Audio book in mp3 of, PASSPORT TO MAGONIA, Of jaques valee. If wanting to follow the the text read here, search up the online pdf book of this. CHAPTER ONE, VISIONS OF A PARALLEL WORLD. ON JUNE 15, 1952, in the jungles of Yucatan, an archaeological expedition led by Alberto Ruz Lhuillicr and three companions made a remarkable discovery. The team was investigating the impressive Palenque monuments, located in the state of Chiapas, on the site of a well known Mayan city that scientists were busy restoring and mapping in systematic fashion. Yucatan is a region of constant humidity and high temperature, and the tropical vegetation had caused considerable damage to the temples and pyramids erected by the Mayas, whose civilization was marked by the genius of its architects and is thought to have declined in the first centuries of our era, disappearing almost completely about the ninth century—that is, at the time of the Charlemagne Empire in Europe. e One of the most impressive constructions on the Palenque site is the "Pyramid of Inscriptions," an enormous truncated pyramid with a long stairway in front. The pyramid is of a somewhat unusual design, for on the top is a large temple. The purpose of the monument was unknown until Lhuillier and his companions sug gested that it might have been built as a tomb for some exceptional king; or illustrious priest. Led by this idea, they began to search the temple at the top of the pyramid for some passage or stairway leading directly into the monument. And on June 15, 1952, they discovered a long flight of stairs going down through the enormous mass and actually under ground level. The passage was built after the traditional Mayan fashion, the inclined walls giving the enclosure a high, conical shape ending with a narrow ceiling. Some Indian huts in Yucatan are still built this way, a most efficient design in the tropical climate since it allows hot air to rise, thereby providing a relatively comfortable temperature inside the hut. At the bottom of the temple passage stairway was a splendid crypt, and in the crypt was a sarcophagus covered with a single carved stone measuring twelve feet by seven. Ten inches thick, the slab weighed about six tons. The fantastic scene depicted by the artists had not suffered; it came to light in every detail; and archaeologists are completely at a loss to interpret its meaning. The Mayans are supposed to have vanished without having invented even the rudiments of a technology. Some archaeologists doubt that they knew the wheel, and yet the design on the Palenque sarcophagus appears to show a very complex and sophisticated device, with a man at the controls of an intricate piece of machinery. Noting that the man is depicted with his knees brought up toward his chest and his back to a complicated mechanism, from which flames are seen to flow, several people, among them Soviet science writer Alexander Kazantsev, have speculated that the Mayans had actually been in contact with visitors from a superior civilization—visitors who used spaceships. Kazantsev's interpretation is difficult to prove. However, the only object we know today closely resembling the Mayan design is the space capsule. The demigod for whom sarcophagus, crypt, and pyramid were built with such splendid craftsmanship by the Mayan artists is something of a puzzle, too. The body is radically different from the morphology of the Mayans, as we imagine them: the corpse is that of a man nearly six feet tall, about eight inches taller than the average Mayan. According to Pierre Honore,1 the sarcophagus was made for the "Great White God," Kulkulkan, but no final clue to the mystery has yet been found, and the tropical jungles of Central America where dozens of temples and pyramids are still buried under the exuberant vegetation have not yet yielded the secret of the Palenque sarcophagus. It is in the literature of religion that flying objects from celestial countries are most commonly encountered, along with descriptions of the organization, nature, and philosophy of their occupants. Indeed, several writers have consistently pointed out that the fundamental texts of every religion refer to the contact of the human community with a "superior race" of beings from the sky. This terminology is used, in particular, in the Bible, where it is said: They come from a far country, from the end of heaven, even the Lord, and the weapons of his indignation, to destroy the whole land.2 The visitors have the power to fly through the air using luminous craft, sometimes called "celestial chariots." With these manifestations are associated impressive physical and meteorological displays, which the primitive authors call "whirlwind," "pillar of fire," etc. The occupants of these craft, to whom popular imagery will later ascribe wings and luminosity, are similar to man and communicate with him. They are organized under a strict military system: The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels: the Lord is among them. Gustave Dore, the French artist who has illustrated splendid editions of the Bible, has left a beautiful engraving showing these "celestial chariots" in the full power of their fantastic flight, speeding above the mountains, the clouds, and the abyss. A period of the early history of Japan ending about 3000 B.C. has received the name "Jomon Era." During that period an important artistic activity was the making of earthen statues.4 At first, these statues were very simple. Small in size, they were made to represent human beings. But in the middle of the period, the artists started to make larger statues showing standard features of a drastically different design: large chests, arc shaped legs, very short arms, and large heads obviously covered with complete helmets. On the nature of the helmets archaeologists disagree. In 1924, because he thought that its expression looked like that found on a wooden mask made in Africa, Dr. Gento Hasebe proposed that the headgear was in reality a mourning mask used at burials. In the Tohoku area of northern Japan, however, some of the most elaborate statues of this kind show something like a pair of "sunglasses": huge eyes with an insectlike horizontal slit—a truly remarkable design. Supposedly, the statues of the later part of the Jomon Era were first made with earth, then copied on rock or soft stone. Those found in Komukai, Nambu Province, are carved in rock and show helmets. One of them, a Jomon Dogu dated 4300 B.C. and excavated at the Amadaki ruins in the Iwatc Prefecture, shows details of the front part of the helmet, with a round opening at the base of the nose, below what appears to be a large perforated plate. The resemblance of the Dogu costume to a pressure suit of the type used by divers and astronauts is the relevant factor here. It has led some students of the Jomon Era to speculate that the statues might indicate the distant memory of visitors from space. The headgear with its filter, the large goggles, the necks with wide collars, and the one piece suits certainly bear a close resemblance to modern space gear. The fact that the sculptors made these figurines hollow is another puzzling element. Altogether, the Far East is a rich source of reports of supernatural beings and celestial signs, as we shall now sec. SORCERERS FROM THE CLOUDS. It is common belief that the term "flying saucer" was "made in America." Was it not coined by an American businessman in 1947? Was not the first official investigation of the mystery by military authorities started in the United States a few weeks later? Well, yes. But a farmer from Texas described a dark flying object as a "large saucer" as early as January, 1878,5 and ancient Japanese records inform us that on October 27, 1180, an unusual luminous object described as an "earthenware vessel" flew from a mountain in the Kii Province beyond the northeast mountain of Fukuhara at midnight. After a while, the object changed its course and was lost to sight at the southern horizon, leaving a luminous trail. "In view of the time which has elapsed since the sighting"—as U.S. Air Force investigators like to say—it would be difficult to obtain additional data today. It is interesting, however, to find a medieval Japanese chronicler speaking of flying earthenware. The Japanese must also receive credit for having organized the first official investigation, and the story is so amusing, and parallels so well recent activities of the U.S. Air Force that I cannot resist reproducing it here. The date was September 24, 1235, seven centuries before our time, and General Yontsume was camping with his army. Suddenly, a curious phenomenon was observed: mysterious sources of light were seen to swing and circle in the southwest, moving in loops until the early morning. General Yoritsumc ordered what we would now term a "full scale scientific investigation," and his consultants set to work. Fairly soon they made their report. "The whole thing is completely natural, General," they said in substance. "It is only the wind making the stars sway." My source of information for this report, Yusuke J. Matsumura, of Yokohama, adds sadly: "Scholars on government pay have always made ambiguous statements like this!" Celestial phenomena seem to have been so commonplace in the Japanese skies during the Middle Ages that they influenced human events in a direct way. Panics, riots and disruptive social movements were often linked to celestial apparitions. The Japanese peasants had the disagreeable tendency to interpret the "signs from heaven" as strong indications that their revolts and demands against the feudal system or against foreign invaders were just, and as assurance that their rebellions would be crowned with success. Numerous examples of such situations can be quoted, For instance, on September 12, 1271, the famous priest Nichircn was about to be beheaded at Tatsunokuchi, Kamakura, when there appeared in the sky an object like a full moon, shiny and bright. Needless to say, the officials panicked and the execulion was not carried out." On August 3, 989, during a period of great social unrest, three round objects of unusual brilliance were observed; later they joined together. In 1361, a flying object described as being "shaped like a drum, about twenty feet in diameter" emerged from the inland sea off western Japan. On January 2, 1458, a bright object resembling the full moon was seen in the sky, and this apparition was followed by "curious signs" in heaven and earth. People were "amazed." Two months later, on March 17, 1458, five stars appeared, circling the moon. They changed color three times and vanished suddenly. The rulers were utterly distressed and believed that the sign announced a great disturbance throughout the land. All the people in Kyoto were expecting disasters to follow, and the emperor himself was very upset. Ten years later, on March 8, 1468, a dark object, which made a "sound like a wheel," flew from Mt. Kasuga toward the west at midnight. The combination of the sound and the darkness of the flying object is difficult to explain in natural terms. On January 3, 1569, in the evening, a flaming star appeared in the sky. It was regarded as an omen of serious changes, announcing the fall of the Chu Dynasty. Such phenomena continued during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, in May, 1606, fireballs were continuously reported over Kyoto, and one night a whirling ball of fire resembling a red wheel hovered near the Nijo Castle and was observed by many of the samurai. The next morning the city was filled with rumors and the people muttered: "This must be a portent." One noon in September, 1702, the sun took on a bloody color several days in succession and cottonlike threads fell down, ap parently falling from the sun itself—phenomena reminiscent of the 1917 observations in Fatima, Portugal. Chaos spread all over Japan on January 2, 1749, when three round objects "like the moon" appeared and were seen for four days. Such a state of social unrest developed, and seemed so clearly linked with the mysterious "celestial objects," that the government decided to act. Riot participants were executed. But confusion became total when people observed three "moons" aligned in the sky and, several days later, two "suns." Undoubtedly the Japanese experienced natural phenomena, similar to mirages and incorrectly interpreted them in the context of social rebellion. From this distance, however, it is impossible to separate the reliable observations from the emotional interpretation. What matters here is the link between certain unusual phenomena— observed or imagined—and the alteration of the witnesses' behavior. In other words, these accounts show that it is possible to affect the lives of many people by showing them displays that arc beyond their comprehension, or by convincing them that they have observed such phenomena, or by keeping alive the belief that their destiny is somehow controlled by occult forces. A brief examination of legendary elements in Western Europe in the Middle Ages will show that a similar rumor about strange flying objects and supernatural manifestations was spreading there, too. Indeed, Pierre Boaistuau, in 1575, remarked: The face of heaven has been so often disfigured by bearded, hairy comets, torches, flames, columns, spears, shields, dragons, duplicate moons, suns, and other similar things, that if one wanted to tell in an orderly fashion those that have happened since the birth of Jesus Christ only, and inquire about the causes of their origin, the lifetime of a single man would not be enough.7 According to the 1594 edition of the same book, this is what happened a few miles from Tubingen, Germany, on December 5, 1577, at 7:00 A.M.: About the sun many dark clouds appeared, such as we are wont to see during great storms: and soon afterward have come from the sun other clouds, all fiery and bloody, and others, yellow as safran. Out of these clouds have come forth reverberations resembling large, tall and wide hats, and the earth showed itself yellow and bloody, and seemed to be covered with hats, tall and wide, which appeared in various colors such as red, blue, green, and most of them black. .. . It is easy for everyone to think of the meaning of this miracle, which is that God wants to induce men to amend their lives and make penance. May Almighty God inspire all men to recognize Him. Amen. Especially interesting to us will be the fact that these reports of celestial objects are linked with claims of contact with strange creatures, a situation parallel to that of modern day UFO landings. PASSPORT TO MAGONIA. Since these rumors have been puzzling to many authorities in the Roman Catholic Church, perhaps it is appropriate to begin with a quotation from the life of St. Anthony, the Egyptian born founder of Christian monasticism who lived about 300 A.D. In the desert, St. Anthony met with a strange being of small stature, who fled after a brief conversation with him: Before long in a small rocky valley shut in on all sides he sees a mannikin with hooted snout, horned forehead, and extremities like goat's feet. When he "saw this, Anthony like a good soldier seized the shield of faith and the helmet of hope: the creature none the less began to offer him the fruit of the palm tree to support him on his journey and as it were pledges of peace. Anthony perceiving this stopped and asked who he was. The answer he received from him was this: "I am a mortal being and one of the inhabitants of the Desert whom the Gentiles deluded by various forms of error worship under the names of Fauns, Satyrs and Incubi. I am sent to represent my tribe. We pray you in our behalf to entreat the favour of your Lord, and ours, who, we have learnt, came once to save the world, and 'whose sound has gone forth into all the earth.' " As he uttered such words as these, the aged traveller's cheeks streamed with tears, the marks of his deep feeling, which he shed in the fulness of his joy, He rejoiced over the Glory of Christ and the destruction of Satan, and marvelling all the while that he could understand the Satyr's language, and striking the ground with his star, he said, "Woe to thee, Alexandria, who instead of God worshippest monsters! Woe to thee, harlot city, into which have flowed together the demons of the whole world! What will you say now? Beasts speak of Christ, and you instead of God worship monsters." He had not finished speaking when, as if on wings, the wild creature fled away. Let no one scruple to believe this incident; its truth is supported by what took place when Constantinc was on the throne, a matter of which the whole world was witness. For a man of that kind was brought alive to Alexandria and shewn as a wonderful sight to the people. Afterwards his lifeless body, to prevent its decay through the summer heat, was preserved in salt and brought to Antioch that the Emperor might see it. Again, with this story, we are faced with an account the truthfulness of which it would be futile to question: the lives of the early saints are full of amazing miracles that should be taken as literary figures rather than as scientific observations. The important point is that basic religious texts contain such material, giving, so to speak, letters of nobility to a category of beings widely believed to be of supernatural origin. Such observations as St. Anthony's will prove fundamental when religious authorities are faced with the problem of evaluating medieval observations of beings from the sky, claims of evocation of demons by occult means, and even modern miracles. The details and the terminology of such observations as St. Anthony's are not important to this study. It is enough to note that in St. Anthony's account the strange being is indifferently termed a satyr and a mannikin, while the saint himself states that the Gentiles also use the names faun and incubus. St. Jerome speaks of a "man of that kind." Throughout our study of these legends, we shall find the same confusion. In the above account, however, it is at least clear to St. Anthony that the creature is neither an angel nor a demon. If it had been, he would have recognized it immediately! In the twenty century old Indian book of primitive astronomy, Surya Siddhanta, it is said that "Below the moon and above the clouds revolve the Siddhas [perfected men] and the Vidyaharas [possessors of knowledge]." According to Andrew Tomas, Indian tradition holds that the Siddhas could become "very heavy at will or as light as a feather, travel through space and disappear from sight." Observations of beings who flew across the sky and landed are also found in the writings of Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, France. Agobard, who was born in Spain in 779 and came to France when three years old, became archbishop at thirty seven. When he died in 840, "one of the most celebrated and learned prelates of the ninth century," he left an interesting account of a peculiarly significant incident: We have, however, seen and heard many men plunged in such great stupidity, sunk in such depths of folly, as to believe that there is a certain region, which they call Magonia, whence ships sail in the clouds, in order to carry back to that region those fruits of the cartli which arc destroyed by hail and tempests; the sailors paying rewards to the storm wizards and themselves receiving corn and other produce. Out of the number of those whose blind folly was deep enough to allow them to believe these things possible, I saw several exhibiting in a certain concourse of people, four persons in bonds—three men and a woman who they said had fallen from these same ships; after keeping them for some days in captivity they had brought them before the assembled multitude, as we have said, in our presence to be stoned. But truth prevailed.11 We shall see in the following pages that the occultists give a quite different interpretation to the same incident. THE SEVEN VISITORS OF FACIUS CARDAN. Throughout medieval times, a major current of thought distinct from official religion existed, culminating in the works of the alchemists and hermetics. Among such groups were to be found some of the early modern scientists and men remarkable for the strength of their independent thinking and for their adventurous life, such as Paracelsus. The nature of the beings who mysteriously appeared, dressed in shiny garments or covered with dark hair, and with whom communication was so hard to establish intrigued these men intensely. They were the first to relate these strange beings to the creatures described in the Bible and in the writings of the early cabalists. According to biblical writers, the heavenly hierarchy includes beings of human form called cherubim, a name that in Hebrew means "full of knowledge." Ezekiel describes them in the following terms: Their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps: it went up and down among the living crea tures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning.12 Are the mysterious creatures who fly through the sky and land in their "cloudships"—Agobard's authority notwithstanding—of the same race as the angels? asked the old philosophers. No, because they are mortal: The Hebrews used to call these beings who are between the Angels and Man Sadaim, and the Greeks, transposing the letters and adding but one syllable, called them Daimonas. Among the ancient Philosophers these demons were held to be an Aerial Race, ruling over the Elements, mortal, engendering, and unknown in this century to those who rarely seek Truth in her ancient dwelling place, which is to say, in the Cabala and in the theology of the Hebrews, who possessed the special art of holding communion with that Aerial People and of conversing with all these Inhabitants of the Air.13 Plutarch even had a complete theory on the nature of these beings: He thinks it absurd that there should be no mean between the two extremes of an immortal and a mortal being; that there cannot be in nature so vast a flaw, without some intermedial kind of life, partaking of them both. As, therefore, we find the intercourse be tween the soul and the body to be made by the animal spirits, so between divinity and humanity there is this species of daemons.14 It is not surprising, then, to find that the "Philosophers" dis agreed with Agobard on the nature of the three men and the woman who were captured by the mob in Lyons: In vain does a Philosopher bring to light the falsity of the chimeras people have fabricated, and present manifest proofs to the contrary. No matter what his experience, nor how sound his argument and reasoning, let but a man with a doctor's hood come along and write them down as false—experience and demonstration count for naught and it is henceforward beyond the power of Truth to reestablish her empire. People would rather believe in a doctor's hood than in their own eyes. There has been in your native France a memorable proof of this popular mania. The famous Cabalist Zcdcchias, in the reign of your Pepin, took it into his head to convince the world that the Elements are inhabited by those peoples whose nature I have just described to you. The expedient of which he bethought himself was to advise the Sylphs to show themselves in the Air to everybody: They did so sumptuously. liiese beings were seen in the Air in human form, sometimes in battle array marching in good order, halting under arms, or en camped beneath magnificent tents. Sometimes on wonderfully constructed aerial ships, whose flying squadrons roved at the will of the Zephyrs. What happened? Do you suppose that ignorant age would so much as reason as to the nature of these marvellous spectacles? The people Straightaway believed that sorcerers had taken possession of the Air for the purpose of raising tempests and bringing hail upon their crops. The learned theologians and jurists were soon of the same opinion as the masses. The Emperor believed it as well; and this ridiculous chimera went so far that the wise Charlemagne, and after him Louis the Debonair, imposed grievous penalties upon all these supposed Tyrants of the Air. You may see an account of this in the first chapter of the Capitularies of these two Emperors. The Sylphs seeing the populace, the pedants and even the crowned heads thus alarmed against them, determined to dissipate the bad opinion people had of their innocent fleet by carrying off men from every locality and showing them their beautiful women, their Republic and their manner of government, and then setting them down again on earth in divers parts of the world. They carried out their plan. The people who saw these men as they were descending came running from every direction, convinced beforehand that they were sorcerers who had separated from their companions in order to come and scatter poisons on the fruit and in the springs. Carried away by the frenzy with which such fancies inspired them, they hurried these innocents off to the torture. The great number of them who were put to death by fire and water throughout the kingdom is incredible. One day, among other instances, it chanced at Lyons that three men and a woman were seen descending from these aerial ships. The entire city gathered about them, crying out they were magicians and were sent by Grimaldus, Duke of Bcneventum, Charlemagne's enemy, to destroy the French harvests. In vain the four innocents sought to vindicate themselves by saying that they were their own country folk, and had been carried away a short time since by miraculous men who had shown them unheard of marvels, and had desired to give them an account of what they had seen. The frenzied populace paid no heed to their defence, and were on the point of casting them into the fire, when the worthy Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, who having been a monk in that city had acquired considerable authority there, came running at the noise, and having heard the accusations of the people and the defence of the accused, gravely pronounced that both one and the other were false. That it was not true that these men had fallen from the sky, and that what they said they had seen there was impossible. The people believed what their good father Agobard said rather than their own eyes, were pacified, set at liberty the four Ambassadors of the Sylphs, and received with wonder the book which Ago bard wrote to confirm the judgment which he had pronounced. Thus the testimony of these four witnesses was rendered vain. Such stories were so well established during the Middle Ages that the problem of communicating with the Elementals became a major preoccupation of the hermetics and an important part of their philosophy. Paracelsus wrote an entire book on the nature of these beings, but be took great pains to warn the reader of the dangers of an association with them: I do not want to say here, because of the ills which might befall those who would try it, through which compact one associates with these beings, thanks to which compact they appear to us and speak to us. And in a treatise entitled "Why These Beings Appear to Us," lie presented the following ingenious theory: Everything God creates manifests itself to Man sooner or later. Sometimes God confronts him with the devil and the spirits in order to convince him of their existence. From the top of Heaven, he also sends the angels, his servants. Thus these beings appear to us, not in order to stay among us or become allied to us, but in order for us to become able to understand them. These apparitions are scarce, to tell the truth. But why should it be otherwise? Is it not enough for one of us to see an Angel, in order for all of us to believe in the other Angels? Paracelsus was probably born in 1491, and in the very same year Facius Cardan recorded his observation of seven strange visitors directly Tclatcd to the creatures of the elements who were so puzzling to the great philosopher. The incident is preserved in the writings of his son, Jerome Cardan (1501 to 1576), who is well known to us today as a mathematician. Jerome Cardan lived in Milan and was not only a mathematician but also an occulist and a physician. In his book De Subtilitate, Cardan explains that he had often heard his father tell the particular story and finally searched for his record of the event, which read as follows: August 13, 1491. When I had completed the customary rites, at about the twentieth hour of the day, seven men duly appeared to me clothed in silken garments, resembling Greek togas, and wear ing, as it were, shining shoes. The undergarments beneath their glistening and ruddy breastplates seemed to be wrought of crimson and were of extraordinary glory and beauty. Nevertheless all were not dressed in this fashion, but only two who seemed to be of nobler rank than the others. The taller of them who was of ruddy complexion was attended by two companions, and the second, who was fairer and of shorter stature, by three. Thus in all there were seven. He left no record as to whether their heads were covered. They were about forty years of age, but they did not appear to be above thirty. When asked who they were, they said that they were men composed, as it were, of air, and subject to birth and death. It was true that their lives were much longer than ours, and might even reach to three hundred years' duration. Questioned on the immortality of our soul, they affirmed that nothing survives which is peculiar to the individual.., . When my father asked them why they did not reveal treasures to men if they knew where they were, they answered that it was forbidden by a peculiar law under the heaviest penalties for anyone to communicate this knowledge to men. They remained with my father for over three hours. But when he questioned them as to the cause of the universe they were not agreed. The tallest of them denied that God had made the world from eternity. On the contrary, the other added that God created it from moment to moment, so that should He desist for an instant the world would perish.. Be this fact or fable, so it stands.10 Nearly three centuries later, in September, 1768, a young man of sixteen was traveling to the University of Leipzig, with two passengers from Frankfurt. Most of the journey was accomplished in the rain, and the coach sometimes had trouble moving uphill. On one occasion when the passengers had left their seats to walk behind the horses, the young man noticed a strange luminous object at ground level: All at once, in a ravine on the right hand side of the way, I saw a sort of amphitheatre, wonderfully illuminated. In a funnel shaped space there were innumerable little lights gleaming, ranged step fashion over one another; and they shone so brilliantly that the eye was dazzled. But what still more confused the sight was that they did not keep still, but jumped about here and there, as well down wards from above as vice versa, and in every direction. The greater part of them, however, remained stationary, and beamed on. It was only with the greatest reluctance that I suffered myself to be called away from the spectacle, which I could have wished to examine more closely. The postilion, when questioned, said that he knew nothing about such a phenomenon, but that there was in the neighborhood an old stone quarry, the excavation of which was filled with water. Now, whether this was a pandemonium of willo'the wisps, or a company of luminous creatures, I will not decide. The young man in question was Goethe. You will find this sighting in the sixth book of his Autobiography, according to Kenneth Anger, to whom I am indebted for this very interesting discovery. Would the German poet and scientist have had occasion to learn more about the "luminous creatures" had he lived in the twentieth century? If Paracelsus came back, would he find new material for his theories on the nature of the strange and fugitive races of beings from the sky? We can safely hypothesize that their attention would be immediately directed to the files of UFO landings. In the next paragraphs, we shall examine some of the recent cases they might have found of interest. What do they prove? Nothing. They only indicate that, if there ever was a time for scientists to bow their heads with awe before the variety and power of natural phenomena and human imagination, it is to be found in our own age of technology and rational thought, not in the confusion of medieval philosophies. RETURN OF THE HUMANOIDS. One night in January, 1958, a lady whose name I am not authorized to publish was driving along the New York State Thruway in the vicinity of Niagara Falls, in the midst of a violent snowstorm. The exact time was 1:30 A.M. The lady was going to visit her son, then in the Army, and she was driving very carefully, trying to find an exit, for she believed the Thruway was closed ahead of her. Visibility was extremely bad. Hence she had no chance to think when she suddenly saw what seemed to be an airplane wreck on the center parkway: A large shape was visible, and a slim rod at least fifty feet high was illuminated and getting shorter as though it were sinking into the ground. My motor slowed down and as I came closer my car stopped completely. I became panicky and tried desperately to start it as I had no lights. My first thought was to get out and see what was happening but I suddenly saw two shapes rising around that slim pole which was still growing shorter. They were suspended but moving about it. 'Ilicy seemed to be like animals with four legs and a tail but two front feelers under the head, like arms. Then, before I could even see things disappeared and the shape rose and I then realized it was a saucer, it spun and zoomed about ten feet off the ground and up into the air and I could not even see where it went. My lights suddenly came on. I started the car and it was all right. I pulled up to that place, got out with a flashlight and walked over to where it had been sitting. A large hole was melted in the snow about a foot across and grass was showing on it. The grass was warm, but nothing was dug up around there. The lady, who met only with disbelief when she told her story to her family, reported the case in a letter to Otto Binder when his syndicated series "Our Space Age" began to appear in a number of newspapers. The most puzzling element in this account is not so much what is described but the fact that such stories have become, since 1946, rather common in all parts of the world. To a physicist, of course, they appear unbelievable, just as the strange mannikin met by St. Anthony would appear unbelievable to a biologist. And yet there are several cases on record in which similar accounts arc associated with traces that can hardly be questioned. In the celebrated incident at Socorro, New Mexico, it was a policeman, Lonnie Zamora, who reported seeing two small beings, dressed in white, close to a shiny egg shaped object, which rested on four pads before it took off with a thunderous noise—only to become perfectly silent as it flew away. The incident took place on April 24,1964, and was the occasion for some interesting measurements (by local police officials and a Federal Bureau of Investigation man) of the traces left by the object, and of some even more interesting deductions by William T. Powers on the possible mechanical construction of the landing gear. Here again we observe an emotional pattern strangely reminiscent of the medieval scene just surveyed: the witness in the Socorro case, when he was about to be interviewed by Air Force investigators, was so little convinced that he had observed a device of human construction that he asked to sec a priest before releasing his report to the authorities. Then, of course, there is the report of the Kentucky family who claimed to have been besciged by several "little men," whose ap pearance was completely fantastic. The incident occurred on the night of April 21, 1955, and was the occasion of many strange observations of the behavior of the "visitors." One of the creatures was seen approaching the farmhouse with both hands raised. When it was about twenty feet away, two of the witnesses shot at the intruder. It "did a flip" and was lost in the darkness. Then it appeared at the window when the men came back inside the house and was again shot at. Another creature, seen on the roof, was knocked over by a bullet, but instead of falling, it floated to the ground. The entities had oversized heads, almost perfectly round, and very long arms, terminating in huge hands armed with talons. They wore a sort of glowing aluminum suit, which is reminiscent of the sylphs of 1491. Their eyes were very large and apparently very sensitive. They always approached the house from the darkest corner. The eyes had no pupils and no eyelids. The eyes were much larger than human eyes and set on the side of the head. The creatures generally walked upright, but when shot at, they would run on all fours with extreme rapidity, and their arms seemed to provide most of the propulsion. On September 10, 1954, in Quarouble, a small French village near the Belgian border, at about 10:30 P.M., Marius Dewilde stepped outside and was at once intrigued by a dark mass on the railroad tracks. Dewilde then heard footsteps in the night. Turning on his light, he found himself facing two beings wearing very large helmets and what seemed to be heavy diving suits. They had broad shoulders, but Dewilde did not see their arms. They were less than four feet tall. Dewilde moved toward them with the intention of intercepting them, but a light appeared on the side of the dark object on the tracks, and Dewilde found he could not make a single move. When he regained control of his body, the two visitors had rccntercd the supposed machine and flown away. This classic observation had a strange sequel, never before pub lished. French civilian investigators who studied the case were cooperating closely with local police officials, but there were other people on the site, notably representatives of the Air Police from Paris. When an inquiry was made regarding the analyses performed on some stones found calcined at the spot where the saucer had been seen by Dewilde, it was discovered that even the police could not obtain information as to the results of the analyses. In the words of the local police chief: The official body working in liaison with the Air Police belongs to the Ministry of National Defense. The very name of this Min istry excludes the idea of any communication. On November 19, 1954, the following facts came to light: the police confirmed that Dcwilde had made a second report concerning an observation of an object "in the vicinity of his home." (We were later to learn that the report in fact described a landing. ) However, the police said Dewilde and his family have decided, for fear of adverse publicity, to take no one in their confidence regarding this second occurrence. Therefore you will find no mention of it in local newspapers. Furthermore, civilian investigators were told—politely but in no uncertain terms—that any further information on such incidents would be kept confidential by the police. Reports continued, however, and some of them would have delighted Paracelsus. On October 14, 1954, a miner named Starov ski claimed to have met, on a country road near Erchin (also in the north of France), a strange being of small height and bulky figure with large slanted eyes and a fur covered body. The midget, less than four feet tall, had a large head and wore a brown skullcap, which formed a fillet a few inches above the eyes. The eyes protruded, with very small irises; the nose was flat; the lips were thick and red. A minor detail: the witness did not claim he had seen the creature emerge from a flying saucer or rccnter it. He just happened to meet the strange being, who did not wear any kind of respiratory device. Before he could think of stopping him, the creature had disappeared. Six days later, on October 20, 1954, in Parravicino d'Erba, near Como, Italy, a man had just put his car in the garage when he saw a strange being, covered with a luminous suit, about four feet tall, standing near a tree. When he saw the motorist, the creature aimed a beam from some sort of flashlight at him, paralyzing the witness until a motion he made when clenching the fist holding the garage keys seemed to free him. He rushed to attack the stranger, who rose from the ground and fled with a soft whirring sound. The author of this unbelievable story was thirty seven years old and was known locally as a trustworthy man. He arrived home in a state of great shock and went to bed with a high fever. The details of the case were obtained through an investigation by the Italian police. Eleven years later, the files of landing reports and strange creatures associated with them had become very thick indeed. Then a new flurry of reports began. On July I, 1965, Maurice Masse, a French farmer who lived in Valensolc, had the following experience. As he arrived in his field, at 6:00 A.M., and was getting ready to start his tractor, he heard an unusual noise. Stepping into the open, he saw a machine that had landed in his lavender field. He I bought it must be some sort of prototype and walked toward it, with a mind to tell the pilots, in no uncertain words, to go find .mother landing spot for their contraption. It was only when he was within twenty feet of the machine that he came in full view of the scene and realized his mistake. The object was egg shaped, had a round cockpit, was supported by six thin legs and a central pivot, and was not bigger than a car. In front, appearing to examine a lavender plant, were the two pilots. They were dressed in one piccc, gray greenish suits. On the left side of their belts was a small container; a larger one was on I he right side. They were less than four feet tall and had human eves, but their heads were very large: about three times the volume of a human head. They had practically no mouth, only a very small opening, without lips. They wore no respiratory device, no headgear, and no gloves. They had small, normal hands. When Masse came upon them, they seemed to become suddenly aware of his existence, and yet it was without any indication of fear or surprise that one of the "pilots" took a small tube from its container and pointed it at Masse—with the result that the witness found himself suddenly incapable of movement. For the next sixty seconds or so, the two entities looked at Masse. They appeared to be exchanging their impressions vocally in a sort of gargle. These sounds came from their throats, insisted I he witness, but the mouths did not move. The eyes, in the meantime, conveyed human expressions. In private, Masse told a civilian investigator that he had not been frightened by their attitude, and that it contained more friendly curiosity than hostility toward him. After some time—estimated by Masse, as I have said, as about one minute—the creatures went inside the craft. The door closed "like the front part of a wooden file cabinet," but Masse could see them through the cockpit. They were facing him as the object took off in the opposite direction, first hovering a few feet from the ground, then rising obliquely with the take oE speed of a jet plane. When it was about sixty yards away, it vanished. The witness was closely questioned on this last point by French scientists who were privately interested by the case, but Masse insisted he could not say whether the object went away so fast that the eye could not follow it or whether it actually disappeared. He made it quite clear, however, that "one moment, the thing was there, and the next moment, it was not there anymore." Masse remained alone in his field, paralyzed. The word "paralysis" is not properly used in connection with incidents of this type. Masse said that he remained conscious during the whole observation. His physiological functions (respiration, heartbeat) were not hampered. But he could not move. Then he became very frightened indeed. Alone in his field, unable even to call for help, Masse thought he was going to die. It was only after about twenty minutes that he gradually regained voluntary control of his muscles and was able to go home. There is a sequel to his experience. For several weeks after the incident, Masse was overcome with drowsiness, and all his relatives—as well as the investigators— observed that he needed so much sleep that he found it diEcult to stay awake even for four hours at a time. This is another little known characteristic of "close proximity" cases. To Masse, who was used to working "from sun up to sun down"—as the early hour of his observation itself shows—this was a very impressive and disturbing consequence of his experience. Another result of the publicity the case attracted was the great damage to Masse's field, as crowds of tourists gathered to sec the traces left by the craft. At this point, I should say that Masse is a man respected in the community. A former Resistance fighter, a conscientious and successful farmer, he is regarded as absolutely trustworthy by the police authorities who investigated the case under the direction of Captain Valnct, of Digne. Yet this man tells us a story that does not simply appear fanciful; it is completely unbelievable. What is Masse's impression of the visitors? For some reason, lie says, he knows they meant no harm. They were not hostile to him, only indifferent. As he stood facing them, during that long minute, he suddenly was overcome with the certitude that they were "good"—a belief he is unable to rationalize, because at no point did he understand their strange language. The story is fantastic. Yet it reminds us of the account Barney and Betty Hill gave under hypnosis of their alleged abduction in New Hampshire. The account involved the same description of an alien language, of entities whose expressions were almost human, of an overwhelming feeling of confidence, and of not the slightest indication that the incident had a meaningful purpose or followed an intelligent pattern. Of considerable interest to the psychologist is the fact that the entities arc endowed with the same fugitiveness and behave with the same ignorance of logical or physical laws as the reflection of a dream, the monsters of our nightmares, the unpredictable witches of our childhood. Yet their craft do leave deep indentations in the ground, according to observers who were fully awake and absolutely competent at the time of the sighting. What docs it all mean? How can one reconcile these apparently contradictor}' facts? Some, in a laudable attempt, question the classical search for patterns: "Is it necessarily true," they ask, "that we would detect meaningful patterns—in the same sense of our own intelligence level—in the behavior of a superior race? Is it not much more likely that we would find in their actions only random data and incoherent pictures, much as a dog would if confronted with a mathematician writing on a blackboard? If so, it is only after new concepts have emerged in our consciousness that our vision of the world would be suddenly illuminated and that we would truly 'discover' the meaning of their presence in our environment. And, if a superior race does in fact generate what we arc now observing as the UFO phenomenon, is it not precisely with the purpose of changing the course of human destiny by presenting us with evidence of our limitations in the technical, as well as the mental, realm?" This theory, which has been presented in particular by the French science writer Aime Michel in several brilliant books and articles, is perhaps the most intriguing that has been put forward to date. It does not attempt, however, to answer the question of the nature of the objects. Children of the Unknown—if they are not real, should we see these rumors as a sign that something in human imagination has changed, bringing into a new light uncharted areas of our "collective unconscious"? They may be only children of our fancy, and our love for them akin to our love for Batman and Cinderella. But they may be real. Modern science rules over a narrow universe, one particular variation on an infinite theme. In any case, it is important to understand what need these images fulfill, why this knowledge is both so exciting and so distressing to us. Such is the subject of this book. PASSPOKT TO MAGONIA precisely with the purpose of changing the course of human destiny by presenting us with evidence of our limitations in the technical, as well as the mental, realm?" This theory, which has been presented in particular by the French science writer Aime Michel in several brilliant books and articles, is perhaps the most intriguing that has been put forward to date. It does not attempt, however, to answer the question of the nature of the objects. Children of the Unknown—if they arc not real, should we see these rumors as a sign that something in human imagination has changed, bringing into a new light uncharted areas of our "collective unconscious"? They may be only children of our fancy, and our love for them akin to our love for Batman and Cinderella, But they may be real. Modern science rules over a narrow universe, one particular variation on an infinite theme. In any case, it is important to understand what need these images fulfill, why this knowledge is both so exciting and so distressing to us. Such is the subject of this book. CHAPTER TWO, THE GOOD PEOPLE. Mans imagination, like every known power, works by fixed laws, the existence and operation of which it is possible to trace: and it works upon the same material —the external universe, the mental and moral constitution of man and his social relations. Hence, diverse as may seem at first sight the results among the cultured Europeans and the debased Hottentots, the philosophical Hindoos and the Red Indians of the Far West, they present on a close examination, features absolutely identical. Edwin S. Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales—an Inquiry into Fairy Mythology IT WAS an unusual day for the Food and Drug Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, when the Air Force requested an analysis of a piece of wheat cake that had been cooked , aboard a flying saucer! The human being who had obtained the cake was Joe Simonton, a sixty year old chicken farmer who lived alone in a small house in the vicinity of Eagle River, Wisconsin. He was given three cakes, ate one of them, and thought it "tasted like cardboard." The Air Force put it more scientifically: The cake was composed of hydrogenated fat, starch, buckwheat hulls, soya bean hulls, wheat bran. Bacteria and radiation readings were normal for this material. Chemical, infra red and other de structive type tests were run on this material. The Food and Drug Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare concluded that the material was an ordinary pancake of terrestrial origin. Where did it come from? The reader will have to decide for himself what he chooses to believe after reading this second chapter. It begins with the Eagle River incident because this is a firsthand account, given by a man of absolute sincerity. Speaking for the U.S. Air Force, Dr. }. Allen Hynck, who investigated the case along with Major Robert Friend and an officer from Sawyer Air Force Base, stated: "There is no question that Mr. Simonton felt that his contact had been a real experience." The time was approximately 11:00 A.M. on April 18, 1961, when Joe Simonton was attracted outside by a peculiar noise similar to "knobby tires on a wet pavement." Stepping into his yard, he faced a silvery saucer shaped object "brighter than chrome," which appeared to be hovering close to the ground without actually touching it. The object was about twelve feet high and thirty feet in diameter. A hatch opened about five feet from the ground, and Simonton saw three men inside the machine. One of them was dressed in a black two piece suit. The occupants were about five feet in height. Smooth shaven, they appeared to "resemble Italians." They had dark hair and skin and wore outfits with turtleneck tops and knit helmets. One of the men held up a jug apparently made of the same material as the saucer. His motions to Joe Simonton seemed to indicate that he needed water. Simonton took the jug, went inside the house, and filled it. As he returned, he saw that one of the men iviside the saucer was "frying food on a flameless grill of some sort." The interior of the ship was black, "the color of wrought iron." Simonton, who could sec several instrument panels, heard a slow whining sound, similar to the hum of a generator. When he made a motion indicating he was interested in the food that was being prepared, one of the men, who was also dressed in black but with a narrow red trim along the trousers, handed him three cookies, about three inches in diameter and perforated with small holes. The whole affair had lasted about five minutes. Finally, the man closest to the witness attached a kind of belt to a hook in his clothing and closed the hatch in such a way that Simonton could scarcely detect its outline. Then the object rose about twenty feet from the ground before taking off straight south, causing a blast of air that bowed some nearby pine trees. Along the edge of the saucer, the witness recalls, were exhaust pipes six or seven inches in diameter. The hatch was about six feet high and thirty inches wide, and although the object has always been described as a saucer, its shape was that of two inverted bowls. When two deputies sent by Sheriff Schroeder, who had known Simonton for fourteen years, arrived on the scene, they could not find any corroborative evidence. The sheriff affirmed that the wit ness obviously believed the truth of what he was saying and talked very sensibly about the incident. FOOD FROM FAIRYLAND The Eagle River case has never been solved. The Air Force believes that Joe Simonton, who lived alone, had a sudden dream while he was awake and inserted his dream into the continuum of events around him of which he was conscious. I understand several psychologists in Dayton, Ohio, are quite satisfied with this explanation, and so are most serious amateur ufologists. Alas! Ufology, like psychology, has become such a narrow field of specialization that the experts have no time left for general culture. They are so busy rationalizing the dreams of other people that they themselves do not dream anymore, nor do they read fairy talcs. If they did, they would perhaps take a much closer look at Joe Simonton and his pancakes. They would know about the Gentry and the food from fairyland. In 1909, an American, Wantz, who wrote a thesis on Celtic traditions in Brittany, devoted much time to the gathering of folk tales about supernatural beings, their habits, their contacts with men, and their food. In his book he gives the story of Pat Fcency, an Irishman of whom we know only that "he was well off before the hard times," meaning perhaps the famine of 1846 to 1947. One day a little woman came to his house and asked for some oatmeal. Paddy had so little that he was ashamed to offer it, so he offered her some potatoes instead, but she wanted oatmeal, and then he gave her all that he had. She told him to place it back in the bin till she should return for it. This he did, and the next morning the bin was overflowing with oatmeal. The woman was one of the Gentry. It is unfortunate that Paddy did not save this valuable evidence for the benefit of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (Food and Drug Lab.). Perhaps they would have explained this miracle of the multiplication of the oatmeal, along with other peculiar properties of fairy food; for it is well known in Ireland that if you are taken away by the fairies, you must never taste food in their palace. Otherwise, you never come back; you become one of them. It is interesting that the analysis performed for the Air Force did not mention the presence of salt in the pancakes given to Simonton. Indeed, Wentz was told by an Irishman who was quite familiar with the Gentry that "they never taste anything salt, but eat fresh meat and drink pure water." Pure water is what the saucer men took from Simonton. The question of food is one of the points most frequently treated in the traditional literature of the Celtic legends, along with the documented stories of babies kidnapped by the elves and of the terrestrial animals they hunt and take away. Before we study this abundant material, however, we should supply some background information about the mysterious folks the Irish call the Gentry, and the Scots, the Good People (Skagfr Maith): The Gentry are a fine large race who live out on the sea and in the mountains, and they are all very good neighbors. The bad ones are not the Gentry at all, are the fallen angels and they live in the woods and the sea, says one of Wentz's informers. Patrick Water gives this description of a "fairy man": A crowd of boys out in the fields one day saw a fairy man with a red cap. Except for his height he was like any other man. He was about three and a half feet tall. The boys surrounded him, but he made such a sputtering talk they let him go. And he disappeared as he walked away in the direction of the old fort. There were few places where one could still sec fairies, even in THE GOOD PEOPLE Great Britain or France, after 1850. All the storytellers, all the popular almanacs, agree that, as civilization advanced, the little folks became increasingly shy. A few untouched places recom mended by Wcntz, however, are the Yosemite Valley in California and the Ben Bulbcn country and Ross Point in County Sligo, Ireland. Dublin seers arc known to have made many trips to Ben Bulben, a famous mountain honeycombed with curious grottoes. At the very foot of the mountain, "as the heavy white fog banks hung over Ben Bulben and its neighbors," Wentz was told, the following incident occurred: When I was a young man I often used to go out in the mountains over there to fish for trout or to hunt. And it was in January on a cold, dry day while carrying my gun that I and a friend with me as we were walking around Ben Bulben saw one of the Gentry for the first time. . This one was dressed in blue with a head dress adorned with what seemed to be frills. When he came upon us, he said to me in a sweet and silvery voice, The seldom you come to this mountain the better, Mister, A young lady here wants to take you away. Then he told us not to fire our guns, because the Gentry dislike being disturbed by the noise. And he seemed to be like a soldier of the Gentry on guard. As we were leaving the mountain, he told us not to look back and we didn't. Wentz then asked for a description of the Gentry, and was told the following: The folk arc the grandest I have ever seen. They are far superior to us and that is why they call themselves the Gentry. They are not a working class, but a military aristocratic class, tall and noble appearing. They arc a distinct race between our race and that of spirits, as they have told me. Their qualifications are tremendous: "We could cut off half the human race, but would not," they said, "for we are expecting salvation." And I knew a man three or four years ago whom they struck down with paralysis. Their sight is so penetrating that I think they could see through the earth. They have a silvery voice, quick and sweet. The Gentry live inside the mountains in beautiful castles, and there are a good many branches of them in other countries, and especially in Ireland. Some live in the Wicklow Mountains near Dublin. Like armies they have their stations and move from one to another. My guide and informer said to me once, "I command a regiment, Mr.x." They travel greatly, and they can appear in Paris, Marseilles, Naples, Genoa, Turin or Dublin, like ordinary people, and even in crowds. They love especially Spain, Southern France, and the South of Europe. The Gentry take a great interest in the affairs of men and they always stand for justice and right. Sometimes they fight among themselves. They take young and intelligent people who are inter esting. They take the whole body and soul, transmuting the body to a body like their own. I asked them once if they ever died and they said, No; "we are always kept young, Mr.x." Once they take you and you taste food in their palace you cannot come back. They never taste anything salt, but eat fresh meat and drink pure water. They marry and have children. And one of them could marry a good and pure mortal. They are able to appear in different forms. One once appeared to me and seemed only four feet high, and stoutly built. He said, "I am bigger than I appear to you now. We can make the old young, the big small, the small big." Now that we have refreshed the reader's memory regarding the Gentry, perhaps we shall be forgiven for driving the parallel be tween fairy faith and ufology a good deal further. The Eagle River incident, again, will be the occasion for our reflections. The cakes given to Joe Simonton were composed of, among other things, buckwheat hulls. And buckwheat is closely associated with legends of Brittany, one of the most conservative Celtic areas. In that area of France, belief in fairies (fees) is still widespread, although Wentz and Paul Sebillot' had great difficulty, about 1900, finding Bretons who said that they themselves had seen fees. One of the peculiarities of Breton traditional legends is the association of the fees or korrigans with a Tacc of beings named /ions. In our chapter on the Secret Commonwealth we shall study the fions more closely; here I want only to call the reader's attention to one particularly pretty legend about fions and magic buckwheat cakes. It seems that once upon a time a black cow belonging to little cave dwelling fions ruined the buckwheat field of a poor woman, who bitterly complained about the damage. The fions made a deal with her: they would see to it that she should never run out of buckwheat cakes, provided she kept her mouth shut. And indeed she and her family discovered that their supply of cakes was inexhaustible. Alas! One day the woman gave some of the cake to a man who should not have been entrusted with the secret of its magical origin, and the family had to go back to the ordinary way of making buckwheat cakes. I hardly need remind the reader that the Bible, too, gives a few examples of magical food supplies, similarly inexhaustible. More over, stories narrated by actual people provide close parallels to this theme. Witness the following account, given by Hartland: A man who lived at Ystradfynlais, in Brecknockshire, going out one day to look after his cattle and sheep on the mountain, dis appeared. In about three weeks, after search had been made in vain for him and his wife had given him up for dead, he came home. His wife asked him where he had been for the last three weeks. "Three weeks? Is it three weeks you call three hours?" said he. Pressed to say where he had been, he told her he had been playing his flute (which he usually took with him on the mountain) at the Llorfa, a spot near the Van Pool, when he was surrounded at a distance by little beings like men, who closed nearer and nearer to him until they became a very small circle. They sang and danced, and so affected him that he quite lost himself. They offered him some small cakes to eat, of which he partook; and he had never enjoyed himself so well in his life. Wcntz, too, has a few stories about the food from fairyland. I Ic gathered them during his trips through the Celtic countries, in the first few years of the present century. John Mac Neil of Barra, an old man who spoke no English, told Michael Buchanan, who translated the story from the Gaelic for Wentz, a pretty talc about a girl who was taken by the fairies. The fairies, he said, took the girl into their dwelling and set her to work baking oat cakes. But no matter how much meal she took from the closet, there was always the same amount left on the shelf. And she had to keep baking and baking, until the old fairy man took pity on her and said, I am sure you are wearying of the time and thinking long of getting from our premises, and I will direct you to the means by which you can get your leave. Whatever remainder of meal falls from the cakes after being baked put into the meal closet and that will stimulate my wife to give you leave. Naturally, she did as directed and got away. John Mac Neil, who was between seventy and eighty years old, gave no date to the story, but since he said he saw the girl after her experience, the event probably took place in the second part of the nineteenth century. Scientifically inclined people scoff at such stories with a very indignant air. A group of UFO students, when contacted about the Eagle River incident, stated that they did not intend to analyze the cookies, planned no further action, and had much more important things to investigate. Two weeks after the sighting, Joe Simonton told a United Press International reporter that "if it happened again, I don't think I'd tell anybody about it." And indeed, if flying saucers are devices used by a super scientific civilization from space, we would expect them to be packed inside with electronic gadgetry, super radars and a big computerized spying apparatus. But visitors in human shape, who breathe our air and zip around in flying kitchenettes, that is too much, Mr. Simonton! Visitors from the stars would not be human, or humanoid. They would not dare come here without receiving a polite invitation from our powerful radio telescopes. For centuries, we would exchange highly scientific information through exquisite circuitry and elaborate codes. And even if they did come here, surely they would land in Washington, D.C., where the President of the United States and the "scientific ufologists" would greet them. Presents would be exchanged. We would offer books on exobioogy, they would give us photographs of our solar system taken through space telescopes. But perforated, cardboard tasting, pancake shaped buckwheat cakes? How terribly rural, Mr. Simonton! And yet, there is no question that Joe Simonton believes that he saw the flying saucer, the nameless grill, the three men. He gave them pure water; they gave him three pancakes. If we re flect on this very simple event, as the students of folklore have reflected on the stories quoted above, we cannot overlook one possibility, that the event at Eagle River did happen, and that it has the meaning of a simple, yet grandiose, ceremony. This latter theory was very well expressed by Hartland, when he said, about the exchange of food with fairies: Almost all over the Earth, the rite of hospitality has been held to confer obligations on its recipient, and to unite him by special ties to the giver. And even where the notion of hospitality does not enter, to join in a common meal has often been held to symbolize, if not to constitute, union of a very sacred kind. That such meaning is still attached to a common meal is readily seen at weddings and other traditional meetings where food is an important constituent, even if the symbolic value of such events is lost to most of our contemporaries. Hartland goes as far as to suggest that the custom of burying the dead with some food might bear some relationship to the widespread belief that one must have a supply of terrestrial food when one reaches fairyland, or forsake the earth entirely. And indeed, in ancient and recent tradition alike, the abode of our supernatural visitors is not always distinct from the world of the dead. This is a moot point, however, because the same applies to "visitors" from heaven. The theologians, who argue about the nature of angels, know it very well. But at least the idea of food provides another connection. In the light of Hartland's remarks about the rite of hospitality, a passage from the Bible is noteworthy: Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree: And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that yc shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said. And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree and they did eat. And according to Genesis 19, Lot took the two angels he met at the gate of Sodom to his house "and he made them a feast, and did bake unleavened bread, and they did eat." So, after all, Joe Simonton's account might be a modern illustration of that biblical recommendation: "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unaware." RINGS IN THE MOONLIGHT. This section is devoted to several types of artifacts claimed by popular tradition to be of supernatural origin. Fairy "rings" and saucer "nests" obviously fall in this category. Although such phe nomena are treated as "borderline" cases by specialists in UFO investigation, I believe the nests deserve more than passing attention and should be considered in the light of specific traditional beliefs about the meaning of the "magic circles" that for centuries farmers have found in their fields. The literature on this subject is of course abundant, and we shall select only a few cases to illustrate the point and set the stage for a more detailed discussion in later chapters. On Thursday, July 28, 1966, in the evening, Mr. Lacoste and his wife were walking in the vicinity of Montsoreau, Maine et Loire, France. All of a sudden, they saw a red sphere cross the sky like a meteor. It did not behave quite as a meteor, however, because it seemed to touch the ground and then rise again— without losing its brilliant red color—and hover at mid height for a while before it was lost to sight. A check was made for military experiments in the area: there were none. The next day, a Montsoreau farmer, Alain Rouillet, reported that a nine square yard area of his wheat field had been flattened and covered with a yellowish, oily substance. Further investigation disclosed additional details on the identity of the witnesses and substantiated the idea that a peculiar object had indeed landed. Lacoste is a photographer in Saumur (unfortunately, he did not carry a camera with him at the time). He described the light given off by the sphere as being so intense that it lit up the whole countryside. The sphere hovered, he said, for a few seconds, then it maneuvered close to the ground. The witnesses felt sure it was a guided military gadget and walked to a distance of about four hundred yards from the object, which went away and was lost to sight behind some woods. The whole sighting had lasted four minutes. Six months earlier, a rash of similar sightings had made head lines in Australia. "More flying saucer nests!" was the big news on the front page of the Sydney Sun Herald for January 23, 1966. Three nests had been discovered in Queensland, circular clearings of dead reeds, surrounded by green reeds. Hundreds of sightseers were searching for more by the time the reports were published. On January 19, 1966, at 9:00 A.M., a twenty seven year old banana grower, George Pedley, was driving his tractor in the vicinity of a swamp called Horseshoe Lagoon when he suddenly heard a loud hissing noise. It "sounded like air escaping from a lire," he said. Then, twenty five yards in front of him, he saw a machine rising from the swamp. It was blue gray, about twenty live feet across and nine feet high. It was spinning and rose to about sixty feet before moving off. "It was all over in a few seconds; it moved at terrific speed," said Pedley. Then he found I lie first nest, with reeds flattened in a clockwise direction. The Sydney Sun Herald sent a reporter, Ben Davie, to investigate the sighting, and it was discovered that dozens of people in the area had seen strange saucerlikc craft similar to the one reported by Pedley, most of them before his sighting. Davie found a total of five nests and published the following description: I saw clearings in the reeds where "they" took off, and it was as everyone described it. In a circle roughly thirty feet in diameter reeds had been cut and flattened in a clockwise direction. One of the nests is a floating platform of clotted roots and weeds, ap parently torn by tremendous force from the mud bottom beneath five feet of water. The second and third nests had been found, respectively, by Tom Warren, a cane farmer of Euramo, and Mr. Penning, a Tully schoolteacher. They were about twenty five yards from the first one, but hidden by dense scrub. In the third nest, which seemed quite recent, the reeds were flattened in a counterclockwise direction. All the reeds were dead, but they had not been scorched or burned. A patch of couch grass, about four feet square and three feet from the boundary of the first disk, had been clipped at water level, thereby adding a new clement of mystery. Altogether, the rings varied in diameter from eight to thirty feet. In all but the smallest, the reeds had been flattened in a clockwise direction. Needless to say, policemen collected samples for tests, scientists came with geiger counters, and the Royal Australian Air Force Intelligence people were all over the place. Rumors circulated blaming the Soviets for using the vast open spaces of Australia to develop scientific ideas one or two centuries ahead of those of flic Americans. Why the Soviets could not conduct their secret testing in the vast open spaces of Siberia was not disclosed. Neither was it revealed why the pilots of the super secret com munist weapon could not resist the temptation to buzz the tractor of a twenty seven year okl banana grower. Fortunately, there were several natural explanations for the sighting or the nests, although only one hypothesis accounted for both. The latter was suggested by a Sydney Sun Herald reader on January 30. He believed the "outer space" panic in Queensland was caused by a "tall shy bird with a blue body and red markings on the head." It was either a type of brolga or a blue heron, but the man did not know the correct scientific name. Many times, as he wandered barefooted through the bush, he said, he had seen the birds dancing, but they flew away at high speed before he could reach them. "They would resemble a vaporous blue cloud and would certainly make a whirring sound in flight." Unfortunately for this pretty and imaginative theory, it got no backing from the Australian Museum. Museum ornithologist H. J. Disney thought the brolgas could not make circular depres sions of symmetrical design. He was similarly skeptical about the "bald headed coot theory" advanced by another man, Gooloogong resident Ken Adams. "I've never heard of this habit by the bird," Disney said. Donald Hanlon, one of the best informed specialists in the field, has pointed out to me that another explanation for the nests has been proposed locally: they are the "playground of crocodiles in love." I fully share Hanlon's skepticism about this last explana tion, because it could hardly apply to the nests found in Ohio, which will be discussed in a moment, or to the damaged wheat field in Montsorcau. A Queensland resident, Alex Bordujcnko, who knows about the crocodiles, claims that the reeds arc too thick in Horseshoe Lagoon for crocodiles to move through them. So here we are: dancing cranes are held responsible by some people for bending reeds that are so thick crocodiles, according to other people, cannot move through them. What caused the damage? Nobody knows. On his way home that Wednesday night, George Pedley decided he would tell no one about the "spaceship" in the swamp. He saw neither portholes nor antennae on the blue gray object, and no sign of life either inside or about it. Furthermore, he had always laughed at flying saucer stories. But then he met Albert Pennisi, the owner of Horseshoe Lagoon, and disclosed the sighting. He was very surprised when Pennisi believed him right away and told him he had been dreaming for a week that a flying saucer would land on his property. This last detail places the Queensland saucer nests in the best tradition of the fairy faith. The time: six months before the Queensland experience. The place: Delroy, Ohio. On June 28, 1965, a farmer, John Stavano, heard a series of explosions. Two days later, he discovered a curious formation on the ground. When analyzed, soil and wheat samples showed no evidence of explosive cause/1 Wheat plants seemed to have been sucked out of the ground, like the uprooted reeds in Queensland, or the uprooted grass in a French landing of 1954 in Poncey. The Ohio incident was carefully investigated by A. Candusso and Larry Movers of the Flying Saucer Investigating Committee, accompanied by Gary Davis. They found the strange circular formation on Stavano's farm, which is situated on a high point. At the center of the ring was a circular depression about twenty eight inches in diameter. It was probed with a pinch bar, but only loose soil was found for a depth of nine inches. Much of the wheat had been removed, roots and all, and clods of soil a few inches long had been disturbed. The wheat was laid down like the spokes of a wheel; there was no swirling effect as in the Tully nests. If we turn from Australia and Ohio to England, we are faced with another incident: July 16, 1963 will long be remembered in the annals of British . Ufology. Something appeared to have landed on farmer Roy Blan chard's field at the Manor Farm, Charlton, Wiltshire. The marks on the ground were first discovered by a farmworker, Reg Alexander. They overlapped a potato field and a barley field. The marks com prised a saucer shaped depression or crater eight feet in diameter and about four inches in depth. In the center of this depression there was found a three feet deep hole variously described as from five inches to one foot in diameter. Radiating from the central hole were four slot marks, four feet long and one foot wide. The object must have landed—if land it did—unseen, but Mr. Leonard Joliffe, a dairyman on the farm, reported he heard "a blast one morning at approximately 6 A.M." On July 23, the London Daily Express was to report that nearly two weeks earlier, on July 10, Police Constable Anthony Penny had seen an orange object flash through the sky and vanish near the Manor Farm field. On the basis of this limited information, it would seem quite plausible to think that the Charlton crater was caused by a meteorite. Indeed, when a small piece of metal was recovered from the hole at the center of the crater, British astronomer Patrick Moore went to the British Broadcasting Corporation and stated categorically that the crater had been caused by a "shrimp sized meteorite/' crashing down and turning itself into a very effective explosive. This ended the mystery as far as the scientific public was concerned. But the true facts of the matter, as they became known to a few scientists who pursued the matter further, and to the Army engineers who were in charge of the investigation, were altogether different. Farmer Roy Blanchard had sent for the police, who, in turn, had summoned the Army. Captain John Rodgers, chief of the Army bomb disposal unit, was the man who conducted most of the field investigations. His preliminary report indicated that there were no burn or scratch marks, no trace of an explosion. And while Captain Rodgers stated that he and his superiors were baffled, farmer Roy Blanchard mack further disclosures: There isn't a trace of the potatoes and barley which were growing where the crater is now. No stalks, no roots, no leaves. The thing was heavy enough to crush rocks and stones to powder? Yet it came down gently. We heard no crash and whatever power it uses produces no heat or noise. Then, on July 19, it was reported that Captain Rodgers had obtained permission to sink a shaft. The readings obtained were rather unusual. They indicated a metallic object of some size, deeply embedded. And it was further learned that "detectors behaved wildly," presumably because the metallic piece in question was highly magnetic. At this stage, it should be pointed out, the investigation was still open and aboveboard, possibly because the Army, rather than the British Air Ministry, was involved. And the Army Southern Command public relations officer at Salisbury told Girvan lli.it the object was recovered from the hole. It was sent to a British Museum expert and promptly identified as a piece of common ironstone, "which could be found buried all over Southcrn England." The British Museum suggested that it had been luiried in the ground for some time, thus eliminating the idea of ;i hoax. And Dr. F. Claringbull, Keeper of the Department of Mineralogy at the Museum, destroyed the meteorite explanation ;ind, according to the Yorkshire Post of July 27, stated: "There is more in this than meets the eye." The last word stayed with Southern Command, however, and it commented wisely: "The cause of the Phenomena is still unexplained but it is no part of I lie Army's task to unravel such mysteries." If we try to summarize what we have learned from these incidents— the Tully nests, the Ohio ring, and the Charlton crater— we: can state the following: public rumor associates sightings nf flying saucers with the discovery of circular depressions on the ground; when vegetation is present at the site, it exhibits the nction of a flattening force which produces cither a stationary pattern ("spokes of a wheel") or a rotating pattern (clockwise or counterclockwise); some of the vegetation is usually removed, sometimes with the roots, leaves, etc.; the effect of a very strong vertical force is often noticed, as evidenced by earth and plants scattered around the site; strong magnetic activity has been found in one instance, where common ironstone was buried close to the center of the depression; and a deep hole, a few inches in diameter, is often present at the center. Do I need to remind the reader of that celebrated habit of the fairies, to leave behind them strange rings in the fields and prairies? One Sunday in August, as he wandered over the hills of Howth, Wcntz met some local people with whom he discussed these old I ales. After he had had tea with the man and his daughter, they look him to a field close by to show him a "fairy ring," and while he stood in the ring, they told him: Yes, the fairies do exist, and this is where they have often been seen dancing. The grass never gets high in the lines of the ring, for it is only the shortest and finest kind that grows there. In the middle, fairy mushrooms grow in a circle, and the fairies use them to sit on [!]. They are very little people, and are very fond of dancing and singing. They wear green coats, and sometimes red caps and red coats. On November 12, 1968, the Argentine press reported that near Necochea, 310 miles south of Buenos Aires, a civilian pilot had re ported a strange pattern on the ground and investigated it with several military men. Walking to the spotT where a flying saucer was earlier alleged to have landed, they found a circle six yards in diameter where the earth was calcined. Inside this circle grew eight giant white mushrooms, one of them nearly three feet in diameter. In Santa Fe province, other extraordinary mushrooms have been discovered under similar circumstances. Another writer, reporting on Scandinavian legends, noted that elves are depicted there as beings with oversized heads, tiny legs, and long arms: They are responsible for the bright green circles, called elf dans, that one sees on the lawns. Even nowadays, when a Danish farmer comes across such a ring at dawn, he says that the elves have come there during the night to dance. It is amusing to note that attempts have been made, in the early days of Rationalism, to explain fairy rings as electrical phenomena, a consequence of atmospheric effects. P. Marranzino,for example, quotes a little couplet by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of the English naturalist, written in 1789: So from the dark clouds the playful lightning springs, Rives the firm oak or prints the fairy rings. And according to Erasmus Darwin: There is a phenomenon, supposed to be electric, which is not yet accounted for; I mean the fairy rings, as they are called, so often seen on the grass. At times larger parts or prominences of clouds gradually sinking as they move along are discharged on the moister parts of the grassy plains. Now this knob or corner of a cloud in being attracted to the Earth will become nearly cylindrical, as loose wool would do when drawn out into a thread, and will strike the earth with a stream of electricity perhaps two to ten yards in diameter. Just the external part of the cylinder burns the grass. The formulation of this idea in terms of modern plasma physics will no doubt soon be provided by eager scholars. They would do well, however, to note the diameter of the cylinder mentioned by the elder Darwin: "two to ten yards"—the diameter of the average flying saucer. ANGELS OR DEVILS? We have already noted several instances connecting unknown beings with the theft of agricultural products. Lavender plants, grapes, or potatoes seem to have been taken away with equal dexterity by the mysterious little men. In story after story, from North and South America and from Europe, the creatures are seen ;ilighting from their shiny craft, picking up plants, and taking off again before amazed witnesses. Such behavior is well designed to make the investigators of such stories assume that the visitors are gathering samples with all the care and precision of seasoned exobiologists. Are we not, after all, designing robots that will accomplish the preliminary analysis of the Martian flora when the first rockets reach that planet? In a few cases, the visitors even take the time to interview the witnesses at length concerning agricultural techniques! Such was the case in a landing that, curiously enough, took place in Tioga City, New York, on the very day of the Socorro landing, about ten hours before Officer Zamora observed the egg shaped, shiny object so familiar to us now. Gary T. Wilcox, a dairy farmer, was spreading fertilizer in his field. Some time before 10:00 A.M., he stopped to check a field surrounded by woods, about a mile away from his barn. He wanted to see whether ground conditions would allow plowing. As he approached the field, however, he saw a shiny object, which lie first took to be a discarded refrigerator, then a wing tank or sonic other aircraft part. When he drew closer, he realized that the object was egg shaped and about twenty by sixteen feet, had the appearance of durable metal, and did not look like anything he had ever seen before. He touched it. It was not hot. He observed no door or hatch of any kind. And yet two humanlike creatures suddenly appeared. They were about four feet tall and wore seamless clothing, with headdress and a full face hood, which did not allow Wilcox to observe any facial features. They appeared to have arms and legs. They talked to him "in smooth English/' but their voices did not come from their heads, as far as Wilcox could tell, but from their bodies. "Do not be alarmed, we have talked to people before. We are from what you people refer to as Planet Mars," they said. In spite of Gary's conviction that "someone must be playing a gag on me," the strange conversation continued. The two beings were interested in fertilizers and expressed considerable interest in their use. They stated that they grew food on Mars, but that changes in the environment were creating problems they hoped to solve by obtaining information about our agricultural techniques. Their questions were quite childish, and they appeared to have no knowledge of the subject whatever. Each one carried a tray filled with soil. "When they talked about space or the ship, I had difficulty in understanding their explanations. They said they could only travel to this planet every two years and they arc presently using the Western Hemisphere," Wilcox reported. They explained that they landed only during daylight hours, "because their ship is less readily visible in daylight," and they said they were surprised that Wilcox had seen their craft. They also volunteered information about space travel. Our astronauts would not be successful, they said, because their bodies would not adapt to space conditions. Finally, they requested a bag of fertil izer but, as Gary Wilcox walked away to get it, the craft took off, disappearing from sight in very few seconds. The witness left a bag of fertilizer at the place; the next day it was gone. A list, even incomplete, of similar cases would rapidly induce tedium. In most of the South American landings, entities have been described walking away with soil samples, plants, even boul ders. Everything in their behavior seems designed to make us believe in the outer space origin of these strange beings and their craft. And, indeed, such incidents have greatly influenced the researchers who have "independently" concluded that the UFO's are space probes sent by an extraterrestrial civilization. On November 1, 1954, Mrs. Rosa Lotti Dainclli, forty years old, was going to the cemetery at Poggio d'Ambra, Bucine, near Arezzo, Italy. A devout Italian woman, she was carrying a pot containing flowers. Her mind at that moment must have been very far indeed from science fiction speculation, and yet what happended to her in the next minute constitutes perhaps the slnmgest of the entire wave of 1954 incidents. As Mrs. Lotti Dainelli walked past an open grassy space, she saw a vertical, torpedo shaped machine with pointed edges: a machine, in other words, shaped like two cones with common hases. In the lower cone was an opening through which two small scats were visible. The craft looked metallic. It did not resemble anything the witness had seen before. From behind the object, two beings appeared. They were three ;md a half to four feet tall. They looked joyful. Their smiles displayed white and very thin teeth. They were wearing gray coveralls and reddish leather helmets similar to those used by military drivers. They had what seemed to be a "convexity" at the center <>f their foreheads. Speaking an incomprehensible language, the two closed in on the woman, and one of them took away from her Hie pot containing the flowers. Mrs. Lotti Dainelli now tried to get her property back, but the two beings ignored her and returned to their craft. The witness slarted to scream and run away. But she returned to the spot with other witnesses, including policemen. Too late. Not a trace of the object was left. But it seems that other people saw the craft in flight, leaving a red and blue trail. These stories would be "amazing" and nothing more if it were not for one fact known to students of folklore: a constant feature of one class of legends involving supernatural creatures is that the beings come to our world to steal our products, our animals, and even—as we shall see in a later chapter—human beings. But for I he moment, let us concern ourselves only with the "samplegathering" behavior of these beings and their requests for terrestrial products. In an Algonquin legend embodying all the characteristics of an excellent saucer story, a hunter beholds a basket that comes down from heaven. The basket contains twelve young maidens of ravishing beauty. The man attempts to approach them, but the celestial creatures quickly reenter the "basket/' which ascends rapidly out of sight. However, witnessing the descent of the strange object on another day, the same hunter uses a trick to come close to it and succeeds in capturing one of the girls, whom he marries and by whom he has a son. Nothing, unfortunately, can console his wife for loss of the society of her sisters, who have gone away with the flying vehicle. So, one day she makes a small basket, and, according to Hartland, having entered it with her child she sang the charm she and her sisters had formerly used, and ascended once more to the star from whence she had come. She had been back in that heavenly country two years when she was told: Thy son wants to see his father; go down therefore, to the earth and fetch thy husband, and tell him to bring us specimens of all the animals he kills. She did so. And the hunter ascended with his wife, saw his son, and attended a great feast, at which the animals he had brought were served. The Algonquin story offers a complex mixture of themes. Some of them are present in modern day UFO stories; others derive from traditional concepts, such as the exchange of food, which we have already discussed. The new elements are: the desire expressed by the celestial beings to receive specimens of all the animals the hunter kills, and the idea that intermarriage between the terrestrial and the aerial laces is possible. This latter aspect will be examined separately in Chapter Four. So far, we have seen our visitors stealing plants and requesting various items. But have they actually killed animals themselves? Have they taken away cattle? If we are to believe the stories told by many witnesses, they have. But the interesting fact is that, here again, we find a trait common to both the ufonauts and the Good People. On page 53 I shall have occasion to quote, in another context, a story describing a crowd of fairies chasing a deer on THE GOOD PEOPLE the island of Aramore. The storyteller added that, at another time, "similar little people chased a horse." And in the same conversation with Walter Wcntz, recorded before 1909, the storyteller, "Old Patsy," told the following story about a man "who, if still alive, is now in America where he went several years ago": In the South Island as night was coming on, a man was giving his cow water at a well, and, as he looked on the other side of a wall, he saw many strange people playing hurley. When they noticed him looking at them, one came up and struck the cow a hard blow, and turning on the man cut his face and body very badly. The man might not have been so badly off, but he returned to the well after the first encounter and got four times as bad a beating. On November 6, 1957, twelve year old Everett Clark, of Dante, Tennessee, opened the door to let his dog, Frisky, out. As he did so, he saw a peculiar object in a field a hundred yards or so from the house. He thought he was dreaming and went back inside. When he called the dog twenty minutes later, he found the object was still there, and Frisky was standing near it, along with several dogs from the neighborhood. Also near the object were two men and two women in ordinary clothing. One of the men made several attempts to catch Frisky, and later another dog, but had to give up for fear of being bitten. Everett saw the strange people, who talked between them "like German soldiers he had seen in movies," walk right into the wall of the object, which then took off straight up without sound. It was oblong and of "no particular color."" In another of the extraordinary coincidences with which UFO researchers are now becoming familiar, on the same day another attempt to steal a dog was made, this time in Everittstown, New Jersey. While the Clark case had taken place at 6:30 A.M., it was at dusk that John Trasco went outside to feed his dog and saw a brilliant egg shaped object hovering in front of his barn. In his path he found a being three feet tall "with putty colored face and large frog like eyes," who said in broken English: "We are peaceful people, we only want your dog." The strange being was told in no uncertain terms to go back where he belonged. He ran away, and his machine was seen to take off straight up some moments later. Mrs. Trasco is said to have observed the object itself from the house, but not the entity. She is also quoted as saying that when her husband tried to grab the creature, he got some green powder on his wrist, but that it washed off. The next day he noticed the same powder under his fingernails. The ufonaut had been dressed in a green suit with shiny buttons, a green tanvo