the fact that this is only a news story without nearly enough grounding in the event.
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H and I. Both of these cases are from MacManus and are therefore Golden. Unfortunately, though golden they probably don't involve the Fairy Folk. One case is from Edenderry, Ireland in 1901, and the other from Killeaden, Ireland in 1939. Both cases have within them strange forbidding figures in black robes.  In the Edenderry incident, four young people walking along low Irish hills and fields saw a group of black robed figures standing in a facing circle absolutely immobile in a field. Within that circle there was some sort of black box. As the young people stood silently staring, the owner of the field and a farm hand walked into the field nearly on a collision course with the circle. The witnesses began to back away, but the farmer and worker passed right by the black robed circle as if they couldn't see them directly in their line of sight. 
The young people retreated but when looking back, the farmer and hand still showed no sign of awareness but the circle had translocated to a different spot without changing form. The youngsters ran further, and then saw the same immobile circle in a field further on. At no time was there any movement of these figures. 

In the Killeaden case, a personal friend of MacManus and a second adult had finished work and began a four mile walk to their homes in the late evening. As they approached a crossing point between an old pathway and the road they were walking, they saw three tall figures clad all in long black robes. these three figures stood in a close triangle almost touching one another. They were completely immobile, arms rigidly at their sides and heads similarly bowed. The two witnesses were afraid due to the uncanny sight, but moved past them as far away as possible. They then split up going to their separate homes. As the friend hurried safely home, the prime witness neared his own house. To his terror, there, just at the gate to his home path, stood the three black cloaked figures in their triangle. Knowing that they could not possibly have beaten him there by normal means just made this worse. Reaching for all the courage he possessed, he ran wildly by them to his door. They again never moved.

These two things very likely happened, but WHAT happened? there is no feeling here of a Little People experience. I think that the reports are real but more "ghost" than "fairy." The Olde Culture believed that ghosts and fairies were two entirely separate things. What form of the Ghost World these things belong to, and what-the-heck they might portend are facts beyond my ken, but I place these cases into a different category. 
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So, today I'll build my house using "B" as a foundationstone, and keep a few of the others as possible decoration later. As to the blog: the next will complete Leprecat three. I'm trying to speed up case numbers-wise. Why? I think that I must put this information out there for "duty" reasons, but at the same time, I know that there are probably only twenty people in the internet world who actually want to read this stuff.

So as not to bore too many people to death, I'll try to get this done as quickly as I can --- maybe in a month or so. 

Till next one. 

GALLERY

                                           GALLERY
Here are the cartoon approximations of what the "Child-sized" Little People look (sort of) like: 

There isn't much more which can be said at this point. The mob above includes the gray area of 1 1/2 foot tall beings (those last four.) Looking at the whole set: The number of times that beings occur together in troops, dances/revels, or at least threes is (surprisingly to me) greater than the number of "solitary" meetings.  The ratio of communal fairies to solitaries in these meetings is about two out of every three. For smaller incidents (very low numbers here) it was about the same, and for larger, the opposite (a few more solitary entities.) I don't pay much attention to those numbers for very smalls and larges as there just aren't enough. 

Deliberateness? There are a small excess of cases where the fairies seem to deliberately intend to interact with the humans. These sorts of things are tough to be sure of, but I believe that 60/40 would be reasonable, with the 40% therefore being entirely "accidental" path crossings which never develop into anything but passive observation. However, within the remaining 60% there are cases where there seems to be fairy-initiated interaction and others with only fairy reaction. In these interacting cases, the intent (along the negative/mischief vs positive/friendly scale) is a hard task. Only two incidents are clearly negative fairy mischief with possible human harm. There are a couple of things which seem like human-initiated anger. The Away-with-the-Fairies "come with us" tales are, in my opinion, impossible to characterize as good or evil. There are a handful of them, none with any particularly negative consequence for the human. None of the small number of very smalls seem deliberately interacting with the witnesses. Only the Fairy Boy of Leith interacted with humans among the normal-sized to large cases. (and he might not have been fairy at all.) The Jerry Clark case of the faun/Pan-like sheep chaser could be viewed as the rare incident of some anomalous normal-sized being interacting with humans and in a possibly negative way (chasing the sheep.) 

I've squeezed this beyond good scientific sense, so let it lie there, and back to individual cases next posting. 

Sweeping Up Never Ends

                            

    

 Sweeping Up More Encounters and Worrying about Size

We've been trudging across the timeline from the early days up through the 1920s (at least as far as my Leprecat sightings are concerned). The past posts have presented in one form or another around 50 incidents. Let's present a little preliminary spice.

The top incident in the sidebar was mentioned as part of the 15 case list at the end of the last post. It is unusual in that it happened to a famous man, the writer William Allen White, and that it describes a very small group of beings.  These were dancing circling little beings of three or four inches tall. The incident was brief and the beings were grayish in color, and their music and dancing continued for some time. Finally they began to fade. After a while they had faded away completely. 

