SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part eleven

The big question that is still sitting there is the one that's almost untouchable: IS there another reality alongside? Do we have any direct evidence? Is there ANYTHING that I can say without sounding like a complete lunatic? 

About 2 weeks ago, I thought that there wasn't much to say. But after a  long meditation, maybe there is. For better or worse, let's begin by asking a few questions.

If there is a world alongside, can we see into it? If we were inside, could we see out? If there is a world alongside, can we walk into it? Can we walk around inside it? Does light work there? Does Gravity? Would we feel generally normal? All of that sounds goofy to be asking, but is it really? We might just have enough hints on some of this stuff after all. 

Diarmuid MacManus & The Stray Sod.

Our hero (MacManus) comes through again.  The first case was from MacManus' minister. He had a visitation to make and set off walking to the place. The walk was able to be shortened quite a bit by crossing a very large field. Though big, it was open and you could see the two large trees near the middle and the rough path leading to the distant exit stile far away. The priest opened the entry gate and started crossing the field as he had done dozens of times before. But when he reached the far side, there was no stile, no path, no cleared area which would allow him to even climb out.

Completely puzzled, he did the obvious: searching all along the hedged area for the missing stile and open patch. Nothing. As he went on he ultimately circumnavigated the entire area: no stile but also no original entry gate either. No matter where he arrived, there was the same impenetrable wall of thick plant staring back at him. He had, as the Irish say, stepped upon the Stray Sod and was trapped within its trickery. An hour or more later, he came to the spot where the exit stile should have been, and there it was.

What should we take from this? Although the field was familiar, and the entry was normal, certain pieces of the area, (the initial entry gate, the joining patch, and the exit stile) were gone. One's best hypothesis would be that this was imitative of the real field in the normal world, but NOT the real field. It could be walked into, but not walked out of until something changed to allow that. The priest also said that when he initially came to the spot where the exit stile should have been and found it changed, he heard a chuckling as if someone far off were laughing at him.

MacManus' second case was that of a young woman who was a housekeeper at a great house but was going to take the long walk back to her family in a nearby village. In order to get to that village, she had to cross over the hill called Lis Ard Fort, known as a "fairy fort" by the locals. She did that, and stood at the summit a while enjoying the view outward towards her own village in the distance. Down the hill she danced until she came to a ditch at the bottom. She headed for a gap in the ditch, but when she arrived she blanked a second and was walking in the precise opposite way. She composed herself and turned and walked to the gap. The same thing happened again. It kept happening. Frightened now, she searched along the ditch, always coming up against some "barrier" which refused to let her pass. This happened for hours. She began feeling a sense of hostility radiating toward her from the Fairy Fort.

Feeling hopeless, hours went by. People from the village got concerned and sent out parties. She saw the lanterns coming. She was standing shouting waving, but they showed no sign of seeing her, even though they passed within twenty yards. Finally hours more gone by, she realized that the barrier was gone, and scrambled quickly out and went to her village and family. This case is almost identical to the first with one added piece of information. She could walk in and ultimately walk out. Light, gravity, and other forces seemed to be normal. Time passed normally. The area was as she knew it. The "addition" to reality was the barrier; and the addition to our understanding was that she could see out of the Stray Sod though others could not see in.

MacManus' third case was one in which a man left a party at one house of an estate to go across a large field to another house for the evening. It was past midnight, and the walk began as usual, but very quickly the entirety of the environment changed. He was immediately aware that he was no longer in the familiar field. He as a good Irishman suspected fairy involvement, so he employed the old legend idea of turning his coat inside out. It didn't work. Nothing changed and he couldn't find any sign of a way out. He walked around and worried himself into a nervous sweat. Finally hours later, a glimpse of a way out occurred, and he hurried on. The opening was in the direction of the first house, so he took the opportunity and straggled back there, showing up at the door "in a state."

Again, walk in, walk around, environment changed but not changing the way things like light and gravity work. Could not see out until the very last moment. Time operated normally. This one seemed clearly like a separate Stray Sod bubble out of touch with the normal world. None of MacManus' three cases were of very large places-alongside, even though the priest's field was a very large multi-acre area.

So, MacManus, as usual, helps. What else do we have? 

We have Ron Quinn's three cases for starters. In two of those cases the witnesses were presented with mists, small islands and bridges to get there. In both of those cases they walked across the bridges out of curiosity and voluntarily. The island acreages were similar to the fields in the Irish cases, but within both islands the witnesses saw faery folk (with whom they did not interact.) The witnesses could also see our normal world from the fairy island shore. Light, gravity, and the forces seemed normal. Time passage was also normal. The third case was an entry (again entered voluntarily in the sense of accidental) but this experience included significant change of visual atmosphere once crossing over. The crossing was into a similar physical environment (mountainous) but distinct from the normal. The main addition to our understanding here was that this environment alongside was a very great terrain --- no small field nor island.

In the fairy census there is a good narrative about a hiker pushing aside some forest bushes and noticing a different type of forested area beyond, which was explored for some time, and found very large just as a mountain area should be. Again no time rate issues.