shanter like cap, and gloves with a shiny object at the tip of each, according to Coral Lorcezen. We have already explored several aspects of the behavior attributed, in modern and ancient folklore, to supernatural beings. Whether the creatures come down in flying saucers or musical baskets, whether they come out of the sea or the rock, is irrelevant. What is relevant is what they say and do: the trace that they leave in the human witness who is the only tangible vehicle of the story. This behavior presents us with a sample of situations and human reactions that trigger our interest, our concern, our laughter. Joe Simonton's pancake story is cute; the tales of fairy food aTe intriguing but difficult to trace; the rings and the nests are real, but the feeling they inspire is more romantic than scientific. Then theTC is the strange beings' peculiarly insistent desire to get hold of terrestrial objects: flora and fauna. The stories quoted in this connection verge on the ludicrous. But to pursue the investigation further leads to horror. This is a facet of the phenomenon we can no longer ignore. THE HAUNTED LAND If human reactions to the vision of a UFO are varied, the opposite holds true for animals: their reaction is unmistakably one of terror. To the well known question that figures in almost every UFO questionnaire, "How was your attention called to the object?", one frequently finds the answer: "My dogs seemed terrified." "There was a commotion among the cattle." "All the dogs in the neighborhood started acting madly." Enough material already exists, in documented cases of animal reaction to close exposure to a UFO, for an outstanding dissertation on animal psychology. THE GOOD PEOPLE. On December 30, 1966, an American nuclear physicist was driving south with his family along a Louisiana road. The weather was overcast, and it was raining. The time was 8:15 P.M. The witness, who is a professor of physics and does nuclear research, and who, as a result, is a very well qualified witness, had reached a point north of Hayncsville when he noticed a pulsating dome of light resembling the "glow of a city." Its color went from a dim reddish light to a bright orange. At one point, its luminosity rose so much that it became brighter than the car headlights. So intense was the white illumination that the two children who were sleeping in the back woke up and, with the physicist's wife, observed what followed. The light was emitted by a source that was stationary and below the treetops—at, or close to, ground level—some distance into the forest. Concern for his family's safety made the witness drive away. But he did make a quick estimate of the amount of energy represented by the light, and it turned out to be i fairly impressive source of radiation—impressive enough to make him return to the location the next day, bearing a scintillometer with him. lie determined the probable position of the object, which had been about one mile (plus or minus 0.2 mile) from his car at the closest point. Then he made some inquiries in the area. The investigations had two results. First, while walking in the forest, he noticed that for some distance around the spot where the source of light had been, animal life had simply vanished. There were no squirrels, no birds, even no insects—and as a hunter, he was quite familiar with the Louisiana fauna. Second, he gathered several reports by local people who had seen the light and claims by farmers that important loss of cattle had occurred in the same period. Until I heard the physicist's testimony, I had never given much credence to reports of stolen cattle. Cows and horses did run away sometimes, or were stolen, and the likelihood that a farmer would try to place the blame on some supernatural agency remains very high even in the twentieth century. There is, however, a precedent, which cannot be ignored: the I .eroy, Kansas, case where a cow was stolen by the pilots of a living object. If that report were dated from 1966, perhaps it could be ignored, lini it was recorded and sworn before witnesses on April 21, 1897, by one of the most prominent citizens in Kansas, Alexander Hamilton. In an affidavit quoted in several recent UFO books and journals, Hamilton states that he was awakened by a noise among the cattle and went out with two other men. He then saw an airship descend gently toward the ground and hover within fifty yards of it. It consisted of a great cigar shaped portion, possibly three hun dred feet long, with a carriage underneath. The carriage was made of glass or some other transparent substance alternating with a narrow strip of some material. It was brilliantly lighted within and everything was plainly visible—it was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said. Upon seeing the witnesses, the pilots of the strange ship turned on some unknown power, and the ship rose about three hundred feet above them: It seemed to pause and hover directly over a two year old heifer, which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found a cable about a half inch in thickness made of some red material, fastened in a slip knot around her neck, one end passing up to the vessel, and the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose and stood in amazement to see the ship, heifer and all, rise slowly, disappearing in the northwest. Hamilton was so frightened he could not sleep that night: Rising early Tuesday, I started out by horse, hoping to find some trace of my cow. This I failed to do, but coming back in the evening found that Link Thomas, about three or four miles west of Leroy, had found the hide, legs and head in his field that day. He, thinking someone had butchered a stolen beast, had brought the hide to town for identification, but was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground. After identifying the hide by my brand, I went home. But every time I would drop to sleep I would see the cursed thing, with its big lights and hideous people. I don't know whether they are devils or angels, or what; but we all saw them, and my whole family saw the ship, and I don't want any more to do with them. One more case, and the circle will be closed. And it will serve to take a case that has been widely reported and discussed among UFO students though it has passed practically unnoticed in the national press. A horse named Snippy, missing for two days, was found on September 15, 1967, six miles from the main highway near the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, in Colorado. No flesh remained on the head, neck and shoulders, the hide was peeled back to expose the skull, and the vital organs were gone, according to Snippy's owner, Mrs. Berle Lewis, and her brother, Harry King. When they went to the site, they also observed what seemed to be fifteen circular exhaust marks covering an area about one hundred by fifty yards. A chico bush had been flattened, and close to it there were six identical holes, two inches wide and four inches deep. As the horse lay about a quarter of a mile from a cabin owned by an eighty seven year old lady, Mrs. Lewis and King went to interview her, and she said that she had seen a large object pass over her home at rooftop level on the day Snippy was last seen. She added that, without her glasses, she had been unable to determine what the object was. Alamosa County Sheriff Ben Phillips declined to visit the site, stating the horse must have been killed by lightning. A pathologist who did go to the site, however, said that "this horse was definitely not hit by lightning." A Forestry official who checked the area with a gcigcr counter found high readings in the vicinity of the burns, but lower readings as he went away from them, toward the horse. The reactions to the report and its sequels have been fairly typical. The University of Colorado, where Dr. Condon was conducting a $500,000 study of UFO's for the U.S. Air Force, sent someone to take a look at what was left of Snippy, who had been dead for a month. "I find nothing unusual about the death of the horse," he said. In Ray Palmer's magazine, Flying Saucers, an American ufologist asked in anger: He finds nothing unusual? Perhaps the razor sharp, clean incision around the horse's neck was the work of a mountain lion? The huge, circular indentation and several smaller ones—was that a mon strously fat fine bird, with babies, all suffering with radiation sickness? And—four legs? And the newsletter published by the UFO Investigating Committee in Sydney, Australia, drew a most interesting parallel between the Snippy case and a more recent report from Canada. Terry Goodmurphy of North Livingstone, Ontario, age twenty, and his friend Steven Griffon, nineteen, were driving west on Highway 17 about 9:30 P.M. on November 5, 1967, two months after Snippy's death. As they neared the top of Maple Ridge Hill, they saw an orange glow in the sky and thought it was caused by a fire. They stopped to watch and saw it was moving. They drove on again for about three quarters of a mile and then saw the object more clearly as it appeared to maneuver at an altitude of about one hundred feet. The two boys became frightened, turned around, and notified the Ontario Provincial Police. Nothing was to be seen when the police investigated. However, that same evening, something happened at the Lome Wolgenuth farm in nearby Sowbcry, for on the following morning when a standardbred mare, Susie, and another horse usually came in from a pasture, only the second horse came to the barn, and a long cut was noticed on his neck. Susie was not there. It was only after several hours of searching that her owners found her, lying dead with her throat and jugular vein cut. Perhaps I have now succeeded in evoking in the reader's mind a new awareness: the suggestion of a possible parallel between the rumors of today and the beliefs that were held by our ancestors, beliefs of stupendous fights with mysterious supermen, of rings where magic lingered, of dwarfish races haunting the land. Purposely, in this second chapter, I have limited the argument to the mere juxtaposition of modern and older beliefs. The faint suspicion of a giant mystery, much larger than our current preoccupation with life on other planets, much deeper than housewives' reports of zigzagging lights: Perhaps we can resolve the point by trying to understand what these tales, these myths, these legends arc doing to us. What images are they designed to convey? What hidden needs are they fulfilling? If this is a fabrication, why should it be so absurd? Are there precedents in history? Could imagination be a stronger force, to shape the actions of men, than its expression in dogmas, in political structures, in established churches, in armies? If so, could this force be used? Is it being used? Is there a science of deception at work here on a grand scale, or could the human mind generate its own phantoms, in a formidable, collective edification of worldwide mythologies? Is a natural force at work here? "Man's imagination, like every known power, works by fixed laws." These words by Hartland, written in 1891, offer a clue. Yes, there is a deep undercurrent to be discovered and mapped behind these seemingly absurd stories. Emerging sections of the underlying pattern have been discovered and mapped in ages past, by long dead scholars. Today we have the unique opportunity to witness the reappearance of this current, out in the open —colored, naturally, with our new human biases, our preoccupation with "science," our longing for the promised land of other planets. A new mythology was needed to bridge the stupendous gap beyond the meaningless present. They provided it. But who are they? Real beings, or the ghosts of our own ridiculous, petty dreams? They spoke to us, "in smooth English." They did not speak to our scientists; they did not send sophisticated signals in uniquely decipherable codes, as alien beings arc supposed to do, if they read Walter Sullivan, as any alien being should before daring to penetrate our solar system. No, they picked Gary Wilcox instead. And Joe Simonton. And Maurice Masse. What did they say? That they were from Mars. That they were our neighbors. And, above all, that they were superior to us, that we must obey them. That they were good. Go to Valensole and ask Masse. He will tell you, perhaps, how puzzled he was when suddenly, without warning, he felt inside himself a warm, comforting feeling— how good they were, our good neighbors. The Good People. They took a great interest in the affairs of men, and they always "stood for justice and right." They could appear in different forms. With them Joe Simonton exchanged food. So in times gone by, did Irishmen, who talked to similar beings. In those days, too, they were called the Good People and, in Scotland, the Good Neighbors, the Sleagh Maith. What did they say, then? "We are far superior to you." "We could cut off half the human race." 50 It does all make sense. These were the facts we have missed, without which we could never piece the UFO jigsaw together. Priests and scholars left books about the legends of their time concerning these beings. These books had to be found, collected, and studied. They contained no solutions, only elements of great puzzlement. But this puzzlement was documented. Together, these stories presented a coherent picture of the appearance, the organization, and the methods of our strange visitors. The appearance was—docs this surprise you?—exactly that of today's UFO pilots. The methods were the same. There was the sudden vision of brilliant "houses" at night, houses that could often fly, that contained peculiar lamps, radiant lights that needed no fuel. The creatures could paralyze their witnesses and translate them through time. They hunted animals and took away people. Their organization had a name: the Secret Commonwealth. In The Magic Casement, a book edited by Alfred Noyes about 1910,1 find this little poem by William Allingham, which I would like all ufologists to learn as a tribute to Joe Simonton: Up the airy mountains, Down the rushy glen, We daren't go a hunting For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, And white owl's feather! Down along the rocky shore Some make their home, They live on crispy pancakes Of yellow tide foam; Some in the reeds Of the black mountain lake, With frogs for their watch dogs, All night awake. CHAPTER THREE. To know human life one must go deep beneath its sunny exterior; and to know that summer sea which is the Fairy Faith one must put on a suit of armour and dive beneath its waves and behold the rare corals and moving sea palms and all the brilliant creatures who moVe in and out among those corals and sea palms, and the horrible and awful creatures too, creatures which would devour the man were his armour not of steel—for they all mingle together in the depths of that sea , hidden from our view as we sail over the surface of its sun lit waters only. Walter Wcntz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. THE TELETYPE message arrived in Dayton, Ohio, on September 9, 1966, through military channels. The full text, about four pages long, was quite unintelligible without knowledge of the Air Force procedure for the transmission of UFO reports (the message is shortened by reference to known, standardized questions that are never repeated in the text itself; with the help of the standard questionnaire, however, it is generally possible to find out what the sender is trying to describe). This particular message had originated at Kelly Air Force Base, Texas, and was addressed to the Air Force Systems Command, Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, and the Secretary. It bore the headline UNCLASSIFIED ROUTINE and the title UFO REPORT IS SUBMITTED IN ACCORDANCE WITH AFR. Kelly Air Force Base was sending something very close to a ghost story. The report made reference to two separate incidents, occurring, respectively, on August 6 and September 3, 1966, in a small Texas town. The author of the report is a father of four children. We shall call him Robert. His house is located in a fairly isolated spot, and he has never discussed the incidents with his neighbors. On August. 6, the three youngest children (ages six to nine) noticed a dark object shaped like an upside down cup. Although it was afternoon, the children had not seen the object arrive. It was dark, "without color and without lights." Then a square yellow light appeared, like a door opening, and a small creature was seen in the square of light. The entity, three to four feet tall, was dressed in black clothing, which reflected a yellow or gold color. The observation lasted several minutes, then the door closed. A low humming sound became audible, and the object took off toward the northeast, rising sharply but at an unexceptional speed. (These details, naturally, were not given spontaneously by the children; the story was reconstituted during the investigation.) At no time did the object touch the ground: it hovered at a height of about fifteen feet, near a tree, which was found undamaged, about thirty five feet from the house. The second sighting took place on September 3. Most of the family had gone away, but the oldest daughter had remained in the house with a friend. They were watching television in the afternoon when the set "snowed," then went out. The house was lit up with eerie red and yellow light, which appeared to be circling or twirling. They looked outside and saw an object hovering in the same position, by the same tree, as in the first sighting. Its shape, again, was that of an upside down cup, with a flat disk beneath, like a saucer. It was covered with light and departed shortly afterward. No sign of life was apparent inside or outside the craft. Two days later, Robert was propped up in bed. Through his door and across the hall he could sec a dark doorway leading to his sons' bedroom. All of a sudden he saw a small person, three and a half to four feet tall, dressed in tight fitting clothes, enter the dark bedroom. He assumed it was his small daughter going in to talk to her mother who was in the room with his sons About ten minutes later he saw something like a "bar of light," which appeared to crumble. He got up and went to the room, where he found his wife and the boys, who had also seen the bar of light. He did not see the person in white leave, and his wife stated their daughter had not been in the room at any time. There was no physical evidence to substantiate the presence of the small person in the house. "THE ROCKS WERE FULL OF THEM". On the island of Aramorc, a man named "Old Patsy," whom we met in Chapter Two, told Walter Wentz a "true story about the fairies": Twenty years or so ago around the Bedd of Dermot and Grania, just above us on the hill, there were seen many fairies, crowds of them and a single deer. They began to chase the deer, and followed it right across the island. At another time similar little people chased a horse. The rocks were full of them, and they were small fellows, Another person told Wentz: My mother used to tell about seeing the "fair folk" dancing in the fields near Cardigan; and other people have seen them around the cromlech up there on the hill. They appeared as little children in clothes like soldiers' clothes and with red caps, according to some accounts. While Wentz was recording material in Ireland, he went to Ratra with Dr. Hyde, and they were told this story about a "leprechaun": One day I was gathering berries along a hedge not far from here and something made me turn over a flat stone which I saw in the ditch where I stood. And there beneath the stone was the most beautiful little creature I have ever seen in my life, and he in a hole as smug as could be. He wasn't much larger than a doll and he was most perfectly formed with a little mouth and eyes. I turned the stone over again and ran as hard as I could to bring my mother, but when we got back we couldn't sec a thing of him. Now, since we arc getting to the central idea of this book, I will quote two more stories, both of them "landing" reports from (he richest period, in terms of number of landings reported, autumn, 1954, in UKO history. Both stories come from France. The first case took place on October 9. Four children living in Pournoy la Chetive, Moselle, reported that at about 6:30 P.M., as they were roller skating, they suddenly saw something luminous near the cemetery: It was a round machine, about 2.5 meters in diameter, which was standing on three legs. Soon a man came out. He was holding a lighted flashlight in his hand and it blinded us. But we could see that he had large eyes, a face covered with hair and that he was very small, about four feet tall. lie was dressed in a sort of black sack like the cassock M. le Cure wears. He looked at us and said something we did not understand. He turned off the flashlight. We became afraid and ran away. When we looked back we saw something in the sky: it was very high, very bright and flew fast. The second case is a classic one. It happened on Sunday, September 26, in Chabcuil, Drome. At about 2:30 P.M., Mrs. Leboeuf was gathering blackberries along a hedge—yes, it is almost the exact duplication of the leprechaun story—when: the dog began to bark and then started howling miserably. She looked around and saw the little animal standing at the edge of a wheat field, in front of something that she thought at first was a scarecrow. But going closer, she saw that the "scarecrow" was some kind of small diving suit, made of translucent plastic material, three feet tall or a little taller, with a head that was also translucent—and suddenly she realized that inside the diving suit was a Thing, and that behind the blurred transparency of the "helmet" two eyes were looking at her; at least she had the impression of eyes, but they seemed larger than human eyes. As she realized this, the diving suit began to move toward her, with a kind of quick, waddling gait. At this point, Mrs. Leboeuf fled in terror and hid in a nearby thicket. When she tried to locate the entity, there was nothing to be seen, but all the dogs in the village were furiously barking. All of a sudden, a large metallic, circular object rose from behind some trees and took off toward the northeast. People who had heard the witness's cries soon gathered around her. At the site where the disk had been seen to rise, a circle was found, about ten feet in diameter, where shrubs and bushes had been crushed: From one of the acacia trees at the edge of this circular imprint hung down a branch more than three inches thick, broken by pres sure from above. The branch of another acacia, which hung over the circular mark eight and a half feet above the ground, was entirely stripped of its leaves. The first few yards of wheat, in the path of the object as it took off through the field, were flattened out in radi ating lines. I hardly need underline the similarity between the depression left by this object and the various kinds of rings or nests we have already studied. Let us now return to the pans, the dwarfish race that accompanies the korrigans, the fairies of Brittany. They are seen only at twilight or at night. Some carry a torch like a Welsh death candle. They have swords no bigger than pins. According to Villemarque, a careful distinction should be drawn between korrigans and dwarfs. The latter are a hideous race of beings with dark or even black hairy bodies, with voices like old men and little sparkling black eyes. A man who wrote to me after reading Anatomy of a Phenomenon pointed out that although be was unconvinced about the existence of the unidentified flying objects, he had discovered something he thought might be of interest to me. And he continued thus: I have spent several years doing research on the Cherokee Indian, which is a branch of the Iroquian tribe. When the Cherokees mi grated into the hills of Tennessee they came upon a strange race of "moon eyed" people who could not see in the daylight. The Cherokees being unable to understand "these wretches" expelled Them. Barton in 1797 states "these people were a strange white race, far advanced, living in houses," etc. Hcywood, 26 years later, states— the invading Cherokees found white people near the head of Little Tennessee with forts extending down as far as the Chicamauga creek. He gives the location of three of these forts. Confirmation of my correspondent's report is found in the excellent book Mound Builders of Ancient America—the Archaeology of a Myth, where Robert Silverberg quotes Barton's New Views of the Origins of the Tribes and Nations of America (published in Philadelphia in 1798 and dedicated to Thomas Jefferson): The Cherokee tell us that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain "moon eyed people" who could not seG in the daytime. These wretches were expelled. Silverberg adds that Barton "left the clear implication that these albino people were responsible for the Tennessee mounds." Let us come to the point now. It would be nice to hold on to the common belief that the UFO's are craft from a superior space civilization, because this is a hypothesis science fiction has made widely acceptable, and because we are not altogether unprepared, scientifically and even, perhaps, militarily, to deal with such visitors. Unfortunately, however, the theory that flying saucers are material objects from outer space manned by a race originating on some other planet is not a complete answer. However strong the current belief in saucers from space, it cannot be stronger than the Celtic faith in the elves and the fairies, or the medieval belief in tutins, or the fear throughout the Christian lands, in the first centuries of our era, of demons and satyrs and fauns. Certainly, it cannot be stronger than the faith that inspired the writers of the Bible—a faith rooted in daily experiences with angelic visitation. In short, by suggesting that modern UFO sightings might be the result of experiments—of a "scientific" or even "super scientific" nature—conducted by a race of space travelers, we may be the victims of our ignorance, an ignorance that finds its cause in the fact that idiots and pedants alike, through a common reaction that psychologists could perhaps explain if they were not its first victims, have covered the fairy faith with the same ridicule as other idiots and pedants cover the UFO phenomenon. The realization that rumors of the real meaning of the UFO phenomenon set in motion the deepest and most powerful mental mechanisms makes acceptance of such facts very difficult, especially since the facts ignore frontiers, creeds, and races, defy rational statement, and turn around the most logical predictions as if they were mere toys. It is difficult to come to grips with the UFO phenomenon; for, although it clearly evolves through phases, its effects are diffuse and it cannot be dated very precisely. We have to rely on legends, hearsay, and extrapolations. Much can be accomplished, however, once it is realized that the observational material on hand since World War II—the twenty thousand or so clear cut, dated reports of UFO's in official and private files—is nothing but a resurgence of a deep stream in human culture known in older times under various other names. Wentz, as we have seen, found several people in Celtic countries who had seen the Gentry or had known people who were taken by fairies. In Brittany, he had much greater difficulty: The general belief in the interior of Brittany is that the fees once existed, but that they disappeared as their country was changed by modern conditions. In the region of the Mcne and of Erce (Ille et Vilaine) it is said that for more than a century there have been no fees and on the sea coast where it is firmly believed that the fees used to inhabit certain grottoes in the cliffs, the opinion is that they disappeared at the beginning of the last century. The oldest Bretons say that their parents or grand parents often spoke about having seen fees, but very rarely do they say that they themselves have seen fees. M. Paul Sebillot found only two who had. One was an old needle woman of Saint Cast, who had such fear of fees that if she was on her way to do some sewing in the country and it was night she always took a long circuitous route to avoid passing near a field known as the Couvent des Fees, The other was Marie Chehu, a woman 88 years old.* The central question in the analysis of the UFO phenomenon has always been that of the controlling intelligence behind the objects' apparently purposeful behavior. In stating the problem in such terms, I am not assuming that the objects are real—contrary to the implications someone might draw if he read this book too fast. Yet in no way am I excluding the possibility that this controlling intelligence is human, and I shall elaborate on this idea in later chapters. For the time being, let me simply state again my basic contention: the modern, global belief in flying saucers and their occupants is identical to an earlier belief in the fairy faith. The entities described as the pilots of the craft arc indistinguishable from the elves, sylphs, and lutins of the Middle Ages. Through the observations of unidentified flying objects, we arc concerned with an agency our ancestors knew well and regarded with terror: we are prying into the affairs of the Secret Commonwealth. * In undertaking research into beliefs in fairies, Gentry—call them what you will—confusion arises from the great variety of names and classifica tions given the different races of beings. In Lower Brittany alone, Paul Sebillot has found and classified fifty different names given to lutins and korrigans, while latins themselves are the same as the elvish people: pixies in Cornwall, robin good fellows in England, gohlim in Wales, goublins in Norimmrfv, and brownies in Scotland. Can we establish with certainty that the two beliefs are indeed identical? I believe we can. In earlier chapters, I have already given several examples of the means of transportation used by the sylphs. The ability of the fairies to cross the continents cannot have escaped the reader's attention. In later chapters, I have several rather striking tales to tell about Indian beliefs in flying races and the aerial ships used by the Gentry taking part in medieval wars. But I have not yet drawn from popular folklore the stories that support most directly the idea that strange flying objects have been seen throughout history in connection with the Little People. But let us clear up this point now. AERIAL RACES: FARFADETS AND SLEAGH MAITH. As late as 1850, one race of lutins survived in France, in the region of Poitou, which has been in recent years a favorite landing area for flying saucers. The lutins of Poitou were known as farfadets, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris contains several delightful accounts of their mischievous deeds. What were the main characteristics of the fadets or farfadets?4 They were little men, very black and hairy. All day long they lived in caves, and at night they liked to get close to the farms. Usually their favorite pastime was to play tricks on terrified women. Their dwellings were located with some precision. C. Puichaud, for instance, has reported in a lecture that farfadets lived for a long time at La Boulardierc near Troves, Deux Sevres, in underground tunnels they had dug themselves.5 At La Boissiere, the inhabitants describe the fadets as hairy dwarfs who played all sorts of pranks.* One night in the 1850's, near the shore of the Egray River, a group of women talked outside until about midnight. As they were returning to the village—they had just crossed a bridge— they heard a terrible noise and saw something that froze their * The verb "lutincr," which means "to behave like a lutin," has survived in the French language. It is used to describe childish pranks or harmless tricks played on the girls. Indeed, the fadets were known to bother pretty girls by pulling their hats, hiding their needles, etc. 1 would not claim that the lutins deserved all the credits for such actions. Some objects,which, for lack of a better term, they called a chariot with whining wheels—was speeding up the hill with a marvelous velocity. Naturally, it was pulled by the farfadets. The terrified women hung together as they saw the apparition. One of them, although half dead with fear, made the sign of the cross. The strange chariot leaped up over the vineyard and was lost in the night. The women hurried home and told the story to their husbands, who decided to investigate. They wisely awaited dawn, however, and then bravely went to the spot as soon as the sun was up. Of course, there was nothing left to be seen. We have already been told of the traveling habits of the Good People. What has not yet been mentioned is the belief, especially in Ireland, that conditions among humans arc related to the travels of the fairies. Wentz says that, according to John Glynn, town clerk of Tuam: During 1846 to 47 the potato crop in Ireland was a failure and very much suffering resulted. At the time, the country people in these parts attributed the famine to disturbed conditions in the fairy world. Old Tedhy Stead once told me about the conditions then prevailing, "Sure, we couldn't be any other way; and I saw the Good People and hundreds besides me saw them fighting in the sky over Knock Magh and on towards Galway." And I heard others say they saw the fighting too. According to another popular Irish belief, the elves have two great feasts each year. The first one takes place at the beginning of spring, when the hero O'Donoglme, who used to reign over the earth, rises through the sky on a white horse, surrounded by the brilliant company of the elves. Lucky is he, indeed, the Irishman who sees him rise from the depths of the Lake of Killarney! In January, 1537, the people of Franconia, between Pabcnberp and the forest of Thuringia, saw a star of marvelous size. It came lower and lower and appeared as a large white circle from which whirlwinds and patches of fire came forth. Falling to earth, the pieces of fire melted spear heads and ironwork, without causing harm to human beings or their houses. The favorite abode of the Gentry, however, was not always an aerial one. In many talcs related by the students of folklore, as in the literature of UFO's, the strange beings often come from the sea. Thus Wentz learned: There is an invisible island , between Innismurray and the coast opposite Grange, on which part of the Gentry is supposed to reside. When it is visible it is only visible for a short time. In the legends of Europe, it is between the eighth and the tenth centuries that celestial prodigies were most often visible. But the books on magic and demonology associate supernatural beings with celestial signs. A strange category of devils called "Friday Demons" is described in The Magical Works of Henri Corneille Agrippa. These devils are of medium height, rather handsome. Their arrival is preceded by a brilliant star. According to the Western cabalists, the sylphs flew through the air with the speed of lightning, riding a "peculiar cloud." It is noteworthy, too, that in France some fairies arc supposed to bear a luminous stone, an object that is often part of the equipment of flying saucer occupants. Many a "little man" has a light on either his belt, chest, or helmet. In a French tradition that survives in modern novels,6 the fortunate mortal who can steal the fairy's luminous stone is sure of lifelong happiness. On June 17, 1790, near Alencon, France, there was an apparition so strange and so disturbing that Police Inspector Liabeuf was instructed to make a thorough investigation. His report reads thus, in part: At 5 A.M. on June 12th, several farmers caught sight of an enormous globe which seemed surrounded with flames. First they thought it was perhaps a balloon that had caught fire, but the great velocity and the whistling sound which came from that body in trigued them. The globe slowed down, made some oscillations and precipitated itself towards the top of a hill, unearthing plants along the slope. The heat which emanated from it was so intense that soon the grass and the small trees started burning. The peasants succeeded in controlling the fire which threatened to spread to the whole area. In the evening this sphere was still warm and an extraordinary thing happened, not to say an incredible thing. The witnesses were; two mayors, a doctor and three other authorities who confirm my report, in addition to the dozens of peasants who were present. This sphere, which would have been large enough to contain a carriage, had not suffered from all that flight. It excited so much curiosity that people came from all parts to see it. Then all of a sudden a kind of door opened and, there is the interesting thing, a person like us came out of it, but this person was dressed in a strange way, wearing a tight fitting suit and, seeing all that crowd, said some words which were not understood and fled into the wood. Instinc tively, the peasants stepped back, in fear, and this saved them be cause soon after that the sphere exploded in silence, throwing pieces everywhere, and these pieces burned until they were reduced to powder. Researches were initiated to find the mysterious man, but he seemed to have dissolved. Let us follow the strange beings across the world now, to Mexico, where an American anthropologist, Brian Stross, from Berkeley, reports that the Tzeltal Indians have strange legends of their own. One night, Stross and his Indian assistant discussed these legends, of the ?ihk'dls or ikals, the little black beings, after seeing a strange light wandering about in the Mexican sky. The ikals are three foot tall, hairy, black humanoids whom the natives encounter frequently, and Stross learned: About twenty years ago, or less, there were many sightings of this creature or creatures, and several people apparently tried to fight it with machetes. One man also saw a small sphere following him from about five feet. After many attempts he finally hit it with his machete and it disintegrated, leaving only an ash like substance. The beings were observed in ancient times. They fly, they attack people, and, in the modern reports, they carry a kind of rocket on their backs and kidnap Indians. Occasionally, Stross was told, people have been "paralyzed" when they came upon the ikals, who are said to live in caves, which the natives are careful not to enter. Gordon Creighton, a staff member of the Flying Saucer Review and a former linguistic expert with the British foreign service, had occasion to study Indian folklore during several visits in Latin America. Commenting upon Stross's report, Creighton pointed out that words such as ik and ikal were found in all the dialects of the Maya Soke linguistic group: The Tzeltal words ihk and ihk'al (the adjective form) simply mean black being or "black." .. . In the Maya language, we find that ik means air or wind, and ikal means a spirit, while ek means black. The Kekchi Maya, in the Alta Vera Paz region of Guatemala, talk of a kek. The kek (meaning black in the Kekchi dialect of Maya) is said to be a centaur like being that guards his patron's house at night, and frightens people at dusk. Black, ugly, hairy, he is half human, with human hands but the hooves of a horse. We shall return to the ikals, or wendis, as they are called in British Honduras, in a later chapter, in connection with another feature of their behavior. For the time being, however, the Mexican legends show, quite conclusively, that many, perhaps every, region of the world has its own traditions about such creatures and associates them very definitely with the idea of aerial, or even cosmic, origin. In the Tzeltal cosmology, the earth is flat and supported on four columns. At the base of these columns lives a race of black dwarfs, and Creighton points out that their blackness is due—so runs the Indian theory—to the fact that they are scorched by the sun when he passes close to them every night as he travels through the underworld. According to the Paiute Indians, California was once populated by a superior civilization, the Hav Musuvs. Among other interesting devices, they used "flying canoes," which were silvery and had wings. They flew in the manner of eagles and made a whirring noise. They were also using a very strange weapon: a small tube that could be held in one hand and would stun their enemies, producing lasting paralysis and a feeling similar to a shower of cactus needles." , How could primitive tribes better describe electrocution? It is interesting to gather such tales in America, but Europeans hardly have to go as far as that to find similarly interesting and forgotten episodes. The archives of the Roman Catholic Church are full of such incidents, and it cannot be doubted that many an accusation of witchcraft stemmed from the belief in strange beings who could fly through the air and approached humans at dusk or at night. Occasionally, these "demons" were seen in full daylight by many people. And in this context, I am not referring to the vague confessions obtained under torture from the poor men and women who fell into the clutches of the Inquisition (although this material would be quite worthy of a parallel study). I am quoting official records of the time, gathered from witnesses by clerics and policemen, of which sort of report the following account is fairly typical. In the early seventeenth century, the cathedral at Quimper Corentin, France, bad on its roof a pyramid covered with lead. On February 1, 1620, between 7:00 and 8:00 P.M., thunder fell on that pyramid, and it caught fire, exploded, and fell down with a stupendous noise. People rushed to the cathedral from all parts of the town and saw, in the midst of the lightning and smoke, a demon, of a green color, with a long green tail, doing his best to keep the fire going! This account, which was published in Paris, is supplemented by a more complete version printed in Rennes. This latter version adds that the demon "was seen clearly by all, inside the fire, sometimes green, sometimes blue and yellow." What were the authorities to do? They threw into the roaring fire a quantity of Agni Dei, close to one hundred and fifty buckets of water, and forty or fifty cartloads of manure—to no avail. The demon was still there, and the fire kept happily burning. Something drastic had to be done: a consecrated host was placed inside a loaf of bread and thrown into the flames, and then blessed water was mixed with milk given by a nurse of above reproach conduct and spread over the demon and the burning pyramid. This the visitor could not stand; he whistled in a most horrible fashion and flew away. I can only recommend the recipe to the U.S. Air Force. Eight hundred years earlier (that is, about 8.30) in the days of Emperor Lothaire, creatures similar to the Elementals were seen very often in the northern parts of the Netherlands. According to Corneil Van Kempen, they were called "Dames Blanches" (White Ladies). He compares them to the nymphs of antiquity. They lived in caves, and they would attack people who traveled at night. The shepherds would also be harassed. And the women who had newly born babies had to be very careful, for they were quick in stealing the children away. In their lair, one could hear all sorts of strange noises, indistinct words that no one could understand, and musical sounds. 64 In the last half of the seventeenth century, a Scottish scholar gathered all the accounts he could find about the Sleagh Maith and, in 1691, wrote a manuscript bearing the title: The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies.™ The Secret Com monwealth was the first systematic attempt to describe the methods and organization of the strange creatures that plagued the farmers of Scotland. The author, Reverend Kirk, of Aberfoyle, studied theology at St. Andrews and took his degree of professor at Edinburgh. Later he served as minister for the parishes of Balquedder and Abcrfoyle and died in 1692. It is impossible to quote the entire text of Kirk's treatise on the Secret Commonwealth, but we can summarize his findings about elves and other aerial creatures in the following way: 1. They have a nature that is intermediate between man and the angels. 2. Physically, they have very light and "fluid" bodies, which are comparable to a condensed cloud. They are particularly visible at dusk. They can appear and vanish at will. 3. Intellectully, they are intelligent and curious. 4. They have the power to carry away anything they like, 5. They live inside the earth in caves, which they can reach through any crevice or opening where air passes. 6. When men did not inhabit most of the world, they used to live there and had their own agriculture. Their civilization has left traces on the high mountains; it was flourishing at a time when the whole countryside was nothing but woods and forests. 7. At the beginning of each three month period, they change quarters because they are unable to stay in one place. Besides, they like to travel. It is then that men have terrible encounters with them, even on the great highways.* 8. Their chameleonlike bodies allow them to swim through the air with all their household. 9. They are divided into tribes. Like us, they have children, * Kirk notes that the Scots avoid all travel during those four periods of the year, and he adds that some country folk go to church on the first Sunday of every three month period to have their family, crops, and cattle blessed in order to keep away the elves who steal plants and animals. nurses, marriages, burials, etc., unless they just do this to mock our own customs, or to predict terrestrial events. 1. Their houses are said to be wonderfully large and beautiful, but under most circumstances they are invisible to human eyes. Kirk compares them to enchanted islands. The houses are equipped with lamps that burn forever and fires that need no fuel. 2. They speak very little. When they do so, when they talk among themselves, their language is a kind of whistling sound. 3. Their habits and their language when they talk to humans are similar to those of local people. 4. Their philosophical system is based on the following ideas: nothing dies; all things evolve cyclically in such a way that at every cycle they are renewed and improved. Motion is the universal law. 5. They are said to have a hierarchy of leaders, but they have no visible devotion to God, no religion. 6. They have many pleasant and light books, but also serious and complex books, rather in the Rosicrucian style, dealing with abstract matters. 