Balloons of the Fairies?

       In 2017 the new fairy census was published containing 500 alleged encounters with these remarkable entities. Five years have passed, and now a second fairy census is available, also containing 500 entries, starting from number 501. Although I haven't performed a statistical analysis, my impression is that the second census contains more dubious material. It seems that the site has been brought to the attention of more people who are uncritical, who see things out of the corner of their eyes, or in the penumbra surrounding sleep, or in altered states of awareness, or who have strange, visionary, New Age type ideas. And I am still puzzled that so many adults remember encounters when they were children as genuine. I'm not saying that children may not be more psychically aware than adults. It is just that, if I had seen a real fairy when I was a little boy, I'm sure that by now I would have convinced myself that I had been mistaken, or had imagined it.

      Unless, of course, the experience was as vivid as these.

The Little Boy and the Little Visitor

      Do you remember having a weird experience - I mean a really weird experience - when you were young - and I mean really young? If you do, how do you remember it now? Do you remember it as a real event, or have you convinced yourself that it must have been a dream, an hallucination, or a misinterpretation of something you didn't understand at the time? It would be comforting if you could so convince yourself. The reason I am asking this is that I am increasingly coming upon people who claim to have encountered as adults what, for lack of a better name, can be called "fairies". But the striking thing is that many others claim to have had such encounters as small children, and yet believe they really did happen.

      Such is the case of a man who calls himself only "John". Most of us can remember hardly anything before the age of three, and possess only fragmentary memories of our lives before school. However, John remembers that, when he was three years old, he was plagued by a tiny, terrifying bedtime visitor. To his incomplete memories he has added what his parents told him he had told them at the time, and the fact that they themselves used to hear voices emanating from his room at night. Whether all this was a strange pychological phenomenon or - perish the thought! - something paranormal, it deserves wider distribution. This article originally appeared in the Fairy Investigation Newsletter 16, New Series (June 2022), and is republished with the permission of the author, John and the editor, Simon Young.

A New Book on Apparitions

      I started this blog with the aim of collecting reports which were in danger of being forgotten, in the hope that, in the aggregate, they might form a pattern. Well, I have now managed to see some sort of pattern - one of which I wasn't aware initially - so I have now collected it into a book. It is called Apparitions: tulpas, ghosts, fairies, and even stranger things, and it is available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle e-book form. Much of it has already been published, but a whole lot more is new: collated from both nineteenth and twentieth century sources. With 213 endnotes, it is fully documented.

A Famous Family's Fairies

       A wonderful thing, the internet! So many old books and documents are now online. I first read this story in one of Janet Bord's books, and even she had to rely on a secondary source. However, it took me just an hour one night to run the original source to earth. The information this times comes from a highly respectable source: the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834 - 1924), clergyman, archaeologist, folklorist, novelist, short story writer, and father of fifteen. These days he is remembered mostly as the author of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, but in his time he was up there with Andrew Lang, Thomas Carlyle, and other prominent Victorian men of letters. And in 1890 he wrote In Troubadour-Land, a ramble in Provence and Languedoc. The relevant pages are 65 and 66 because he had travelled there both as an adult and as a child, so after describing an area known as the Crau, he introduced a childhood anecdote.

The Pixie on the Plane

     If you have been following this blog from its inception, you will probably be aware that, over the decade, I have gradually come to the conclusion that there really is something to sightings of the "little people", even if it is not possible to accept the whole of the fairy mythology. (If you want further information, see here.) However, there is one place I never expected to find them.

     In 1995 a then British police officer, John Hanson got interested in UFOs. After being joined by Dawn Holloway, they began a project of producing a comprehensive history of the the phenomenon. It is an indication of the immensity of the subject that they ended up with a series of ten (yes, ten) volumes entitled, Haunted Skies. And it must have been sometime in 2008 or 2009 that they received a communication from a retired headteacher on the Isle of Wight, who had an incredible story to tell.

