A novel that I like quite a bit is Charles deLint's The Little Country. In that book he allows the reader to believe that there are places where [my phrase now] "the world grows thin" and one can pass from one reality to another --- for we Earthlings, Terra to Faerie, or whatever one wants to call your favorite "other place". In deLint's book, the transporting place was the Men-an-Tol in Cornwall.
I used the picture above long ago { 11/21/09 } on this blog to lead off a wildly Out Proctor claim by an old Alaskan copper miner that he had in fact stumbled through such a portal and knew exactly where it was. He had written of all people a UFOlogist about this, and his letter was passed on to Allen Hynek, who I presume did nothing about it --- it would have been a cold rough trip to the Yellowknife Copper Mountains region of upper Canada.
.... and this was the specific. There is a Willow Creek running west/east on the left side of the map, and a lake pooling in it. He mentioned Willow Lake as his main camp. {so get your tickets}.
The countryside is not scenic. The ground is mainly rock with a moss and lichen cover. His job was to wander about this area pounding on promising looking surfaces, and if lucky taking samples for lab analysis. It was near the end of a tenure out in this wilderness when he was finished with his job and just decided to wander, when his adventure happened. Before I go into it though, here is why I'm writing about this again: a regular reader of this blog noticed that this story, slightly different [as it came from a relative of the witness whose letter Hynek had] had been been posted on another site. As the story was the same [all the settings were identical plus the beginning and ending], but different [the original witness correspondence had left out some high strangeness], this "news" cried out for a new hearing.
The part of the story that I had had him walking into a nearby but new area and coming upon a narrow gully, almost a cleft, in the low mountain there. This cleft was only four feet wide and about 50 feet long. It took a 50 foot drop to get down there. {some of this fellow's description is a bit unclear to me, but I'm going to assume that it was the initial gouge in the cliff-face which was 4x50 and after that you got out into a small gully which widened out a little.}
Once into this gully he saw some odd rocks which were very puzzling to him plus one old dead tree and no other signs of life. What fixed his attention though was a "stable" highly localized fog bank shaped like a tube. This was too much to resist so he walked into it.
In "my" letter, he walks two steps into the mist and begins to see a vast grassy field which increased in height as he walked until it was three feet high. Startled, he walked back out. He couldn't resist however and again walked back in.
As he penetrated the mist further, he began to see more to his left and right which allowed him to see much greenery and even what he called "an oasis", as the mist left him. In my letters at this moment he says his mind went blank except for a fight or flight instinct, and he forced himself to stagger and crawl out of there, soon returning to camp. But with the new material from his relative, it appears that he left a little something out --- understandable when you read it and consider that he was trying to get people to believe his story so as to go back up there with him to reclaim this location.
So what happened when the mist cleared and he was surrounded by the beautiful green world?
He had company .... apparently interested company. My composition above isn't exactly accurate [ robes only went to the knees and they had sandals ] but the feeling is creepily in synch with the way these entities made our fellow feel. ... which was almost nauseous with fear and shaken. He said that these "persons" just hung there in the air staring at him from their vantage of three feet off the ground. They never addressed him nor one another ... just silently stared.
This, understandably, made him want to get-the-hell out of there, and he scrambled up a nearby slope to put distance between them. One of the entities continued to turn in his direction as he climbed. There was one more Whackland experience before he "got back to reality." He came to a small hillside lake, or something. This "lake" consisted of two triangular bodies of water separated by a regular row of plants, and generally looking geometrically constructed. Well, OK, so what?
The "lake" sloped seriously downhill AND ITS WATER LEVEL SLOPED PARALLEL TO THE HILLSIDE. Uhhhhh .... WAIT A MINUTE!!! He was so shook up at the moment that the impossibility of this [in our reality of physical law] didn't fully register on him until he was well away.
Somehow he got into familiar rocky mossy country and found his way to camp.
Did our fine fellow not only walk trough a portal mist into Faerie but even encounter two of its inhabitants? His, as we know, is not the only such claim even in my files. Diarmuid MacManus has a few such tales of blundering across a threshhold onto "The Stray Sod". And it's intriguing, and annoying, that some UFO cases have these darn mists just before the weirdness happens.
Well, what can I tell you?: I like the idea. I liked going to deLint's portal in Cornwall too, and even going through the Men-an-Tol opening --- no, I wasn't too fat [and it was very unkind of you to think that]. But I WAS obviously unworthy as no Faeryland landscape appeared other than the Cornish landscape itself. [which can be pretty close].
So, once again, an abject failure ... but maybe it was a moment of fun for you.
Peace.