7. They can be made to appear at will before us through magic. The similarities between these observations and the story related by Facius Cardan, which antedates Kirk's manuscript by exactly two hundred years, are clear. Both Cardan and Paracelsus write, like Kirk, that a pact can be made with these creatures, and that they can be made to appear and answer questions at will. Paracelsus did not care to reveal what that pact was "because of the ills that might befall those who would try it." Kirk is equally discreet on this point. And, of course, to go deeper into this matter would open the whole field of witchcraft, which is beyond my purpose in this book. Kirk's conclusion is that every age has left a secret to be discovered. Sooner than we think, he says, the relations with the aerial beings will be as natural to us as, say, microscopy or the printing press, navigation—all things that caused considerable surprise when they were first introduced. We can only follow him in this and give a humble salute to a man who managed to gather such a complete description of our visitors. It is remarkable that one cannot find a single writer who claims he knows the physical nature of the fairies.14 They give us their personal opinions on the subject or report on the various theories held during their time, but they do not assure us they have a final answer. To Kirk, the Good People have bodies so plyable thorough the Subtilty of the Spirits that agitate them, that they can make them appear or disappear at Pleasure. Some have Bodies or Vehicles so spungions, thin, and defecat, that they are fed by only sucking into some fine spirituous liquors, that pierce the pure Air. According to medieval occultists, all invisible beings can be divided into four classes: the angels, the gods of the ancients; the devils or demons, the fallen angels; the souls of the dead; and the elemental spirits, which correspond to Kirk's Secret Commonwealth. In the fourth group are the gnomes, who inhabit the earth and correspond to mine haunting fairies, goblins, pixies, korrigans, leprechauns, and the domovoys of Russian legends, and the sylphs, who inhabit the air. These subdivisions are obviously arbitrary, and Paracelsus himself will admit it is extremely difficult to provide definitions for these various classes. The bodies of the Elementals arc "of an elastic semi material essence, ethereal enough so as not to be detected by the physical sight, and they may change their forms according to certain laws." To start from this basis would naturally open the way to far reaching speculations. From John Mac Neil of Barra, Wentz learned: The old people said they didn't know if fairies were flesh and Hood or spirits. They saw them as men of more diminutive stature than our own race. I heard my father say that fairies used to come and speak to natural people and then vanish while one was looking at them. Fairy women used to go into houses and talk and then vanish. The general belief was that the fairies were spirits who could make themselves seen or not seen at will. And when they took people they took body and soul together. Another man interviewed by Wentz insisted that "the fairies of the air are different from those in the rocks." Similarly, in Brittany, popular tradition divides the fairies into two groups: pygmy sized entities endowed with magic powers and the science of prophecy, on one hand; and white, aerial fairies, on the other. Beings in the first category are black, hairy; their hands terminate in talons. They have old faces and hollow eyes, small and bright like burning coals. Their voices arc low as if "broken by age." With the remark about prophecy, we are led again to consider the relationship between the actions of the Secret Commonwealth and the affairs of men. Wentz, noting this relationship in ancient poetry, says that during the last fight of the great hero of Ulster, Cuchulainn (who was a favorite of the sidhe or fairies), one of these beings named Morrigu flew over Cuchulainn s head as he fought in his war chariot. Similarly, the fairies took part in the Battle of Clontarf (April 23, 1014), providing what would be called, in modern military language, "air support" for the Irish side. Before the battle, a fairy woman came to Dunlang O'Hartigan and begged him not to fight; she knew the issue could only be death (and here we find the prophetic powers of fairies again). lie assured her that he was ready to die for Ireland. The two armies met near Dublin: It will be one of the wonders of the day of judgment to relate the description of this tremendous onset. There arose a wild, im petuous, precipitate, mad, inexorable, furious, dark, lacerating, merciless, combative, contentious Badb which was shrieking and fluttering over their heads. And there arose also the satyrs and sprites , and destroying demons of the air and firmament, and the demoniac phantom host. This is only one of many references to the flying hosts of the fairies. We shall have occasion to study them more closely in a later chapter, But, first, let us return to UFO's. Can we study modern UFO reports without reopening the entire problem of apparitions? To most UFO writers, the answer is yes. Unidentified flying objects, they argue, leave physical traces and behave like space probes. It is obvious to them that UFO's are scientific devices having nothing to do with the mystico rcligious context of medieval apparitions, and nothing to do with the creatures studied by Kirk, since—as we have just seen —these latter could appear and vanish at will. This view is no longer tenable. The reports of recent observa tions do describe objects that appear and vanish. It is just that such reports are not publicized. Students of UFO's are reluctant to publish them. And the witnesses themselves are not eager to come forward with stories they know are unbelievable. During a discussion with Aime Michel on this subject, he pointed out the negative reactions of scientists to his analysis of the French sight ings. They argued that such fantastic stories could only come from deranged minds. "What would these people have said," he remarked, "if I had published all the data!" Among the cases that deserve close examination, but which were "swept under the rug" by UFO students themselves, is the sighting at Nouatre, Indre et Loire, France, near Marcilly sur Vienne on September 30, 1954. About 4:30 P.M. Georges Gatay, head of a team of eight construction workers, found himself walking away from the other workers. He felt a "peculiar drowsiness" and suddenly wondered where he was going. Then, without warning, he found himself facing the strangest apparition. Less than thirty feet away, above him on the slope, was a man: his head was covered with an opaque glass helmet with a visor coming down to his chest. He wore gray coveralls and short boots. In his hand he held an elongated object: "It could have been a pistol, or it could have been a metal rod." On his chest was a light projector. The strange man was standing in front of a large shining dome, which "floated" about three feet above the ground. Above the cupola of the machine were objects like rotating wings or blades. Then suddenly, the strange man vanished, and I couldn't explain how he did, since he did not disappear from my field of vision by walking away, but vanished like an image one erases suddenly. Then I heard a strong whistling sound which drowned the noise of our excavators; the saucer rose by successive jerks, in a vertical direction, and then it too was erased in a sort of blue haze, as if by miracle. As soon as he saw the object and the entity, Gatay tried to run, but he found himself helplessly nailed to the spot. He was thus "paralyzed" during the whole observation. So were his seven co workers, in a unique case of collective physiological reaction. None of them had previously believed in the reality of the so called saucers. As soon as he was able to move again, Gatay rushed back to his men and cried: "Have you seen something?" Mr. Beurrois told him: "Yes , a flying saucer!" And the man who was the driver of the excavator, Mr. Lubanovic, added: "There was a man dressed like a diver in front of it." Four others—Messrs. Scchct, Villcneuve, Rougicr, and Amiraut, a truck driver—confirmed all the details of the sighting. It must be pointed out that the incident took place in a remote rural region. At the time—the end of September—the French wave of reports was just beginning. But Gatay, who fought during the war with the Resistance and was wounded in Luxembourg, said that he is not used to flights of fancy. Following the incident, he suffered from insomnia, strong headaches, and loss of appetite for a week. Ironically, the eight men are still not convinced that flying saucers were from another world. They feel sure they are a secret development by a terrestrial nation—probably France! In Jalapa, Mexico, early in September, 1965, a hovering object with luminous slits in its circumference and a black clad being with eyes gleaming like a cat's, holding a shining metal rod, were seen. The entity vanished suddenly while under observation in a Jalapa street by a local reporter, two taxi drivers, and a bullfighter. In the Carazinho case of July 26, 1965, five dwarfs dressed in dark uniforms and small boots were seen. We are told that "one of them had in his right hand a brilliantly luminous object like a wand." There was a sudden flash of lightning about 1:45 P.M. on January 28, 1967, on Studham Common, near Whipsnade Park Zoo, an isolated spot up in the Chiltern Hills, in England. Rain was falling and the atmosphere was heavy, reports R. H. B. Winder, who investigated this case for the Flying Saucer Review.1" Seven boys were on their way to school in the vicinity of the Dell—a shallow valley and an ideal spot for playing hidc and seck. Alex Butler ase ten, was looking south over the Dell when he saw clearly, in the open, "a little blue man with a tall hat and a beard." He called his friend, and they ran toward the figure. They were about twenty yards away when it "disappeared in a puff of smoke." The boys were very much surprised, naturally, but nothing in the attitude of the strange figure had inspired fear or suggested threat, so they kept looking for the "little blue man" and saw him again on the opposite side of the bushes from where he was first standing. They went toward him. He vanished once more, reappearing at the bottom of the Dell. This time, they heard "voices" in nearby bushes and became slightly afraid. The voices reminded them of "foreign sounding babble." Finally, they saw the man a fourth time before they were summoned to school by the whistle. Their teacher, Miss Newcomb, noticed how excited they were and, in spite of their warnings that "she would never believe them," immediately separated them and made each of the seven boys write down his experience, each in his own words. The essays were then gathered into a book called The Little Blue Man on Studham Common, which, notes Winder, makes fascinating reading and no doubt "will occupy an honoured place in the archives of the Studham Village Primary School." Investigation by Winder, Moulster, Bowen, and Creighton disclosed a number of local sightings—among them two landings in the vicinity of the spot—within a few months of the January sighting. Naturally, the investigators were most interested in hearing the boys themselves give details on the appearance of the creature. They interviewed them in the presence of their teacher, and Winder reports: They estimate the little man as 3 ft. tall (by comparison with themselves) with an additional 2 ft. accounted for by a hat or helmet best described as a tall brimless bowler, i.e. with a rounded top. The blue colour turned out to be a dim greyish blue glow tending to obscure outline and detail. They could, however, discern a line which was either a fringe of hair or the lower edge of the hat, two round eyes, a small seemingly flat triangle in place of a nose, and a one piece vestment extending down to a broad black belt carrying a black box at the front about six inches square. The arms appeared short and were held straight down close to the side at all times. The legs and feet were indistinct. As for the "puff of smoke," it apparently was a whirling cloud of yellowish blue mist shot toward the pursuers. I hardly need to quote more cases. THE MAGIC CASEMENT. The Reverend Robert Kirk makes no bones about it: the elves did at one time occupy the land. Today it is still a common belief in the north of Scotland that the sith or fairy people existed once —a belief that survives in their title "Good Neighbors," although they could occasionally be hostile to man: While the Sith had no inborn antagonism towards human beings, and were occasionally known to do good turns to their favourites, they were very quick to take offence, capricious in their behavior and delighted in playing tricks on their mortal neighbors. These cantrips had to be patiently endured, as resistance or hostility might lead to dreadful reprisals—the kidnapping of children or even adults. An attitude of passive friendliness on the human side was therefore assumed to be eminently desirable. Scott refers to this when Bailie Nicol Jarvie, in Rob Roy, tells his companion, as they pass a fairy hill near Aberfoylc: They ca'them , Daoine Sith, which signifies, as I understand, men of peace: meaning thereby to make their gudewill. And we may e'en as well ca'them that too, Mr. Osbaldistone, for there's nae gude in speaking ill o'the laird within his ain bounds. A Gaelic scholar, Campbell, minister of Tiree, published a story called "Na Amhuisgean—The Dwarfs or Pigmies," in which he remarks: The existence of pigmies in some unknown region bordering upon, if not forming part of, the "kingdom of coldness" is of interest as indicating some of the connection between smallness of person and cold climate, and so leading to the speculations as to the first dispersion of the human race and connection of tribes that are now far removed from each other in appearance, dress, mode of life, and dialects. Although the connection between climate and size is not a tenable hypothesis, Campbell's remarks do open the way to interesting speculations. He notes that the term Lapanach applies to a certain "little, thick set, insignificant man" who figures in many tales, and he adds: There arc many traditional tales in the Highlands of much interest in which little men of dwarfish, and even pigmy, size, figure as good bowmen, slaying men of large size, and powerful make, by their dexterity in the use of the bow and arrow. In spite of their small size, they are understood to have been of very considerable strength. They were not "undersized in the same way that children arc, but full grown individuals, undersized and sinew}', or muscular." These dwarfs or pygmies are called Na Amhuisgean or, more correctly, Amhuisgean. The English phonetics for the Gaelic "amhuisg" would be "awisk." The same beings are sometimes found under the names Tamhasg and Amhuish, and these words uniformly designate dwarfs. It is ironic, therefore, that in one talc (''The Lad with the Skin Garments," quoted by Mac Dougall) the awisks address a human intruder as "O little man" while he in turn calls them "big men all." Now one point must absolutely be cleared up. Were there or were there not races of dwarfs living among the West and Middle Europeans of antiquity? Were the legends about the fairies and the elves based on the fact that the ancient inhabitants of the northern parts of the British Isles were such a race? Historical and archaeological researchers definitely say no, and we must agree with them. Yet several writers, such as David MacRitchic, claim there arc indications in this direction, and of course such indications would be crucial to any theory concerning the nature of the humanoids." In a book published in London in 1894, Tyson's Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients, Professor Windle, of Birmingham, remarks that a race of dwarfs supplied the "best warriors" and bodyguard of several kings. Tyson made an extensive study of the dwarf races and quotes the Greek historian Ctesias: Middle India has black men, who are called Pygmies, using the same language as the other Indians. .. . Of these Pygmies, the king of the Indians has three thousand in his train; for they are very skillful archers. And he adds: There seem to have been near lake Zerrah, in Persia, Negrito [pygmy black] tribes who are probably aboriginal, and may have formed the historic black guard of the ancient kings of Susania. Tyson's work, to which Windle provided the Preface, was written in the seventeenth century. After calling attention to the remark by Ctesias, it goes on: Talentonius and Bartholine think that what Ctesias relates of the Pygmies, as their being very good archers, very well illustrates this Text of Ezekiel. The Ezekiel text in question appears thus in the King James Bible: The men of Arvad with thine army were upon thy walls round about, and the Gammadims were in thy towers. The Genevan translation printed in Edinburgh in 1579 also has "Gammadims" glossed "valorous men." In the Vulgate, however, it runs thus: Filii Arvad cum Exercitu tuo supra Muros tuos per circuitum, et Pygmaei in Turribus tuis fuerunt. And indeed, the English Bishops' Bible of 1572 and 1575 does not have "Gammadims" but "Pygmenians." Without going into further detail, it is clear that the Gaelic story of a guard of dwarf warriors is not an isolated case. If we return now to David MacRitchic's quotation from the Flemish folklore journal Ons Volksleven, we can learn more: The Fenlanders [a race dwelling in our country prior to the Kelts] were little, but strong, dexterous, and good swimmers, they lived by hunting and fishing. Adam of Bremen in the eleventh century thus pictures their descendants or race: "They had large heads, flat faces, flat noses, and large mouths. They lived in caves of the rocks, which they quitted in the night time for the purpose of committing sanguinary outrages." The Keltic people, and later those of German race, so tall and strong, could hardly look upon such little folk as human beings. They must have regarded them as strange, mysterious creatures. And when these negroes or Fenlanders had lived for a long enough time hidden, for fear of the new people, in their grottoes, especially when they at length fell into decay through poverty, or died out, they became changed in the imagination of the dreamy Germans into mysterious beings, a kind of ghosts or gods. In a footnote, MacRitchie states that he is "not aware on what grounds this author speaks of them as black people," but he admits that these dwarfish Fenlanders might be regarded as the originals of the awisks of the Gaelic legend. Now we seem to be getting somewhere. There is a tradition in the Orkney Isles that offers a parallel to the above story. Sometime in the first part of the fifteenth century, Bishop Thomas Tulloch of Orkney gave details, in De Orcadibus Insulis, of the tradition that the archipelago had been inhabited six centuries earlier by the Papae and a race of dwarfs. The Papae, according to many scholars, were the Irish priests. And the dwarfs were the Picts. In this, MacRitchie follows Barry's Orkney, where we read: they are plainly no other than the Peiths, Picts, or Piks, . The Scandinavian writers generally call the Piks Peti, or Pets: one of them uses the term Petia, instead of Pictland (Saxo Gram.); and besides, the firth that divides Orkney from Caithness is usually denominated Petland Fiord in the Icelandic Sagas or histories. The consistency running through these ancient accounts, Mac Ritchie says, is indeed remarkable. The Irish priests followed St. Columba, who himself was a great grandson of Conall Gulban, who, tradition states, had fierce battles with a race of dwarfs. Conall Gublan's fights with the dwarfs, indeed, are the origin of a series of tales sometimes attributed to other legendary heroes. If we try to get as close as possible to the original story, this is what we get: Conail Gulban was the son of the famous Neil (or Nial), the ancestor of the O'Neills of Ulster. He was the paternal grandfather of Fedlimidh, the father of St. Columba, and his adventures begin in the northwest of Ireland, "somewhere in the dawn of the fifth century." After various experiences, Gulban landed in the "realm of Lochlann," generally believed to be Scandinavia, which itself had a rather vague meaning at the time. There Gulban was intrigued by a strange construction and asked his guide: "What pointed house is there, Duanach?" "That is the house of the Tamhaisg, the best warriors that are in the realm of Lochlann," Duanach, the guide, replied. "I heard my grandfather speaking about the Tamhaisg," said Conall, "but I have never seen them. I will go to see them." "It were not my counsel to thee!" were Duanach's last words. This advice, naturally, Conall Gulban disregarded. He went straight to the palace of the King of Lochlann and challenged him to combat. He was told that he should get no fighting at that time of night, but he should get lodging in the house of the amhusg [awisks], where there were eighteen hundred amhusg, and eighteen score. . He went, and he went in, and there were none of the amhuish within that did not grin. When he saw that they had made a grin, he himself made two. "What was the meaning of your grinning at us?" said the amhusg. "What was the meaning of your grinning at me?" said Conall. Said they, "Our grinning at thee meant that thy fresh royal blood will be ours to quench our thirst, and thy fresh royal flesh to polish our teeth." And, said Conall, "The meaning of my grinning is, that I will look out for the one with the biggest knob and slenderest shanks, and knock out the brains of the rest with that one, and his brains with the knobs of the rest." At this point, each of the awisks put a "stake of wood against the door," and Conall asked them why they had done so. "We have never seen coming here [one] a gulp of whose blood, or a morsel of whose flesh could reach us, but thou thyself, except one other man, and he fled from us. And now every one is doubting the other in case thou shouldest flee." "That was the thing that made me do it myself likewise, since I have got yourselves so close as you are," answered Conall, who had followed their lead in this action. Then he went and he began upon them. "I feared to be chasing you from hole to hole, and from hill to hill, and I did that." Then he gazed at them, from one to two, and he seized on the one of the slenderest shanks and the fattest head; he drove upon the rest sliochd! slachd! till he had killed every one of them; and he had not a jot of the one with whom he was working at them, but what was in his hands of the shanks. The tale of Conall Gulban, recorded by Campbell of Islay, continues with many wonderful fights in other lands. In France, for example, Conall wins in the same absurd way over "the house of the Tamhaisg, the best warriors that the King of France had." MacRitchie concluded: it is of course to be understood that the passage as it stands is as impossible as it is ludicrous. But this docs not interfere with the assumption that the basis of the story actual encounter between men of tall stature and a race of dwarfs; the excessive number of the latter, and the case, wil li which the hero swings them about, being merely the embroidering of talc lellcrs in later times. As for the seeming impossibility that a tflle could be transmitted for fifteen centuries and yet be historical, MacRitchie adds: it ought to be remembered that the or:il transmission of history and genealogy, with the most careful attention In language and details, was a perfect science among the Gaelic speaking peoples. But, then, what became of the dwarfish race? According to MacRitchie, the dwarfs were destroyed or went into hiding toward the sixth century, when Columba and his followers carried on a religious war against the Picts. At the same time, he says, the Irishmen were also using force against the same people in the north of Ireland. And since the new owners of the land felt for their ancient enemies a mixture of guilt and fear, numerous rumors were born concerning the ghosts of the Picts, still roaming through the land. And this in turn led to the elves and fairies. This theory—generally referred to as the "Pygmy theory"—is, however, now no longer tenable in the face of the evidence his torians have gathered about the Picts. The name "Picti" (according to Wainwright") appears first in 297 A.D., and from that time on, it is applied to all the peoples who lived north of the Antonine Wall and were not Scots. In earlier times, we are really concerned with the predecessors of the Picts, who formed various groups called "Proto Picts." Could MacRitchie's pygmies have figured among the Proto Picts? Wainwright gives the following translation of a passage from the Historic hlorwegiae already referred to above: These islands were first inhabited by the Picts and the Papae. Of these, one race, the Picts, little exceeded pigmies in stature; they did marvels, in the morning and in the evening, in building [walled] towns, but at mid day they entirely lost all their strength, and lurked through fear in little underground houses. And Wainwright comments: The story is interesting in that it brings together Picts, souterrains, and perhaps brochs, at once explaining the common belief that the Picts were a pigmy people and providing an early example of the mistaken equations implicit in the names "Picts' houses" (souter rains) and "Pictish Towers" (brochs). Should we believe that, among the Proto Picts, there were dwarfs who were mistaken for a native people? And, then, where did they come from? MacRitchie's theory offers only confusion, and it is amusing to observe his .embarrassment when he must report that the Fenlanders were not only dwarfish, but black, too. Could it be that there were ikals in Northern Europe at the dawn of recorded history? I believe we have at least established that there were open questions in the minds of the scholars of all epochs concerning such beings, and on this point Ilartland docs not disagree with MacRitchie: "Nothing is more likely than the transfer to the mythical beings of Celtic superstition of some features derived from alien races." In his conclusion to his discussion of the Pygmy theory, which he rejects as Hartland does, Wentz remarks that it leaves all the problems of the historical origins of the fairy faith unsolved, since it is clearly global, not limited to the Celtic lands. Thus A. Lang, in his Introduction to the 1922 edition of Kirk's book, states that "to my mind at least, the subterranean inhabitants of Mr. Kirk's book are not so much a traditional recollection of a real dwarfish race living underground (a hypothesis of Sir Walter Scott's) as a lingering memory of the chthonian beings, the Ancestors." FOLKLORE IN THE MAKING. No matter how interesting it may be to speculate on the origin of these ancient beliefs, the opportunity to observe folklore "in the making" is even more attractive to those with an inclination toward research. When modern rumors appear to fall into the very same patterns that have puzzled generations of scientists, theologians, and literary scholars, the feeling one gets is a mixture of gratitude and enthusiasm. When the phone rings in Wright Paterson Air Force Base, and a local intelligence officer transmits the observation of a motorist who has just been "buzzed" by what he describes as a flying saucer, we arc really witnessing the unique conjunction of the modern world—with its technology—and ancient terrors—with all the power of their sudden, fugitive, irrational nature. We are in a very privileged position. Neither Wentz nor Hartland was able to interview people who had just observed the phenomena they studied. Most of their witnesses spoke of days gone by, of stories heard by the fireplace. We feel, on the other hand, that we can almost reach out into the night and grab those lurking entities. We are hot on their trail; the air is still vibrating with excitement, the smell of sulphur is still there when the story is recorded. Take, for instance, the story of the Air Force colonel who was driving at night on a lonely Illinois road when he noticed that a strange object was flying above his car. It looked, he said, like a bird, but it was the size of a small airplane. It flapped its wings and flew away. This is the type of horror story adolescent girls sometimes tell their mothers when they come home late and a bit nervous. But an Air Force colonel? During November December, 1966, West Virginia was plagued by a similar "bird," called "The Mothman" by imaginative reporters. One witness, twenty five yeaT old Thomas Ury, who lives in Clarksburg, met the creature at 7:15 A.M. on November 25,1966, in the vicinity of Point Pleasant. It was a large gray thing which rose from a nearby field. "It came up like a helicopter and veered over my car," he told John Keel, who spent many days in the area investigating the reports. He accelerated up to 75 M.P.H., but the "bird" was still there, casually circling the car. It appeared to be about six feet long, with a wingspread of eight to ten feet. According to other witnesses quoted by Keel, the figure had large, round, glowing red eyes. On January 11, 1967, Mrs. McDaniel saw the "Bird" herself in broad daylight. She was outside her home when she observed what appeared to be a small plane flying down the road almost at tree top level. As it drew closer she realized it was a man shaped object with wings. It swooped low over her head and circled a nearby restaurant before going out of sight. Mrs. McDaniel, who works in the Point Pleasant Unemployment Office, is known in the community as a rational and responsible person. 79 Now consider this report: The intruder was tall, thin and powerful. He had a prominent nose, and bony fingers of immense power which resembled claws. He was incredibly agile. He wore a long, flowing cloak, of the sort affected by opera goers, soldiers and strolling actors. On his head was a tall, metallic seeming helmet. Beneath the cloak were close fitting garments of some glittering material like oilskin or metal mesh. There was a lamp strapped to his chest. Oddest of all: the creature's ears were cropped or pointed like those of an animal, Was it a prankster in a Batman dress? It seems entirely possible. Especially when we take into account the fact that the "bird" was carrying something on its back and made incredible leaps—actually flying, on one occasion—above the heads of would be captors. There is only one trouble with this explanation: the latter episode took place not in West Virginia in 1966 but in the dark lanes of a London suburb, in November, 1837. Like The Mothman of Point Pleasant, the mysterious flying man of London was ignored by authorities as long as possible. Finally, a resident of Pcckham wrote a letter to the Lord Mayor, and the censorship could no longer be maintained. Nightly, horse patrols searched the countryside; Admiral Codrington set up a reward fund (still unclaimed, by the way). And J. Vyncr, in a remarkable article about the mystery, informs us that even "The old Duke of Wellington himself set holsters at his saddle bow and rode out after dark in search of Springheel Jack." On February 20, 1838, a girl of eighteen, Jane Alsop, of Old Ford, near Bow, London, heard a violent ringing of the front door bell. Going out, she faced the "most hideous appearance" of Springheel Jack. He wore shining garments and a flashing lamp on his chest. His eyes resembled glowing balls of fire! When Miss Alsop uttered a cry, the intruder grabbed her arm in clawlike fingers, but the girl's sister rushed to her rescue. The visitor spurted a fiery gas in Jane's face, and she dropped unconscious. Then Jack fled, dropping his cloak, which was picked up at once by another shadow who ran after him. Two days earlier, though not revealed until after the Old Ford incident had made headlines, a Miss Scales, of Limehouse, was walking through Green Dragon Alley. The alley was a dim lit passage beside a public house, and when she saw a tall figure lurking in the shadows Miss Scales hesitated, waiting for her sister who had fallen behind. The sister, who described the loiterer as "tall, thin and (save the mark) gentlemanly," came up in time to see his long cloak thrown aside, and a lantern flashing on the startled girl. There was no time to scream; Jack's weird blue flame spurted into his victim's face and she dropped to the ground in a deep swoon. Whereupon, Jack walked away calmly. Vyner suggests that Jack had a rendezvous in Green Dragon Alley and wanted to get rid of witnesses. A week after the Old Ford incident, he knocked on the door of Mr. Ashworth's house in Turner Street and inquired for him. The servant who opened the door screamed the place down. Jack fled. He was never seen again, in the London neighborhood at least. Had a contact been made? It is strange indeed, as Vyner remarks, that Springheel Jack should have paid two visits within two days to houses less than a mile apart, whose owners were named Alsop and Ashworth, respectively. Two of the main witnesses, as in West Virginia, were young girls. With them, in the two cases, were their sisters. There seems to be a pattern here. But, rather typically, it is once again an absurd one. In 1877, wearing tight garments and shining helmet, Jack was seen again at Aldershot, Hampshire, England. On that occasion he flew above two sentries, who fired at him. He answered with a burst of blue fire, which left them stunned, and vanished, Vyner believes that Jack was again to blame for the scare in late August, 1944, in Mattoon, Illinois. He was seen at night peering through windows "as in search for someone known to him by sight." Most of the witnesses were women; some of them reported falling unconscious after a device was pointed at them by the visitor, who left a strange cloying smell. In the spring of 1960, Italian jeweler Salvatore Cianci was driving in Sicily, near Syracuse, when a small being in shining clothes wearing a diving helmet appeared in the beam of the headlights. It had no arms but two "little wings." Mr. Cianci suEered a nervous shock. On Saturday, November 16, 1963, four teen agers were walking near Sandling Park, near Hythe, Kent, England. One of the four, seventeen year old John Flaxton, describes how they were frightened by an object which they first had taken to be a star: "It was uncanny. The reddish yellow light was coming out of the sky at an angle of sixty degrees. As it came towards the ground it seemed to hover more slowly." A bright light, golden in color, suddenly appeared in the field near them after the first object had been hidden by some trees: "It was about eighty yards away, floating about ten feet above the ground. It seemed to move along with us, stopping when we stopped as if it was observing us. The light was oval, about fifteen to twenty feet across with a bright, solid core. "It disappeared behind trees and a few seconds later a dark figure shambled out. It was all black, about the size of a human but with out a head. It seemed to have wings like a bat on either side and came stumbling towards us. We didn't wait to investigate." Folklore in the making. . From the farfadets, we have drifted to modern times, with Springheel Jack and The Mothman. And we have seen our visitors' arsenal become more precise. Jack's lantern and ray gun have survived in modern tales, in twentieth century comic books, in television series. But the real question is: Could all this be real? And if not, how can we explain the consistency of these descriptions, at a time when there were no comics and no television? The Italian artist R. L. Johannis had a remarkable experience in 1947, at a time when the name "flying saucer" was already popular in the United States, but when the now abundant documentation about the landings was nonexistent. The date was, as he recalls, August 14. He was hiking alone, following a small stream in the mountainous region between Italy and Yugoslavia. Among some rocks, he suddenly saw a large, brilliant red, lens shaped object, about ten yards in diameter. Close to it, he discovered two people, whom he first regarded as "kids" until he realized they were dwarfs—of a type he had never seen before. The two beings were under three feet tall; their heads were larger than a man's head. They had no hair, eyelashes, or eyebrows. Their faces were greenish, their noses straight, their mouths wide slits, giving them something of the appearance of a fish, Their eyes were huge, round, and prominent, their color yellow green. The skin around their eyes formed rings rather than eyelids. As Johannis moved, one of the beings touched his belt. At once, from the center of the belt something like a ray and a puff of vapor were emitted. Johannis experienced something like an elec trical discharge and found himself on the ground, helpless and very weak. It took all his energy to turn his head around and observe the two beings as they walked away. A moment later they were gone. In 1965 a case very similar to Johannis's was reported to the U.S. Air Force, and we tried in vain to get an active investigation of it by Project Blue Book. Finally the case was "leaked," at my suggestion, to a civilian group, which conducted a speedy and careful study of the testimony given by the only witness, a Mr. S. The details of the testimony arc available in an excellent book by the leaders of the civilian group, the Lorenzens,al so I need not discuss all the circumstances of the observation. Some remarks concerning the case (called by the Lorenzens the "most spectacular report we have examined") are relevant in the present context, however. The incident took place on September 4, 1964, in the mountains of northern California, about eight miles from Cisco Grove. Mr. S. had been hunting when he became separated from the party and lost his way. Night was falling, so he lighted some fires to call attention to his position. Soon lie observed a light in the sky, which he thought was a helicopter looking for him. When it stopped and hovered silently nearby, however, he realized it was an unusual object and climbed a large tree to observe the situation from that vantage point. The light circled the tree. S. saw a flash and a dark object falling to the ground. Next he noticed one figure crashing through the woods below him and another moving in from a slightly different direction. Both figures approached the tree and looked at him. They were a little over five feet tall, the witness estimates, and clothed in a silvery uniform that covered their heads. A third creature appeared later, behaving more like a mechanical being than an animal or a man, It was darker and had two reddish orange "eyes." It had no mouth, but rather a slitlikc opening that would "drop" open like an oven door. For the rest of the time S. was conscious, the entities used a variety of means to try to get him to fall from his tree. He managed to keep them away by throwing lighted bits of paper and clothing at them, to which they reacted in fear. The main weapon used against him was a very curious one. If we arc to believe this report, the "robot like" entity would let its lower "jaw" drop, then place its "hand" inside the rectangular cavity thus revealed, and emit a puff of smoke in S.'s direction. The smoke would spread like a mist, and upon reaching him, it would make him lose consciousness for a certain time. The effect of it was comparable to being suddenly deprived of oxygen, S. said. It is hard to believe the story: Would not such beings as he describes be able to climb a tree? If they came out of a flying saucer, why could they not fly up to his refuge? But it is equally difficult to prove that he simply had a nightmare. The witness is not given to such behavior, and when he woke up at dawn, still tied to the tree with his belt, all the objects he had dropped in an effort to get rid of the intruders were still lying around. Furthermore, there is the description of the strange, powerful gas, which plays such an important role in the story, as it does in the incidents related to Springheel Jack, the Johannis sighting, and the Sonny Desvergers case of August, 1952. According to Captain Ruppelt's report of his investigations in Florida,32 Desvergers, a scoutmaster who went into a wood to investigate a strange light and faced, he said, a horrible being who looked at him from the turret of a flying machine unlike anything he had ever seen, found himself breathing the same peculiar gas. He froze where he stood and noticed a small ball of red fire began to drift toward him. As it floated down it expanded into a cloud of red mist. He dropped his light and machete, and put his arms over his face. As the mist enveloped him, lie passed out. This is confirmed by the unpublished memorandum written by Ruppclt on September 12, 1952, upon his return from West Palm Beach. Captain Ruppclt and Lieutenant R. M. Olsson began their investigation by a conference with Captain Corney, Wing Intel ligence OEcer with the 1707th Air Base Wing, on the morning of September 9. A conference was held with Capt. Corney to determine whether or not there had been any late developments in this case that the two ATIC officers were not familiar with. Capt. Corney stated that to his knowledge there was nothing outstanding that had happened. He was asked about the facts of supposedly anonymous threatening telephone calls that Mr. Desvergers had received. He stated that Desvergcrs had called him approximately two weeks ago and stated that he had been receiving anonymous threatening telephone calls while at work in the establishment in which he is employed. The gist of the calls was telling Desvergers to lay off of his story and that if he didn't he would be sorry and several other things. Not much attention was given to this claim, however, and Ruppclt continued his investigations by interviewing people who knew the scoutmaster, and especially the members of the scout group who were with him in the car when he decided to go into the woods: He gave the boys instructions to go get help if he wasn't back in ten minutes and started in the woods. The boys claimed that they could see his flashlight going back into the woods. From this point on, the boys' stories varied to a certain degree. The first boy states that he did not sec the first light that Desvergers saw, however, shortly afterwards, after Desvergers had got out, made the state ment about flying saucers, and got back into the automobile, he looked out of the window and saw a semi circle of white lights about three inches in diameter [sic] going down at an angle of 45 degrees into the trees. None of the other boy scouts saw this. He then states that he saw Desvergers go back into the woods and that the next thing that he saw was a series of red lights in the clearing. .. . As soon as he saw the red lights he claims that he saw Sonny "stiffen up" and fall. According to two other boys: They both saw Desvergers going through the woods, could sec flashlights flashing on the trees and then he disappeared for a few seconds, at least the light disappeared. The next thing they saw was a series of red lights. They said they looked a lot like flares or sky rockets. The lights were not making any definite pattern, some of them were going up, some of them were going down, or going around and around in all directions. It just seemed to be a type of six or eight red lights going in all directions. This time they ran down the road to get help. Here we have confirmation from witnesses of the observation of red lights. The witnesses were not close enough, however, to experience the lights effects, but it is interesting to remark that the lights kept "going around and around" after the scoutmaster (according to his own account of the incident) was already unconscious. It is also interesting to note, in this connection, that over a century ago Leroux dc Lincy, in his Livre des Legendes, had this to say about the elves: If a mortal being dares come near them, they open their mouth and, struck by the breath which escapes from it, the imprudent fellow dies poisoned. On October 7, 1954, Mr. Margaillon saw an object which had landed in a field in Montcux, France. It was shaped like a hemisphere, about two and a half yards in diameter. The witness gasped for air and felt paralyzed during the observation. The sudden lack of air noted in the Cisco Grove case is not infrequently reported by witnesses of landings. Nor arc the peculiar eyes of the small entities: reddish orange, glowing in the dark. On October 9, 1954, in Lavoux, Vienne, France, a farmer who was riding his bicycle suddenly stopped as he saw a figure, dressed in a sort of "diving suit," aiming a double light beam at him. The individual, who seemed to have "boots without heels," very bright eyes, and a very hairy chest, carried two "headlights," one below the other, on the front of his suit. Nine days later, in Fontcnay Torcy, also in France, a man and his wife reported that they saw a red cigar shaped object in the sky. All of a sudden, it dived toward them, leaving a reddish trail, and landed behind some bushes. Upon reaching the top of a hill, the witnesses found themselves confronted by a bulky individual, human in appearance but only about three feet tall. He wore a helmet, and his eyes glowed with an orange light. One of the witnesses lost consciousness. Four other people saw the object in flight from another spot. A third group of independent witnesses in another town, Sansoivla~Poterie7 saw the craft fly away at tre mendous speed, in a westerly direction. The countryside was illuminated over an area one to two miles wide. It is indeed appropriate to tell the man who investigates such cases (in the words of Robert Herrick): Her eyes the Glow worme lend thee, The Shooting Starres attend thee; And the Elves also, Whose little eyes glow Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee. TO MAGONIA AND BACK! The mind of a person coming out of Fairy Land is usually blank as to what has been seen and done there. Walter Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries THE MIND of Private First Class Gerry Irwin was blank when he woke up on March 2, 1959, in Cedar City Hospital. He had been unconscious for twenty three hours, at times mumbling incoherently something about a "jacket on the bush." When he became conscious his first question was: "Were there any survivors?" The story of Private Irwin is a mysterious one, and very little has been done to clarify it. It has been mentioned only once in UFO literature, by James Lorenzen, director of the APRO group, and has not, to the best of my knowledge, been the subject of subsequent investigation. Such an investigation, however, would throw light on some aspects of the UFO problem now gaining considerable publicity and causing some concern to those who follow the development of the sociological context of UFO reports. Perhaps, as Lorenzen suggests, there was a military investigation that has been kept secret. If so, secrecy on the part of the authorities, if they arc really concerned with the nation's peace of mind, is not the best course, as the following review of the few well established facts of the Irwin case, which serves as an introduction to a discussion of the problem of "contact," makes clear. Late on February 28, 1959, Gerry Irwin, a Nike missile technician, was driving from Nampa, Idaho, back to his barracks at Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas. He was returning from military leave. He had reached Cedar City, Utah, and turned southeast on Route 14 when he observed an unusual phenomenon, six miles after the turnoff. The landscape brightened, and a glowing object crossed the sky from right to left. Irwin stopped the car and got out. He had time to watch the object as it continued in an easterly direction until hidden from view by a ridge. The witness decided that he might have seen an airliner on fire attempting a forced landing, in which case there was no time to lose. Consequently, instead of resuming his journey, Irwin wrote a note ("Have gone to investigate possible plane crash. Please call law enforcement officers.") and placed it on the steering wheel of his car. Using shoe polish, he wrote STOP on the side of his car, to make sure people would find his note, and then started out on foot. Approximately thirty minutes later, a fish and game inspector did stop. He took the note to the Cedar City sheriff, Otto Pfief, who gathered a party of volunteers and returned to the site. Ninety minutes after he had sighted the strange "object," Gerry Irwin was discovered unconscious and taken to the hospital. No trace of an airplane crash was found. At the hospital, Dr. Broadbent observed that Irwin's temperature and respiration were normal. He seemed merely to be asleep, but he could not be awakened. Dr. Broadbent diagnosed hysteria. Then, when Irwin did wake up, he felt "fine" although he was still puzzled by the object