The Trickster phenomenon indicates that transaction of objects out of our normal space to another may even be common. The few faery-world witness cases seem to show that these thousands of small object translocations do not have to disappear into tiny cubbyholes of almost dislocated spacetime, but might have a whole other world into which they migrate. But this is, without need to say it, pretty speculative without more cases of witnesses "going" into there, walking about, and coming back to tell us about it.

There are a fair number of encounters wherein the experience is of a house or even a village out of place which, later, cannot be re-found. I have a list of maybe two or three dozen of these. I'm tired though ... and I don't feel like making ANOTHER lengthy study of a separately defined anomaly, and so, as I know that you know these things already, I'll just leave it as a claim: there are lots of reports of things like cottages et al (even visited inside) which later can not be documented as existing.

But, I am going to revisit one special case ... Helen Lane.

I'm going to repeat my telling of this encounter because it is not only inexplicable but the mere fact that it happened threatens to discombobulate almost any model of reality one chooses to lean upon.

I have several brothers. All of them are great fellows, and all of them are somewhat different. One of them is "grounded" in the real world of work, teaching, service, hammers-and-nails, small town orientation, etc. more so than most people I know. He is not a fool, and is not to be fooled. He goes very slowly to conclusions outside of the normal. His wife enjoys the thought of the unusual much more than he, but she is also an intelligent, substantive woman. I know them very well. There is certainty that the incident that they recounted to me was exactly as they experienced it, to their honest perceptions.

It was July 1998. My sister-in-law's grandmother was dying and she, my brother, her mother, and other family members had gone to the old home area to be with her in the last days. People were spread out, residing with other extended family members et al, some quite a few miles apart. My brother and sister-in-law got a call saying that the time was probably near, and late in the evening (c.11pm) began driving to pick up her mother at another location and then drive to the nursing home. My brother was driving. The trip to the mother's temporary residence was through a relatively non-built-up stretch but which contained suburban structures at intervals and was normally quite well traveled, even at night. (My sister-in-law grew up in this exact area.)

This night there were no cars at all. Out ahead, alongside the road, they could see someone walking dressed in white. As they passed, in a hurry to pick-up the mother to get to the grandmother's location, they saw that this was an older woman in a white nightgown. As they proceeded on down the road, they had a wave of guilt as they felt that this was almost surely an old lady, probably with Alzheimer's, who needed help. They picked up the mother and a cousin and retraced their drive down the still empty road. Up ahead again was the old lady. This time they slowed, asked a question, and the "simple" reply indicated that they must take the woman in and try to help her. Her comment to them was: "Oh God bless you. I am trying to get home". She sat in the rear of the car between the mother and the cousin, and was generally "normal", saying that her name was "Helen Lane" and giving an address and phone number.

My sister-in-law's family had originally lived in this area [some still did] and they knew enough about the place to find the street address. That did not work out due to there being no numbers on any of the houses, and not wanting to wake up the entirely unlighted neighborhood by trial-and-error. They drove instead to a fire station that the family knew was active at all hours. Still no traffic. The fire station was brightly lit as expected. They knocked at the door--nothing. They circled the building looking in windows and knocking--nothing. This was a major establishment as it served, among other locations, a wealthy area of town. But, feeling a little creepy now, they drove on, for up ahead was a police station that the family knew well. [by the way, they had also somewhere in this sequence tried the phone number and only gotten an irate individual who said he'd never heard of Helen Lane and that they'd woken him up].

The police station that they headed for was run, as Chief of Police, by another of their cousins. They didn't expect him to be there at midnight, of course, but they had confidence that the station would handle the old lady and her problems. [she had said a few "childish" things by now which convinced everyone that they were dealing with Alzheimer's]. The police station was there, as it should be, but still with no traffic. It was brightly lit but showing no activity. Through the large front windows, one person could be seen. Greatly relieved, my sister-in-law took Helen Lane up the steps while my brother watched closely. Within there was only this one person. She was a middle-aged woman dressed in civilian clothes. There were no policemen to be seen anywhere. When they came through the door, the woman said "Hello Helen." My sister-in-law told the story, in brief, and the woman said "We know Helen. We'll get her back home". Taking some information on paper, she said not to worry about anything, it would all be taken care of.

As I said, my sister-in-law was familiar with this station. It was far too empty. No dispatcher, no desk sergeant, no policemen of any kind. It just felt wrong---but who knows? They let it go and went back to their car and on to the nursing home where the grandmother had just died. The next morning, both my brother and sister-in-law wanted to lay this to rest. They called on the police station and asked. The Chief, their cousin, was in a position to find out. He told them the following: 1). the station had no record of their visit, nor any particulars; 2). there was no record of the existence of any person named "Helen Lane", as far as their files were concerned; 3). the station should have been busy and active with several uniformed officers on duty; 4). no such person as described as being behind the desk has anything to do with the station, nor does anyone know of such an individual being in the station.