Ron Quinn and the Little People of New York State

     In 1936 a certain Miss Lampeter wrote to John O'London's Weekly asking, in effect, whether anyone had seen fairies, because his area of Wales a number of people had claimed to have done so. Funny about that! For the next few months the magazine found itself publishing letters from people who claimed the experience. If you are interested, you can read them here (PDF 158 KB). Similarly, in 1989 Ron Quinn wrote in a weekly paper in upstate New York about his encounter with a little man in 1942, and gave them his name and address. He asked if anybody had had a similar experience. Funny about that! As you have probably guessed by now, over the coming weeks, dozens of letters arrived in his box.

Elves in the Andes ?

     Overlooked books are often sources of anomalies which are easily lost to our collective memory. Thus, a couple of Sundays ago, a friend of mine called Trevor casually referred to what he labelled the "leprechauns" of South America. Readers of this blog will be aware that I no longer automatically scoff at such stories. (Why, this time last year I was translating newspaper articles about a plague of goblins in Argentina.) Trevor mentioned how they had been seen by Brian Fawcett (1906-1984), the younger son of the explorer, Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon jungle, almost certainly murdered by Indians, while searching for the Lost City of Z. Now, Trevor has provided extracts from Brian Fawcett's 1958 book, Ruins in the Sky, relating to his time working on the Peruvian railways, and the events took place near what was then the highest railway station in the world. The relevant extract is from pages 65 and 66.

Goblins, Shadows, and Unholy Things

    I regard the paranormal as a big jigsaw puzzle, of which most of the pieces are missing, and the major aim of this blog is to collect and present some of those pieces which are in danger of being overlooked or lost. For this reason, I do not normally report items which have appeared on somebody else's website. Nevertheless, I make an exception when the item is quite at variance with the normal theme of the website, and is in danger of being lost among the other details. Thus, the story of the psychics of Ape Canyon came from the Bigfoot Encounters website. Likewise, the tale of the miniature flying cyclist was discovered in the Castle of Spirits website, which contains literally hundreds of first hand testimonies of ghostly encounters. Nevertheless, a few of them are not what you might call run-of-the-mill ghost stories. Let's have a look at a few.

Results of the New Fairy Census

     The results of the new fairy census are now at hand. The last census began in 1955, and took almost 60 years to find a publisher. Now, due to the wonders of the internet, the new one can be downloaded as a free e-book of 5.02 MB, the result of a survey by the new Fairy Investigation Society. The original FIS was composed essentially of New Age cranks. The new FIS, with which I am a member, is as much concerned with folklore as with the paranormal, and with respect to the latter, they maintain an open mind, but not so open that their brains fall out. The earlier survey was conducted by paper and postage, while the new one involved a questionnaire on the FIS's website, which means it would only have been accessed by someone with an actual interest in the subject, albeit after being alerted to it by social media or other advertisements. The author concedes that a few jokes or hoaxes have crept in, but feels that the vast majority of respondents were sincere. Having read their circumstantial accounts, I am forced to agree. Of course, any individual report, no matter how seemingly sincere, may be false, but if only one is accurate, it is a whole new ball game.

A Plague of Goblins in Argentina

      I found this collection of stories on a Spanish language website while following up a lead from the Fairy Investigation Society. It was written in 2003 by a Sr Fabio Picasso, and was a Spanish version of an article in French (presumably by the same author) called "Les petits êtres d'Argentine" ["The little beings of Argentina"] originally published in La Gazette Fortéenne  ["The Fortean Gazette"] volume II, Oeil du Sphinx, París, 2003, and he linked it to a website which is no longer active. For myself, I have used Google Translator as a basis, but have made changes when necessary for greater accuracy and readability. I have also transferred his endnotes into the main text for the sake of readability. With this in mind, welcome to a series of strange encounters. I have translated duende as "goblin", but it is a catchall term for goblins, elves, etc. - even ghosts. I draw no conclusions about the nature of the phenomena described, except to say that, whereas a single witness may be discounted, it is a lot harder for multiple witnesses.