he had seen. He was also puzzled by the disappearance of his jacket: he was assured that he was not wearing it when he was found by the search party. Irwin was flown back to Fort Bliss and placed under observation at William Beaumont Army Hospital for four days, after which period he returned to duty. His security clearance, however, was revoked. Several days later, Irwin fainted while walking in the camp, but he recovered rapidly. Several days afterward, on Sunday, March 15, he fainted again in an El Paso street and was taken to Southwest General Hospital. There his physical condition was found similar to that observed in Cedar City. He woke up about 2:00 A.M. on Monday and asked: "Were there any survivors?" He was told that the date was not February 28 but March 16. Once more, he was taken to William Beaumont Hospital and placed under observation by psychiatrists. He remained there over one month. Lorenzen reports that, according to a Captain Valentine, the results of the tests indicated that he was normal. He was discharged on April 17. The next day, following an unidentifiable but very powerful urge, he left the fort without leave, caught a bus in El Paso, arrived in Cedar City Sunday afternoon (April 19), walked ,to the spot where he had seen the object, left the road, and w^nt back through the hills—right to a bush where his jacket lay. There was a pencil in a buttonhole with a piece of paper wound tightly around it. He took the paper and burned it. Then he seemed to come out of a trance. He had to look for the road. Not understanding why he had come there, he turned himself in and thus met Sheriff Otto Pfief, who gave him the details of the first incident. The Lorenzens contacted Irwin after he had returned to Fort Bliss and undergone a new psychological examination, as futile as the previous one. His case came to the attention of the Inspector General, who ordered a new examination. On July 10, Irwin rccntered William Beaumont Army Hospital. On August 1, he failed to report for duty. One month later he was listed as a deserter. He was never seen again. NEW HAMPSHIRE REVISITED The Irwin case is reminiscent of another incident that has become one of the standards of modern American folklore: the report by Betty and Barney Hill and their examination under hypnosis by Dr. Benjamin Simon, which has been documented at length by John Fuller in his excellent book, The Interrupted Journey. The reader must carry in mind the main features of the Irwin and Hill cases in order to follow the discussion that is the object of the present chapter, so those already familiar with the cases must forgive me if I repeat what is already well known to them. But in so doing, I hope some observations will come to light that have not previously been published. Report No. 100 61, in the files of the 100th Bomb Wing, Strategic Air Command, Pease Air Force Base, New Hampshire, was prepared by Major Paul W. Henderson. The only official document concerning the Hill case, it apparently has never before been published. Yet it contains a detail of which both Dr. Simon and John Fuller were unaware: the object seen by the Hills had been detected by military radar: During a casual conversation on 22 Sept 61 between Major Gardiner B. Reynolds, and Captain Robert O. Daughaday, Commander 1917 2 AACS DIT, Pease AFB, NH, it was revealed that a strange incident occurred at 0214 local on 20 Sept. No importance was attached to the incident at the time. Subse quent interrogation failed to bring out any information in addition to the extract of the "Daily Report of Controller." The visual sighting itself is summarized as follows: On the night of 19 20 Sept , Mr. & Mrs. Hill were traveling south on route 3 near Lincoln, NH when they observed, through the windshield of their car, a strange object in the sky. They noticed it because of its shape and the intensity of its lighting as compared to the stars in the sky. The weather and sky was clear at the time. In the report itself, under Paragraph E: Location and Details, we read Betty Hill's account of the sighting as reported by Pease Air Force Base officials: The observers were traveling by car in a southerly direction on Route 3 south of Lincoln, N.H, when they noticed a brightly lighted object ahead of their car at an angle of elevation of approximately 45°. It appeared strange to them because of its shape and the intensity of its lights compared to the stars in the sky. Weather and sky were clear. They continued to observe the object from their moving car for a few minutes then stopped. After stopping the car they used binoculars at times. They report that the object was traveling north very fast. They report it changed directions rather abruptly and then beaded South. Shortly thereafter it stopped and hovered in the air. There was no sound evident up to this time. Both observers used the binoculars at this point. While hovering, objects began to appear from the body of the "object" which they describe as looking like wings which made a V shape then extended. The "wings" had red lights on the tips. At this point they observed it to appear to swoop down in the general direction of their auto. The object continued to descend until it appeared to be only a matter of "hundreds of feet" above their car. At this point they decided to get out of that area, and fast. Mr. Hill was driving and Mrs. Hill watched the object by sticking her head out of the window. It departed in a generally North westerly direction but Mrs. Hill was prevented from observing its full departure by her position in the car. They report that while the object was above them after it had "swooped down" they heard a series of short loud "buzzes" which they described as sounding like someone had dropped a tuning fork. They report that they could feel these buzzing sounds in their auto. No further visual observations were made of this object. They con tinued on their trip and when they arrived in the vicinity of Ashland, N.H., about thirty miles from Lincoln, they again heard the "buzzing" sound of the "object"; however, they did not sec it at this time. Mrs. Hill reported the flight pattern of the "object" to be erratic, changed directions rapidly, that during its flight it ascended and descended numerous times very rapidly. Its flight was described as jerky and not smooth. Mr. Hil] is a Civil Service employee in the Boston Post Office and doesn't possess any technical or scientific training. Neither docs his wife. During a later conversation with Mr. Hill, he volunteered the ob servation that he did not originally intend to report this incident but inasmuch as he and his wife did in fact see this occurrence he decided to report it. lie says that on looking back he feels that the whole thing is incredible and he feels somewhat foolish—he just cannot believe that such a thing could or did happen. He says, on the other hand, that they both saw what they reported and this fact gives it some degree of reality. Information contained herein was collected by means of telephone conversation between the observers and the preparing individual. The reliability of the observer cannot be judged and while his apparent honesty and seriousness appears to be valid it cannot be judged at this time. This report is remarkable for what it does not contain. In this respect, it is probably typical of a large class of Air Force records (most of those involving close proximity to a UFO) where either witness reluctance or lack of adequate follow up eliminated the most significant information. In the present case, the witnesses failed to give the Air Force any information as to the beings they could see aboard the craft during their observation with binoculars. And proper investigation would have disclosed an element Of which they were not immediately aware: they could not ac count for a time gap of two hours between the two periods of buzzing sounds. In fact, they could not recall how they had driven the thirty five miles between Indian Head and Ashland so casually mentioned in the Air Force report. What happened after their story became known is well documented in John Fuller's book. Both witnesses had a scries of strange nightmares. The dreams led them to see a psychiatrist who used hypnosis to discover the root of the problem, and it was only then found that the origin of the nightmares could be traced to those missing two hours. Under separate hypnosis, Betty and Barney Hill said they had been taken by the strange beings into the UFO. I have been privileged to hear the portion of the tapes covering the "abduction" of Betty and Barney Hill. Further discussion with the witnesses, and with Dr. Simon and John Fuller, leads me to regard the case, not as an individual event to be investigated and treated as such, but, on the contrary, as an indication of a general pattern that cannot be separated from the total phenomenon. First, it is interesting to note that, as further details came to the Hills' memories after treatment, the case took on more of the features present in other UFO landings, of which the Hills could not have heard. One such detail is the recollection by Betty Hill that, after their car was stopped and a group of "men" had come toward them, the creatures had opened the door of the vehicle and pointed a small device at her. When I asked her to what usual object she could compare it, she told me, "It could have been a pencil." It is not necessary to repeat the descriptions given by the Hills of the manner in which they were abducted or of the conditions inside the object. It is enough to say that the statements made under hypnosis by Betty and Barney are in general agreement. And it is also useful to study the detailed accounts of the entities given by the witnesses: Betty states: Most of the men are my height, . None is as tall as Barney, so I would judge diem to be 5' to 5'4". Their chests are larger than ours; their noses were larger [longer] than the average size although I have seen people with noses like theirs—like Jimmy Durante. Their complexions were of a gray tone; like a gray paint with a black base; their lips were of a bluish tint. Hair and eyes were very dark, possibly black? In a sense, they looked like mongoloids, . This sort of round face and broad forehead, along with a certain type of coarseness. The surface of their skin seemed to be a bluish gray, but probably whiter than that. Their eyes moved, and they had pupils. Somehow, I had the feeling they were more like cats' eyes.4 Barney, on the other hand, says this: The men had rather odd shaped heads, with a large cranium, di minishing in size as it got toward the chin. And the eyes continued around to the sides of their heads, so that it appeared that they could see several degrees beyond the lateral extent of our vision. This was startling to me, . [The mouth] was much like when you draw one horizontal line with a short perpendicular line on each end. This horizontal line would represent the lips without the muscle that we have. And it would part slightly as they made this mumumumming sound. The texture of the skin, as I remember it from this quick glance, was grayish, almost metallic looking. I didn't notice any hair —or headgear for that matter. I didn't notice any proboscis, there just seemed to be two slits that represented the nostrils. There are some obvious contradictions between the two descriptions. Betty speaks of very dark hair; Barney did not notice any. The men described by Barney do not exactly evoke in my mind the picture of Jimmy Durante! On the other hand, the creatures are strikingly reminiscent of the UFO operators of a large number of stories unknown outside a very small group of specialists. Apart from disagreement on the nose and lips, Betty's statement matches the description made by Barney of the shape of the head and the color and appearance of the skin. Another remark by Betty is significant in this respect: "I got the impression that the leader and the examiner were different from the crew members. But this is hard to say, because I really didn't want to look at the men." Two other elements are outstanding in this case. One of them is the manner of communication with the strange beings. They communicated among themselves through an audible language, which was definitely not understandable to the witnesses. Yet when they communicated with the Hills, their thoughts came through in English. Betty thinks that they spoke English "with an accent," while Barney feels that the words and the presence of the entity were two separate things: I did not hear an actual voice. But in my mind, I knew what he was saying. It wasn't as if he were talking to me with my eyes open, and he was sitting across the room from me. It was more as if the words were there, a part of me, and he was outside the actual creation of the words themselves. This very remarkable statement, an excellent description of the mechanism that triggered the communication, may well be a clue to the entire episode, and it certainly places the case in the domain of the Theory of Apparitions—as it is treated, for instance, by Tyrrell in his celebrated 1942 Myers Lectures before the British Society for Psychical Research. Thus it is noteworthy that the apparent absurdity of the sequence of actions constituting the episode should be reducible to the triggering of high level perception patterns within the witness's brain, and not necessarily through an actual normal physical process. And this characteristic, in its turn, is reminiscent both of neurophysiological experiments and of reports by the most reliable observers of "ghosts," although, of course, ghosts are distinguished from the class of phenomena we are studying here by the absence of material traces— which makes their interpretation a good deal simpler. And while it is probable that a complete theory of ghosts could confine the phenomena to parameters within the human nervous system, the same is not true of UFO's. For this reason, therefore, it is crucial to pursue the investigation of cases of apparitions in older times, in relation to reports such as that of the Hills. The recognition of a strong psychological (or psychic, if you prefer) component in UFO manifestations makes such a study imperative. If the phenomena are to be ascribed to psychological causes, then the causes must have manifested themselves during all epochs, although naturally sociologists could give various reasons to expect a considerable increase in such manifestations since World War II. On the other hand, if the phenomenon is not wholly psychological in nature, then the discovery of his torical antecedents would be a valuable clue to its nature. The "experiment" performed on Betty Hill by the entities is therefore quite remarkable. It will be recalled that while she was in the craft, Betty was submitted to a simulated medical test. Under hypnosis, she reported that a long needle was inserted into her navel, that she felt pain, and that the pain stopped when the leader made a certain gesture with his hand in front of her eyes. A fifteenth century French calendar, the Kalendrier des Bergiers, shows the tortures inflicted by demons on the people they have taken: the demons are depicted piercing their victims' abdomens with long needles. In fact, the psychological invariable in all these stories is unmistakable. The problem, then, is not to identify it, but to relate it in a rational manner to the physical features encountered during the observations—for example, the tracking by military radar operators of the UFO seen by the Hills. Perhaps we should illustrate the difficulty of this problem by using a case that is less well known than the Hills incident, though it is quite as dramatic. It has never appeared in English UFO literature and therefore cannot have influenced American UFO lore. Even in France it is practically unknown. The incident took place on May 20, 1950, at about 4:00 P.M. I cannot reveal the name of the witness or the exact location. I can say, however, that the witness was a woman, and that the episode took place in the central region of France, near the Loire River. An official investigation by French local police has substantiated the physical traces mentioned in this report, which can be translated thus: I was hurrying back home to prepare dinner. I was happy and content and I was singing some popular tune. Everything was calm and still, without any breeze or wind; I was alone on the path. Suddenly, I found myself within a brilliant, blinding light, and I saw two huge black hands appear in front of me. Each one had five fingers, of a black color with a yellowish tint, somewhat like copper. The fingers were roughly formed, slightly vibrating, or quivering. These hands did not come from behind me, but from above, as if they had been hanging over my head awaiting the proper time to catch me. The black hands did not immediately apply themselves to my head. I probably took two or three steps before they touched me. The hands had no visible arms! The two black hands were ap plied to my face with violence and squeezed my head, as a bird of prey rushes on its unfortunate, helpless victim. They pulled my head back against a very hard chest—one that seemed to be made of iron; I felt the cold through my hair and behind my neck, but no contact with clothes. The hands were squeezing my head like a formidable vice, not abruptly, but gradually. They were very cold, and their touch made me think that they were not made of flesh. The big fingers were placed on my eyes, and I could not see anymore, on my nose so that I could not breathe, and also on my mouth, to prevent me from crying out. When I was surrounded by the strong, blinding light, I had the feeling I had been paralyzed, and when the hands touched me, I had the very distinct impression of a strong electric discharge, as if I had been shaken by a lightning bolt. My whole body was annihilated, helpless, without reflexes. I was like a broken toy between the inhuman hands of my unknown aggressor. For a little over a minute, I felt his hands tightening very strongly on either side of my throat. It was horribly painful. Then he began to swing me forward and backward several times, still fiercely squeezing my head against his chest. I had the distinct impression that this being wore armor or a steel carapace, or some very hard and cold material. I felt his two [invisible] arms pressing heavily on my shoulders. It was at that moment that I heard his laugh, a strange laugh I could not explain; it was as if I heard him through some water, and yet it seemed quite close, above my head. At first it sounded rough and hushed, then rather strong and rolling. It made me shudder and hurt me. After a few seconds the laugh stopped, suddenly cut off. Then a knee hit me in the back, hurting me very much, as if it were made of steel. That made me think my aggressor was completely covered with steel. This blow made me fall back, and the unknown aggressor made me lie down, still squeezing my head against his chest. Then he dragged me along the path, by my head, and he seemed in a great hurry. I did not hear him breathe. He pulled me into a bush full of brambles and nettles and acacias, still going backward at an incredible speed, holding my head. At that moment I heard his voice above me, and it said: "There she is. We've got her." As if he were talking to someone else, some accomplice who had stayed inside the bush; this voice, like the laugh, seemed close by, although hushed by some obstacle, and it was short, rough, sharply cut. I was choking, and I felt I was going to die; I thought of my family waiting for me at home, and my whole life passed before me in a few seconds. My aggressor pulled me through the bushes until we reached a small pasture, and suddenly he stopped! Why? Ilis hands had gradually slipped down my face, and I tried to call for help but I had no voice left but a tiny, shrill cry. After a while I was able to sit among the brambles. I had a very hard time breathing. My bag was still in my hand, with the money it contained. At last I was able to get up in spite of my weakness, and then I heard some noise to my left inside the bushes. I thought I was going to see my aggressors and recognize their faces, but I saw nothing! Only the branches moved, waving in the air; I saw and heard the brambles scratching the empty space, and the grass being pressed as if under the steps of some invisible being. I was terrified. Softly, I took to the path again, walking with difficulty. My legs were lacerated by the brambles and bleeding; I felt a strange sensation of nervous exhaustion, indefinable, as if I had been electrified by a strong current. In my mouth was a sickening, metallic, bitter taste; my muscles did not obey me. Over my shoulders I felt something like a bar, and in my back a painful heat, as if I had been exposed to flames or to a burning ray. At times I still felt as if I was being brushed by an invisible brush. I must have walked like that for five or six minutes. At the end of the path there was a turn, and from there I could see houses, and then the pains decreased a little bit. Everything had lasted a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes, and it seemed that I had lived in an unreal world. Abruptly I heard a great noise, like a violent wind during a storm, a sudden displacement of warm air or a violent whirlwind. I saw the trees bending as if under a sudden storm, and I was nearly thrown down. Almost simultaneously, there was a strong, blinding white light. I had the feeling something flew through the air very fast, but I saw nothing. Soon everything became calm again. I felt discomfort and nausea. I reached the house of the lock keeper and when I opened the door they came toward me and asked me what had happened, because they too had seen a light from their house. The lock keeper's wife asked me what was wrong. When I was able to speak at last, they told me all the fingers were still deeply marked in the flesh of my face, making large red bars. They applied peroxide to the scratches on my legs, and an ointment, and bathed my face with cold water. My hands were badly hurt. After a long lapse of time I started again toward to buy a few things, without saying anything to anyone, and I came back home laboriously, by another path. After I told my mother, and my father and my brother, too, what had happened to me, they filed a complaint with the gendarmerie. The police came and interviewed me at length; they examined me and observed the marks of large fingers on my face. I was still swollen, and felt pains at several places. They concluded there had been an abduction attempt and told me that it was very strange, mysterious. They took me to the spot to continue their investigation there. They noted that at some places the brambles were black and scorched; at some other places they were only pressed and flattened. The acacias too had been burned in places, and they were broken too. The fences in the pasture, which were made of wooden posts and barbed wire, had suffered also. Some posts were burned, others pulled out; the barbed wire had been wrenched away and broken. The previous day (May 19), in the evening, the witness in this case had observed a "kind of shooting star," which stopped abruptly, then appeared to go up and stay among the other stars for a while, then to grow bigger and take on a kind of swinging motion, its light alternately on and off. Suddenly it left, on a curved trajectory, and reached the horizon at very high speed. She had dismissed the incident from her mind at the time. The official investigation got nowhere and was dropped. The case is still carried as an unsolved abduction attempt. What can we say about such reports? They are neither more nor less believable than other UFO sightings; they are in line with some of the most dramatic stories of older days, which inspired the fairy tales; they are also in line, as we shall see, with the visions of the 1897 airship and the incidents that followed it. But it is too early to theorize. It is better, at this time, merely to inspect the documents, though I must confess that I have previously regarded many such cases as worthless (even if their documentation is not inferior to that of the more believable cases we study). Take another abduction case, one that allegedly occurred on August 21, 1915: Gallipoli, August 28, 1915. The following is an account of a strange incident that happened . in the morning, during the severest and final days of the fighting, which took place at "Hill 60," Suvla Bay, "ANZAC" [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps]. The day broke clear, without a cloud in sight, as any beautiful Mediterranean day could be expected to be. The exception, how ever, was a number of perhaps six or eight "loaf of bread" shaped clouds— all shaped exactly alike—which were hovering over "Hill 60." It was noticed that, in spite of a four or five mile an hour breeze from the south, these clouds did not alter their position in any shape or form, nor did they drift away under the influence of the breeze. They were hovering at an elevation of about 60 degrees as seen from our observation point 500 ft. up. Also stationary and resting on the ground right underneath this group of clouds was a similar cloud in shape, measuring about 800 ft. in length, 200 ft. in height, and 200 ft. in width. This cloud was absolutely dense, almost solid looking in structure, and positioned about 14 to 18 chains from the fighting in British held territory. All this was observed by twenty two men of No. 3 Section of No. 1 Field Company, N.Z.E., including myself, from our trenches on Rhododendron Spur, approximately 2500 yards south west of the cloud on the ground. Our vantage point was overlooking "Hill 60" by about 300 ft. As it turned out later, this singular cloud was straddling a dry creek bed or sunken road (Kaiajik Dere) and we had a perfect view of the cloud's sides and ends as it rested on the ground. Its colour was a light grey, as was the colour of the other clouds. A British Regiment, the First Fourth Norfolk, of several hundred men, was then noticed marching up this sunken road or creek towards "Hill 60." It appeared as though they were going to reinforce the troops at "Hill 60." However, when they arrived at this cloud, they marched straight into it, with no hesitation, but no one ever came out to deploy and fight at "Hill 60." About an hour later, after the last of the file had disappeared into it, this cloud very unobtrusively lifted off the ground and, like any fog or cloud would, rose slowly until it joined the other similar clouds which were mentioned in the beginning of this account. On viewing them again, they all looked alike "as peas in a pbd." All this time, the group of clouds had been hovering in the same place, but as soon as the singular "ground" cloud had risen to their level, they all moved away northwards, i.e. towards Thrace (Bulgaria). In a matter of about three quarters of an hour they had all disappeared from view. The Regiment mentioned is posted as "missing" or "wiped out" and on Turkey surrendering in 1918, the first thing Britain demanded of Turkey was the return of this regiment. Turkey replied that she had neither captured this Regiment, nor made contact with it, and did not know that it existed. A British Regiment in 1914 18 consisted of any number between 800 and 4000 men. Those'who observed this incident vouch for the fact that Turkey never captured that Regiment, nor made contact with it. We, the undersigned, although late in time, that is at the 50th Jubilee of the ANZAC landing, declare that the above described incident is true in every word. Signed by witnesses: Sapper F. 57 King St., Cambridge. TAKEN BY THE WIND. We have now examined several stories of abductions and attempts at kidnappings by the occupants of flying saucers. These episodes are an integral part of the total UFO problem and cannot be solved separately. Historical evidence, gathered by Wentz, moreover, once more points in the same direction. This sort of belief in fairies being able to take people was very common and exists yet in a good many parts of West Ireland, . The Good People are often seen there (pointing to Knoch Magh) in great crowds playing hurley and ball. And one often sees among them the young men and women and children who have been taken. Not only are people taken, but—as in flying saucer stories—they are sometimes carried to faraway spots by aerial means. Such a story is told by the Prophet Ezekiel, of course, and by other religious writers. But an ordinary Irishman, John Campbell, also told Wentz: A man whom I have seen, Roderick Mac Neil, was lifted by the hosts and left three miles from where he was taken up. The hosts went at about midnight. Rev. Kirk gives a few stories of similar extraordinary kidnap pings, but the most fantastic legend of all is that attached to Kirk himself: the good reverend is commonly believed to have been taken by the fairies. Mrs. J. MacGregor who keeps the key to the old churchyard where there is a tomb to Kirk, though many say there is nothing in it but a coffin filled with stones, told me Kirk was taken into the Fairy Knoll, which she pointed to just across a little valley in front of us, and is there yet, for the hill is full of caverns and in them the "good people" have their homes. And she added that Kirk appeared to a relative of his after he was taken. Wentz, who reports this interesting story, made further inquiries regarding the circumstances of Kirk's death. He went to see the successor to Kirk in Abcrfoyle, Rev. Taylor, who clarified the story: At tlie time of his disappearance people said he was taken because the fairies were displeased with him for disclosing their secrets in so public a manner as he did. At all events, it seems likely that Kirk was taken ill very suddenly with something like apoplexy while on the Fairy Knoll, and died there. I have searched the presbyter books and find no record of how Kirk's death really took place, but of course there is not the least doubt of his body being in the grave. Kirk believed in the ability of the Good People to perform kidnappings and abductions, and this idea was so widespread that it has come down to us through a variety of channels. We can therefore examine in detail four aspects of fairy lore that directly relate to our study: 1. the conditions and purpose of the abductions; (2) the cases of release from Elfland and the forms taken by the elves' gratitude when the abducted human being had performed some valuable service during his stay in Elfland; (3) the belief in the kidnapping activities of the fairy people; and (4) what I shall call the relativistic aspects of the trip to Elfland. Hartland reports that a Swedish book published in 1775 contains a legal statement, solemnly sworn on April 12, 1671, by the husband of a midwife who was taken to fairyland to assist a troll's wife in giving birth to a child. The author of the statement seems to have been a clergyman named Peter Rahm. On the authority of this declaration we are called on to believe that the event recorded actually happened in the year 1660. Peter Rahm alleges that he and his wife were at their farm one evening late when there came a little man, swart of face and clad in grey, who begged the declarant's wife to come and help his wife then in labour. The declarant, seeing that they had to do with a Troll, prayed over his wife, blessed her, and bade her in God's name go with the stranger. She seemed to be borne along by the wind. It is reported that she came home "in the same manner," having refused any food offered to her while in the troll's company. In another tale, the midwife's husband accompanies her through the forest. They arc guided by the "earthman"—the gnome who has requested their help. They go through a moss door, then a wooden door, and later through a door of shining metal. A stairway leads them inside trie earth, to a magnificent chamber where the "earthwife" is resting. Kirk reports that in a case whose principals he personally knew the abducted woman found the home of the Little People filled with light, although she could not see any lamp or fire. Rev. Kirk also says that later, in the company of another clergyman, he visited a woman, then forty years old, and asked her questions concerning her knowledge of the fairies. It was rumored that for a number of years she had taken almost no nourishment, and that she often stayed very late in the fields looking after her sheep, that she met there and talked with people she did not know, and that one night she had fallen asleep on a hill and had been carried away into another place before sunrise. This woman, says Kirk, was always melancholy and silent. The physical nature of Magonia, as it appears in such tales, is quite noteworthy. Sometimes, it is a remote country, an invisible island, some faraway place one can reach only by a long journey. Indeed, in some tales, it is a celestial country, as in the Indian story quoted earlier. This parallels the belief in the extraterrestrial origin of UFO's so popular today. A second—and equally wide spread—theory, is that Elfland constitutes a sort of parallel universe, which coexists with our own. It is made visible and tangible only to selected people, and the "doors" that lead through it are tangential points, known only to the elves. This is somewhat analogous to the theory, sometimes found in the UFO literature, concerning what some authors like to call the "fourth dimension" •—although, of course, this expression makes much less physical sense than does the theory of a parallel Elfland. (It does sound more scientific, however!) Hartland gives tales that illustrate the theory of "tangential universes," such as the following: In Nithsdale a fairy rewards the kindness of a young mother, to whom she had committed her babe to suckle, by raking her on a visit to Fairyland. A door opened in a green hillside, disclosing a porch which the nurse and her conductor entered. There the lady dropped three drops of a precious dew on the nurse's left eyelid, and they were admitted to a beautiful land watered with meandering rivulets and yellow with corn, where the trees were laden with fruits which dropped honey. The nurse was here presented with magical gifts, and when a green dew had baptized her right eye she was enabled to behold further wonders. On returning the fairy passed her hand over the woman's eye and restored its natural powers. This tale brings us to our second point, that of the gratitude shown by the elves in return for services performed by humans, and the form such gratitude takes. The gratitude itself is evidenced by many stories of elvish gifts in Scandinavian and Northern European talcs, such as this one: A German midwife, who was summoned by a Waterman, or Nix, to aid a woman in labor, was told by the latter: "I am a Christian woman as well as you; and I was carried off by a Waterman, who changed me. When my husband comes in now and offers you money, take no more from him than you usually get, or else he will twist your neck. Take good care!" In another story, the midwife is asked how much she wants. She answers she will not take more from them than from other people, and the elf replies: "That's lucky for thec. Hadst thou demanded more, it would have gone ill with thee!" In spite of that, she received her apron full of gold. In a Pomeranian story, the midwife similarly replies to the same question, and the mannikin says, "Now then, lift up thy apron!" and fills it with rubbish that lay in the corner of the room. He then takes his lantern and politely escorts her home. But when she shakes out her apron, pure gold falls on the floor. Elvish gifts have a magical character, which will take very special meaning in the next chapter. Their magical quality could be illustrated with tales from practically any country. Chinese folklore, in particular, gives numerous examples of it. In one tale, the dwarf fills the woman's apron with something she must not look at before she reaches her house. Naturally she takes a look as soon as the dwarf has vanished, and sees that she is carrying black coals. Angered, she throws them away, retaining two as evidence of the dwarf's bad treatment. She arrives home and discovers the black coals have turned into precious stones. But when she goes back to find the other coals, they are all gone. There are, in fact, numerous stories in folklore of humans who have gone to fairyland of their own will, either taking a message, or bringing one back, or performing some service for the supernatural beings who live there. But—and this is my third point— we also have numerous accounts of abductions by the fairies. They take men and women, especially pregnant women or young mothers, and they also are very active in stealing young children. Sometimes, they substitute a false child for the real one, leaving in place of the real child a broom with rugs wrapped around it or one of their children, a changeling: By the belief in changelings I mean a belief that fairies and other imaginary beings are on the watch for young children or .. . sometimes even for adults, that they may, if they can find them unguarded, seize and carry them off, leaving in their place one of them. This belief is not confined to Europe. It is found in regions as remote from Europe as China and the American Pacific coast.But, in any case, once the parents have recognized their child has been taken, what should they do? Hartland says that a method in favour in the North of Scotland is to take the suspected elf to some known haunt of its race, generally, we are told, some spot where peculiar soughing sounds are heard, or to some barrow, or stone circle, and lay it down. An offering of bread, butter, milk, cheese, eggs and flesh or fowl must accompany the child. The parents then retire for an hour or two. If their gifts have vanished when they come back, then their own child will be returned. But sometimes more radical methods have been used, and we can only pity the poor children who have been ill treated because their superstitious parents thought they looked like elves! As late as May 17, 1884, it was reported in the London Daily Telegraph, two women were arrested at Clonmel and charged with cruelty toward a child three years old. They thought he was a changeling and, by ill treating him, hoped to obtain the "real child" from the fairies! And there is no question that in medieval times the same superstition has led to the death of children who had congenital defects. Sometimes the same treatment applies to adults who have been changed, and Hartland gives a very funny example of such a case: A tale from Badenoch represents the man as discovering the fraud from finding his wife, a woman of unruffled temper, suddenly turned a shrew. So he piles up a great fire and threatens to throw the occupant of the bed upon it unless she tells him what has become of his own wife. She then confesses that the latter has been carried off, and she has been appointed successor. But by his determination he happily succeeds in recapturing his own at a certain fairy knoll near Inverness. Of course, the UFO myth has not yet reached such romantic proportions, but we are perhaps not quite far from it, at least in certain rural areas, where strange flying objects have become a source of terror to people traveling at night, and where the rumor that "invaders" might be around has gained interest, if not support. A recent television scries has capitalized on this aspect of UFO lore. In the show, the human race has been infiltrated by extraterrestrials who differ from humans in small details only. This is not a new idea, as the belief in changelings shows. And there is a well known passage in Martin Luther's Table Talk, in which he tells the Prince of Anhalt that he should throw into the Moldau a certain man who is, in his opinion, such a changeling— or killcrop, as they were called in Germany. What was the purpose of such fairy abductions? The idea advanced by students of folk talcs is again very close to a current theory about UFO's: that the purpose of such contact is a genetic one. According to Hartland: The motive assigned to fairies in northern stories is that of pre serving and improving their race, on the one hand by carrying off human children to be brought up among the elves and to become united with them, and on the other hand by obtaining the milk and fostering care of human mothers for their own offspring. {We shall see below what parallels can be found in recent UFO cases.) However, such is not always the purpose of abduction, and people are often returned by the elves after nothing more than a dance or a game. But a strange phenomenon often takes place: the people who have spent a day in Elfland come back to this world one year, or more, older! This is our fourth point, and quite a remarkable one. Time does not pass there as it does here. And we have in such stories the first idea of the relativity of time. How did this idea come to the storytellers, ages ago? What inspired them? No one can answer such questions. But it is a fact that the dissymmetry of the time element between Elfland and our world is present in the tales from all countries. Discussing this supernatural lapse of time in fairyland, Hart land relates the true story of Rhys and Llewellyn, recorded about 1825 in the Vale of Ncath, Wales. Rhys and Llewellyn were fellow servants to a farmer. As they went home one night, Rhys told his friend to stop and listen to the music. Llewellyn heard no music. But Rhys had to dance to the tune he had heard a hundred times. He begged Llewellyn to go ahead with the horses, saying that he would soon overtake him, but Llewellyn arrived home alone. The next day, he was suspected of murdering Rhys and jailed. But a farmer "who was skilled in fairy matters" guessed the truth. Several men gathered— among them the narrator of the story—and took Llewellyn to the spot where he said his companion had vanished. Suddenly, "Hush!" cried Llewellyn. "I hear music, I hear sweet harps." All listened but could hear nothing. Llewellyn's foot was on the outer edge of the fairy ring. He told the narrator to place his foot on his, and then he too heard the sounds of many harps and saw a number of Little People dancing in a circle twenty feet or so in diameter. After him, each of the party did the same and observed the same thing. Among the dancing Little Folk was Rhys. Llewellyn caught him by his smock frock as he passed close to them and pulled him out of the circle. At once Rhys asked, "Where are the horses?" and asked them to let him finish the dance, which had not lasted more than five minutes. And he could never be persuaded of the time that had elapsed. He became melancholy, fell ill, and soon after died. Such stories can be found in Keightlcy's The Fairy Mythology and other books, although of course the story of Rhys and Llewellyn is remarkable because it dates from the nineteenth century, thus providing a measure of continuity between fairy and UFO lore. In the tales of this type, several modes of recovery of the persons taken are offered. One of them consists in touching the abducted man with a piece of iron, and the objection of super natural beings to this metal is one of the themes of fairy lore. Near Bridgcnd, Wales, is a place where it is reported that a woman who had been taken by the fairies came back ten years later and thought she had not been away more than ten days. Hartland gives another charming story on the same theme, concerning a boy named Gitto Bach, or Little Griffith, a farmer's son who disappeared: During two whole years nothing was heard of him; but at length one morning when his mother, who had long and bitterly mourned for him as dead, opened the door, whom should she see sitting on the threshold but Gitto with a bundle under his arm. He was dressed and looked exactly as when she last saw him, for he had not grown a bit. "Where have you been all this time?" asked his mother. "Why, it was only yesterday I went away," he replied; and opening the bundle he showed her a dress the "little children" as he called them, had given him for dancing with them. The dress was of white paper without seam. With maternal caution she put it into the fire. The best known stories where time relativity is the main theme are of course of the "Rip van Winkle" type, patterned after numerous folk stories that allegedly concern actual events. Strangely enough, we again find the identical theme in ages old Chinese folklore. Witness the story of Wang Chih, one of the holy men of the Taoists. One day, as Wang Chih wandered through the mountains of Kii Chow gathering firewood, he saw a grotto where some old men were playing chess. He came in to watch their game and laid down his ax. One of the old men gave him something like a date stone and instructed him to place it on his mouth. "No sooner had he done so than hunger and thirst passed away." Some time later, one of the aged players told him, "It is long since you came here; you should go home now." But as he turned to pick up his ax, Wang Chih found that the handle had turned into dust. He reached the valley, but found not hours or days but centuries had passed, and nothing remained of the world as he had known it. A similar tradition exists in Denmark. For instance, in a tale which is typical of the pattern, a bride thoughtlessly walked through the fields during the festivities of her wedding day and passed a mound "where the elves were making merry." (Again, we have here a description of the Little People close to the magical object sometimes described as a large, flat, round table, sometimes as a hillock. A disk or a large cone resting on the ground would fit that description. In describing the fairy knoll, Hartland writes: "The hillock was standing, as is usual on such occasions, on red pillars!") The "wee folk" offered the bride to be a cup of wine, and she joined in a dance with them. Then she hastened back home, where she could not find her family. Everything had changed in the village. Finally, on hearing her cries, a very old woman exclaimed: "Was it you, then, who disappeared at my grandfather's brother's wedding, a hundred years ago?" At these words, the poor girl fell down and expired. It is fascinating indeed to find such talcs, which antedate Einstein's and Langcvin's rclativistic traveler by centuries! The supernatural lapse of time in fairyland is often allied to the theme of love between the abducted human being and one of the fairies. Such is the pattern of the story of Ossian, or Oisin: Once, when he was a young man, Oisin fell asleep under a tree. He woke up suddenly and found a richly dressed lady "of more than mortal beauty" looking at him. She was the queen of the legendary land of Tir na n'Og, and she invited him to share her palace. Oisin and the queen were in love and happy, but the hero was warned not to go into the palace gardens or to stand on a certain flat stone. Naturally, he transgressed the order, and when he stood upon the stone, he beheld his native land, suffering from oppression and violence, lie went to the queen and told her he must return. "How long do you think you have been with me?" she asked. "Thrice seven days," said he. "Thrice seven years," was the answer. But he still wanted to go back. She then gave him a black horse from whose back he must not alight during his trip in the other world, for fear of seeing the power of time suddenly fall on him. But he forgot the warning when an incident induced him to dismount, and at once he became a feeble, blind, and helpless old man. It is not necessary to spend time here to point out in detail the parallel traditions of the island of Avalon, Morgan the Fay, the legend of Ogier the Dane, and the magical travels of King Arthur. All these traditions insist on the peculiar nature of time in the "other