SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part seven

And so ... what's next?

The things that go "BUMP" in the night.

 
What to say? As this project has gone on (and on), some further intuitions have arisen. I make no claims for originality, only that they have grown stronger in me --- from no cognizance at all to a nervous feeling that maybe they are true. Finally, the other evening, I drew the following crude diagram. No big deal, but if you read it maybe it says something specific to you that you may either want to accept, reject, or, best, research. 

In this diagram we know that our world of physics exists with its strengths and limitations (that is we know that unless we are some over-heated philosophical lunatic), and I think that we know a few other things. We know that we have a lot of anomalous reports, some of which seem pretty good. I think that it is without much debate that we have anomalous BOLs, and that some dozens of them can be interpreted as "acting" in intentional ways. And I KNOW that poltergeist phenomena exist. 

  
Veteran readers of this blog know why I know this. Above is the poltergeist house owned by my family members (brother and sister-in-law.) I've written about it in earlier posts. There's no arguing with me anymore on this topic. I know my relatives, I know their absolute intelligence and honesty, and I know that the manifestations there were many. Poltergeists, whatever they are, are real and NOT explained by the kneejerk flapdoodle analyses by professional skeptics.

The fact that I have been privileged to know such (for me) perfect witnesses, allows me to list some of the things that I know poltergeists do: (from roughly simple to more spectacular) creaks and odd sounds; footsteps on stairs or upper floors; "jumpings" on the beds on upper floors; doors opened when shut, and shut when formerly open; locks unlocked, and unlocked locks locked; lights turned on; lights turned off; radios and TVs turned on; radios and TVs turned off; objects moved, and in rare cases, objects "thrown." Plus, apparent communication with one very young child when she would visit. 

And that's it for my relatives' home. No violence, no fires, no breakages. These things might happen elsewhere, but not there. The "phenomenon" was more amusing than frightful, in fact it was not frightful at all. It WAS irritating now and then when my brother would wake up and have to turn off a blaring TV. Other than that my relatives considered the whole business to be somewhat of a hoot. 

Bumps in the night ... knockings on the wood ... knockers in the mines ... pixies in the woods. 

A very good friend (Jerry Clark) told me of the experience of one of his very good friends. She heard "bumps" in the basement, screwed up her courage, and went down the stairs to investigate. There under the stairs were three dwarfish men sitting facing one another. Not looking as friendly as Snow White's friends above,  she beat it out of there back upstairs. 

Agricola told us that he would not put anything into his writing that he had not seen himself or had not been seen by someone that he knew and respected. He, as we've seen, was THE Renaissance expert on all things metallurgical and mining. He wrote that it was common for miners to hear the knockings in the deep mines, and not uncommon to even see the Coballos beings who were making them. John Lewis wrote John Aubrey that he knew of the Knockers of the Cornish mines and of persons who had seen the pixie knockers. 

Bump Knock Tommyknock ... who goes there? 

My favorite female author of all time, Catherine Crowe, told us in the NIGHT SIDE OF NATURE that there were "hauntings" taking place in her time (the first half of the 19th century) that she had personal knowledge of, and had investigated/interviewed the main witnesses. 

Catherine relates things like this (I'll make a composite story which characterizes these cases): a property which consisted of an old carpentry business (or something similar) on the bottom and the basement, and living quarters on the top. Residents (usually when alone sleeping there at night) would hear knockings-about downstairs in the old shop area. Creeping down to investigate, the doors would be firmly locked, but knockings might continue. Peering into the lowest area, some evidence of activities would be found as if the occupants of the old shop had been at work. Occasionally there might even be a fleeting glimpse of those night worker entities. ... hmmm .... what were the Brounies supposed to do again?  

And my favorite Catholic priest-investigator-of-things-paranormal: Fr. Herbert Thurston, advisor to popes on all things off the beaten track, and hands on investigator of many. 

Thurston reported  many instances showing that there was no question of the reality of these experiences, and that they were the resultant of something intentional other than the witnesses themselves. Whether we had to enlist "devils" to deal with these cases was a question that he seems NOT to have preferred. Some other spirits? Should exorcism be employed? 

Hmmmm again. Should exorcism be employed? There are quite a lot of claims that denizens of Faery do NOT like the Cross or people who pray at them. 