What are we to make of this? Some people would like to say that this is "just" another instance of the "Phantom Hitchhiker" phenomenon. Well, if it makes anyone feel better to give it a name, then God bless you, but that's hardly very helpful. This case seems to be telling me that my relatives "slipped into" an alternate reality for an hour or so, wherein the circumstances were very close but not identical to our "real world". I have to believe that the details as stated happened--multiple witnesses, including some that I'd trust with my life. If they did, then it SEEMS that they were driving about in a world which was in imitation of ours but not quite identical. As my brother said: "we know the woman in the police station didn't exist." Well, what DID exist? What-the-heck went on here? This experience hardly stands alone. The illustration above is meant to picture a roadway encounter in the early 20th century, where after a brief interaction, the man dressed in olde-time clothing just vanished before the witness' eyes. In the UFO literature, cases of this "same-but-not-same" environment crop up now and again. And the mysterious "empty" road is common. I have no good "model" for this reality. I find it difficult to incorporate these displacements or slippages into a coherent way of thinking about anomalies. And there seems to be more than random accident here; more like an "intention". My brother said: "I think it was a test." Maybe, Bro, maybe.

This event, which I heard about from my family long before any study of Faery and Stray Sod, seems incredibly useful to me in understanding some bits of our current inquiries. My family members seamlessly drove into a reality of which they recognized nearly every aspect. Other than the emptiness of the usually busy road, everything was so much as it should be that there was no thought of something strange going on. Light worked; Gravity worked; the car engine worked; everything still worked. BUT it still was not our reality. Somehow a near perfect matching of familiar reality was in place, but my family and their car were not in our space. Their experience doesn't seem much like being in Faery, but if "someone" wanted it to be, then ... how much more would they really need to add? (By the way, the rate of Time seemed normal here too.)

I know that you cannot buy the Helen Lane mystery with the assurance that I can. Maybe the MacManus and Quinn and Fairy Census and all the other displacement tales can fill in that credibility gap. I hope so. Because for me, the Helen Lane event broke the barriers of stubborn skepticism. Also, it about exhausts what I can usefully say to you about all this "other dimensional" stuff. I could utter pseudo-scientific vagueness about the Quantum Front of the Universe-to-come surging into the Uncollapsed Sea-of-Indeterminism (Ouch!) and the possibility of more or less Likely universes being "crystallized" (our own but also slightly less endowed realities) or twin universes with variable particle spins, which only become interactive via exotic force situations in boundary interfaces, or Block theories of Time and re-running of fixed matter relationships a la filmstrips, etc etc until we all went completely insane or at least went out for a drink.
 
But I'm not falling for that. The truth, if ever we find it, resides in only one area: The Case Reports, The Actual Experiences of Real People. Never drift too far from that. Anyone can dream up neat sounding BS.

I have been blessed with just the happy amount of great anomalistic experiences. A good UFO close encounter (which is irrelevant here since advanced aero-tech is part of normal universal behavior), a great Trickster (my watch) translocation, and Helen Lane (plus poltergeists et al) from my family. Helen Lane and the translocation(s) pretty much end discussion for me regarding the existence of another space-time. The translocations and the Trickster pretty much end discussion for me that at least some of these experiences are "intentional" and not by us.

NAUGHTY?

or NICE?

I think that I'm done now. Maybe for a long time. Whether anything more gets published in this blog is unknown to me, as other work (a review chapter on CE2 electromagnetic effects, plus a possible piece for Simon Young, plus a book maybe) encroaches, which work has been long put off. If anyone has a particular request, and I think that i have anything worth saying, maybe that will move me to resuscitate this enterprise again.

As I leave, you might be interested in one of the wilder "World Alongside" claims published and updated earlier on this blog. Way back in 2009 I did an entry called The Man Who Found a Door in the World --- it was from a letter and packet of geological information sent to Dr. Hynek. Later in 2015, I received a little more information on the case and published a second blog entry titled Are There Doors in the World? It at the very least is fun. "Search it" on the blog and have a good read.

Blessings to all of you, and stay close to the "data" (the reports) on your quests --- they will inoculate you against the tiny minded reductionists whose words blow hot against the Soul. As to that: someone told me once that my name could be scrambled to become Charles Wisdom. I thought that was pretty inappropriate and over-inflated (picture pun on this shortly). So I tried one for myself. My spelling wasn't as good but I got Wilde Shamrocs. For this time-displaced Irish Catholic Boy, that felt just about right. The two persona then had a conversation with our cousin, the West Virginian philosopher, Mountain William.

CW: My dear WS, don't you think that you're a bit rough on the academics?
WS: Perhaps, some of them are OK. But others ....
MW: Seems to me that most of them are like fancy cars with four flat tires.
WS: Yeh. They could use a little Fresh Air to get them moving.
CW: But what if you're just full of Hot Air yourself?
WS: That might not be so bad.

Sail On, Friends

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?
 

Faery in the Seventies???