The middle cartoon represents a case from Devonshire in about 1915. This encounter also had a very tiny entity --- the witness described the emergence of a tiny man garbed in green, with a red conical hat. He also seemed to have greenish tinted skin. He was swinging on a leaf for a while, and then just disappeared. Five inches tall. 

The third and lower cartoon is a representation of the case from the other day wherein a group of gnomes seemed to act as protectors to smaller fairies --- the latter of which seemed smaller than them, perhaps one foot tall. These fairies were non-winged floating beings of small size. 

These cases are of much smaller than usual entities and introduce the concern which, whether I like it or not, can be verbalized as: Is there any pattern in these cases or not? Is there any sort of commonality which might give me any insight into this difficult mystery? Can what little data that we have get us any assurance that the beings in these incidents are "real" and in what sense? I can't help it. I would REALLY like to learn SOMETHING more "solid" evidentially about this business. I'm almost certain that I'm going to fail, but in a Fool's Errand I'm going to start by trying to estimate heights and graph them. I haven't at this stage of this moment of  typing done any of the height logging, but am about to press "save" and go off and do it. 

 OK. Done, in some sense of that word. (took about a day)

What was "done": 
I looked through the cases as were previously described in the early posts. There were a little over 50 encounters. 

I looked for the best words used by witnesses to describe entity heights. Sometimes you get lucky and the witness says a concrete word or phrase ("two feet tall") and you start thinking that maybe you're about to deal with a crisp data set. 

Most of the time you aren't that lucky. You get a range, or you get a comparison (ex. "child" or "Small children") and then you're guessing. Many cases (not so much in the ones I described, as I picked them deliberately to be a bit more detailed), you are really out of luck entirely and can't use the incident for anything like this. 

But in our set, we have 53 cases that, in my opinion, are usable. 

About two-thirds of them are graphed to the left. All of these have pretty solid measurement related words, or something else about the description that makes me feel as if the graphing is at least mildly respectable. 37 cases. The remaining 16 will be talked about in just a moment.

The graph is fairly strong in the 2-to-3 1/2 foot range (more on that as a category later also.) It also has a fair representation in the normal or near-normal height range (this is 4-to-5 1/2 foot tall ---- 5 1/2 foot was the normal average male before the modern age's nutritional driven 4 to 5 inch growth spurt took place in almost every country.) 

There are two giants and few very smalls. I've left 1 1/2 foot tall as a gray area, as my feeling for those cases is that they could easily drift into a taller or a smaller category (who knows? Just a feeling.) 

In one sense it is nice to see a peak of some kind, but the still small number of cases makes this less than confident. The peak is however pretty much where general commentary about the Little People say it should be. 

Note that there are (up to the time period that we covered c. the 1920s) almost no tiny beings and (as an aside) no wings at all. 
I'm not saying that other folklore divers wouldn't find good cases of that type, but so far I have not. 

But what about the "Missing 16" incidents? 

The Missing 16 share a common characteristic: they all have words in their descriptions stating that the Little People were the size of "A child", or "Children", or some other words aimed at humans who are not adults in stature. 16 cases. That is a big enough number to drive me either crazy or to try harder to get a decent estimation. I'd rather do the latter.

The graph above is the growth curve for children in the United Kingdom for the current era. Going back in time, one would subtract about 4 inches per curve. (until you get nearer birth, where the difference will decay to a smaller number.) What it shows is that if one was to refer to something as the height of a child (and not a baby), one is talking about the 2 1/2 foot to 3 1/2 foot range. The graph says that's correct, and the Little People testimonies seem to say that's correct. 

So, it's up to you if you want to buy this or not, but for me, I have 16 cases wherein the witnesses are talking about entities the size of a "child", not a "baby" and not a "young man", or "near normal" --- just a "child."

This is then what we get. 

The 2 to 3 1/2 foot peak shoots up far beyond the other categories and begins to look like it might be something real. 

I threw out two cases for this second graph by the way (the "four foot" bent old woman of Paris, who seems FAR more like an apparitional haunting; and the "three and a half foot" Bourneville entities with the caps with antennae and the "house" which flashes away in the air, because I can't get any handle on that thing to compare it too any other Faery case.) 

So there's 51 left. If you toss the next most peculiar thing of your choice to get to 50, you could make the claim that exactly 60% of these cases are in the "Child" size category ... and thereby very compatible with "tradition." 

I don't have much more to say or CAN honestly say about this except that I'll bet with near certainty that this graph changes significantly as we penetrate deeper into the 20th century and on to the 21st. 

So next time I'll go back into Leprecat (the thirties or even a few leftover late twenties maybe, and on to the WWII period.) 

Yes 

brilliant.
fantastic.
couldn't have thought it out better myself ... 
wait ....





"Before I came to your lecture I was confused about this subject. Now that I have listened to your lecture, I am still confused but on a higher level." 

Enrico Fermi.