 It's been good clean fun, has it not, to journey the woodland paths looking for Faery? But just now ... things seem to be getting a bit darker. 
 

 

How violent and disruptive are things allowed to get?

 

How much grief are these things allowed to dish out?

 WHO is behind this curtain? 

 

The Old People talked of Daemons and these daemons did not equal "devils." They were powerful paranormal non-human entities who pursued their own paths. Some of them were large; some of them were small; some of them were winged, most of them were not. Some of them roamed the woods, some the waters, some the air, some the caves. Some were rooted to locations (called the genii of the places they watched over.) Some were nice; some not; most generally indifferent. 

They were from all over. Perhaps no location lacked them. Some mimicked; some did not. Some were beautiful; some were not. Some seemed to believe in a Duty; some seemed to believe in nothing. If you left them alone, and the things to which they were attached, you usually had no problems. They seemed willful, but rarely purposeful. What is their game? Is there a Goal? 

The Old People did not think that these things were "devils" and it took a strong promulgation of warning dogma by the Protestant Churches in the 1500-1600s to cram them together with Satan's minions. The Middle Angel theory does not see them as devils but as Earth-bound and restricted cousins... and our long consorting with them on the fairy woods paths doesn't see them as devils either.  Their nature remains obscure. Their actual "moral state" more so. And, unless we could get some insight there (across the whole class of these beings) I don't see how much more progress understanding them can be made. 

Maybe we are stuck confronting the dreaded Bell-Shaped curve: Some paranormals better than others morally, some worse. Some consciously trying to show by their actions that they are ready to finally answer that big First Question that they passed by. Some still saying Screw It and slumping further down into an immoral black hole. If any of that could make any sense at all, the reports of the Little People would place most of them still happily childishly in the middle of our Bell Curve. They kind of just don't care.

The diagram again. Little People reports. BOLs-of-intention reports. Poltergeist reports. The obvious next addition is The Trickster. After that??? What other Cryptids belong within this tribe? The one thing that I know Does NOT belong there is the "Advanced Technology operating in our Atmosphere." UFOs are not Faery. (Light balls? OK.)

And what evidence do we have that there even is a World Alongside?  Spoiler alert: I can't answer that any more than I've answered anything yet.

SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part six

Are There Any More Paths To Search For Faery? 
  
We have made a respectable effort looking at the basic encounter phenomenon. I think that it was worth it, and that it seems to indicate a true mystery, and one which involves a form of intelligence not our own. But with anything which would have this character, the research at some fundamental level is not controllable, and, unless the "other side" cooperates, will probably remain an anomaly forever. 

.... and that's alright with me. 

But it doesn't mean that I'd just give up the fun of looking, just because I felt that I'd never get all the way to a "scientific" de-mythologized answer. My guess is that I'll keep reading about this stuff until the day of "Passing over to the Other Side" and seeing the answers then (I hope.) And ... I have some intuitions that there are three more areas of research which are closely related to Faery anyway. 

1. The mystery of The Balls of Light;
2. Poltergeists: "Bumps" in the night and "Knocks" in the mines;
3. Jottles: Disappearing Objects and Straying Sod. 

One of these seems to allow some actual science-like research (BOLs). One of these has sort-of been research but (to my mind) largely botched. And one of these we are just now slightly taking seriously. I'm going to make some VERY modest attempts at addressing these three mysteries before letting this Faery blog glut go. Today, BOLs. As an old UFO researcher, at least I can claim to know something about that.

As you see, the category is a complexity, and therefore in bad need of unraveling. I'm not going to do it --- here anyway. I've made about ten runs at this area of mystery in blog posts of the olden past, so you can search back into these if you wish. I WILL steal freely from those posts though. 

There are THOUSANDS of Lights-in-the-Sky reports in UFO files. There are over three hundred in my file drawers alone. A bunch of these are just because whatever-it-was was a long way away. UFO, Faery, or X?: we won't worry about those very distant lights. Some of these are just because the light was so bright that you couldn't see anything else. Let's skip those too. A few actually ARE ball lightning, and a few even are marsh gas. But there is a lollapaloosa of a pile which are none of those, and some of these get very close indeed. For me, it has been the biggest conundrum in UFO research as to whether to include close encounters with BOLs part of the core UFO research field. My intuition has been "No." 