LEPRECAT SIX: the 1970s. For no known reasons (to me anyway) the 1970s were richer in total numbers of Little People reports than the sixties. Some of this MIGHT have been from UFO research, in which field "everybody" was seeing humanoid entities whether there was a good UFO around or not. Anyway, I'll start with a first dozen, and we can go from there.

The above shows a large variety of entity types, not all of which seem obviously Faery in nature. BUT --- since it's all utterly mysterious, who knows if we are dealing with Faery, UFOs, apparitions or some unthought of weirdness. 

Color code: pink/salmon --- good researched case. genuine possibility for Faery.
                    yellow/gold --- pretty strong credibility. odd entities. But not "normals." 
                    green --- lacking desired credibility, but very possibly Faery. 
                    violet --- two really strange things, but I think not Faery. 
                    light violet --- things probably leaning to the apparitional.
=========================================================================

CASE 1: Springfield, IL. 1973.  This is a John Timmerman case, which means that you have a personal interview and a permanent record on tape to listen to. The "personal-ness" of this sort of evidence gets you as close as you can to being with the witness yourself. (It also helps me that I knew John so well in person.) The encounter is not "classic fairy" but it isn't much like anything else. 

The witness lived in a rural setting and had a dog which she cared for. She had a pattern to her life, and it was that time in the evening to go outside and retrieve the dog's water pan. She was a tough country person and this was the time for bringing in the water pan, and, by gum, that's what she was going to do. Things went normally for the first several feet of the trip (although a light moved by high in the sky), {typical effort to try to cram a UFO in here somewhere}, but then, beside her, hanging/floating in the air, was a little man. He was about a foot away and a foot off the ground. 

This odd person was about four foot tall and dressed all in close-fitting black. Only his face showed. The outfit seemed one-piece, and his toes seemed pointed. His face had a pallor to it, and he generally scared the hell out of the witness. But she refused to show it. 

"He looked over at me and I was scared. And I thought, well, I've got to get that water pan; I've got to get it. Because I needed it. Well, he had a smirk smile on his face and he had a different color on his face than we have, and he kept giving me that look, but anyway I kept on going. When I reached for that water pan, he just disappeared just like that ... in thin air; I don't know where he went." 

The floating-pacing-staring lasted a minute or slightly less, but quite a bit of time in the witness' eyes. She was being stared at all the way and felt uncomfortable if not menaced. 

I can't help it; I love this case. The witness is as down-home simple as you can get, and John did the perfect-gentleman interview. What WAS this? This is "interactive" and doesn't feel apparitional. There is no good UFO connection, nor does the being fit well with other such claims in that field. The action here is very like the meddling tricksters that we run into in our stories, so that is "who" I'm going with. The size is in our common range even if the clothing is idiosyncratic (though we get dark cloaked weirdos now and then.) 
=========================================================================

CASE 2: Albany, OH. 1973. This is another incident that I'm 99% sure happened, because the investigator is another good friend, former CUFOS treasurer, George Eberhart, who is probably the most knowledgeable encyclopedic cryptozoologist in the world. Translation: George is really smart about this stuff. There is a line drawing of the entity for this case, which I've re-done. I like the way it turned out (more so than my typical cartoons) so I'm featuring it here. (the entity is unique and therefore the illustration helps.) 

The encounter has a prequel: The witness was returning home after a night class. She saw a ghostly lightform about four foot in size floating about some three football fields away. Then a BOL sailed into the area. It was a big one, about 20 feet in diameter. It bounced about, seeming to possibly be interested in her. That scared her, but the thing retreated into a field and faded out. She continued on to her house trailer, saw her husband, and began to make supper. Her husband went outside leaving the door ajar. That's when she had her encounter. 

One time she turned and saw a small two and a half foot tall being or thing peering around the edge of their door. It was as if a bunch of aqua-colored electricity had formed into (roughly) a human shape. "It was like the Electric man" (then popular on electrical co-op signs.) It had a sort-of face, with spiky discharge like things emerging. There were eyes and a mouth and maybe a nose. It had stumpy arms. It didn't try to communicate, just stared for maybe ten seconds. Its solidity was such that the witness felt that she could almost see through it. "It didn't look like a monster ... it looked like a friendly little thing." Then it just disappeared back behind the door. 

George is a careful person, so his report will be pretty good. But what the heck is it about? Once again, this has no real UFO connections historically or even at that moment. It doesn't therefore feel UFO to me. It isn't like apparitional figures either, nor does it resemble other past Earthly objects/lifeforms which one might imagine trapped in some visionary playback filmstrip from old times. It seems wedged between some electrostatic weirdness and some Will O' the Wisp Faeryworld manifestation. Having a "personality" feature, I'm not happily going for some misinterpreted Ball Lightning (these sorts of things don't act at all like physics textbook ball lightning anyway, so I wish that red herring would stop being floated. If skeptics want to speculate on a distant cousin of ball lightning [currently totally unexplained] which is low energy density and yet long time persistent [like Allen Hynek's hoped for "nocturnal meandering lights"], then OK --- humbly toss that out there.) 