Tiny Craft, Tiny Pilots

     Ever since the days of Tom Thumb and Lemuel Gulliver, shrunken humans, tiny humans, and tiny humanoids have be grist to the mill of science fiction. Unfortunately, as I explained in my sci-fi blog, they are biologically impossible. That is why I find reports of such beings so intriguing. The list of shortest people reveals a number of dwarfs slightly taller and, in some cases, slightly shorter than 2 feet [60 cm]. Nevertheless, many of them had disproportionate body parts, and all of them grew up and lived among people of normal height. A breeding population of such little people might run into problems. What is certain is that any sighting of a normally proportioned adult much shorter than this is unlikely to refer to anything of flesh and blood. So what are we to make of the following reports of tiny pilots of tiny craft?

The "Mince Pie Martians" : the Original Account

     The 4th of January was the 38th anniversary of what the English press whimsically labelled the "Mince Pie Martians". It was on that date in 1979, two days from the festival of the visit of the Wise Men to Bethlehem, that a small West Midlands town allegedly received a visitation of three quite extraordinary beings. Under normal circumstances, I would provide an abridged version, but in this case I feel that it would be impossible to do justice to it without copying verbatim the written account of the alleged witness, 43 year old Mrs Jean Hingley. A briefer version originally appeared in The Dudley Herald of 12 January 1979, but it was left to a UFO researcher, Eileen Morris to interview Mrs Hingley and her husband several times, make extensive notes, and eventually type up the report, which the witness affirmed as accurate. Most of the other versions you will find on the internet refer back to secondary sources, particularly one by Alfred Budden in 1988, but this is the original, and thus has priority, so here goes. [Square brackets represent my own inserts.]

Attempted Abduction by "Gnomes"

     Of all the strange phenomena I have described, few are so enigmatic as the appearance of miniature humanoids: elves, goblins, gnomes - call them what you like. I don't know what they might be, I have no explanation for them, I have reservations about many of the reports, but I have heard enough not to scoff at them.
     Then, only last week I received an extraordinary account by e-mail. By itself this was unusual; you will note that my e-mail address does not appear anywhere on this blog. The lady in question was obviously determined enough to search for it among my other blogs. I am also impressed with the second half of the story, about her unremitting attempts for nearly thirty years to find a person or an organisation who would take it seriously, and perhaps provide some sort of explanation. (I'm afraid I can't help much on the second issue.) She has asked me not to divulge her identity. Indeed, she originally provided only her first name, year of birth, and the suburb where she used to live. You could never trace her with that meagre information. Just the same, she has now provided an amended version which removes even that information. Whatever else can be said about her, she is not seeking notoriety! She has also provided a lot of background information which is not for publication, and does not greatly affect the narrative, but is indicative of her sincerity. I am convinced that this is an account of a genuine experience, make of it what you wish. As she put it:

I suspect my account will be ridiculed and/or disbelieved.  I doubt I'd believe it myself if I read it somewhere.  But who knows - someone may have experienced something similar, in which case they might be relieved to know they're not alone with their experience.  Or, someone may have heard about a similar experience occurring to someone else.

It Came Out of the Basement

     Up to a couple of months ago, I always regarded imaginary childhood friends in the same light as pickpockets: I'd heard about them, but never had any direct or indirect experience of them. I never had an imaginary friend as a child. None of my friends had, that I know of. I never met any adult who told me he had had one as a child, or that his children had one. Indeed, the only references to imaginary friends I had ever read were in fiction. Then, I came across the Fortean Times publication,  It Happened to Me!, volume 3, in which ordinary people told of their extraordinary experiences. (I reviewed volume 2 previously.) Here, several people described their own, or their children's imaginary friends. Significantly, they all recognized them as imaginary, and invisible. (One did say that she saw her "friend" briefly, but I suspect that was with the mind's eye.) Then, squirreled in among them, on page 36, was a story of something quite different, and quite weird.