Here's a taste of what an UFO researcher gets dumped on his desk: a few years back (only a couple maybe), a colleague was interested in finding out every UFO report which featured a physical effect (particularly an electromagnetic one) and whether those kinds of cases continued to occur in large numbers after the year 1957. 1957 was a data anchor because it was the year that the US had its huge flap of UFO cases involving car engine stops and other E-M effects. As he collected, he would send copies of the cases to me. I was swamped as usual with too much case logging et al, but I tried to do a little. The following panels are three such tries. 

 So, cases of all types of shapes, and all with allegedly some kind of physical effect on the environment. A lot of them had clear technological shape, and another lot seemed to just be really blindingly bright. But a bunch were just BOLs. I can't read the reports and the craft descriptions and conclude that all the agents behind these effects were of the same nature. Maybe they were/are, but it is not obvious to me. (Other than the Betty and Barney Hill case, by the way, my favorite encounter from a "romantic point of view is the "window" which seems to open up in the sky and shine a bright lightshaft downwards.) 

If I'm honest (I am), I'll look at these things and say: I can't see the technology in some of these descriptions, so, maybe for them, I should entertain the hypothesis that those particular BOLs are not part of the UFO core. But if they are not, then what are they? Not something which matches nothing in the reports (like lightning) and not just "ghosts" which don't have a track record of physical effects. But what in the anomalies pantheon does have these possibilities? The Old People might say: Jack O'Lantern and Joan O'Wad the King and Queen of the Pixies. "They" supposedly looked like BOLs some of the time, and could play physical tricks on you. 

Alright, somewhat crazy thinking. But while researching the UFO case files, I was also amazed to see the numbers of reports wherein the witnesses felt that they were being "accompanied," or "paced," or "curiously observed," or even "stalked" by the UFO. Sometimes the UFO looked like a machine, but a big number of these cases were BOLs. Here, for what it's worth, are my crude table notes for these cases. I include them just to show you that the cases exist in quantity. 

Hmmm... BOLs as stalkers or curious? Sounds like I'm theorizing that a ball of light might be intelligent, and willful. ... one might almost say that they are like pixie tricksters. 

Alright. So far I haven't added much other than BS to the discussion. So, there are BOLs which MIGHT exhibit intelligent behavior, but what else? You and I might have gotten lucky here (for a change.) Our luck has to do with an unrelated research agenda by a physicist who became interested in cracking the mysteries of lightball field areas where such unexplained phenomena appear sort of regularly. You've heard of all these: places like Hessdalen, Yakima, Marfa, the North Carolina "gold hills", etc. Hessdalen, the most famous in UFO research circles, is the home away from home of Erling Strand (a very long time researcher of these matters.) 

Well, here we are at that famous (infamous?) thing, The Rockefeller-Sturrock workshop. (Dick is smiling broadly as he's just played a trick on me --- rocking backwards to block me partly in the photo. It was OK; I'd been kidding him.) I've circled some of the "players." Erling is on our far right. The amount of scientific brainpower rattled him at first, and he even seemed to lose his fluency in English. (Erling is a really nice guy and I felt terrible for him.) But a day later, he got it together and made a fine presentation on the Hessdalen lights. Noting his earnest use of instrumentation, the outsider science invitees stopped smirking for a moment and showed some interest (They still, three of them anyway, behaved largely like jerks). After listening to Erling, the more jerk-like of them suggested that this was a scientific issue, yes, and they probably could solve it "over the weekend" if they had the instrumentation. 


Of course they couldn't and they didn't try. Erling continued his decades long questing and along came the right scientist to truly help out. 

The scientist that was needed and courageous enough to take things seriously was/is Massimo Teodorani, astrophysicist and remarkably open-minded explorer of mysteries. (That's him seated at the right with Erling standing behind him; they are at the Hessdalen "school" research site.) Teodorani attacked the problem with technology and effort. 