So, where am I? Boggled of course. I'm sort of "in" for a "living" creature of some paranormal kind, but, if Faery in nature, it's almost never encountered. It's nothing like water or ground folklore entities. What do "salamanders" look like? What do "sylphs"? It doesn't seem to have a category at all. ... but it seems to have been real. Did the witness just make it up? (this is the classic way to get rid of an outlier.) If she had, I think that George would have suspected so.
=========================================================================

CASE 3: Wauwatosa, WI. 1975.  I haven't a close friend in this game. But, the newspaper reporter who covered the incident seems to have done a much better than usual job, and the article report is substantial and full of quotes. The couple reporting the encounter are an older husband and wife (c. ages 60) who called in the police promptly after the incident. The comfort zone on this is pretty good, except that the policeman didn't take them seriously and refused to write up the "complaint." The couple remained in touch with the police investigation for several days after. The entities involved here are not as weird as the little electric man, but are definitely not classic gnomes either (even though one of the witnesses used the word "gnome" in trying to describe them.) So, do I write the report off because the police didn't want to put in writing something that they did not understand at all, or give the witnesses a break because they seemed quite earnest in their interest? I'm cutting them some slack. (to start)

A husband and wife are in their home when the doorbell rings. The date is November the 10th (a fact which might or might not be of significance.) the wife went to answer but peeked through the window first. She saw a "man" (who had apparently stepped back from the door to the sidewalk) who looked strange. She opened the door, but locked the intervening screen. She asked "Yes?" twice with no response. Her husband then showed up, looked at the weird appearance, and said: "What the hell is this? Something left over from trick or treat?" He unlocked and opened the screen door, ready to do something "masculine", but his wife grabbed his suspenders and pulled him back. 

The being was roughly normal sized, but with shocking facial features. It was like an ugly "gnome"with a very tiny mouth hole, and a face liked smoked meat with deep grooves. Its hair was scraggly, and peeked out beneath a narrow brimmed hat. The chin was pointed. The thing carried a five foot long white cane held in its left hand, which it tapped in three time intervals. Each tapping seemed to coincide with the thing floating (three inches off the ground) away from the house door. The couple during this time noticed four other essentially identical beings further out in the street. The motions away were in little looping jumps a la astronauts on the Moon. The witnesses went back inside as the original being raised a hand with fingers slightly like claws. Intention could not be read into this, but they were not unhappy to see the group go. 

OK. What is this? When I look closely at the descriptions here, and given that it wasn't that far past Halloween, I'd spend little interest on this if it wasn't for one bit of high strangeness --- the floating above the ground and looping motion. I'm not sure that the ugly looks on a normal sized being can't be explained by make-up and masks. The certainty of the witnesses that the faces were inhuman "could" be explained by shock and excitement. But the floating above the surface --- that's the kicker. Such a phenomenon is not fake-able for a Halloween prank. So, for me, the incident turns on this one claim. 

If the phenomenology is as described, then we have a case which could be apparitional or perhaps some other paranormality. The being seemed very interaction-oriented. Most apparitions that are of unknown personalities are not particularly interaction-oriented. So I lean towards something else. This seems to me to be either a two-person error or something Boggart-like from the fairy world. There ARE menacing uglys (and even friendly ones) from that alleged area of reality. I'd LIKE to side with two normal seemingly earnest witnesses who reported to police immediately.  But I don't know WHAT I'm siding with.
=========================================================================

CASE 4: I'm going to take these four "greenies" together (that is in briefer description.) They are all intriguing and three of the four are classic gnomish encounters. They lack an investigation (mostly) but could well be good. the fourth "green" case is a bit different but has for me similar intrigue. 
4A: Unnamed forest area, USA. 1971 (from About.com website). Witness looks out window to view nature as was his habit. Saw a little gnome. Brown tightly curled hair with hat. Two foot tall. Walked about as if floating (like anti-gravity.) When talking about this later with an older brother, the brother admitted that he too had seen the same or similar entity when he was a child, but this time inside the house. 
4B: Lexington, MA. 1974. (from an article in FATE Magazine.) Two girlfriends were walking to their high school. Off to their left is a patch of weeds within which is sitting a little man who looked to them like a leprechaun. The creature was only ten inches tall. He was dressed only in green with a floppy hat. He carried a traditional large curved golden pipe. Both girls described him the same way. One of the two girls thought that she (with another friend) saw a group of fairies dancing among flowers in a field in 1975. These creatures were very small, only five inches tall.
4C: near Liberty, NY. 1976. (a Ron Quinn radio call in case.) A sixty seven year old bird watcher was walking on a forest path, when he heard voices, shouting at one another as if in anger. He cautiously approached within about 100 feet and saw two little men, about two feet tall. The details were few: All green dress and floppy wrinkled hats. Each had a beard and were quite like gnomes. The two were wildly gesticulating when a third joined them, and all three began shouting and bumping into one another "like the Three Stooges." Shortly all three turned away and walked off. 
4D: Middleburg, South Africa. 1972. (A "UFO report" from the Flying Saucer Review.) A husband and wife (he the senior local post office official) were at home watching a light hanging above a nearby mountain. They decided to go to the police station. While going there, they saw another light flash. Then there was nearby an "object" not described --- it sounds like it was a bright light, out of which stepped two small red men. These three foot tall entities were glowing bright red and had knapsacks on their backs. Each red man carried a bright light of some kind in his hand. As they seemed to be ready to approach, the entire lighted complex shut off like a light switch.
========================================================================= I don't find the remaining cases particularly interesting for this topic, but I'll mention one of them since it's a Bill Chalker case --- and that means a good investigator was involved. This is The MT. BUTLER, NSW 1972 incident. I don't believe that it has anything to do with Faery but it is indeed HIGH strangeness. In this event, a witness in the presence of others was confronted by a normal sized "monkish" entity. This monk came up to the primary witness and ENTERED the witness' body (!!!) After a time period of "possession" during which the witness was very ill at ease, a group of horses came near, and the entity jumped from the witness into one of the horses. Well, Wow. Pure Bible. Not much like Faery, though.
=========================================================================

