Thursday, December 8, 2011

FAERIE?: A small data-set indicating that folkloric entities or something very like them could be real, Part Six.


Let's wade in the deep water again folks, and see if we or anything else will float. This set of 100 is like the last in the distressing fact that it seems to be composed of many different things. Some of these things might be closely allied, but some don't feel well related at all. That might not be bad if we were sitting with a box of hardware separating the hammers from the chainsaws from the pliers, but this "ain't at all like that". My view of these piles is that we are on shaky ground indeed when it comes to working criteria for neat labeling. But we soldier on.....



Here's a [very] crude attempt at "something": About half of the 100 case files mentioned a fairly firm estimation for the height of the humanoid entity encountered. It would have been really nice if more had done so [and cases where the little folk came right up upon the witness "pinching" or "attacking" him, or dancing around him, certainly have no excuses for omitting that detail, but lots do not not say]. Still, given that the Pookhas and the disembodied music and the terrible trees don't count in this humanoid height business, 44 of the actual humanoid cases isn't awful.

So graph away I did. Despite what I said yesterday, the graph MAY indicate that my intuition wasn't completely off on the mere matter of height groupings of these characters. There may in fact be a cluster of 3 to 4 footers, another of about one-&-a-half footers, and a group of very small folk. I believe that for at least this simple "measurement", these estimations should be pretty good. Most of the entities were very close, and it takes a pretty poor estimator NOT to be able to distinguish between someone who comes up to your chest vs someone who comes up to your knee vs someone who comes up to your ankle. But, if this is "good" and if this would statistically hold, then I still don't know much, because the groups don't [so far] show much difference in either appearance or behavior.

Really vaguely, the bigger the entity the more likely it is an older looking , usually bearded male. In fact you almost are never getting solitary female fairies/gnomes anyplace except the Tinkerbells. Females, much the minority elsewhere, appear essentially in couples with males, and/or in dancing. All of these folk may be brightly dressed or not. Some colors prevail [red and green and brown ] but not universally. "Handsome" entities are almost always small. All of them will just vanish on you, but they also might just run away. Nobody, so far, ever causes any real damage.

All of this may change in a blink when I add more cases. So, there I'll leave it and proceed to thumbnail a small number of particularly confusing cases.


The interconnections between these cases exist on so many levels/directions, that I can't wrap my head around them and give you an orderly presentation. In a way that's a blessing, as in such a state of ignorance one is probably out-of-line to present a pseudo-structure at all. So... in lieu of that, I'm going to thumbnail a few cases which seem vaguely like they are in the "muddy middle" between UFOlogy and Faerie, and you can chew on them and do a sorting for yourself.

1). 1901, Bournville, UK: A boy of ten was returning home and was near the garden of his house. There he encountered a "building" which should not have been there. It was about 5-6' wide, 4' high, and 3+' deep. It had a stack or turret on the top. And it had a small square door.

The door opened and out stepped two small entities. They resembled my drawing to the left above, which I took from the witness drawing. Their clothing was a tight-fitting coverall of grey-green and they wore helmet/caps of black with two projections sticking out the top. The boy thought that they looked sort of "military". One being approached holding its arms wide. The witness interpreted this as a warning to move away, and did so. The beings returned through the door and soon followed a bright flash, and the bottom of the hut glowed in a circle of light. The hut rose up in an audible WHOOSH and streaked away across the rooftop in a curved flight.

Well, a clear case of a UFO, or was it??

2). 1958, Bellingham, WA: A man was sitting in his home reading when he was disturbed by a loud THUD on his roof. He scrambled up to investigate and found a small body lying in the snow outside. It was a four-foot tall little man with light pinkish skin, apparently bruised in his upper body [he was naked from the waist up] and breathing hard. As he was lying there stunned, our not-so-good Samaritan decided to go get rope and tie him up. When he returned with the rope, he saw that the little fellow was standing up and smiling at him. He walked up, shook the witness' hand pointed to the nearby forest and left the scene. Shortly there was a swishing noise from that direction.

Hmmmm... Little people, right?? The witness interpreted this as an alien who had an escape saucer hidden in the woods, which swished away, even though he couldn't see it.

3). 1959, County Carlow, Ireland: An equipment driver was removing a large bush on a farm, using a bulldozer. This is always asking for trouble in Ireland. As he ripped up the bush, he and three other workers were startled by the emergence of a three-foot tall little man in red rush out from under the machine. The Little Man did not stop running for 100 yards whereupon he leapt a fence and continued on into the next field. The commentator said: " Only the Irish locale kept this from being treated as a UFO incident, even though no UFO was seen".

Sheesh! I guess we are really that stupid.