These are examples of the equipment used and at the left some of the target BOLs. Teodorani captured data from many BOLs at Hessdalen and was certain that he had demonstrated their real world presence, but what caused them? Ball lightning and anything similar to that was a laughable non-starter hypothesis as became clear. He wondered (in print) whether esoteric ideas like mini-black holes or tiny wormhole exits could have anything to do with this, but knew that such commentary was just that: talk. There was neither math nor science to connect these things. 

Other BOL sites existed. The above are photos from my/CUFOS' collection of such things (Yakima top and Hessdalen bottom.) Having had success at Hessdalen, Teodorani decided to go to other well known fields and see if results duplicated there. He went to several places where he sometimes did the work alone (with his team) and sometimes did it in concert with local people. The results generally showed the same phenomenon. 

Still, what were "they?" In some incidents there were hints that something other than the light might be inside the BOL. Other times, no hint of that. More peculiar, and unexpected, was the "behavior" of some of these BOLs. There seemed to be in some cases behavior which felt like it was intentional or responsive. 

 

Many lightfields later, and masses of observations (both instrumental and human) he came to what seems to have been a reluctant (soft) conclusion. These BOLs, at least some of them, appear to be conscious. 

 

Now whose opinions does that remind us of? 

 I'm leaving this probe into this unknown here. Read Teodorani's work. It is in a report on a symposium talk that I read the "reluctant conclusion." I don't blame him for any reluctance he may or may not have had --- anything such as that requires great courage. And I applaud him. 

I'll belabor just one last story: he became much in demand to give opinions on all sorts of alleged anomalies, and one of these was crop circles. He tried to be open-minded, but every one of these that he was taken to was an obvious hoax. (I agree with him on this topic.) He'd go into the circles with some equipment and immediately see the central holes used by the hoaxers to ensure symmetries. He couldn't help laughing to himself about those inevitable "revelations." But there was something strange which happened that boggled him. 

After going through one hoaxed circle, he was walking back through a little tunnel to a train stop. There he met an old woman that he didn't know. She wanted to talk with him for some reason. She said that in the morning she had passed through this same tunnel, and all sorts of little colored light balls had been floating in the air just there. This was a head shaker, as he did not know the woman, nor did he think she should have known him. So why that information?

This odd interaction stuck in his mind when he was later researching another crop circle elsewhere (another hoax.) No instruments recorded anything. As a sudden lark, on his way out of the circle, he thought that he would just snap off an infrared photo "for the road." 

When he produced the photo later via the computer screen, he got a shock. There across the fence in the crop circle field was a dark shadow image. The image to his eyes looked just like The Mowing Devil of the famous old chapbook drawing that you see below.

 He said that while he thought that this was a simulacrum fortuitously created by a plant, it still made him wonder. Were his two experiences after the crop circle hoax expeditions the Universe (or something within it) playing little trickster games with him? 

But we --- we would never entertain such nonsense. Would we?

Next time? Who knows? There's not much left for me to say ....

SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part five

On we go. 

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

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

Do UFOs Explain Faery?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where did "Magonia" come from? 

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

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

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

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

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

What Does The Evidence Say? 

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

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

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

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

But it's "feeling"....

Here is the concept"UFOs":

Here is the concept"Faery":

How do these two realities feel to you? 

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

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

But am I being too rough minded? 

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

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

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

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

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

 What about Rosa Dainelli's imps? 

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

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

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

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

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

What if WE were not their main research interest? 

Till next time?
 

SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part four

HEADING DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE TO ??????????????

I guess that I can't avoid it any longer. It appears in this posting and the next, that I'm driven to making a fool out of myself, by going far beyond the data into the bizarre lands of speculation. I'm hoping to make a little sense while doing this, but I can't honestly promise anything. 

Two "practical(?)" remarks up front:
1. I got a bit "old and cranky" at one point in this post, but I don't take it back. My views on the actual damage to the search for truth done by cowardly academics sometimes outrages me; 
2. The awkward path of this post became so long, that I never got to the UFO vs Faery "thing" which is important to me, but will have to wait till another day.

But, to begin: 

A friend of mine remarked on the titles of these last posts (The Summa Faeryologica's) that I was giving a nod to St. Thomas Aquinas. That is sort of true, but mainly in a subtle way that should be mentioned now. When Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologica, he plowed along at the task for years and then just quit leaving it unfinished. I find that to be the first proper comparative point of the very few that could be made between the great genius and my feeble production. 