What if any was our harvest in this lot? Honestly not much. The Timmerman case is a good encounter, but not classic fairy. There are three cases which look like classic fairy, but not strong enough credibility (though not negative either.) There are the good Eberhart and FSR South Africa cases, but they are not classic either. 





When faced with such results, I'm a half-full sort of person. I look back at all the encounters we've perused from Leprecats 1-6 and say: sure, a lot of weak cases, but one by one we're putting together some higher grade ones. This isn't ufology. I can't hope for the abundance of powerhouse incidents with corresponding investigations. This is a much rawer albeit at least as fascinating subject. It's worth the work, hard as it is. I have the hope that somewhere in the British Isles there are people bringing the UFO investigating attitude to these occurrences. If there is, we'll see many more foundationstones  laid. 

 There are several 70s cases to go, and then four more whole notebooks worth of Leprecat. It will be more low grade ore generally, but there will surely be gems. 

Till next time.

LEPRECAT 4, Part 4: UFO files cross-overs??

Most cases in UFO files are there for an immediately recognizable reason. Others seem forced. Others still are clear outliers. Because the 1950s was so rich in UFO CE3 case claims, it was a decade ripe for containing some such enigmas, and let's look at a few here. 
=========================================================================

 ................A....................//.............B..............//...............C..............//...........D............//.............E...........

Yep. Kelly-Hopkinsville.  Cennini, too. Let's take a closer look. 
 =========================================================================

A.  Kelly-Hopkinsville, KY 1955. The provenance here is solid as the Appalachians, and within that, the credibility is pretty good too. This incident has had interviews and follow-ups a-plenty. Because it so multi-witnessed, any individual personality questions are muted. This case was worked to death by UFO researchers Bud Ledwith (a one-time colleague of Allen Hynek), and legends of the field, Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher. It's rare that there is anything approaching this in fairylore work. 

 The encounter: (I'm going to be lazy here as I have already written this case up elsewhere --- I don't think that you can plagiarize yourself, but if I'm wrong I apologize to me.)

One evening, with a large family celebration going on, one man stepped outside and saw a rainbow colored round object (or a round object with a rainbow-colored trail) coming to Earth in the woods some way off. Another man joined him and about a half hour later the two saw weird silvery glowing creatures approaching from the forest.

Scared at the weirdness, they went inside only to see the creatures keep coming on. A type of siege ensued with creatures going all about and climbing on the roof. Shots were fired at nearly point blank range to no avail. This strangeness continued most of the night. In the morning, upon going outside, no evidence that anything had been there was discernible except for empty cartridges, and damage by the bullets to farm property. [I'm telling the story almost off the top of my head, by the way, so a small detail could be off here or there].

The police were informed and the family gave witness. The military sent an investigator [he was from the Army base] to also write up a report. The drawings on yellowed paper [it's colored blue on the accompanying illustration below] are his, [It is possible that the Army guy just took the drawings made by Bud Ledwith who was on the scene rapidly] taken from the witness descriptions. Following that, many news outlets also came by, and most importantly, an engineer/scientist named Bud Ledwith, who had worked in the Moonwatch Program, and knew Allen Hynek well. [He was working at a nearby radio station at the time].

Somehow, not exactly known, Ledwith's very positive views of the veridical nature of the family testimony made it to CSI-NY and two of our finest-ever UFO researchers, Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher. Isabel and Ted collected all the data associated with the incident and several others in what seemed to be a mini-creature flap going on. Exactly how long after the information collected by the military and Ledwith, Isabel and Ted got involved, I don't know, but it was they who put together the bigger picture. This is published in the well-known but rare-to-own monograph called, I believe, Close Encounter at Kelly and Others in 1955, by the Center for UFO Studies in the 70s.