world." Nor is this limited to European history, as Hart land again points out: Many races having traditions of a Culture God—that is, of a superior being who has taught them agriculture and the arts of life, and led them to victory over their enemies—add that he has gone away from them for awhile, and that he will some day come back again. Quctzalcoatl and Viracocha, the culture gods of Mexico and Peru, arc familiar instances of this. Similarly, Vishnu has yet a tenth incarnation to accomplish the final destruction of this world's wicked. At the end of the present age, he will be revealed in the sky, seated on a white horse and holding a blazing sword. Such great traditions are common knowledge, like the abductions of Enoch, Ezekiel, Elijah and others in the Bible. What is not commonly known is that such legends have been built on the popular belief in numerous actual stories of the less glorious, more ordinary and "personal," type we have reviewed here. For instance, while all the books about Mexico mention Quetzalcoatl, they usually ignore the local beliefs in little black beings, the ikals, whose pranks we have already mentioned, and who, while their relationship with modern Latin American UFO lore is clear, also provide an obvious parallel to the fairy faith. In his study of the tales of Tenejapa, Brian Stross reports they are believed to be beings from another world, and some have been seen flying with some kind of rocket like thing attached to the back. With this rocket they are said occasionally to have carried off people. Similarly, Gordon Creighton reports: The ikal of the Tzotzils flies through the air. Sometimes he steals women, and the women so taken are remarkably prolific, and may bear a child once a week, or once a month, or even daily. The off spring are black, and they learn the art of flying inside their father's cave. Brian Stross's Indian informants reported that a flurry of ikals was sighted "about twenty years ago"—which would take us back to 1947, a very important year in UFO history. On June 5, 1968, the press reported that a Buenos Aires couple, Mr. and Mrs. Vidal, had a very strange adventure while driving between Chascomus and Maipu. They were surrounded by a thick cloud of mist and fell asleep. When they woke up, their car was on a dirt road they did not know, and they found out to their dismay that they were in Mexico! The paint on their car, a Peugeot 403, had entirely vanished. The Vidals went to the Argentine consulate in Mexico, and from there called some friends of theirs in Buenos Aires to make arrangements for their return. The consulate has refused to comment on the incident. The Vidals' car has been taken to the United States for investigation, and Mrs. Vidal has been hospitalized in an Argentina clinic, in a state of nervous depression. Forty eight hours in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Vidal cannot be accounted for. BEYOND REASON. In the past twenty years, UFO reports have been studied not only in a sensational light by people with journalistic motives and methods but also by serious persons who have tried to place them within the framework of space science, modern physics, psychol ogy, or the history of superstition. An increasing number of re searchers—best identified with the Flying Saucer Review in Great Britain and with the groups such as APRO and NICAP14 in the United States—have made systematic efforts at responsible data gathering, at the same time attempting to discover one or several consistent "patterns" in the reports. But these efforts at rational ization of the UFO phenomenon have so far failed. The most appealing of the theories proposed, which would regard the UFO's as probes from another planet, falls short of explaining the phenomena in their historical development. Present day saucers cannot be evaluated without reference to the 1897 airship or to earlier sightings of similar objects. Then, too, the theory of simple visitation must be combined with the as sumption that the visitors know far more physics than we do— so much more, in fact, that an interpretation in terms of physical concepts known to us is bound to end up in failure and contradiction. A second major flaw in all the theories proposed so far is found in the description of the entities and their behavior. Any theory can account for some of these reports, but only at the expense of arbitrary rejection of a much larger group. The recognition of a parallel between UFO reports and the main themes of fairy lore is the first indication I have found that a way might exist out of this dilemma. And although it is still too early for us to pick up the scattered pieces of our old theories in a new attempt at explanation, I would like to conclude this chapter with a more precise review of the most difficult cases we have before us. Of the "reasonable" sightings there is little that can be said. The real problem begins when we find witnesses who are typical of the average population and who tell a story that, though not inconsistent with the spectrum of UFO reports, still stands out because of a few specific details that are so unbelievable that our first reaction is to reject the entire story. The thought that the story must be disregarded because it is a challenge to our reason is a reaction I am very familiar with, and it has led me in the past to select for analysis only those sightings that seem amenable to scientific criticism. Similarly, major groups such as NICAP or APRO and the official investigators working for Project Blue Book have devised some more or less conscious standards for the automatic rejection of "unbelievable" stories. To be sure, many of these reports do deserve the "crackpot" label, but such stories are usually accompanied by numerous signs of the witness's lack of mental balance. But when no such psychological context is evident, we must appraise the story very carefully. October 12, 1963. It was raining hard between Monte Maiz and Isla Verde, in Argentina, as Eugenio Douglas drove his truck loaded with coal along the road. Dawn was coming. Suddenly, Douglas saw a bright spot on the road ahead, like the headlights of an approaching vehicle, except that it was a single, blinding light. To avoid a collision, Douglas slowed down. The light became so intense he had to lower his head and move to the side. he stopped the truck and got out. The light had disappeared. Through the rain, Eugenio Douglas could now see a circular metallic craft, about thirty five feet high. An opening became visible, making a second area of light, less intense, and three figures appeared. They looked like men, but they were wearing strange headdresses with things like antennae attached to the headpieces. They were over twelve feet tall. There was nothing repulsive about the entities, said Douglas, but he was terribly scared. As soon as he was seen by the figures, a ray of red light flashed to the spot where he stood and burned him. Grabbing a revolver, he fired at the three entities and ran off toward Monte Maiz. But the burning red light followed him as far as the village, where it interfered with the street lights, turning them violet and green. Douglas could smell a pungent gas. The beauty and dramatic character of that scene is impressive, and in a screen illustration of the UFO saga this is probably the sighting that would best carry its total meaning. Douglas ran to the first house and shouted for help. Ribas, the owner, had died the previous night, but his family, gathered around the body, reported that at the same time they heard Douglas's call the candles in the room and the electric lights in the house turned green, and the same strange smell was noticed. They rushed to open the door: there was Douglas in the pouring rain, his overcoat over his head and a gun in his hand. The street lights had changed color. It must have been one of the most fantastic scenes in the rich archives of ufology. Eugenio Douglas was taken to the police station, where the burns on his face and hands were clearly seen. The police, it turned out, had received a number of calls about the lights' color change, but they had attributed the change to irregularities in the local power plant— which, however, would hardly account for the change in the candle lights, if that particular observation was not an illusion. Douglas was examined by a doctor, who stated the burns had been caused by a radiation similar to ultraviolet (according to Douglas, he had felt a burn when exposed to a red beam). When villagers went to the site where the truck was still parked, they found large footprints, nearly twenty inches long, but they were shortly afterward washed away by rain. In late August, 1963, near the town of Sagrada Famila, Brazil, three boys, Fernando Eustagio, eleven, his brother Ronaldo, nine, and a neighbor named Marcos, went into the Eustagio garden and started to draw water from the well. Suddenly they became aware of a hovering sphere above the trees. They could even sec four or five TOWS of people inside the sphere. An opening under the sphere became visible, and two light rays shot downward. A slender, ten foot tall being came down, as if gliding on the two beams of light. He alighted in the garden and walked for twenty feet or so in an odd fashion: his back seemed stiff, his legs were open, and his arms outstretched. He swung his body from left to right as if trying to find his balance and then sat down on a rock. The three boys observed that the giant wore a transparent helmet and had in the middle of his forehead what they described as a dark "eye." He wore tall boots, each of which was equipped with a strange triangular spike, which made a peculiar impression in the soft ground and could be seen for several days afterward. His garment was shiny and had inflated as soon as the entity had touched the ground. The trousers seemed to be fastened tightly to the boots. He had a peculiar square pack on his chest, which emitted flashes of light in an intermittent manner. Inside the sphere, still hanging motionless above the garden, the three boys could see occupants behind control panels "turning knobs and flicking switches." When the giant in the garden made a motion as if to grab one of the boys, Fernando picked up a stone—only to find himself unable to do anything with it as the spaceman looked straight into his eyes. The giant then returned to the sphere, still using the light beams as an "elevator" but holding his arms close to his body this time. The boys were no longer afraid, although they could not account for their new feeling. As the sphere left, they were sure the giant spaceman had not come to hurt them, and somehow, in the same irrational fashion, they knew he would come back again. In Brazil, six years earlier, an incident had taken place that has gained in UFO literature the place it certainly deserves, thanks to an excellent investigation by the late Professor Olavo Fontes, of the National School of Medicine in Rio de Janeiro, who interviewed and examined the witness, A. Villas Boas, of Sao Francisco de Salles, Minas Gerais. On the night of October 5, 1957, Antonio and his brother went to bed about 11:00 P.M. The night was hot, and as he opened the window, Antonio saw a silvery light in the corral similar to the spot made by a powerful searchlight. Later that night, the two brothers observed the light was still there. Then it moved toward the house, sweeping the roof before going away. About 10:00 P.M. on October 14, Antonio was plowing with his tractor when he saw a blinding white light at the northern end of the field. Every time Antonio tried to approach it, the light moved away. This happened about twenty times, though the light always appeared to "wait for him." His second brother was watching the scene as Antonio finally gave up. The light simply vanished. The next evening Antonio was alone at the same spot. The night was cold, clear, and starry. At 1:00 A.M. he saw something like a red star, which grew larger and became an egglikc, bright object, which hovered above his tractor, then landed softly. Antonio tried to drive away, but the engine of the tractor died. He jumped down and took two steps, but someone caught his arm. After a short struggle, four men carried him inside the craft. The beings communicated among themselves in slowly emitted growls, unlike any sound the witness could reproduce, although they were "neither high pitched nor too low." In spite of his resistance, the creatures stripped him, washed his body with something like a wet sponge, and took him into another room through a strangely lettered door. It is not my purpose here to record all the details of the experience reported by Villas Boas: they have been adequately documented first in the Flying Saucer Review by Fontes and Creighton and later by the Lorenzcns, who provide a complete reprint of the testimony as recorded by Fontes and J. Martins, along with the professional opinion of Dr. Fontes after his medical examination of the witness, in their book Flying Saucer Occupants, Fontes's conclusion that Villas Boas is not mentally unbalanced and that he is sincere in reporting his story is what prompts me to include the story here. And the story docs provide a link between such tales as the story of Ossian and the general question of the genetic context of the UFO myth, which will be the object of the next section of this chapter. Antonio remained alone in the room for what seemed to him a very long time. When he heard a noise at the door, he turned and received a "terrible shock": the door was open and a woman came in, as naked as he was. Her hair was blonde, with a part in the center. She had blue eyes, rather longer than round, slanted outward. Her nose was straight, her cheekbones prominent. Her face looked very wide, "wider than that of an Indio native." It ended in a pointed chin. Her lips were very thin, nearly invisible, in fact. Her ears were small but ordinary. She was much shorter than he was, her head only reaching his shoulder. She quickly made clear to him what the purpose of her visit was. Soon after, in fact, another man came in and beckoned to the woman, who, pointing to her belly, smiled, pointed at the sky, and followed the man out. The men came back with Antonio's clothes, then took him to a room where the other crew members were sitting, growling among themselves. The witness, who felt sure no harm would come to him now, carefully observed his surroundings. Among other things—all his remarks here are of interest—he noticed a box with a glass top that had the appearance of an "alarm clock." The "clock" had one hand and several marks that would correspond to the 3, 6, 9, and 12 of an ordinary clock. However, although time passed, the hand did not move, and Antonio concluded that it was no clock. The symbolism in this remark by Villas Boas is clear. We are reminded of the fairy tales quoted above, of the country where time does not pass, and of that great poet who had in his room a huge white clock without hands, bearing the word "It is later than you think." It is the poetic quality of such details in many UFO sightings that catches the attention—in spite of the irrational, or obviously absurd, character of the tale—and makes it so similar to a dream. Antonio must have thought so, because he reflected that he must bring some evidence back and tried to str;i! the "clock." At once, one of the men shoved him to the side angrily. This attempt to secure evidence is a constant feature of fairy tales, and we are also reminded of the efforts by Betty Hill to convince her captors to let her take a peculiar "book" she saw inside their craft. As in the Villas Boas incident, the men denied her the opportunity to convince the world that the experience had been real. As last, one of the men motioned Antonio to follow him to a circular platform. He was then given a detailed tour of the machine, taken to a metal ladder, and signaled to go down. Antonio watched all the details of the preparation for take off and observed the craft as it rose from the ground and flew away in a matter of seconds. He noticed that the time was 5:30; he had spent over four hours inside the strange machine. It must be noted that the witness volunteered information about the sighting in general terms when a notice appeared in a newspaper calling for UFO reports. He was extremely reluctant to discuss the more personal aspects of his experience and related them only when questioned with insistence by Fontes and Martins. Like Maurice Masse, Villas Boas suffered from excessive sleepiness for about a month after the incident. DAEMONIALITAS. When folklore becomes degraded to a minor literary form, as the fairy faith was degraded to the fairy tales we know today, it naturally loses much of its content: precisely those "adult" details that cannot be allowed to remain in children's books. The direct result of the censorship of spicy details in these marvelous stories is that they really become mere occasions for amazement. The Villas Boas case is hardly appropriate for nursery school reading, but to eliminate the little lady from the story would turn it into a tale without deep symbolic or psychological value. The sexual context is precisely what gives such accounts their literary influence. It is what provides impact to the fairy faith. Without the sexual context—without the stories of changelings, human midwives, intermarriage with the Gentry, of which we never hear in modern fairy tales—it is doubtful that the tradition about fairies would have survived through the ages. Nor is that true only of fairies: ihe most remarkable cases of sexual contact with nonhumans are not found in spicy saucer books, nor in fairy legends; they rest, safely stored away, in the archives of the Catholic Church. To find them, one must first learn Latin and gain entrance into the few libraries where these unique records are preserved. But the accounts one finds there make the Villas Boas case pale by comparison, as I believe the reader will agree before the end of this chapter. Let us first establish clearly that the belief in the possibility of intermarriage between man and the nonhuman races we arc studying is a corollary to the apparitions in all historical contexts. This is so obvious in biblical stories that I hardly need elaborate. The sex of the angels is not the most difficult—on the contrary, it is the clearest—of all theological questions. In Anatolc France's Revolt of the Angels it is Arcade, one of the celestial beings, who says: There's nothing like having sound references. In order to assure yourself that I am not deceiving you, Maurice, on this subject of the amorous embraces of angels and women, look up Justin, Apologies I and II; Flavins Joscphus, Jewish Antiquities, Book I, Chapter III; Athcnagoras, Concerning the Resurrection; Lactantius, Book II, Chapter XV; Tertullian, On the Veil of the Virgins; Marcus of Ephesns in Psellus; Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, Book V, Chapter IV; Saint Ambrose, in his book on Noah and the Ark, Chapter V; Saint Augustine in his City of God, Book XV, Chapter XXIII; Father Meldonat, the Jesuit, Treatise on Demons, page 248. Thus spoke Arcade, his guardian angel, to poor Maurice, as he tried to apologize for having stolen his mistress, pretty Madam Gilberte. And he added shamelessly, It was bound to be so; all the other angels in revolt would have done as I did with Gilberte. "Women, saith the Apostle, should pray with their heads covered, because of the angels."w This is clear enough. But fairies and elves? Are they subject to such carnal desires? Consider the following facts. In the Preface of the Saga of Hrolf, Torfeus, a seventeenth century Danish historian, records statements made about the elves by Einard Gusmond, the Icelandic scholar: I am convinced they really do exist, and they are creatures of God; that they get married like we do, and have children of either sex: we have a proof of this in what we know of the love of some of their women with simple mortals. William Grant Stewart, in The Popular Superstitions and Festive Amusements of the Highlanders of Scotland, devotes the second part of his discussion to fairies. In a chapter entitled "Of the Passions and Propensities of the Fairies," he has this to say on sexual intercourse with them: The fairies are remarkable for the amorousness of their disposi tions, and are not very backward in forming attachments and con nections with the people that cannot with propriety be called their own species. This is a beautiful example of convoluted phraseology. Stewart is less obviously embarrassed when he reports that such events no longer seem to take place between men and fairies: We owe it, in justice to both the human and the fairy commu nities of the present day, to say, that such intercourse as that de scribed to have taken place betwixt them is now extremely rare; with the single exception of a good old shoemaker, now or lately living in the village of Tomantoul, who confesses having had some dalliances with a "lanan shi" in his younger days, we do not know personally any one who has carried matters this length. If Stewart came back today, he would have to revise this statement after reading UFO material. Kirk stated.the case more clearly when he said: "In our Scotland there are numerous and beautiful creatures of that aerial order, who frequently assign meetings to lascivious young men as succubi, or as joyous mistresses and prostitutes, who are called Leannain Sith or familiar spirits." I hardly need to remind the reader of the importance of such "familiar spirits" in medieval occultism, particularly in Rosicrucian theories. Nor do I need to mention the number of accused witches who were condemned to death on the evidence that they had such familiar spirits. There is no gap between the fairy faith and ufology regarding the sexual question. This is apparent from the study made by Wentz, who records, for example, the following story: My grandmother Catherine Mac Innis used to tell about a man named Laughlin, whom she knew, being in love with a fairy woman. The fairy woman made it a point to see Laughlin every night, and he being worn out with her began to fear her. Things got so bad at last that he decided to go to America to escape the fairy woman. As soon as the plan was fixed and he was about to emigrate, women who were milking at sunset out in the meadows heard very audibly the fairy woman singing this song: What will the brown haired woman do When Lachie is on the billows? Lachic emigrated to Cape Breton, landing at Pictu, Nova Scotia; and in his first letter home to his friends he stated that the same fairy woman was haunting him there in America. The comments by Wentz on this case are extremely important: To discover a tale so rare and curious as this .. . is certainly of all our evidence highly interesting. And aside from its high literary value, it proves conclusively that the fairy women who entice mortals to their love in modern times are much the same, if not the same, as the succubi of middle age mystics. This allows us to return to the religious records mentioned above, one of which offers one of the most remarkable cases of apparition I have ever come across. It is difficult to believe that stories exist that surpass, for their amazing contents or shocking features, some of the reports we have already studied, such as the Hills case or the Villas Boas report. But, remarkable as they are, these latter two accounts refer only to one aspect of the total phenomenon; they can be interpreted only after being placed within the continuum of hundreds of lesser known cases, which provide the necessary background. The following case stands alone, and it is unique in that it relates the apparition of an incubus with the poltergeist phenomenon. The authority upon which the case rests is that of Fr. Ludovicus Maria Sinistrari dc Amcno, who reports and discusses it in his manuscript De Daemonialitate, et lncubis, et Succnbis,22 written in the second half of the seventeenth century. Who is Fr. Sinistrari? A theologian scholar born in Ameno, Italy, on February 26, 1622, he studied in Pavia and entered the Franciscan Order in 1647. He devoted his life to teaching philosophy and theology to numerous students attracted to Pavia by his fame as an eminent scholar. He also served as Councilor to the Supreme Tribunal of the Inquisition and as Theologian attached to the Archbishop of Milan. In 1688 he supervised the compilation of the statutes of the Franciscan Order. He died in 1701. Among other books, Fr. Sinistrari published a treatise called De Delictis et Poenis, which is an exhaustive compilation "tractatus absolutissimus" of all the crimes and sins imaginable. In short, Fr. Sinistrari was one of the highest authorities on human psychology and religious law to serve the Catholic Church in the seventeenth century. Compared to his De Daemonialitate, Playboy is a rather innocent gathering of mild reveries. The good father writes: About twenty five years ago while I was a professor of Sacred Theology at the Holy Cross Convent in Pavia, there lived in that city a married woman of excellent morality. All who knew her, and particularly the clergy, had nothing but the highest praises for her. Her name was Hieronyma, and she lived in the St. Michael Parish. One day, Hieronyma prepared some bread and brought it to the baker's to have it baked. He brought it back to her, and at the same time he brought her a large pancake of a very peculiar shape, made with butter and Venetian pastes, such as they use to make cakes in that city. She refused it, saying she had not prepared anything like it. "But," said the baker, "I have not had any bread to bake today but yours. The pancake must come from your house too; your mem ory probably fails you." The good lady allowed herself to be convinced; she took the pan cake and ate it with her husband, her three year old daughter, and a servant girl. During the following night, while she was in bed with her husband and both were asleep, she found herself awakened by an extremely fine voice, somewhat like a high pitched whistling sound. It was softly saying in her ear some very clear words: "How did you like the cake?" In fear, our good lady began to use the sign of the cross and to invoke in succession the names of Jesus and Mary. "Fear naught," said the voice. "I mean no harm to you. On the contrary, there is nothing I would not do in order to please you. I am in love with your beauty, and my greatest desire is to enjoy your embraces." At the same time, she felt that someone was kissing her cheeks, but so softly and gently that she might have thought it was only the finest cotton down touching her. She resisted, without answering anything, only repeating many times the names of Jesus and Mary and making the sign of the cross. The temptation lasted thus about half an hour, after which time the tempter went away. In the morning, the lady went to her confessor, a wise and knowl edgeable man, who confirmed her in the ways of the faith and appealed to her to continue her strong resistance, and to use some holy relics. The following nights: similar temptations, with words and kisses of the same kind; similar opposition, too, from the lady. However, as she was tired of such lasting trials, she took the advice of her confessor and other serious men and asked to be examined by trained exorcists to decide whether or not she was possessed. The exorcists found nothing in her to indicate the presence of the evil spirit. They blessed the house, the bedroom, the bed, and gave the incubus orders to discontinue his importunities. All was in vain: he went on tempting her, pretending he was dying with love, and crying, moaning, in order to invoke the lady's pity. With God's help, she remained unmoved. Then the incubus used a different approach: he appeared to her in the figure of a young boy or small man with golden, curling hair, with a blond beard gleaming like gold and sea green eyes. To add to his power of seduction, he was elegantly dressed in Spanish vestments. Besides, he kept appearing to her even when she was in company; he would complain, as lovers do; he would send her kisses. In a word, he used all the means of seduction to obtain her favors. Only she saw and heard him; to all others, there was nothing. Tin's excellent woman had kept her unwavering determination for several months when the incubus had recourse to a new kind of persecution. First, he took from her a silver cross full of holy relics and a blessed wax or papal Iamb of Pope Pius V, which she always had on her. Then, rings and other jewels of gold and silver followed. He stole them without touching the locks of the casket in which they were enclosed. Then he began to strike her cruelly, and after each series of blows one could see on her face, arm, or other areas of her body bruises and marks, which lasted one or two days, then vanished suddenly, quite unlike natural bruises, which go away by degrees. Sometimes, as she suckled her daughter, lie took the child from her knees and carried her to the roof, placing her at the edge of the gutter. Or else he would hide her, but without ever causing her harm. He would also upset the household, sometimes breaking to pieces the plates and earthenware. But in the blink of an eye he also re stored them to their original state. One night, as she lay in bed with her husband, the incubus, appearing to her under his usual form, energetically demanded that she give herself up. She refused, as usual. Furious, the incubus went away, and a short time later he returned with an enormous load of those flat stones that inhabitants of Genoa, and of Liguria in general, use to cover their houses. With these stones he built around the bed such a high wall that it reached almost to the ceiling, and the couple had to send for a ladder in order to come out. This wall was built without lime. It was pulled down and the stones were stored in a corner, where they were exposed to everyone's sight. But after two days they vanished. On the day of St. Stephen, the lady's husband had invited several military friends to dine with him. To honor his guests he had pre pared a respectable dinner. While they were washing their hands according to the custom—hop!—suddenly the table vanished, along with the dishes, the cauldrons, the plates, and all the earthenware in the kitchen, the jugs, the bottles, the glasses too. You can imagine the amazement, the surprise, of the guests. There were eight of them, among them a Spanish infantry captain who told them: "Do not be afraid. It is only a trick. But there used to be a table here, and it must still be here. I am going to find it." Having said that, he went around the room with outstretched hands, attempting to seize the table. But after he had made many turns, seeing he was only touching air, the others laughed at him. And since dinner time had passed, everyone took his coat and started for home. They had already reached the door with the husband, who was politely accompanying them, when they heard a great noise in the dining room. They stopped to find out what it was, and the servant girl ran and told them the kitchen was full of new plates loaded with food, and the table had come back in the dining room. The table was now covered with napkins, dishes, glasses, and silverware that were not the original ones. And there were all kinds of precious cups full with rare wines. In the kitchen, too, there were new jugs and utensils; they had never been seen there before. The guests, however, were hungry, and they ate this strange meal, which they found very much to their taste. After dinner, as they were talking by the fireplace, everything vanished, and the old table came back with the untouched dishes on it. But, oddly enough, no one was hungry any longer, so that nobody wanted to have supper after such a magnificent dinner—which shows that the dishes which had been substituted for the original ones were real and not imaginary. This persecution had been going on for several months, the lady consulted the Blessed Bernardino of Felter, whose body is the object of veneration in St. James Church, some distance outside the city walls. And at the same time, she vowed to wear for a whole year a gray monk's gown, with a rope as a belt, like those used by the minor brothers in the order to which Bernardino belonged. She hoped, through his intercession, that she would be freed from the persecu tions of the incubus. Indeed, on September 28,which is the Vigil of the Dedication of Archangel St. Michael and the Feast of the Blessed Bernardino— she took the votive dress. The next morning was the Feast of St. Michael. Our afflicted lady went to the church of that saint, which was, as I have said, her own parish. It was about ten o'clock, and a very large crowd was going to mass. Now, the poor woman had no sooner put her foot on the church ground than all of a sudden her vestments and ornaments fell to the ground and were carried away by the wind, leaving her as naked as the hand. Very fortunately, it so happened that among the crowd were two knights of mature age who saw the thing and hurriedly removed their coats, to hide as well as they could that woman's nudity. And having put her in a coach, they drove her home. As for the vestments and jewels stolen by the incubus, he returned them six months later. To make a long story short, although there are many other tricks that this incubus played on her, and some amazing ones, suffice it to say that he kept tempting her for many years. But, at last, per ceiving he was wasting his efforts, he discontinued these unusual and bothersome vexations. As a theologian, Fr. Sinistrari was as puzzled by such reports as most modern students of UFO lore are by the Villas Boas case. Observing that the fundamental texts of the Church gave no clear opinion on such cases, Sinistrari wondered how they should be judged by religious law. A great part of his manuscript is devoted to a detailed examination of this question. The lady in the above example did not allow the incubus to have intercourse with her. But there arc numerous other cases in the records of the Church (especially in witch trials) in which there was intercourse. From the Church's point of view, says Fr. Sinistrari, there arc several problems. First, how is such intercourse physically possible? Second, how does demoniality differ from bestiality? Third, what sin is committed by those who engage in such intercourse? Fourth, what should their punishment be? The earliest author who uses the word "demonialitas" is J. Caramuel, in his Theologia Fundamentalis. Before him, no one made a distinction between demoniality and bestiality. All the moralists, following St. Thomas Aquinas, understood by bestiality "any kind of carnal intercourse with an object of a different species." Yet, a few centuries earlier, the best minds saw in similar accounts an occasion to increase their knowledge of human nature and did not feel it was beneath their dignity as philosophers to spend considerable time in this study. If, as a twentieth century scientist, I need an apology to write the present book, this should be as good a precedent as any. The act of love, writes Sinistrari, has for an object human generation. Unnatural semination, that is, intercourse that cannot be followed by generation, constitutes a separate type of sin against nature. But it is the subject of that semination that distinguishes the various sins under that type. If demoniality and bestiality were in the same category, a man who had copulated with a demon could simply tell his confessor: "I have committed the sin of bestiality." And yet he obviously has not committed that sin. Considerable problems arose, however, when one had to identify the physical process of intercourse with demons. This is clearly a most difficult point (as difficult as that of identifying the physical nature of flying saucers!), and Sinistrari gives a remarkable discussion of it. Pointing out that the main object of the discussion is to determine the degree of punishment these sins deserve, he tries to list all the different ways in which the sin of demoniality can be committed. First he remarks: There are quite a few people, over inflated with their little knowl edge, who dare deny what the wisest authors have written, and what everyday experience demonstrates: namely, that the demon, either incubus or succubus, has carnal union not only with men and women but also with animals. Sinistrari docs not deny that some young women often have visions and imagine that they have attended a sabbat. Similarly, ordinary erotic dreams have been classified by the Church quite separately from the question we are studying. Sinistrari does not mean such psychological phenomena when he speaks of demoniality; he refers to actual physical intercourse, such as the basic texts on witchcraft discuss. Thus in the Compendium Mateficarum, Gnaccius gives eighteen case histories of witches who have had carnal contact with demons. All cases are vouched for by scholars whose testimony is above question. Besides, St. Augustine himself says in no uncertain terms: It is a widespread opinion, confirmed by direct or indirect testi mony of trustworthy persons, that the Sylvans and Fauns, com monly called Incubi, have often tormented women, solicited and obtained intercourse with them. There are even Demons, which are called Duses [i.e., hitins] by the Gauls, who are quite frequently usin^ JUCh impure practices: this is vouched for by so numerous and so lii^li authorities that it would be impudent to deny it. Now, the devil makes use of two ways in these carnal contacts. One he uses with sorcerers and witches; the other with men and women perfectly foreign to witchcraft. This is a point of paramount importance. What Sinistraii is saying is that two kinds of people may come in contact with the beings he calls demons: those who have made a formal pact with them—and he gives the details of the process for making this pact—and those who simply happen to be "contacted" by them. The implications of this fundamental statement to occultism for the interpretation of the fairy faith and of modern UFO stories should be obvious to the reader. The devil does not have a body. Then, how does he manage to have intercourse with men and women? How can women have children from such unions if they specifically express the desire? All the theologians answer that the devil borrows the corpse of a human being, either male or female, or else he forms with other materials a new body for this purpose. Indeed, we find here the same theory as that expressed by one of the Gentry and quoted by Wentz: "We can make the old young, the big small, the small big." The devil then is said to proceed in one of two ways. Either he first takes the form of a female succubus and then has inter course with a man. Or else, the succubus induces lascivious dreams in a sleeping man and makes use of the resulting "pollu tion" to allow the devil to perform the second part of the op eration. This is the theory taught by Gnaccius, who gives a great number of examples. Likewise, Hector Boethius, in Historia Scotorum, documents the case of a young Scot who, for several months, was visited in his bedroom, the windows and doors of which were closed, by a succubus of the most ravishing beauty. She did everything she could to obtain intercourse with him, but he did not yield to her caresses and entreaties. One point intrigued Sinistrari greatly: such demons do not obey the exorcists. They have no fear of relics and other holy objects, and thus they do not fall into the same category as the devils by which people are possessed, as the story quoted above certain shows. But then, are they really creatures of the devil? Should not we place them in a separate category, with the fairies and the Elementals they so closely resemble? And then, if such creatures have their own bodies, does the traditional theory— that incubi and succubi are demons who have borrowed human corpses— hold? Could it explain how children are born from such unions? What are the physical characters of such children? If we admit that the UFO reports we have quoted earlier in this chapter indicate the phenomenon has genetic contents, then the above questions are fundamental, and it is important to see how Sinistrari understood them. Therefore, I give in the following a complete translation of his discussion of the matter. To theologians and philosophers, it is a fact, that from the copulation of humans (man or woman) with the demon, human beings are sometimes born. It is by this process that Antichrist must be born, according to a number of doctors:* Bellarmin, Suarez, Maluenda, etc. Besides, they observe that as the result of a quite natural cause, the children generated in this manner by the incubi are tall, very strong, very daring, very magnificent and very wicked, . Malucnda confirms what has been said above, proving by the testimony of various classical authors that it is to such unions that the following owe their birth: Romulus and Remus, according to Livy and Plutarch. Servius Tullius, sixth king of the Romans, according to Denys of Halicarnassus and Pliny. Plato the philosopher, according to Diogenes Laertius and St. Jerome. Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch and Quinte Curce. Seleucus, king of Syria, according to Justin and Applian. Scipio the African, according to Livy. The Emperor Caesar Augustus, according to Suetonius. Aristomenes of Messenia, the illustrious Greek general, according ro Strabo and Pausanias. Let us add the English Merlin or Melchin, born of an incubus and a nun, the daughter of jCharlemagne. And finally, as writes Cocleus, quoted by Maluenda^^frTaTtlamned heresiarch whose name is Martin Luther. However, in spite of all the respect I owe so many great doctors, I do not see how their opinion can stand examination. Indeed, as he Brim's comment throws more light: "If the body of these children is tints different from the bodies of other children, their soul will certainly have qualities that will not he common to others: that is why Cardinal Bellarmin thinks Antichrist will he horn of a woman having Had intercourse with tin incubus." Pererius observes very well in Commentary on Genesis, Chapter Six, all the strength, all the power of the human sperm, comes from spirits that evaporate and vanish as soon as they issue from the genital cavities where they were warmly stored. The physicians agree on this. Therefore, it is not possible for the demon to keep the sperm he has received in a sufficient state of integrity to produce genera tion; for, no matter what the vessel where he could attempt to keep it is, this vessel would have to have a temperature equal to the natural temperature of human genital organs, which is found no where but in those same organs. Now, in a vessel where the warmth is not natural, but artificial, spirits are resolved, and no generation is possible. A second objection is that generation is a vital act through which man, from his own substance, introduces sperm through the use of natural organs, into a place proper for generation. To the contrary, in the special case we are now considering, the introduc tion of the sperm cannot be a vital act of the generating man, since it is not by him that it is introduced into the matrix. And, for the same reason, it cannot be said that the man to whom the sperm belonged has engendered the fetus that is procreated. Neither can we consider the incubus as the father, since the sperm is not of his own substance. Thus here is a child who is born and has no father— which is absurd. Third objection: when the father engenders natur ally, there is a concourse of two causalities: a material one, for he provides the sperm that is the material of generation; and an efficient one, for he is the main agent in the generation, according to the common opinion of philosophers. But, in our case, the man who does nothing but provide the sperm simply gives material, without any action tending toward generation. Therefore he could not be regarded as the child's father, and this is contrary to the notion that the child engendered by an incubus is not his child, but the child of the man whose sperm was borrowed by the incubus, . We also read in the Scriptures (Genesis 6:4) that giants were born as a result of intercourse between the sons of God and the daughters of Man: this is the very letter of the sacred text. Now, these giants were men of tall stature, as it is said in Baruch 3:26, and far superior to other men. Besides their monstrous size, they called attention by their strength, their plunders, their tyranny, And it is to the crimes of these giants that we must attribute the main and primary cause of the Flood, according to Cornelius a Lapide in his Commentary on Genesis. Some state that under the name of sons of God we must under stand the sons of Seth, and, under that of daughters of men, the daughters of Cain, because the former practiced piety, religion, and all other virtues while the latter, the children of Cain, did exactly the opposite. But, with all the respect we owe Chrysostom, Cyril, and others who share this view, it will be recognized it is in disagree ment with the obvious meaning of the text. What do the Scriptures say? That from the conjunction of the above were born men of monstrous corporeal proportions. Therefore, these giants did not exist previously, and if their birth was the result of that union, it is not admissible to attribute it to the intercourse between the sons of Scth and the daughters of Cain who, of ordinary size themselves, could have children only of ordinary size. Consequently, if the intercourse in question has given birth to beings of monstrous proportions, we must see there not the ordinary intercourse of men with women but the operation of the incubi who, owing to their nature, can very well be called sons of God. This opinion is that of the Platonist philosophers and of Francois George of Venice, and it is not in contradiction with that of Josephus the historian, Philo, St. Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian, according to whom these incubi could be angels who had allowed themselves to commit the sin of luxury with women. Indeed, as we shall show, there is nothing there but a single opinion under a double appearance. What we have here is a complete theory of contact between our race and another race, nonhuman, different in physical nature, but biologically compatible with us. Angels, demons, fairies, creatures from heaven, hell, or Magonia: they inspire our strangest dreams, shape our destinies, steal our desires. But who are they? CHAPTER FIVE, They are fairies; he that speaks to them shall die: I'll wink and couch: no man their works must eye. William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor. "THEY SPEAK all the languages of the earth. They know all about the past and future of the human race—of any human being." This statement was made in 1968 by a Spanish clerk who claims he has been in contact with extraterrestrials since 1954. "The inhabitants of planet Wolf 424 [sic] are among us in human form and with false identities. They are far superior to us and very peace loving. I am in permanent contact with them: they either write to me or call me. We have meetings." How did he contact these superior entities? It seems that in 1954 a saucer threw a stone covered with hieroglyphics into the University Gardens, Madrid. Fernando Sesma copied the sym bols down, and soon two way communication began. In Great Britain also, fantastic rumors are spreading. British scientists, some people claim, have been contacted by a mys terious source through radio and have become involved in under cover activities at the request of extraterrestrials. Some of these scientists have disappeared. Through such contacts, so the story goes, the extraterrestrials hope to control our history. For what purpose? I myself have received letters from individuals claiming to be members of secret organizations whose headquarters arc, quite literally, "out of this world." These correspondents in formed me that the purpose of these groups is to prevent man kind from reaching other worlds in space. Of course, other "contactees" make exactly opposite claims. The fact remains, however, that belief in nonhuman control of terrestrial destinies is as old as politics. Thus a Madrid newsman, Armando Puente, claims that Sesma warned him three months before Robert Kennedy was assassinated that the senator would be killed, Sesma similarly "predicted" the wave of UFO sightings in Argentina (a much easier task!). Moreover, the same power attributed to saucer people— namely, that of influencing human events—was once the exclusive property of fairies. This was true in the beliefs of ignorant medieval peasants and of the scholars as well. Thus, one of the first questions put to Joan of Arc by her inquisitors was "if she had any knowledge or if she had not assisted at the assemblies held at the fountain of the fairies, near Domremy, around which dance malignant spirits." And another question and answer was thus recorded: "Asked whether she did not believe—prior to the present day—that fairies WCTC malignant spirits, [she] answered she did not know." To pursue this line further would involve reopening the entire problem of witchcraft, which is obviously beyond the purpose of this book. It is important, however, to note the continuum of beliefs, for the continuum leads directly from primitive magic, through mystical experience, the fairy faith, and religion, to modern flying saucers. The study of witchcraft has shown these subjects to be closely interrelated, and from the point of view of modern psychiatry, they must be treated together. And while we are not concerned with individual beliefs in this chapter, we are interested in the social implications of such rumors, which have seldom been faced by the students of the phenomenon. In the Soviet Union, not so long ago, a leading plasma physicist died in strange circumstances: he was thrown under a Moscow subway train by a mentally deranged woman. It is noteworthy that she claimed a "voice from space" had given her orders to kill that particular man—orders she could not resist. Soviet criminologists, I have been reliably informed, are worried by the increase of such cases in recent years. Madmen rushing through the streets because they think the Martians arc after them have always been commonplace.' But the current wave of mental unbalance that can be specifically tied to the rise and de velopment of the contactee myth is an aspect of the UFO problem that must be considered with special care. It was to be hoped that the recent scientific investigations of the UFO phenomenon would have treated this problem with the attention it deserved. Unfortunately, they have not done so. This leads me to offer, in the present chapter, all the information 1 can provide on this matter, with the hope that sociologists will tackle the problem with more than passing amusement. Of course, some details relevant to this aspect of the UFO phenomenon cannot be published. This docs not mean, however, that they should remain the exclusive property of a few bureaucrats concerned only with the preservation of their peace of mind and the stability of their administrations. To let UFO speculation grow unchecked would only make the public an easy and defenseless prey to charlatans of all kind. It would mean that any organized group bent upon the destruction of our society could undermine it by skillful use of the saucer mythology; they could take us to Magonia with the blessing of all the "rationalists." A GREAT SIGN IN HEAVEN. Knock is a tiny village in the west of Ireland. But something took place there on August 21, 1879, something no student of the human mind should ignore;1 The weather had been growing steadily worse all day long. At 7:00 P.M. rain was pouring down on the village as Archdeacon Cavanagh returned home. Mary McLoughlin, his housekeeper, lighted a good turf fire and then, at 8:307 went out to visit her friend, Mrs. Margaret Bcirne. As she passed the church, she noticed several strange figures in a field and something "like an altar" with a white light, but she dismissed the sight from her mind and continued on her way. Rain was still falling heavily, and she was not tempted to investigate, although she did "find the matter very strange." Two other parishioners had seen the figures before her and had reacted in similar fashion. Later on, when it was still not yet dark and as rain continued to fall, Mary McLoughlin went back past the church, accompanied by Mrs. Bcirne. At one point, between the church building and the two women, lay an uncut meadow. And in the meadow on top of the grass, three persons appeared to be standing, surrounded by an extraordinarily bright light and forming "such a sight as you never saw in your life." The central figure was Our Lady, that on her right was St. Joseph. The third one was identified by Mary Bcirne as St. John the Evangelist, because it resembled very much a statue of the saint she had seen in another village—except that now he wore'; a miter) A few minutes later, eighteen parishioners were assembled before the apparitions. When a diocesan commissior investigated the phenomenon, fourteen witnesses (three men, two hildren, three teenagers, and six women), with ages between six and seventy five, described what they had seen. Three witnesses reported noticing her bare feet. One woman, Bridget Trench, was so carried away by the sight that she fervently went to the apparitions to embrace the Virgin's feet. But her arms closed on empty air. I felt nothing in the embrace but the wall, yet the figures appeared so full and so lifelike and so lifesizc that I could not understand it and wondered why my hands could not feel that was so plain and distinct to my sight. Bridget also remarked how heavily the rain was then falling, but, she added: I felt the ground carefully with my hands, and it was perfectly dry. The wind was blowing from the south, right against the gable, but no rain fell on that portion of the gable where the figures were. St. John was standing at an angle to the other figures. Dressed as a bishop, he was holding a large open book in his left hand. The fingers of his right hand were raised in a gesture of teaching. One of the witnesses, Patrick Hill, went close enough to see the lines and letters in the book. When the parish priest was told of the apparitions, he said it might be a reflection from the stained glass windows of the church and quietly spent the rest of the evening at home. The phenomenon lasted several hours. Their clothes soaked through, all the witnesses went home before midnight. The next morning nothing was left to be seen. Ten days after the incident, a deaf child was cured and a man born blind saw after his pilgrimage to Knock. Soon seven or eight cures a week were reported: A dying man, so ill that he vomited blood most of the way while being carried to Knock and received the Last Sacraments from the Archdeacon on his arrival, was cured instantaneously after drinking some water in which a scrap of cement from the gable wall had been dissolved. All this came at an unfortunate time for the Catholic Church in Ireland. Most of Archdeacon Cavanagh's fellow priests doubted and disapproved. The Knock church had been built only fifty years earlier, when Irish Catholics had emerged from hiding, and much as in Lourdes in the early days, the clergy tried not to get involved in the pilgrimages. Local and national papers were asked by the clergy to refrain from giving the apparition publicity, while some papers hostile to Catholicism printed derisive articles about it. Attempts to explain the phenomenon by physical means were made. A science professor from Maynooth performed tests for the official commission of inquiry appointed by the Archbishop of Tuam. He used a magic lantern to project photographic images on the gable wall in the presence of twenty priests and testified that the tests ruled out the possibility that the apparition had been a product of a photographic hoax. A correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph made his own tests at a later date and reported that "however the reported apparitions were caused, they could not have been due to a magic lantern." It is not irreverent to point out that many features in this report are identical to those in UFO phenomena: the strange globe of light of varying intensity, the luminous entities within or close to the light, the absence of rain at the site of the apparition and, finally, the alleged miraculous cures. All these features arc present in the current UFO mythology in America. To those who have not closely followed the specialized UFO literature in the last few years, the assertion that UFO sightings involve mysterious "cures" will come as a surprise. They will find several cases in the Appendix; for instance, the Damon, Texas, report of September 3, 1965, where a policeman was allegedly cured of a wound on his hand when exposed to the light from a hovering object (Case 694). Or the Petropolis, Brazil, report of October 25, 1957, in which we are told that a girl dying from cancer was saved by a fantastic operation performed by two men who came from the sky (Case 415). Clearly we are dealing here with a pattern reminiscent of medieval mysticism. The Knock case is not the most remarkable instance of a similarity between religious apparitions and UFO sightings. And although it took place in Ireland, the miracle aspect is not the inos! reminiscent of the standard features of the fairy faith. An incident occurring at daybreak, on Saturday, December 9, 1531, in Mexico, however, does represent the culmination of all the superstitions we have discussed.5 Of tremendous sociological and psychological impact, it has left physical traces that can still be seen—and, indeed, are still an object of much devotion—today. On that long ago morning, a fifty sevcn year old Aztec Indian whose Nahuatl name was Singing Eagle and whose Spanish name was Juan Diego was going to the church of Tlaltclolco, near Mexico City. Suddenly he froze in his tracks as he heard a concert of singing birds, sharp and sweet. The air was bitterly cold: no bird in its right mind would sing at such hour, and yet the harmonious music went on, stopping abruptly. Then someone with a woman's voice called Juan Diego's name. The voice was coming from the top of the hill, which was hidden in "a frosty mist, a brightening cloud." And when he climbed the hill, he saw her. The sun wasn't above the horizon, yet Juan saw her as if against the sun because of the golden beams that rayed her person from head to feet. She was a young Mexican girl about fourteen years old and wonderfully beautiful. So far, we have a perfect beginning for a standard fairy apparition. But in the ensuing dialogue, Juan Diego was told that the girl was Mary, and that she desired a temple at that particular place: "So run now to Tcnochtitlan [Mexico City] and tell the Lord Bishop all that you have seen and heard." This was easier to say than to accomplish. Poor Indians were not in the habit of going to the Spanish section of the city, and even less to the bishop's palace. Bravely, however, Juan ran down the mountain and begged Don Fray Juan de Zumarraga to hear his story. Naturally, the bishop, although he was kind to the Indian, did not believe a word of his tale, so Juan went back through the mountains and met the lady a second time. He ad vised her to send the bishop a more suitable messenger, and he was quite frank about it. "Listen, little son," was the answer. "There are many I could send. But you are the one I have chosen for this task. So, tomorrow morning, go back to the Bishop. Tell him it is the Virgin Mary who sends you, and repeat to him my great desire for a church in this place." The next morning, Juan Diego returned to Mexico City and met again with the patient bishop. Juan Diego was so adamant and seemed so honest in telling his story that Fray Juan de Zumarraga was shaken. He told Juan to ask the apparition for a tangible sign, and he instructed two servants to follow the Indian and watch his actions. They tracked him through the city, observed that he spoke to no one, saw him climb the hills , and then he vanished. They searched the area without finding a trace of him! The perfect fairy tale. But Juan had gone to the hill. He gave the apparition the bishop's answer, and she said: "Very well, little son. Come back tomorrow at daybreak. I will give you a sign for him. You have taken much trouble on my ac count, and I shall reward you for it. Go in peace, and rest." The next morning, Juan did not come. His uncle—his only relative—was dying. Juan spent the day trying to relieve his suf ferings and left him only on Tuesday, to get a priest. As he was running to Tlaltelolco, however, the apparition again barred his way. Embarrassed, he told her why he had not followed her instructions, and she said: "My little son, do not be distressed and afraid. Am I not here who am your Mother? Arc you not under my shadow and protection? Your uncle will not die at this time. This very moment his health is restored. There is no reason now for the errand you set out on, and you can peacefully attend to mine. Go up to the top of the hill; cut the flowers that are growing there and bring them to me." There were no flowers on the top of the hill, as Juan Diego knew very well. In the middle of December, there could be no flower there, and yet upon reaching the place, he found Castilian roses, "their petals wet with dew." He cut them and, using his long Indian cape— his tihna—to protect them from the bitter cold, carried them back to the apparition. She arranged the flowers he had dropped in the wrap, then tied the lower corners of the tihna behind his neck so that none of the roses would fall. She advised him not to let anybody but the bishop sec the sign she had given him and then disappeared. Juan Diego never met her again. At the bishop's palace several servants made fun of the Indian visionary. They "pushed him around" and tried to snatch the flowcis. But when they observed how the roses seemed to dissolve when they reached for them, they were astonished and let him go. Juan was taken once more to the bishop. Juan Diego put up both hands and untied the corners of crude cloth behind his neck. The looped up fold of the tilma fell; the flowers he thought were the precious sign tumbled out and lay in an untidy heap on the floor. Alas for the Virgin's careful arrangement! But Juan's confusion over this mishap was nothing to what he felt immediately after it. Inside of seconds the Bishop had risen from his chair and was kneeling at Juan's feet, and inside of a minute all the other persons in the room had surged forward and were also kneeling, The bishop was kneeling before Juan's tilma, and, as Ethel Cook Eliot remarks, "millions of people have knelt before it since," for it has been placed over the high altar in the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico City. The tilma consists of two pieces, woven of maguey fibers and sewn together and measuring sixty six by forty one inches. On this coarse material, whose color is that of unbleached linen, a lovely figure can be seen, fifty six inches tall. Surrounded by golden rays, it emerges as from a shell of light, clear cut and lovely in every detail of line and color. The head is bent slightly and very gracefully to the right, just avoiding the long seam. The eyes look downward, but the pupils are visible. This gives an unearthly impression of lovingness and lovablcness. The mantle that covers the head and falls to the feet is greenish blue with a border of purest gold, and scattered through with golden stars. The tunic is rose colored, patterned with a lacc likc design of golden flowers. Below is a crescent moon, and beneath it appear the head and arms of a cherub. In the six years that followed the incident, over eight million Indians were baptized. In recent times, sonic fifteen hundred persons kneel before Juan Diego's tilma (still intact with the image's radiant colors) ever}' day. Juan's uncle was cured. As he was awaiting the priest, too weak even to drink the medicine his nephew had prepared, he saw his room suddenly filled with soft light. A luminous figure, that of a young woman, appeared near him. She told him he would get well and informed him of Juan Diego's mission. She also said, "Call me and call my image Santa Maria de Guadalupe"—or so the message was understood. But was this the intended meaning? Following the research of Helen Bchrcns, Ethel Cook Eliot suggests that the Indian word used by the apparition was Tetlcoatlaxopeuh, which could be transcribed phonetically as Deguatlashupee. To Spanish ears, this would naturally sound like "De Guadalupe." But the apparition spoke the same Indian dialect as Juan Diego and his uncle— she even looked like "a young Indian girl"—and she had no reason to use the Spanish term ascribed to her. Tetlcoatlaxopeuh means "Stone Serpent Trodden on." Helen Bchrcns assumes that the apparition was thus announcing that she had supplanted Ouctzalcoatl, whom the Indians had idolized as a feathered serpent. This impressive story contains a magnificent symbolism. Not only docs it bring us back, through the stone serpent, to the Maya monuments we discussed at the beginning of this book, but it also reminds us, in several important aspects, of the many talcs of fairies we have reviewed: the mysterious, sweet music announcing that the fairy draws near; the flowers (roses once again) that grow in an impossible place; and the sign given to the human messenger, which changes nature as he goes away, like the coals given to human midwives by the gnomes that changed to gold; the numerous similar symbols found in countless talcs;* and finally, the cosmic symbolism, the crescent moon under the Virgin's feet, as in the lines of Revelation: And there appeared a great sign in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon was under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. "LOOK BUT DO NOT TOUCH". It was a very great wonder, a sign, in heaven indeed, the marvelous airship that flew over the United States in the spring of * Indeed, we cannot help but recall here the words of llartland in his Science of Fairy Talcs: "This gift of an object apparently worthless, which turns out, on the conditions being observed, of the utmost value, is a com monplace of fairy transactions. It is one of the most obvious manifestations of superhuman power," 1897. And the rediscovery of the remarkable wave of reports it generated has provided a crucial missing link between the appari tions of older days and modern saucer stories. On Donald Hanlon's map reproduced with the photographs, all the airship reports have been plotted, with a special sign to denote landings. This map perhaps gives a measure both of the volume of data the students of American folklore have been missing and of the amount of work done in the last three years by researchers such as Hanlon, Jerome Clark, and Lucius Farish. The result of their investigations is astonishing. In California, in November, 1896, hundreds of residents of the San Francisco area saw a large, elongated, dark object, which carried brilliant searchlights and was capable of flying against the wind. Between January and March, 1897, it vanished entirely. And suddenly a staggering number of observations of an identical object were made in the Midwest. Earlier in the book, we have seen how Alexander Hamilton described it: a craft with turbine wheels and a glass section with strange beings aboard looking down, a description not unlike that given by Barney Hill. In March, an object of even stranger appearance was seen by Robert Hibbard, a farmer living fifteen miles north of Sioux City, Iowa. Ilibbard not only saw the airship, but an anchor hanging from a rope attached to the mysterious craft caught his clothes and dragged him several dozen feet, until he fell back to earth. To present in an orderly fashion all the accounts of that period would itself take a book. My object here is only to review the most detailed observations of the behavior of the airship's occupants on the ground. But first, how did the object itself behave? It maneuvered very much in the way UFO's are said to maneuver, except that airships were never seen flying in formation or per forming "aerial dances." Usually, an airship flew rather slowly and majestically—of course, such an object, in 1897, ran no risk of being pursued—except in a few close proximity cases when it was reported to depart "as a shot out of a gun." Another difference from modern UFO's lies in the fact that its leisurely trajectory often took it over large urban areas. Omaha, Milwaukee, Chicago, and other cities were thus visited; each time, large crowds gathered to watch the object. Otherwise, the airship exhibited all the typical activities of UFO's: hovering, dropping "probes"—on Newton, Iowa, on April 10, for example—changing course abruptly, changing altitude at great speed, circling, landing and taking off, sweeping the countryside with powerful light beams. The occupants of the airship were as variously described as arc UFO operators. Several reports could be interpreted to mean that dwarfs were among them, but it was not—to my present knowledge, at least—stated in so many words by witnesses. Alexander Hamilton says that the beings were the strangest he had ever seen, and that he did not care to sec them again. I am not aware of any detailed portrait of the creatures by the witnesses in the Leroy case. They were "hideous people": two men, a woman, and three "children," jabbering together. All the operators who engaged in discussions with human witnesses were indistinguishable from the average American population of the time, This, for instance, is the experience related by Captain James Hooton (described in the Arkansas Gazette as "the well known Iron Mountain railroad conductor"). I had gone down to Texarkana to bring back a special, and knowing that I would have some eight to ten hours to spend in Texarkana, I went to I Ionian (Arkansas) to do a little hunting. It was about 3 o'clock in the afternoon when I reached that place. The sport was good, and before I knew it, it was after 6 o'clock when I started to make my way back toward the railroad station. As I was tramping through the bush my attention was attracted by a familiar sound, a sound for all the world like the working of an air pump on a locomotive. I went at once in the direction of the sound, and there in an open space of some five or six acres, I saw the object making the noise. To say that I was astonished would but feebly express my feelings. I decided at once that this was the famous airship seen by so many people about the country. There was a medium size looking man aboard and I noticed that he was wearing smoked glasses. lie was tinkering around what seemed to be the hack end of the ship, and as I approached I was too dumbfounded to speak. He looked at me in surprise, and said: "Good day, sir; good day." I asked: "Is this the airship?" And he replied: "Yes, sir," whereupon three or four other men came out of what was apparently the keel of the ship. A close examination showed that the keel was divided into two parls, terminating in front like the sharp edge of a knife like edge, while the side of the ship bulged gradually toward the middle, and then receded. There were three large wheels upon each side made of some bending metal and arranged so that they became concave as they moved forward. "I beg your pardon, sir," I said, "the noise sounds a great deal like a Westinghouse air brake." "Perhaps it does, my friend: we are using condensed air and aeroplanes, but you will know more later on." "All ready, sir," someone called out, when the party all disappeared below. I observed that just in front of each wheel a two inch tube began to spurt air on the wheels and they commenced revolving. The ship gradually arose with a hissing sound. The aeroplanes suddenly sprang forward, turning their sharp end skyward, then the rudders at the end of the ship began to veer to one side and the wheels revolved so fast that, one could scarcely see the blades. In less time than it takes to tell you, the ship had gone out of sight. Captain Hooton adds that he could discover no bell or bell rope about the ship and was greatly shocked by this detail, since he thought "every well regulated air locomotive should have one." He left a detailed drawing of the machine. We next look at the testimony of Constable Sumpter and Deputy Sheriff McLemore, of Hot Springs, Arkansas: While riding north west: from this city on the night of May 6, 1897, we noticed a brilliant light high in the heavens. Suddenly it disappeared and we said nothing about it, as we were looking for parties and did not want to make any noise. After riding four or five miles around through the hills we again saw the light, which now appeared to be much nearer the earth. We stopped our horses and watched it coming down, until all at once it disappeared behind another hill. We rode on about half a mile further, when our horses refused to go further. About a hundred yards distant we saw two persons moving around with lights. Drawing our Winchesters— for we were now thoroughly aroused to the importance of the situation—we demanded: "Who is that, and what are you doing?" A man with a long dark beard came forth with a lantern in his hand, and on being informed who we were proceeded to tell us that he and the others—a young man and a woman—were travelling through the country in an airship. We could plainly distinguish the outlines of the vessel, which was cigar shaped and about sixty feet long, and looking just like the cuts that have appeared in the papers recently. It was dark and raining and the young man was filling a big sack with water about thirty yards away, and the woman was particular to keep back in the dark. She was holding an umbrella over her head. The man with the whiskers invited us to take a ride, saying thar he could take us where it was not raining. We told him we believed we preferred to get wet. Asking the man why the brilliant light was turned on and off so much, he replied that the light was so powerful that it consumed a great deal of his motive power. He said he would like to stop off in Hot Springs for a few days and take the hot baths, but his time was limited and he could not. He said they were going to wind up at Nashville, Tenn., after thoroughly seeing the country. Being in a hurry we left and upon our return, about forty minutes later, nothing was to be seen. We did not hear or sec the airship when it departed. In the Chicago Chronicle of April 13, 1897, appeared the fol lowing, under the headline "AIRSHIP SEEN IN IOWA": Fontancllc, Iowa, April 12. The airship was seen here at 8:30 tonight, and was viewed by the whole population. It came from the south cast, and was not over 200 feet above the tree tops and moved very slowly, not to exceed ten miles an hour. The machine could be plainly seen, and is described as being sixty feet in length, and the vibration of the wings could be plainly seen. It carried the usual coloured lights, and the working of the machinery could be heard, as also could the strains of music, as from an orchestra. It was hailed, bur passed on to the north, seeming to increase its speed, and disappeared. There is no doubt in Fontanelle that it was the real thing, and is testified to by the most prominent citizens, etc. Here the airship, which had appeared to Captain Hooton as a typically mechanical contraption, takes on a more fairylike ap pearance. The parallel becomes even more striking in the following report, as pointed out by Hanlon. It is extracted from the April 28 edition of the Houston Daily Post: Merkel, Texas, April 26. Some parties returning from church last night noticed a heavy object dragging along with a rope attached. They followed it until, in crossing the railroad, it caught on a rail. On looking up they saw what they supposed was the airship. It was not near enough to get an idea of the dimensions. A light could be seen protruding from several windows; one bright light in front like the headlight of a locomotive. After some ten minutes, a man was seen descending the rope. He came near enough to be plainly seen; he wore a light blue sailor suit and was small in size. lie stopped when he discovered parties at the anchor, and cut the rope below him and sailed off in a northeast direction. The anchor is now on exhibition at the blacksmith shop of Elliot and Miller and is attracting the attention of hundreds of people. "This sounds much too familiar to be taken lightly," comments Hanlon, who reminds his readers of the Sioux City incident— when Robert Hibbard was dragged by an anchor hanging from an airship—and of Drake's and Wilkins's account of two incidents that took place about 1211 A.D. or earlier. According to the Irish story: There happened in the borough of Cloera, one Sunday, while the people were at Mass, a marvel. In this town is a church dedicated to St. Kinarus. It befell that an anchor was dropped from the sky, with a rope attached to it, and one of the flukes caught in the arch above the church door. The people rushed out of the church and saw in the sky a ship with men on board, floating before the anchor cable, and they saw a man leap overboard and jump down to the anchor, as if to release it. lie looked as if he were swimming in water. The folk rushed up and tried to seize him: but the Bishop forbade the people to hold the man, for it might kill him, he said. The man was freed, and hurried up to the ship, where the crew cut the rope and the ship sailed out of sight. But the anchor is in the church, and has been there ever since, as a testimony. In Gervasc of Tilbury's Otis Imperialia, the same account is related as having taken place in Gravescnd, Kent, England. An anchor from a "cloudship" became fastened in a mound of stones in the churchyard. The people heard voices from above, and the rope was moved as if to free the anchor, to no avail. A man was then seen to slide clown the Tope and cut it. In one account, he then climbed back aboard the ship; in another, he died of suffocation. The Houston Post of April 22, 1897, has a further report: Rockland: Mr. John M. Barclay, living near this place, reports that last night about 11 o'clock, after having retired, he heard his dog barking furiously, together with a whining noise. He went to the door to ascertain the trouble and saw something, he says, that made his eyes bulge out and but for the fact that he had been reading of an airship that was supposed to have been in or over Texas, he would have taken to the woods. It was a peculiar shaped body, with an oblong shape, with wings and side attachments of various sizes and shapes. There were brilliant lights, which appeared much brighter than electric lights. When he first saw it, it seemed perfectly stationary about five yards from the ground. It circled a few times and gradually descended to the ground in a pasture adjacent to his house. He took his Winchester and went down to investigate. As soon as the ship, or whatever it might be, alighted, the lights went out. The night was bright enough for a man to be distinguished several yards, and when within about thirty yards of the ship he was met by an ordinary mortal, who requested him to lay his gun aside as no harm was intended. Whereupon the following conversation ensued: Mr. Barclay enquired: "Who are you and what do you want?" "Never mind about my name, call it Smith. I want some lubricating oil and a couple of cold chisels if you can get them, and some bluestone. I suppose the saw mill hard by has the two former articles and the telegraph operator has the bluestone. Here is a ten dollar bill: take it and get us these articles and keep the change for your trouble." Mr. Barclay said: "What have you got down there? Let me go and see it." He who wanted to be called Smith said: "No, we cannot permit you to approach any nearer, but do as we request you and your kindness will be appreciated, and we will call you some future day and reciprocate your kindness by taking you on a trip." Mr. Barclay went and procured the oil and cold chisels, but could not get the bluestone. They had no change and Mr. Barclay tendered him the ten dollar bill, but same was refused. The man shook hands with him and thanked him cordially and asked that he not follow him to the vessel. As he left Mr. Barclay called him and asked him where he was from and where he was going. He replied, "From anywhere, but we will be in Greece day after tomorrow." He got on board, when there was again the whirling noise, and the thing was gone, as Mr. Barclay expresses it, like a shot out of a gun. Mr. Barclay is perfectly reliable. The same night, half an hour later (according to the Houston Post of April 26 and reported independently): Josserand: Considerable excitement prevails at this writing in this usually quiet village of Josserand, caused by a visit of the noted airship, which has been at so many points of late. Mr. Frank Nichols, a prominent farmer living about two miles east of here, and a man of unquestioned veracity, was awakened night before last near the hour of twelve by a whirring noise similar to that made by machinery. Upon looking out he was startled upon beholding brilliant lights streaming from a ponderous vessel of strange proportions, which rested upon the ground in his cornfield. Having read the despatches, published in the Post of the noted aerial navigators, the truth at once flashed over him that he was one of the fortunate ones and with all the bravery of Priam at the siege of Troy [sic] Mr. Nichols started out to investigate. Before reaching the strange midnight visitor he was accosted by two men with buckets who asked permission to draw water from his well. Thinking he might be entertaining heavenly visitors instead of earthly mortals, permission was readily granted. Mr. Nichols was kindly invited to accompany them to the ship. He conversed freely with the crew, composed of six or eight individuals about the ship. The machinery was so complicated that in his short interview he could gain no knowledge of its workings. However, one of the crew told him the problem of aerial navigation had been solved. The ship or car is built of a newly discovered material that has the property of self sustenance in the air, and the motive power is highly condensed electricity. He was informed that five of these ships were built at a small town in Iowa. Soon the invention will be given to the public. An immense stock company is now being formed and within the next year the machines will be in general use. Mr. Nichols lives at Josserand, Trinity County, Texas, and will convince any incredulous one by showing the place where the ship rested. In the Flying Saucer Review, Jerome Clark observes that "the 1897 wave indicates the futility of any attempt to divorce flying objects from the general situation in which they operate." This makes the study of such objects infinitely broader than the simple investigation, in scientific terms, of a new phenomenon; for if the appearance and behavior of the objects arc functions of our inter pretation at any particular time in the development of our culture, then what chances can we have of ever knowing the truth? In Chalcix, Dordognc, France, on October 4, 1954, Mr. Garreau, a man who is regarded as trustworthy by local residents, saw a round flying object, the size of a small truck, shaped somewhat like a cauldron. It landed in his field, and a door slid open. Two "normal" men in brown coveralls came out. They looked like Europeans and shook hands with Garreau. Then they asked: "Paris? North?" The poor farmer was so taken aback that he did not answer. The two men stroked bis dog and flew away. On October 20, that same year, a forty year old Czech worker who lives in France was going to work at 3:00 A.M. near Raonl'Etape, Vosgcs, when a quarter of a mile from his house he met a heavy set man, of medium height, wearing a gray jacket with insignias on the shoulders and a motorcyclist's helmet and carrying a gun. The stranger spoke an unknown language. The witness, Lazlo Ujvari,8 knew some Russian and tried that language. The man, who spoke in a high pitched voice, understood him at once and asked: "Where am I? In Italy, in Spain?" Then he wanted to know how far he was from the German border and what time it was. Ujvari told him it was about 2: 30, and the man pulled out a watch, which said four o'clock. The visitor then told the witness to move along. Soon, Ujvari came into view of a craft that had apparently landed on the road. It was shaped like two saucers glued together, about five feet in diameter and three feet high. Ujvari came within thirty feet of it, but the unknown individual told him to move away, and soon he saw the object rise vertically, "with the noise of a sewing machine." October 12, 1954. At about 10:30 P.M. at Sainte Maric d'Herblay, on the Atlantic coast of France, thirteen year old Gilbert Lelay" was walking around outside, about half a mile away from his parents' home, when he saw, in a pasture, a machine he describes as a "phosphorescent cigar." Close to the object was a man wearing a gray suit, boots, and a gray hat. In a familiar gesture, the man put his hand on Gilbert's shoulder and told him in French: "Look but don't touch." In his other hand, the man held a sphere from which purple rays were emitted. Shortly thereafter, he climbed aboard the craft and shut the door with a clapping sound. Gilbert had time to see something like a control console with numerous colored lights on it. The craft arose vertically, made a couple of loops while throwing light in all directions, and vanished. A foggy morning, June, 1968: Argentina. An artist, seventyycar old Benjamin Solari Parravicini, was walking outside when he was confronted by a tall blond man with clear eyes, who addressed him in an unknown language. Thinking he was some insane character, the witness went on his way, but then he lost consciousness. He woke up inside a strange craft, where he was told, among other things, that the saucer people were keeping watch on the earth to avoid a catastrophe. July 18, 1967: Boardman, Ohio. Rev. Anthony de Polo was awakened by a strong sound similar to the background music of a science fiction television show. He thought that someone was telling him to go downstairs. He did so and looked outside: there, between his house and the next one, he saw a figure wearing a luminous suit. De Polo went outside. The sound started again, then he received the message: "You have nothing to fear. I shall not hurt you, and I know you will not harm me," De Polo came closer. The sound started again, and he received a third message: "Danger. I must leave." De Polo saw a light, or rather a kind of glow, in the sky. When he lowered his eyes, the strange entity had vanished. March 23, 1966: Temple, Oklahoma. W. E. Laxson,fifty seven, a civilian instructor with the U.S. Air Force, was driving south toward Sheppard Air Force Base at 5:00 A.M. when he found the road blocked by a large object, the size of a Douglas C 124 Globemaster without wings or engines, resting on pads. A man dressed in coveralls, with a kind of baseball cap on his head, appeared to be examining something on the underside of the craft. When asked how this man looked, Laxson replied: He was just a plain old G.I. mechanic,. or a crew chief or what ever he might happen to be on that crew. He had a flashlight in his hand and he was almost kneeling on his right knee with his left hand touching the bottom of the fuselage which was about three feet from the pavement. And he added: People wonder if they looked as "an outer space deal" .. . I told them I didn't know what "an outer space deal" looked like, but I do know this was made in America, I am sure. It had a plain old G.I. in it, I know that much, I would know the man if I saw him in Chicago tomorrow. On October 18, 1954, at 10:45 P.M., near the lake of Saint Point, in the east of France, a Miss Bourriot saw a bright light on the road and stopped her bicycle. She saw a man, average in size, close to the light. With him were two dwarfs. THE FUNCTIONING LIE What does it all mean? Is it reasonable to draw a parallel between religious apparitions, the fairy faith, the reports of dwarf NURSI.INGS OF IMMORTALITY like beings with supernatural powers, the airship tales in the United States in the last century, and the present stories of UFO landings? I would strongly argue that it is—for one simple reason: the mechanisms that have generated these various beliefs are identical. Their human context and their effect on humans arc constant. And it is my conclusion that the observation of this very deep mechanism is a crucial one. It has little to do with the problem of knowing whether UFO's are physical objects or not. Attempting to understand the meaning, the purpose of the so called flying saucers, as many people are doing today, is just as futile as was the pursuit of the fairies, if one makes the mistake of confusing appearance and reality. The phenomenon has stable, invariant features, some of which we have tried to identify and label clearly. But we have also had to note carefully the chameleonlikc character of the secondary attributes of the sightings: the shapes of the objects, the appearances of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment into which they arc projected. The airship stories are especially relevant in this connection. As we have seen, a good number of bearded characters alighted in the Midwest and elsewhere in 1897, to request water from a well, bluestoncs, or other similar things. The stories they told were be lievable, if somewhat astounding, to American farmers of the time. The airship itself corresponded to the popular concept of an elaborate flying machine; it had wheels, turbines, wings, powerful lights. There is only one detail not yet dealt with: the fact that the airship, though it was believable to the witnesses of 1897, is no longer credible to us. We know very well that the device as described could not possibly fly, unless its outside appearance was designed to deceive potential witnesses. But if so, why? And what was it? What was its purpose? Perhaps the airship, like the fairy tricks, the flying saucers, was a lie, so well engineered that its image in human consciousness could sink very deep indeed and then be forgotten—as UFO landings are forgotten, as the appearance of supernatural beings in the Middle Ages are forgotten. But, then, are they really forgotten? Human actions are based on imagination, belief, and faith, not on objective observation—as military and political experts know well. Even science, which claims its methods and theories are rationally developed, is really shaped by emotion and fancy, or by fear. And to control human imagination is to shape mankind's collective destiny, provided the source of this control is not identifiable by the public. And indeed it is one of the objectives of any government's policies to prepare the public for unavoidable changes or to stimulate its activity in some desirable direction. Thus the Soviets have skilfully employed the services of science fiction writers to supply the emotional support of their space effort among the young people. In the Western world, control over our imaginations is more diffuse, and many sources compete for it. But it is significant that intelligence agencies and advertising companies alike should be so highly interested in folklore. Not only are Batman and the Jolly Green Giant instances of experiments in this direction; the Vietnam war has seen similar appeals to public imagination through the use of local superstition. Recent discussions in Congress regarding the advisability of military experimentation with witchcraft in black Africa is also a case in point.* I am not saying, of course, that the UFO phenomenon is pro duced by a similar trick. But I do say that, beyond the question of the physical nature of the objects, we should be studying the deeper problem of their impact on our imagination and culture. Whatever they are, a lot of books about them have been written, sold, and read. How the UFO phenomena will affect, in the long run, our views about science, about religion, about the exploration of space, it is impossible to measure. But to those who follow the situation closely, the UFO phenomenon docs appear to have a real effect. And a peculiar feature of this mechanism is that it affects equally those who "believe" and those who oppose the reality of the phenomenon in a physical sense. For the time being the only positive statement we can make, without fear of contradiction, is that: it is possible to make large * A century ago, the French were using magicians to impress African leaders. sections of any population believe in the existence of supernatural races, in the possibility of flying machines, in the plurality of in habited worlds, by exposing them to a few carefully engineered scenes the details of which are adapted to the culture and super stitions of a particular time and place. Could the meetings with UFO entities be such artificial con structions? Consider their changing character. In the United States, they appear as science fiction monsters. In South America, they are sanguinary and quick to get into a fight. In France, they behave like rational, Cartesian, peace loving tourists. The Irish Gentry, if we believe its spokesmen, was an "aristocratic race" organized somewhat like a religious military order. The airship pilots were strongly individualistic characters with all the features of the American farmer. Now consider the following case, which I regard as the "perfect landing." The date is October 23, 1954, and the place near Tripoli, Libya. About 3:00 A.M. an Italian farmer saw a flying craft land a few dozen yards from him. It was shaped like an egg laid horizontally. The upper half was transparent and flooded with very white light; the lower half appeared to be metallic. The fore part had two side ports; the central part an external ladder. The hind part had two vertically disposed wheels, one above the other, and two cylindrical protruding tubes. While descending, the craft made a noise similar to that of a compressor "like those used for inflating car tires." No propeller was visible. The fuselage was surmounted by two antennae, one behind the other, and bore a kind of undercarriage with six wheels (two pairs in the fore part of the craft, one pair behind). The machine was about six yards long and three yards wide. Inside it were six men in yellowish coveralls wearing gas masks. One of them took his mask off in order to blow into a sort of tube: his face appeared to be that of a normal human being. When the witness got close to the object and put a hand on the ladder in order to climb it, a strong electric shock threw him to the ground. One of the occupants made gestures as if to warn him, for his sake, to keep away from the craft. Another occupant pulled Out a wheel and again put it back where it formerly was. Then, pushing a button, he caused a kind of half container to cover the wheel. Inside the cockpit, a kind of radio set, complete with wires and operated by a man with earphones, was visible. All six pilots were busy on their instrument panels. The incident lasted about twenty minutes. Then the object silently took off and reached an altitude of fifty yards. Then it went away at a dizzying speed, toward the east. The imprints left by the undercarriage's wheels on the soft ground have been photographed. They resembled those of normal rubber wheels. Their length was only about two feet. If it were possible to make three dimensional holograms with mass, and to project them through time, I would say this is what the farmer saw. And with that theory we could explain many of the apparitions: in numerous UFO cases and in some religious miracles, the beings appeared as three dimensional images whose feet did not actually touch the ground. But what about the other physical actions, such as the electric shocks? As we read the account of the Libyan landing case, it is tempting to assume that the farmer, far from witnessing by chance the maneuvers of interplanetary visitors, was deliberately exposed to a scene designed to be recorded by him and transmitted to us. Hence, the gas masks, the instrument panels, and the radio set— "complete with wires." The same is true with the following Italian case, which took place in Abbiate Guazzone, near Varese, on April 24, 1950: At 10:00 P.M., Bruno Facchini heard and saw sparks which he attributed to a storm, but he soon discovered a dark mass hovering between a pole and a tree two hundred yards from his house. A man dressed in tight fitting clothes and wearing a helmet appeared to be making repairs. There were three other figures working around the huge craft. This work being over, a trap through which light had been shining was closed, and the thing took off. Other details were as follows: the object made a sound similar to that of a giant beehive and the air seemed strangely warm around it. Two of the men were standing on the ground near a ladder; the third one was on a telescopic elevator, the base of which touched the ground, and was holding something near a group of pipes: this produced the sparks seen by Facchini. They were about five feet nine inches tall, dressed in gray diving suits with an oval transparent glass in front of their faces, which were concealed behind gray masks. From the fore portion of the masks a flexible pipe emerged at the level of the mouth. They wore earphones. Inside the craft could be seen a series of oxygen type containers and many dials. When Facchini offered his help, the men talked among themselves in guttural sounds, and one of them took a cameralike device from around his neck and projected a beam of light on Facchini, who tumbled away for several yards. He was then caught by a rush of air and thrown again to the ground. They subsequently ignored him as they recovered the elevator and brought it inside the craft, which took off. After a sleepless night, Facchini returned to the site and found some metal fragments left by the soldering operation, also four circular imprints and patches of scorched grass. He revealed the observation only ten days later, when his doctor treated him for the pains and bruises resulting from his fall and advised him to call police. Ministry of Defense technicians who examined the metal samples found them to consist of an "anti friction material very resistant to heat." The incident had other witnesses, who testified privately. 