Thomas quit because he came to realize that his subject was too difficult for him to wrap his head around , and he had to admit to himself that he would never quite know what he was writing about. THAT is also a proper comparison with my current efforts.

Finally, though Thomas could never (just using philosophy and reason) PROVE the existence of GOD, Souls, The Spiritual Side of Life, another good friend of mine often reminded me that he nevertheless provided us humans with a great service: with all his heroic efforts, Aquinas demonstrated that it was REASONABLE to look into and think about these topics. 

In my embarrassingly minor way (and despite our very minor topic), this latter "Thomistic" accomplishment is all that I hoped for. I hope that our adventure down these paths and through these old forests have shown that it is not an unreasonable topic. And ... that thinking and being interested in these matters are not de facto childish nor deserving of derision. If I've done that for any of you, this has been a success.

So. If there is a reasonable excuse for exploring this topic, what is it that we've explored? My approach to that question is to trust the old folks.

 I think that it is "reasonable" to ask the old culture what they believed about these things for two reasons: One, they were a lot closer to this stuff than we are, or I am. Two, what they've "told" me so far about the Little People has more or less matched what I've found. What did they say about The Little People or The Fair Folk or The Other Crowd? Fortunately for us twenty-first century inhabitants, there were a few dozen people who felt that the 18th and 19th century influences were threatening to destroy the old understandings, and that this was a very bad idea. So they went out into the field, into the rurals of Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Wales, but also Scandinavia and Germany, and interviewed ordinary folks to save their stories and their vision. Our still-existing antiquarian books gladly tell us what those beliefs were. And, they were remarkably similar in what is to me a helpful way. This is it: 

The books tell us that the old cultures believed in four separate types of anomalous things: one was "Magic", another was "Witchcraft", a third was "Ghosts", and the fourth was "The Little People, or Fairies." The key point is: these four things, from their experience, were four basically distinct realities. The World of Faery had nothing to do with Magic (i.e. it was not based upon humans who had, by learning or close attention to Nature's behaviors, achieved the ability to do things that normal humans could not, and who did these things by strict discipline in following learned "rituals" or "recipes" or "actions.") Secondly, the World of Faery had nothing to do with Witchcraft (i.e. it was not based upon humans who had made contracts with fundamentally evil beings, and who through those contracts could do things that other humans could not do.) This second stance contains an important corollary: Faery is not Demonic. It is not demonic despite the majority Christian authority trying to make it so. That misplaced attack from Protestant Christianity may have had something to do with the fading of Faery across the decades, but, if so, it did not do so because the two were directly related --- only related through the misplaced prejudices and sometimes deadly emotions of those eras. 

A quick word about Clairvoyance or Second Sight: That "talent" is basic to none of the four concepts, although we humans might also get involved with that anomaly during experiences with any of the four. My guess as to why the folklore collectors did not include paranormal insight as a fifth "odd" belief, is that our ancestors thought that it was natural and not anomalous at all. So that leaves us with "Ghosts" and "Faery." To start we can say that our old ones "knew" that fairies were NOT ghosts.  

There's a bit of an issue regarding "Ghosts" --- what did they mean? This was a tougher issue for me. Here's my conclusion: The old folks did NOT mean what we call "poltergeists." They also would not have meant what we now call "tricksters." They DO seem to have meant the apparitional appearances which look perfectly "solid" even though they are not. They include the doppelgangers --- appearances of actual or recently deceased humans. The world of ghosts probably included things like the "banshees", or the apparitional carriage, or whatever images might announce a death. This gray area could be shoved into either the Ghost or the Fairy category depending upon the region, but if they do, they do not soften the cultural position that the entities of Faery are not ghosts nor the disembodied souls of humans passed away. 

The above are the cartoon images for the better credentialed cases where some creepy black-cloaked creatures were sighted. These things do not act like the other entities associated with fairy reports. They usually do not move at all, often standing like inert (yet creepy) black statues, which if they do move, seem to have instantly translocated to another location, again standing motionless. This is universally true for the multiple groups of three formations. Some of the singletons also stand motionless. Some do seem to drift or even come forward. None of these things seem to have a real feeling of life in them. I don't know what these things are, but relate them more to apparitional manifestations than the biologically-imitating Faery.