As was said, although the family literally felt the physicality of the experience, no such physical evidence persisted. The whole thing smacks not only of the Uncanny but also the paranormal. These were country people who don't miss shooting things at close range. These are outdoors people who would laugh at your face [if you were lucky] if you suggested that they couldn't recognize an owl [certain "intellectual" clowns have recently suggested that this was nothing more than owls protecting nests --- note the "unusual" owl crawling on all fours behavior in one of the drawings --- these sorts of "intellectuals" are societal criminals deliberately confusing the search for truth with their hung-up garbage].

Throughout her life, the central female figure in the Sutton family was engaged in reflection about that night by prominent townspeople. The sheriff said that there always came that time in those reflections where she would just go silent with a look of awe on her face. The Kelly-Hopkinsville event happened, whatever it was. My belief is that it was not "biological"; that is not part of the evolution of lifeforms of the Universe of physical laws. Why? Even setting aside for the moment the apparent non-hit-ability by rifle shot, and the floating-slowly-about the landscape, the form of the creatures is "unlikely".

These things, if biological, are not water creatures and are sizable. They look sort of like they should be mammals or something which would have a chance for a large brain and intelligence, and if they are to be guessed as UFOnauts must be quite brainy. But their heads are absurdly gigantic in proportion to their bodies. This next thought doesn't HAVE to be true, but, if it is not, someone needs to do some real thinking as to why not: Those heads could never come through a birth canal of anything remotely shaped like the creatures drawn. Could the females be wildly different in shape than the males? If so, there is nothing on Earth remotely comparable in terms of divergent sexual dimorphism in large animals. Could the things be birdish and come from eggs? Eggs have real structural size limits and so the heads would have to be small and do a tremendous amount of growing while "outside" exposed to natural threat. Growing and remaking skulls to accommodate growing brains would take a very great risk-taking time using soft malleable skulls. Anything's possible, I suppose, but these things REALLY don't look like normal evolutionary biology to me. The only hope I'd believe would be that they were artificially grown. If so, why bother with the out-sized ears if you had that technology? Nothing about these critters says anything but "bogan" "bauchan" "trickster" to me.

 I'm maybe overdoing it here but I'm going to give you an added treat. Following are Bud Ledwith's notes comparing the several witnesses' testimonies, as found in the Center for UFO Studies files. 

=========================================================================

B. Stockton, GA 1955. Back to normal (descriptive amounts, that is. The Kelly case will doubtless exceed any other example incident writing in volume by factors of ten.) The provenance of the Georgia case is similar to Kelly, as Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher hunted down it and others which were occurring at the same time. It appears that a handful of encounters with mysterious boggart like beings happened almost simultaneously and with very weak UFO connections. 

As far as this following story is concerned, there is not a lot to it. A woman was driving along a road at night and saw "beings doing road construction" ahead. She slowed way down --- they were in the middle if the road, and gingerly inched past. They were very strange non-human "workmen" more like boogeymen than people. They were three to four foot tall. 

The lady merely happily bypassed the things without incident and drove away. This, weird as it is, is not unlike some UK passive path crossings with British gnomes. 
========================================================================

C. Cennini, Italy. 1954. A famous case in the history of the UFO subject. Even given its early occurrence, it was pretty well investigated and followed up over several years (The lady involved did maintain that her narrative of the encounter was true for decades thereafter.) The incident is weird even for a UFO close encounter, but I've read a lot about this thing, meditated about it more than most of my files, and I believe that Senora Dainelli told the truth as she felt it. 

In brief: Rosa Dainelli (she has been described as a simple Italian peasant woman) was preparing to go to Church for Mass. She had collected some flowers for the Church, and was walking in the woods, the grass of which was wet with dew. To avoid soaking her shoes and stockings, she had removed them, and was carrying them along with the flowers. She then came across two small "men" who could easily be labeled as "imps." Dressed as old time aviators, they began harassing her, trying to take the flowers and her stockings. Though frightened by this, she fought with them, and succeeded in salvaging her stockings but not her flowers, which the imps took. She hurried on to church where she told her story. Some rumors ultimately arose about seeing a light in the sky or whatever (not by her) but nothing substantial was reported. 

Rosa and her family at the time: to my knowledge her testimony did not waver and all she got out of it was some hassle and unwanted publicity. The Cennini case probably happened, but what was it? UFO researchers stick it into the early stage of the massive European UFO Wave of 1954 (which though dominant in France, did express in other European countries.) If I had to choose (and though I don't have to, I do), I'd say fairy-trickster not "UFO." 

Although some CE3 UFO beings act weirdly, they seldom act "impactfully" upon the witness, but fairylore knuckleheads OFTEN do. These guys are classic knuckleheads. 

Let's look at the "craft." Odd shape. I've read the reports and believe that the magazine version got it at least somewhat wrong (the spindle was fatter and the door opened differently), so for whatever it's worth I've redrawn it on the right. This "craft" was not seen "in flight" at all. Rosa Dainelli saw a structure on the ground in the woods which was no longer there later on, and leaving no trace. The interior of the thing could be seen through the open hatch. It resembled more something out of an old Jules Verne idea or an H G Wells story than a "saucer", with its padded plush looking interior a la an English Gentleman's way of outfitting a ship to the Moon. 