What Sort of People See Fairies?

Belief in fairies, in one form or another, is found all over the world, but is strongest among primitive peoples. It is presumably as old as mankind itself, and in Christian communities is one of the surviving relics of paganism.

     That was a passage I remember well from the 1144-page tome pretentiously entitled, The Great Encyclopædia of Universal Knowledge, apparently published in 1938, and the constant literary companion of my boyhood. Indeed several of the front and rear pages have been seriously damaged by the caresses of my childish fingers.
     I was only a little boy at the time. That was the first time I had heard that there were people who genuinely believed in fairies. As I grew older, I discovered that a detailed and complex mythology exists regarding fairies, and that during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries folklorists recorded people who not only believed in fairies, but claimed to have seen them. Of course, it is assumed that they were making it up. Just the same, the folklorist Katherine Briggs included in her 1967 book, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature a chapter 16 entitled, "Fairy encounters and odd experiences". Interestingly, some of them were by people who did not share the tradition and did not expect it. Then there was Fairies, real encounters with little people (1997), in which Janet Bord culled the literature for exactly that. In this blog I myself have published two posts of such odd encounters from different parts of the world. (See here and here.) And at the back of all this, there were rumours of a mysterious organisation called the Fairy Investigation Society, which I could never discover for itself. Well, at last it has made its appearance. I am, of course, referring to Seeing Fairies by Marjorie T. Johnson (Anomalist Books, 2014)

I Still Don't Believe in Fairies, BUT . . .

     As I said in my last post, I don't believe in fairies as such. But suppose you did happen to see - ahem! - a tiny humanoid creature, who're you gonna call? Probably not your local newspaper - not unless you've forgotten what "laughing stock" means. You could google "tiny humanoid creature", but it won't get you to any central registry. In the bad old (pre-internet) days it was even worse. However, any sizeable telephone directory is likely to contain an entry commencing,"UFO" or "Flying saucer". And since ufologists have a penchant for weird stories anyway, they have a tendency to accumulate such accounts over the years.
     The following reports, except for the last one, were collected by ufologists. It is important to note, however, that no UFO was present in any of the cases.

I Don't Believe in Fairies, BUT . . .

     If a grown man believes in fairies, you would probably say that he has never outgrown his childish beliefs, but do children really believe in fairies? Well, I used to believe in the tooth fairy, but I gave up on her after I go my last threepence for my last baby tooth. (Santa Claus got a better run with me.) But, by and large, I viewed fairies the same as I did dragons (which used to give me the heebee-jeebies), witches, and talking animals: as "just stories", and I suspect that most children are the same.
     On the other hand, many people would be surprised to learn that belief in fairies, elves, dwarfs, and the like has a long and venerable tradition in Europe. Like belief in witchcraft, it is one of the last relics of paganism. Indeed, one of the drawbacks of studying genuine fairy folklore is that I can no longer tolerate the prettified, gossamer-winged monstrosities of children's books. The last stronghold of this tradition in Western Europe is Iceland, where even some politicians share the belief. There is even a government body dedicated to it. (This is not as stupid as it sounds. What do you do if citizens claim that problems with road construction are caused by the elves?)
     People may also be unaware that, when folklorists were researching fairy traditions in the British Isles during the 19th, and even 20th, century, they found people who not only believed in them, but also claimed to have seen them. Of course, they might have been making it up. Indeed, that is the only view you could take if you have already ruled out the existence of fairies. Now, I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but there is a certain fragility in any theory - such as the non-existence of something - which relies on the assumption that every piece of evidence to the contrary must be based on a lie.
     Of course, the term, "fairy" carries a lot of baggage - magic powers, underground dwellings, time dilation, changelings, to name just a few - and it would be unwise to assume the whole tradition if you did happen to observe what something small and humanoid. So, I don't believe in fairies, but ... there are still a lot of strange things being encountered. Like what happened in North Carolina in 1976.