So, Faery stands on its own. It is not a realm of Devils nor a realm of tortured human souls. What's left? The people of the Dark Ages world faced all the same experiences in the fields and forests that the folks in later centuries did, but without the "benefit" of the scowls of 16th century Protestantism. (I'm sure that when early pre-protestant monks came to the isles there was a real adjustment needed but there seems to have been an early "understanding" between those two cultures, which often merely overlain a Biblical veneer onto the ancient celebrations and beliefs.) It is my belief that in these areas of the world, there was an era in which the culture of the past melded with the "new" ideas to form syntheses of belief. Such syntheses might even have made enough sense not only to survive but (maybe) even reflect what is real. 

And out of that came the majority theory about what Faery was. It is a truth that the old people were trying to figure out what this fairy business was. Modern theorists have lined up their own conclusions, often with stunning lack of humility. One oft-mentioned idea is that these creatures are a legendary culture, the Tuatha Da Danaan. For me, writings about the TDD leave me more confused than enlightened. They were supposedly powerful, brilliant, beautiful ... and somehow not able to hold onto anything in the face of crude outside invaders. For me, they don't make any sense. Not only don't they make any sense to me, but they don't look much like Snow White's seven dwarfs (or a faun/satyr, merperson, Ent, giant, or anything that witnesses actually report.) Heck, they don't even look like Tinkerbell. 

Another prominent theory is that they are remnants of primitive original peoples, or invaders from Denmark or some such "mysterious" place. It would be nicer for this theory if palaeontologists found any such peoples, or if they could be conceived to look anything like the fairy folk clan. I find it "unusual" for human pygmies to instantly appear and vanish before your eyes. The bottomline: one might allow a rare interaction to be with something like a genetic dwarf, but "POOF VANISH"?, no way that "Picts" do that. But all of this sort of alternative theorizing are the products of academia and therefore can be almost assuredly be classified as nonsense, if not the lucubrations of morons. (pardon me, folks, but these armchair reductionist "experts" have really irritated me in my own ancient years.) 

Recently, a good friend tasked me (gently and gentlemanly,) with looking into a "new way" of understanding fairies. Drugs. Naturally this is something so anti-scientific and misguided that only a lifetime brain-basher (Terence McKenna) or an academic (will remain anonymous) could seriously consider it. Belief in Fairies is, to our great surprise, the result of smashing our brains with DMT psychedelic. 

Yeh. THAT's the Ticket! That's exactly what all our witnesses from the last 500 years have been reporting!! I am so delighted to get this well grounded academic guidance on the subject. 

Our peasant witnesses must just have lacked the proper vocabulary. 

To add to my grateful understanding (while subtracting from the total amount of knowledge in the Universe), a website did an intelligent (if wrong-headed) explication of these DMT-is-the-Way speculations, and concluded it with a listing of "all" the theories which might be behind the truth of Faery. Since that is what I'm trying to do now, naturally I was intrigued. Here are a few of the theories offered: It's all hallucination; DMT shoves us into a higher dimension; DMT takes us down to the atoms; DMT activates our Reptile Brain (don't ask me how they say some of these with a straight face); Non-humans created us and left town, leaving a fairy-contact gene to contact them later --- sometimes you just wish that public firing squads were legal; it's all the Dead; it's all Aliens; it's all Time travelers. ... And you know what? These advanced human academics never mentioned one hypothesis: THAT THE FAIRIES ARE REAL ENTITIES just as the old folks and the witnesses say they are!!!!

A writer once said about a confused constricted academic: It's a marvel that such a respectable intellect can exist in such a tiny mind. 

I'll make one more remark: IF anyone takes this DMT=Faery-Gate seriously, then the INEVITABLE academic conclusion to all of this will be --- It's ALL subjective hallucination. 

So, Bill, my friend, thanks for sending me down THAT particular rat-hole for a day.
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Now, back to something that might lead us somewhere worth the journey.