4). Bells Corners, Ontario:
This took place in the fields behind the house of a very rural family farm. At 10:45pm, the lady of the house looked out her window and saw a patch of bluish light 25 yards behind the house. She immediately went to investigate rousting out her son to accompany her. The Mother walked right up to the luminosity but her son stayed cautiously away [despite being an adult]. What the lady saw was a small entity [drawn by me in the accompanying illustration -- caveat emptor on my art], with a strikingly chalk white face and skin, tightly wound wooly blonde-brown hair, and no noticeable facial features other than large jewel-like "faceted" eyes, which may even have been the source of the patch of illumination. Her son insisted in near panic that she return to the house, which she then did. By the time they were back inside, no light could be still seen in the field.

Oh, well! THAT's a UFO case. No you say? It comes from someone's UFO files.....

5). no year and locale on this website case; I include it as it illustrates a point that in clumsier ways many other case reports are making: This was from a young man who was on a camping trip. His buddies had hit the sack but he stayed up for a while. Looking out of the tent, he noticed a strange blue light flitting about in the woods [Uh Oh, blue is supposed to be the favorite fairylight color; and yes I remember the last case]. Shortly, the blue light ball was joined by several others and they began dancing about as if they were playing with each other. At closest glance, he felt that within those lightballs were tiny figures. Then he made a noise and the things flew away in a hurry.

Lightballs... fairies... no, UFOs... no...

6). The Olden Days, Great Lakes area: This is the beginning of a 19th century Native American tale. I offer it here because this tale sounds like an encounter. Perhaps a true encounter served as a basis for constructing a more imaginative folklore story.

A young hunter was walking in an untrammeled field, when up ahead he saw a circle flattened in the grass [Oh no! Not ancient crop circles!!]. He walked all around it but could find nowhere where someone could have entered and made the circle. Curious in the extreme, he decided to hide nearby to discover perhaps how the thing was made.

Soon, coming from the air above, were the sounds of sweet music. Far away in the sky, a small cloud appeared. It moved ever closer and downward to the Earth and the circle. The cloud became a "basket-car" in which were the twelve fairest maidens ever sen by the young man. They landed directly in the center of the ring, sprang out, and began to dance around the shining round basket-car which had brought them. The young brave was so taken by the fairest of the dancers that he rushed forth to grab this princess of the stars, but they all sprang back into the light basket and soared away into the skies.

Well, now that's about as much as I can take. Are beautiful fairy sky dancers coming to Earth in lightballs and forming crop circles within which they perform their faerie merriment??? Yep. That must be it. You see a lot of that sort of thing going on nowadays.....


Well, I was going to do three more, but the leprechauns of this blogsite decided to dump my illustration for that section, so I'll quit and do another batch in a couple of days.

I notice that as I'm typing their messing with the placements of the sentences... Faerie revenge? Maybe I actually AM discovering something with this crazy approach, but you can't tell it from my vantage point. Maybe they'll behave better next time.

2 comments:

  1. As usual you've made me think, at least a little, outside the box. Of course it's difficult when the box is not so well defined.
    If a larger than human sized, winged entity, appeared to someone with red glowing eyes, we'd likely not thing of the fairies. Or if something with an "ace of spades" shaped head floated down a hill, same observation. These reports get shelved somewhere else. But now, I wonder.....
    Thanks Professor.

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  2. Hello Prof, a very enjoyable read and my ‘little grey cells’ are firing away like Roman candles.

    As you know, the little guys were strongly represented in Vallee’s analysis of reported entities. 44 of 80 reports described ‘entities’ being around the 3 and half feet mark. He noted that it was only the little fellas who were ever reported as wearing the ‘diver’s suits.’ This raises my interest due to the costumes of reported folk being so richly detailed in both the ‘UFO entities’ and the ‘fae folk’ sightings reports. He wrote this back in ’64 (FSR V10 N1/3) and the observation has lost some of its weight as subsequent reports have seen the arrival of man-sized humanoids wearing space/diver’s suits. Also, it never struck me before how uncomfortable the young Vallee was with these reports.

    I was looking to find a table of humanoid heights in the ufological literature. It exists somewhere and can’t I find it in Bloecher, Vallee or Webb’s writings. If you know the one I mean, does it offer a tantalising fit with your own table in this blog?

    I remember Ted Bloecher suggesting that small humanoids (in UFO lore) seemed to be attracted to, or associated with, vehicles like cars. Does his observation still stand? I only ask because the ‘wee folk’ reports seem largely absent of witnesses in, or near, cars. Between the possible differences in costume and frequency of vehicle presence; perhaps they offer a fragile distinction between those two enclaves, ufology and faery lore?

    I appreciate you’re making the case that distinctions are quite probably imaginary and imposed by ourselves, but I’d like you to blur my boundaries a little more. Fortunately, cognitive dissonance is a reasonable character in my mind and has a growing tolerance for ambiguity.

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