1 ^ Had Mr. Facchini been exposed deliberately to a faked appari4; <* tion of "space beings"? What could be the purpose of such a worldwide elaborate hoax? Who can afford to contrive such a complex scheme, for so little apparent result? Is human imagination alone capable of 2 ;f playing such tricks on itself? Or should we hypothesize that an advanced race somewhere in the universe and sometime in the future has been showing us three dimensional space operas for the last two thousand years, in an attempt to guide our civilization? If so, they certainly do not deserve our congratulations! Are we dealing instead with a parallel universe, where there are races living, and where we may go at our expense, never return to the present? Are these races only semi human, so that order to maintain contact with us, they need crossbreeding with men and women of our planet? Is this the origin of the many tales and legends where genetics plays a great role: the symbolism f the Virgin in occultism and religion, the fairy tales involving human midwives and changelings, the sexual overtones of the flying saucer reports, the biblical stories of intermarriage between the Lord's angels and terrestrial women, whose offspring were giants? From that mysterious universe, have objects that can materialize and "dematcrialize" at will been projected? Are the UFO's "windows" rather than "objects"? There is nothing to support these assumptions, and yet, in view of the historical continuity of the phenomenon, alternatives are hard to find, unless we deny the reality of all the facts, as our peace of mind would indeed prefer. The problem cannot be solved today. If we absolutely must have something to believe, then we should join one of the numerous groups of people who have all the "answers." Read Menzel's books or the Condon Report, that fine piece of scientific recklessness. Or subscribe to the magazines that "prove" that "flying saucers are real and from outer space." I have not written this book for such people, but for those few who have gone through all this and have graduated to a higher, clearer level of perception of the total meaning of that tenuous dream that underlies the many nightmares of human history, for those who have recognized, within themselves and in others, the delicate levers of imagination and will not be afraid to experiment with them. CONJECTURES. It may seem useless to conjecture about a phenomenon that, according to all authorities, remains unidentified. But this book has shown that it has left a clear series of marks in the beliefs and attitudes of our contemporaries, in a pattern not only identifiable but also by no means unprecedented. Hence it is not necessarily pointless to try to devise critical tests, both sociological and physical in nature, to determine whether or not purposeful design is involved in the phenomena the witnesses describe. If the answer is yes, the problem of deducing the identity of the intelligence that generates it is not necessarily a solvable one. This latter fact should therefore be the basis of any future attempt at theoretical interpretation. Whenever a set of unusual circumstances is presented, it is in the nature of the human mind to analyze it until a rational pattern is encountered at some level. But it is quite conceivable that na ture should present us with circumstances so deeply organized that our observational and logical errors would entirely mask the pattern to be identified. To the scientist, there is nothing new here. The history of science consists in dual progress: the refine ment of observational techniques and the improvement of analytical methods. On the other hand, the proposition that the universe might contain intelligent creatures exhibiting such an organization that no model of it could be constructed on the basis of currently classified concepts is also theoretically plausible. The behavior of such beings would then necessarily appear random or absurd, or would go undetected, especially if they possessed physical means of retiring at will beyond the human perceptual range. It is interesting, but only incidental, to observe that such physical actions would appear on scientific records as mere random accidents, easily ascribablc to instrumental error or to a variety of natural causes. Considering the UFO phenomenon as a special instance of that more fundamental question, we are presented with the dual possibility of very long term unsolvability and of continued manifestation, and this is true whether the phenomenon is natural or artificial in nature. This being the case, the development of a new myth feeding upon this duality is entirely predictable. In the absence of a rational solution to the mystery, and public interest in the matter being intense, it is quite likely that in the coming years every new brand of charlatanism will use it as a base, although it is not possible to predict its exact form. We may very well be living the early years of a new mythological movement, and it may eventually give our technological age its Olympus, its fairyland, or its Walhalla, whether we regard such a development as an asset or as a blow to our culture. Because many observations of UFO phenomena appear self consistent and at the same time irreconcilable with scientific knowledge, a logical vacuum has been created that human imagination tries to fill with its own fantasies. Such situations have been frequently observed in the past, and they have given us both the highest and the basest forms of religious, poetic, and political activity. It is entirely possible that the phenomenon we study here will give rise to similar developments, because its manifestations coincide with a renewal of interest in the human value of technology. There currently is considerable puzzlement among the public, and especially among the young, whenever the attitude of scien tists confronted with such phenomena is discussed. Sometimes their questions contain a note of anguish. Typically, they ask the following: "How can we react to the flood of absurd, incoherent stories about flying saucers?" "What is the use of pursuing a study of science if it cannot be applied to the rational analysis of such phenomena?" "In a time when the young are encouraged to follow with enthusiasm the progress of space exploration, why should the subject of life in the universe be a forbidden topic?" "Several organizations exist in the United States devoted to the investigation of this problem. They seem to have the support of some reputable scientists, and they often allege that the government is convinced that the phenomena have an intelligent origin; but that it hides the truth from the public. Should we not join such organizations to gain knowledge of the subject?" A tentative answer could perhaps be formulated as follows. First, it is a mistake to believe in Authority, or to put blind faith in official reports, scientific theses, or the theory of a particular author, whenever a point of research is discussed. As objective as my reader perhaps thinks I am, I cannot help but have a general image in mind as I write this book, and so do all writers, even writers on subjects as amenable to objective analysis as chemistry or geometry—no matter how loudly they deny being biased. Therefore one must borrow from books only those elements that appear properly documented, and they must be confronted with a larger human context. A good researcher should not be afraid to change his mind; he should not feel desperate because his comforting beliefs leave him as soon as he begins to think critically. If he applies these rules, he may not solve all the problems he attacks, but at least he will be less likely to fall victim of every delusion or fad that is associated with them. Just as some cheap magazines are deliberately written to gencrate fear in the public and to capitalize on that fear, some scientific reports arc deliberate hoaxes designed to reinforce the credibility of our scientific, political, or military establishments. This is a fact of life, and it should not discourage one from the study of science. It does not necessarily mean that anybody is hiding some formidable truth. If the idea that science knows nothing about certain phenomena is unacceptable to the public, why should it he more easily acceptable to professional scientists? Those groups of enthusiasts who advocate a crash study of flying saucers by specially hired scientific consultants forget that a given discipline can make progress only if competent professionals are genuinely and sufficiently interested in it to direct their efforts toward its solution, and this is not done by money alone, or by act of Congress. Either there is no scientific value at all in the many UFO observations that have accumulated over the years, in which case no amount of publicity will have any effect on its solution, or these observations contain scientific paydirt, in which case that residue will be recognized and exploited by direct research, and will result in novel developments that current methods are by definition incapable of predicting. A young researcher should keep in mind that he will never make a serious contribution to the study of this problem, or of any problem, unless he first develops his own competence to the point where he can select an aspect of it and cover it by himself, without relying on the emotional form of thinking which characterizes the enthusiast. It is precisely because science is the process through which unsolvable emotional arguments can be transformed into organized sets of sub problems amenable to rational analysis that the UFO phenomenon is interesting. Therefore, to say that UFO's are not a scientific problem, or even to pose the question, is to utter an absurdity. There is no such thing as a scientific problem: it is the man who looks at the problem who is scientific in his approach or who is not. Science is an object in the mind of man, not a characteristic we are at liberty either to bestow upon or to withdraw from every funny looking contraption that happens to cross our skies. For a scientist, the only valid question, in this context, is to decide whether the phenomenon can be studied by itself, or whether it is an instance of a deeper problem. This book has attempted to illustrate, and only to illustrate, the latter approach. And the conclusion is that, through the UFO phenomenon, we have the unique opportunity to observe folklore in the making, and to gather scientific material at the deepest source of human imagination. We will be the object of much contempt by future students of our civilization if we allow this material to be lost, for "tradition is a meteor which, once it falls, cannot be rekindled." The manner in which observations are gathered should lie of interest to the sociologist because it exhibits certain amusing features. There is a tendency among the believers to gather into large, very formal organizations, where they waste all their energy and, sometimes, a good deal of money, with practically no visible result. It is clear that such organizations answer a psychological need rather than a genuine desire to discover the answer to an interesting intellectual problem. Maintaining such a group implies a tremendous overhead—mailing lists, bookkeeping, etc.— and experience shows that research is always the last activity it can afford. Instead, these groups generate so much internal bitterness and so many intcrorganizational feuds that they prove to be serious obstacles to independent researchers who are simply trying to get firsthand data and do not care to support one particular personality or theory against another. There are so many such groups now that their publications no longer reach the scientists, who can hardly be expected to read fifteen or twenty specialized magazines every month. If people really wanted to get at the root of the UFO phenomenon, they should simply constitute a laTge number of small, informal circles, the only objective of which would be the gathering of firsthand reports. It should be obvious that professional scientists are not in a position to do this. They know the problem only through the daily press, which does not give information on reports made outside a small area. When it does, the witness account is so biased that the information becomes worthless. And even if the article is accurate, there is no way to measure the reliability of the witnesses or to learn their standing in the community. Only local residents can evaluate such an odd occurrence as a UFO sighting at its true weight. The creation of a network of active but informal groups would also help solve the problem of documentation and publication. When the main organized groups do conduct investigations, they bury them in their files or publish only biased, heavily edited summaries, thus screwing down the lid on the observational material they precisely set out to reveal. To summarize: neither a crash program staffed with twenty Nobel prize winners, nor computer correlations of millions of poorly observed parameters, nor mental telepathy with superior space beings, nor the organization of hundreds of people into observation squads, scanning the heavens every night with binoculars and a pure heart, will easily dispose of a problem that has eluded our radar, aircraft, astronomers, and physical theories for so long. The only thing that might help us make some progress toward an understanding of the phenomenon is the publication of good reports. They must be firsthand reports. They must be gathered fast and published fast. They must circulate freely. In the United States, unfortunately, there is not a single serious journal whose columns are open to private researchers for the publication of such investigations, but there are several respected periodicals in other parts of the world, notably the Flying Saucer Review, of London, often quoted here, which is becoming a major source of material for the student of folklore. In French, the GEPA Bulletin and Lumieres dans la Nuit are two sources whose honesty this writer has found indisputable. But none of these publications has the answer to the UFO problem. The material for many years of very constructive study lies about us unnoticed; it is only when witnesses come forward with the type of observation discussed in this book that we realize that never in history has the human mind been so productive, so secret, and so fascinating. We must finally address ourselves to the question: "If we reject the naive theory that the UFO phenomenon is caused by friendly visitors from Mars, what alternatives can we suggest?" It is amusing to try to answer this question. Imaginative science fiction buffs could perhaps look into the following lines of speculation: 1. There exists a natural phenomenon whose manifestations border on both the physical and the mental. There is a medium in which human dreams can be implemented, and this is the mechanism by which UFO events are generated, needing no superior intelligence to trigger them. This would explain the fugitivity of UFO manifestations, the alleged contact with friendly occupants, and the fact that the objects appear to keep pace with human technology and to use current symbols. The theory explains the behavior of the "visitors": aggressive in Latin America, "Cartesian" in France, "alien monsters" in the United States, etc. It also, naturally, explains the totality of religious miracles as well as ghosts and other so called supernatural phenomena. 1. The same result would be obtained if we could hypothesize mental entities, which would be simultaneously perceptible to groups of independent witnesses. Unfortunately it would stop short of explaining the traces left by such phenomena. 2. We could also imagine that for centuries some superior intelligence has been projecting into our environment (chosen for reasons best known to that intelligence) various artificial objects whose creation is a pure form of art. Perhaps it enjoys our puzzlement, or perhaps it is trying to teach us some new concept. Perhaps it is acting in a purely gratuitous effort, and its creations are as impossible for us to understand as is the Picasso sculpture in Chicago to the birds that perch on it. Like Picasso and his art, the great UFO Master shapes our culture, but most of us remain unaware of it. Unfortunately, none of these attractive theories has a scientific leg to stand upon! I must apologize for presenting them here, but I only wanted to show how quickly one could be carried into pure fantasy as soon as the hard lesson of the facts was ignored. Clearly, a hundred or a thousand such theories could be enumerated at very little expense, and every one of them could serve as the basis for a very nice new myth, religion, or pseudo scientific fad. If we decide to avoid extreme speculation, but to make certain basic observations from the existing data, five principal facts stand out rather clearly: Fact L There has been among the public, in all countries, since the middle of 1946, an extremely active generation of colorful rumors. They center on a considerable number of observations of unknown machines close to the ground in rural areas, the physical traces left by these machines, and their various effects on humans and animals. Fact 2. When the underlying archetypes are extracted from these rumors, the saucer myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy faith of Celtic countries, the observations of the scholars of past ages, and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological descriptions place them in the same category as the present day ufonauts. Fact 3, The entities human witnesses report to have seen, heard, i° and touched fall into various biological types. Among them are A beings of giant stature, men indistinguishable from us, winged £ creatures, and various types of monsters. Most of the so called jf"pilots, however, are dwarfs and form two main groups: (1) dark, hairy beings—identical to the gnomes of medieval theory—with V small, bright eyes and deep, rugged, "old" voices; and (2) beings I — who answer the description of the sylphs of the Middle Ages u^or the elves of the fairy faith—with human complexions, over pj£ sized heads, and silvery voices. All the beings have been described and without breathing apparatus. Beings of various cate have been reported together. Fact 4. The entities' reported behavior is as consistently absurd ^a s the appearance of their craft is ludicrous. In numerous instances 'I of verbal communication with them, their assertions have been ,"•* systematically misleading. This is true for all cases on record, O£ from encounters with the Gentry in the British Isles to conversa.^•tions with airship engineers during the 1897 Midwest flap and . ^discussions with the alleged Martians in Europe, North and South ^ America, and elsewhere. This absurd behavior has had the effect ^ of keeping professional scientists away from the area where that activity was taking place. It has also served to give the saucer myth its religious and mystical overtones. Fact 5. The mechanism of the apparitions, in legendary, historical, and modern times, is standard and follows the model of religious miracles. Several cases, which bear the official stamp of the Catholic Church fFatima, Guadalupe, etc.), are in fact—if one applies the definitions strictly—nothing more than UFO phenomena where the entity has delivered a message having to do with religious beliefs rather than with fertilizers or engineering. Given the above five facts I believe the following three propositions to be true: Proposition 1. The behavior of nonhuman visitors to our planet, or the behavior of a superior race coexisting with us on this planet, would not necessarily appear purposeful to a human observer. Scientists who brush aside UFO reports because "obviously intelligent visitors would not behave like that" simply have not given serious thought to the problem of nonhunian intelligence. 162 Observation and deduction agree, in fact, that the organized action of a superior race must appear absurd to the inferior one. That this does not preclude contact and even cohabitation is an obvious fact of daily life on our planet, where humans, animals, and insects have interwoven activities in spite of their different levels of nervous system organization. Proposition 2. If we recognize that the structure and nature of time is as much of a puzzle to modern physicists as it was to Reverend Kirk, then it follows that any theory of the universe that does not take our ignorance in this respect into account is bound to remain an academic exercise. In particular, such a theory could never be invoked seriously in a discussion of the constraints placed on possible visitors to our planet. Proposition 3. The entire mystery we are discussing contains all the elements of a myth that could be utilized to serve political or sociological purposes, a fact illustrated by the curious link between the contents of the reports themselves and the progress of human technology, from aerial ships to dirigibles to ghost rockets to flying saucers—a link that has never received a satisfactory interpretation in a sociological framework. With respect to the last point, I find it remarkable that the first instance of a blackout caused by a UFO should be found in Twilight Bar, a play written by Arthur Kocstler in 1933. During the play, which takes place on a small unnamed island where a civil war is about to break out, an enormous "meteor" flies over the town with a high pitched whistling sound as all the lights go out. The craft plunges into the sea, and two beings, dressed in white coveralls and moving as if in a trance, come ashore and introduce themselves as messengers sent to warn mankind that it has three days in which to mend its ways. Otherwise, the creatures say, mankind will be destroyed and the earth will be repopulated by a superior race. Similarly, I am indebted to Donald Hanlon for pointing out that the first reference to UFO effects on car ignition came in a novel written in 1950 by Bernard Newman and entitled The Flying Saucer. It is true that when Newman's book was written, some UFO reports involving magnetic disturbances (of the compass) were circulating. Even in 1944, the military had already amassed considerable information about unidentified flying objects, the first large scale scientific investigation having been done the previous year. But the fact remains that the coincidence between these works of imagination and the actual details of the reports that came from the public is a remarkable one, and it opens the way to unlimited speculation. Unfortunately, this is precisely the point where we must stop speculating. To conclude, let us remark that the density (timewise) of UFO manifestations is not decreasing. Let us also note that knowledge of the structure of time would imply superior knowledge of destiny (I am using the word "destiny" to designate not the fate of individuals but the mechanism through which physical events unfold and the canvas upon which they are implemented). Perhaps I should remind the reader of two points we have touched upon earlier: (1) the relativity of time in Magonia, a theory passed on to us in numerous tales we have reviewed; and (2) that astonishing little remark made by a sylph to Facius Cardan, which antedates quantum theory by four centuries: "He added that God created [the universe] from moment to moment, so that should He desist for an instant the world would perish." As Jerome Cardan says, "Be this fact or fable, so it stands." I cannot offer the key to this mystery. I can only repeat: the search may be futile; the solution may lie forever beyond our grasp; the apparent logic of our most elementary deductions may evaporate. Perhaps what we search for is no more than a dream that, becoming part of our lives, never existed in reality. We cannot be sure that we study something real, because we do not know what reality is; we can only be sure that our study will help us understand more, far more, about ourselves. This is not a worthless task, and this idea gives me comfort, as I leave you with the lines of Milton: I took it for a faery vision Of some gay creatures of the element That in the colours of the rainbow live And play i the plighted clouds. I was awestruck And as I passed, I worshipped; if those you seek It were a journey like the path to heaven To help you find them. APPENDIX A CENTURY OF UFO LANDINGS (1868 1968) To COMPILE a catalogue is to invite criticism. Catalogues are obtained by integrating information over a variety of sources, but not every piece of information has an identifiable source; information drawn from a single source is always questionable; information gathered from several sources is generally contradictory. To compile a catalogue, then, is to weigh alternatives and to make difficult choices. In classical fields (in astronomy, for instance), the original sources are people scientifically trained in the same discipline as the man who conducts the compilation. Both follow common rules and observe a common ethic. They each provide many entries, so that personal bias can be estimated with some degree of accuracy. A general validity measure can be given for the catalogue as a whole. None of these guarantees exists in the present domain. The study of UFO's is more than a descriptive analysis of folklore, but it has not developed into a scientific field. It differs from folklore in two respects: the individuals at the source of the rumor are, for most of them, still alive; and physical effects are, in a significant number of cases, available to the analyst. What is lacking to bring the matter into the realm of science is a proper definition of the phenomenon to be studied, along with a set of criteria to determine the significance of any particular report. In the absence of a general presentation of outstanding cases, it is naturally impossible to ascribe meaning to an individual sighting, taken out of context. Criteria that are proposed under those conditions remain purely philosophical exercises, and definitions are similarly void of interest. For these reasons, it was felt that a catalogue of unsolved landings might be useful to those currently engaged in a serious study of the problem. The sample of observers, earlier studies have shown, is a true cross section of the rural population: all ages and all nations are represented. These observers witnessed an event that, to them, was unique, and it was not always reported to authorities, but spread through the public or was given to the newspapers. Such accounts we shall find worded very loosely. Specialized magazines that record the data seldom bother to check them. Typically, they add errors of their own, giving the date of the newspaper as the date of the sighting or failing to recognize obviously duplicated versions of the same case. All those who have investigated claims of UFO sightings know well the frustration caused by journalistic inaccuracy. Fortunately, official sources can be consulted as a check on the reported events. Such sources often provide precise data not only on the phenomenon itself but also on the conditions of the observation. To compile a catalogue of UFO sightings, we must start with a number of books, magazines, and private files from which a general index is built. In doing so, we find that many writers do not quote their sources, so that we must either take their story at face value (reaction of the average reader) or reject it summarily (reaction of the average scientist). A third solution exists, but it is costly and extremely time consuming; it involves cross indexing every available source with all others, so that the path of the information through the reporting network can be traced back to the origin. Naturally, the attempt is not always successful. The publication of a catalogue such as this, however, may well stimulate new studies into cases we have failed to clarify either because we had to rely on a single source of data or because fresh field investigation would have been the only way to arrive at the truth. It is impossible to work alone when compiling such a catalogue, but the problem is complicated rather than simplified when people from different continents must cooperate to prepare a list of events that they see from different angles and know from different versions—which in turn reflect the biases of local authors, translation errors, etc. Lack of official recognition makes it very difficult to organize meetings or to exchange extensive files, in view of the costs involved in such operations. A compromise must therefore be found between completeness, accuracy, and practicality. The method we used in the preparation of the present catalogue represents such a compromise. The construction of a cross index of sources of UFO literature was begun by our group in 1961. We started with the French literature on the subject and extended it gradually to the Anglo Saxon literature, then to that of the rest of the world. We were fortunate, coming into the field at that relatively late date, to benefit from the work of several predecessors who had already gathered in a systematic fashion exten sive files covering one particular region or period. Foremost among these were the files of Aime Michel and official data in Europe and in the United States. Correlation and overlap between the main sources have been studied in an effort to strengthen the validity of the whole, and it is from this index of sightings that the present catalogue of landings (which is but a small fraction of the general list) has been extracted. Draft versions were produced and circulated among a handful of people who have gained special knowledge of this subject either through personal interest or in an official capacity. They were thus able to contribute comments and additions to the list, which is finally presented here for the examination of a wider public. It is our hope that this preliminary work will encourage anyone who possesses relevant information and understands the need for the centralization of descriptions of such phenomena to come forward and join this continuing effort. SOURCES OF INFORMATION It must be realized that a complete study of even the existing files— not to mention field investigation and active follow up—would require full time attention and a permanent staff. Speaking solely from the point of view of data gathering, a serious examination of the sighting reports that have accumulated in recent years cannot be conducted until a major institution seriously devotes some of its facilities to this task. It would be unreasonable to expect a powerful stream of rumors such as those surrounding the UFO phenomenon to be susceptible to analysis in a few months, while many universities must devote considerable time and effort in the understanding of classical folklore themes (such as Indian tribal rites and artifacts), which present no unsolved technological riddle and affect a much smaller and much more localized series of sources, This fact being granted, considerable clarification can be brought by the students of the phenomenon, provided they select an area small enough to be covered with some degree of reliability in spite of the inadequate facilities at their disposal. And, indeed, excellent work of this type is not lacking: Richard Hall with UFO Evidence (1964), Hanlon, Clark, and Farish with their important articles about the 1897 wave, and Ted Bloecher with his authoritative Report on the UFO Wave of 1947, to cite only a few, have published such works. But a general catalogue of landings from international sources has been sorely needed. To provide adequate historical perspective while preserving homogeneity of the material, we decided to focus our attention on the reports of the period 1868 1968. Before discussing our sources in detail, we should pay tribute to a researcher who compiled not only a list of landings but also a general catalogue of sightings of all categories, as early as 1961: Guy Quincy, whose catalogues have unfortunately never been published. In France they circulated in manuscript form and have served as a base for our earliest index. Since 1961 we have found independent sources that provided cross references for most items in these listings, but a few cases were never confirmed in this fashion, and our source in such cases will be indicated thus (Quincy). Original references, unfortunately, were not given in his catalogues. At the end of 1963, when we compiled preliminary statistics on occupant reports, we were able to gather only 80 such cases.* It is a measure of the remarkable research done by many individuals in the last few years that in the present catalogue the number should have quadrupled, since 35 per cent of all landing accounts indexed here include descriptions of occupants. A third and very significant step toward an up to date reference was taken in 1966 when Charles Bowen, the present editor of the Flying Saucer Review, agreed to serve as the chairman of an international team of contributors and to devote a special issue of his publication to "The Humanoids." That special issue remains an outstanding document on the question of the occupants, along with Michel's Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery. "The Humanoids" was of special interest not only because it listed over three hundred landing reports but also because it contained for the first time extensive bibliographies and sources. This will allow us to give it as unique reference for many cases in the present list. The notation will therefore refer the reader to page 34 of the Flying Saucer Review special issue for a detailed discussion and bibliography. Within the scope of this catalogue, it was impossible to give adequate treatment of the many interpretations that had been offered for each sighting, and we felt our role was simply to provide in all cases the reference to the most complete and most readily accessible authority. Descriptions of landings can be found in specialized journals and in many books in addition to those quoted above. Charles Fort mentions a few such incidents in his works, and we quote from the Holt edition * Vnllec, "A Descriptive Study of the Entities Associated with the Type 1 Sighting," Flying Saucer Review, X, 1 (January February, 1964), and june, 1964). by Tiffany Thayer. An American researcher, Orvil Hartle, has published several accounts of early twentieth century landings in his privately printed book, A Carbon Experiment. Similar cases have been noted during the 1947 1952 period: Captain Ruppelt, who was in charge of the U.S. Air Force's investigations in 1952, considered himself to be plagued by reports of landings, as he writes in his The Report on UFO's, and his team conscientiously eliminated them. But it is only when dedicated civilian researchers such as Leonard Stringfield (author of Inside Saucer Post) and Coral Lorenzen of APRO started independent investigations of the matter that proper light was cast on the American sightings. Another American researcher, George D. Fawcett, regularly publishes sighting summaries in Ray Palmer's magazine, Flying Saucers. Between 1963 and 1967, I have reexamined the totality of the general files of the Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) and have extracted from them reports that had fallen into oblivion. In some cases, I was able to initiate new investigations into some of the most remarkable incidents, published here for the first time with this reference: (Atic). The official procedure demanded that we delete the names of the witnesses from such reports. In one case we had to delete the name of the town itself. Although we recognize as futile an attempt at the exhaustive compilation of report: from all countries in the last one hundred years, we did try to achieve the complete tabulation of French and Italian cases for that period, paying very special attention to the year 1954. The landings of 1954 have long appeared as the natural nucleus of any study of this problem, for several reasons. First, most of the sightings were made over rural areas of Western Europe, where a network of hamlets and small towns exists that has no counterpart in more recently developed regions of the world. A large number of detailed reports was thus generated when a major wave swept from Belgium and northern France to Sicily and northern Africa in the last four months of 1954. These reports were often made by independent witnesses in neighboring towns. The observers were well known locally, so that reliability could be easily ascertained. The stories were told with considerable naivete, because the reporters were country people who had never heard of flying saucers. Valuable details, firsthand documents, and personal interviews were promptly centralized by able researchers, such as Charles Garreau, a professional newspaperman with La Bourgogne Republicaine, a daily newspaper sold in the east of France. In a pilot study of the 1954 observations done for the Flying Saucer Review special issue in 1966, we chose to limit our analysis to two hundred sightings. About forty more cases will be found here for that single year, and we feel this is by far the best documented section of the catalogue. Not only have all cases been reexamined for possible errors, but the dates, times, exact places, number and names of wit nesses have been ascertained with a new degree of precision. I have benefited here from the assistance of several researchers in France and Italy, who must remain anonymous but to whom I here express my gratitude. The basic references for that period have been extracted from the files of Aime Michel, who had himself worked from collections of newspapers and files of letters from readers of the Paris press, made available by the news media. We also used the collection gathered before 1958 by such pioneers as; Raymond Veillith, the publisher of Lumieres dans la Nuit, Charles Garreau, and Roger Vervisch. The early compilation of similar data by the team of Ouranos under the direction of Marc Thirouin was also most useful. The book by Car rouges, Les Apparitions de Martiens, provided additional details, as did the two books by Harold T. Wilkins. For the post 1954 sightings the scene is entirely different. The Flying Saucer Review was founded in 1955 and published articles by private researchers such as B. Lc Poer Trench and Gordon W. Creighton, who gathered and translated reports from the entire world, many of which were later included in the book World Round Up. Many South American sightings reached the APRO group through Olavo Fontes. Mrs. Coral Lorenzen has published these documents in her books The Great Flying Saucer Hoax (1962) and Flying Saucer Occupants (1966) while recent developments will be found in the third Lorenzen book, UFOs over the Americas (1968). In Australia, Andrew Tomas, an early pioneer of the field, gathered well organized collections with the outstanding team of the Australian Flying Saucer Review. In South America, groups such as CODOVNI and SBEDV, working respectively in Argentina and Brazil, publish regular information bulletins that cannot be neglected. Similar societies are active in Belgium, Chile, Denmark, Norway, Japan, New Zealand, and Germany. They have all contributed sightings to our list, either directly or indirectly. These sources provide continuity in the study for the entire period until the recent dramatic rise in the number of reports, i.e., until the end of 1965. Up to that date, we believe the catalogue contains a clear majority of all reports in print, in national papers or in official files, and the near totality of the observations of occupants that have con tribnted to the emotional reaction of the public associated with the UFO phenomenon. After 1966, a similar statement would be meaningless. Conversation with policemen in practically any small town in the United States will disclose reports of unidentified objects, including, of course, landings, about the reality of which we shall never know the truth. In the present catalogue, a few cases selected from the files of the last three years have been given in order to encourage the continuation of this effort, but we have not published details of sightings still under investigation, and we have made no attempt at a systematic data gathering effort. The reader should therefore be warned that the apparent leveling off of the number of entries has no relationship whatsoever to actual reality. PRESENTATION OF THE OBSERVATIONS. The following list has been prepared under several severe constraints: all pertinent information (to the extent that it can be defined in the present state of our ignorance) must be present, and yet one should be able to use it for quick reference. It must not become boring to the reader who simply wants to gain a general view of the diversity of reports. The journalist, the physicist, and the social scientist should find data relevant to their various studies in this common source. And it should also provide a useful link to the general literature of the field whenever possible. This meant certain rules had to be made and strictly followed for the presentation of the reports. 1. It was decided to regard as essential data: the date, local time, exact place of sighting; number and names of witnesses; the altitude and size of the object, and its distance from observers; appearance and behavior of object; the number and reported behavior of the creatures associated with it. 2. Other data were summarized to a varying degree. When the case had enjoyed nationwide or worldwide publicity and was presently available in books and journals, we felt it was enough to give adequate references and a summary. When we had been able to obtain new information, or to find a more solid interpretation of previously doubtful details, this was included. 3. As a majority of the observations come from outside the United States or Britain, all measures of distance have been expressed in the metric system. Weights, when given, were converted to kilograms or tons. 4. We have tried to remove subjective interpretation of the phenomena while preserving indications of the emotions of the witness during the observation. Naturally we cannot claim we were always successful in increasing the objectivity of the report. But at least the reader should be aware of the fact that we have tried to select words from a limited vocabulary in order to provide for all entries a measure of consistency, without reducing the sightings to arbitrarily chosen patterns, types, or categories. 1. Every sighting has a source listed, generally selected as "the most readily available publication which gives more detailed references on the case." The only exceptions are (Quincy) for reasons explained above and (Personal), the latter being applied only when we have used documents that I am not authorized to quote in detail, or whose exact reference I myself do not know. 2. All reports which met our earlier definitions for Typef sightings were candidates for inclusion here. We have rejected: (1) all cases for which a conventional explanation has been found to our satisfaction; (2) all those for which the month or year or place of observation was missing, except for some early cases; (3) all reports accompanied by photographs offered as material evidence and that have been proven to be fakes. It can be argued that in the latter case, it does not necessarily follow that no valid sighting has been made, or that the incident is not relevant to the UFO rumor in general. Such faked evidence, however, throws considerable doubt on the character and truthfulness of the witness and would carry the discussion into an altogether different province. Furthermore, such reports have received a wide coverage in the press and will be found without difficulty by those who wish to extend the present list. A sample of rejected cases may be published separately at a later date, along with the reason for rejection so that notable omissions can be justified. A WARNING. We shall not apologize for the inclusion of reports that may with reason be regarded as unbelievable or ludicrous. We are not claiming that any of the reports in the list relates to a real physical event. We are compiling not a table of controlled laboratory experiments but only a general guide for a study of the abundant literature of this intriguing subject. It would be an unfair procedure and a grave misunderstanding of our purpose to assume that all cases in the list stand at the same level of reliability, or to claim that the presence of this or that particular case either supports or weakens by itself the credibility of any other. We cannot accept responsibility for the mistakes of those who ignore this warning. End. Footnotes not red here, and see the pdf book online to get it all.