I am going to guess that the old people thought of these entities as real physical beings, not humans, and having some dangerous and arcane powers. Where they lived, who really knew? But they seemed slightly related to certain locations which may have had meaning to the Old Religion. They seemed mainly existing in natural settings, but might show up anywhere. The following I'm not as comfortable with, but it has felt to me that some of these ideas probably were linked somehow with the Cosmos of the druidical religion, or whatever preceded that. This is despite the fact that I cannot find any substantive connection between druidical religion and fairy belief. But some sort of synthesis between two important parts of a culture had to be present. (This lack of literature reference to such a connectivity should be viewed as hardly surprising and certainly no show stopper as there exists essentially NO written data on the specific details of the druidical religion --- despite what modern "druids" would want to be true.)

Whatever that synthesis was, it was sitting there in everyday people's minds when the early Christian monks showed up with their own ideas. I believe that it is again obvious that one of the more esoteric concepts that the monks brought stuck, and gave the folks a plausible more specific answer to what these fairies were. It was an answer which fit the idea that fairies were real, yet not involved with ghosts or magic or witchcraft. They were the "Middle Angels." 

GOD created a whole lot of paranormally-empowered creatures before we humans (and presumably anyone else of our dualistic ilk) arrived in the physical Cosmos. HE gave them free will and a task or question to grapple with. Some of them "passed the test" and some of them said: Hell, no! (it turns out literally.) 

  This little disagreement was settled by some sort of spectacular conflict in which the "rebel angels" got their paranormal butts kicked. 

GOD said: OK, losers, I've a plan for how you fit into the rest of the Creation with some LAWS as to what you can and cannot do. So get the Hell out and Obey! 

But there was another problem. 

 
 Some of these paranormal beings didn't like the idea of saying No to The BIG FELLOW, but on the other hand, didn't really want to limit their options either. They refused to choose. 

 GOD, because He's the Good Guy, felt that these confused and childish characters did not deserve to be allowed to just go about their angelic business as before, but also didn't deserve to be cast into the (fiery) darkness (whatever that was.) They needed to go somewhere else, and be stripped of some of their angelic powers, while remaining essentially the creatures originally created. But where to leave them? And how to fit them into The Universal Plan? 

There were "new" places popping up (evolving) all over the physical Cosmos. Why not assign these childish clowns to them? But as paranormals, they couldn't be allowed simple free reign. There had to be Rules. Different rules than the strict "no-contact (physically) without voluntary agreement" laws for the devils, but restrictive rules nevertheless. They couldn't be allowed to just constantly interfere with obvious continual presence in human affairs either. The humans must be free to go their own way. Maybe it would be best to place them in a "World-alongside" which was connected more deeply or more weakly with places of natural or spiritual significance. These paranormals could slip into and out of the physical world "like magic" but not due to the demands of the humans on their side. ... and there were doubtless other imaginings to try to fit experiences into a philosophy. 

The result was a theory called The Middle Angels, wherein limited power paranormal creatures of GOD inhabited a World Alongside linked more or less strongly to Place. They weren't "ghosts" nor were they really devils. To what extent they could act and interfere might vary in regional belief, but the general concept could be made to fit the experience of the culture. The "moral" question of how much they were allowed to do, whether they could be "good" or "evil" and whether they might find Salvation differed culturally. 

Well, as a good Catholic boy, who believes in spiritual beings like angels and devils, I can adjust my theology rather easily to include "Middle Angels", as well. As an amateur student of Native American religion, I can adjust my understanding of Manitou and the Spirits of Place (The many Manitoug) to easily fit this as well.  Heck, I can even fit C.S.Lewis' "Eldils" from the SF books Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra into this ... and almost all the other cultures' concepts (not quite all, but most.) 

OK.  But. This is the point where I say that I'm not at any Jim McDonald (favored UFO hypothesis) stage and cannot, without cringing, state that one hypothesis  (even the Middle Angels) answers the details of all our questions. But I like it. And I really don't think that counter theories like pygmies, unknown aborigines, hallucinations, aliens, or some of those other mentioned data-less spewings make any sense at all. I'm happy to work with anyone who would construct another "parallel reality" style model with a very minimalist nod to tossing out case reports involving human mental errors, as long as we embue the Little Folk with some paranormal abilities and some action limitations.

........ but this posting has gotten way out of hand, and I never broached the UFO vs Faery conundrum. That's going to have to wait till next posting. Sorry.