Wrong I may well be, but this is a rare one which I believe very probably happened and very probably was not ET nor even UFO, but possibly Trickster-faery. 
=========================================================================

D. Everittstown, NJ. 1957. Provenance is quite good in a legitimate sense of that quality as we've been using it. BUT this is one of the screwiest things in UFO research investigation history (well, maybe that's overstated given our history, but it's still screwy.) The case comes to the perfect group: CSI-NY (Ted Bloecher, Isabel Davis, Lex Mebane et al.) Unfortunately, the "et al" included an intelligent man named Jules St.Germain, who had a bad theory about investigating it, and really messed up. This left the community with the firm belief that this case was bad. But I think that the predecessor of St. Germain collected quite a bit of worthwhile information before the later boondoggle, trying to entrap the witnesses and causing them to bail from the story. My reading of this is that the earliest narrative might well be honest, but St. Germain blundered the approach and caused a what-the-hell-it's-not-worth-pursuing response. Anyway, I'm for the moment going to go with the original information and see what we might see.

The original report got to a CSI-NY investigator named Dick Harpster and he immediately personally interviewed the wife in the encounter, and the husband by phone. He was impressed by these narratives. The case as he heard it commenced with the husband going outside to the barn to look into what was alarming their dog. Both witnesses saw a small (9 to 12 foot long) "egg" which was bobbing up and down a few feet off the ground.  From the wife's position in the house, she could not see the "little man" but her husband was right in front of it. This being was dressed "leprechaun-style", all in green with shiny buttons and a green cap. His eyes were very big and round, and his voice scratchy. The Little Man said that "they were peaceful" but wanted his dog. The husband yelled "Get the Hell out of here!", and the "leprechaun" went back to the floating egg. The egg rose and went rapidly off. The wife said: you "should have let them take King, he's half blind and so cross I don't know who else would ever want him."  ... that's almost hilarious, and strikes a good note with me. 

The case was screwed up when CSI-NY sent St. Germain to do a longer follow-up. He opened up with a warning that some people have gotten into trouble for telling UFO yarns that proved bogus. This caused the witnesses to go into a private room, converse and return with a somewhat different story. St. Germain then (happily?) wrote them off as hoaxers. No evidence of hoaxing ever surfaced and no attempts at profiting ever occurred. 

Leprechaun-trickster in a floating egg? Maybe.
=========================================================================

E. Bells Corners, ONT. 1958. Very bizarre thing. Few moments of "action" therefore a brief tale. Provenance/credibility? You decide. This incident occurred in August of 1958, was talked about with friends shortly thereafter, but not publicly until February 1960. The primary (of two) witness was listening to a radio show where the speaker was a famous and controversial person in UFO history named Wilbert B. Smith. The witness called in, and shortly Smith and a second investigator went to her home and the site. Bells Corners is a small village in the vicinity of Ottawa. 

While there, Smith and his associate did a good job with the interview and the site investigation. Smith's unusual beliefs about UFOs apparently did not damage his scientist training in gathering simple facts. So, it is my (romantic?) opinion that the case report is pretty good. 

This night in August, the woman saw an oddly colored bluish patch of light in the back area of her home, perhaps twenty-five feet away. She went to investigate, as did her son, but he had reservations and asked her to not go too close. She ignored him and walked right up to the light patch. (two or three feet.) There is to my knowledge no imagery of this encounter, so I've attempted to "art" one. Whatever the success, in my opinion the best way to "read" the encounter is to look at a picture --- so, better or worse:

Here's what the lady and  to a lesser degree her son said they saw: A child-like form lying on its belly in the grass/pasture, head raised slightly so that mainly its eyes were all you could see. Tight curly brownish golden hair. A "patch" of bright bluish light which seemed perhaps to originate from the eyes. Very large eyes seemingly faceted like jewels. Very white skin. No motion. 

After watching this being for a minute or so, the son became so agitated (the mother was not afraid) that he insisted that they return to the house. They did. Once inside, they looked out and the patch of light was gone. A year and a half later, the investigators thought that they could discern an irregular area of dead grass in that field, where the being lay.  It measured approximately 3x1 1/2 feet in size. 

And so what is that all about? Doesn't look like UFOlogy to me, but what DOES it look like? 
========================================================================

So, what do we know? We know at least that there are unusual cases which get into the UFO files which seem to fit better elsewhere. They aren't a high percentage --- in my experience far lower than 1precent. But now and then an incident gives you pause. 

Where to draw the Line? .... and IS there a Line? I "feel" that there is a clear feeling line. UFO cases are "cold." Faery cases are "alive." So, for me, things like 

 Are much more like Faery than UFOlogy. 

HEY, Mike! What about THIS?

What's this?

Bangor, Washington. 1989.

What did the beings look like?

GIVE ME A BREAK!!!!  ................. till next time folks. (I won't have the help of the UFO community so it shouldn't be so long a posting.)