Hundreds of years ago, the stories of people about meetings with the "little people" (elves, gnomes, fairies, etc.) did not seem to be something unique. They even became part of folklore, eventually turning into fairy tales and legends.
But these cases did not disappear completely even in the twentieth century, although their number undoubtedly decreased many times. Especially after the appearance of the phenomenon of UFOs and aliens.
Did one crowd out the other or maybe this one and the same phenomenon and it only slightly changed its form?
For an example of a typical meeting of people with fairies and elves, two relatively recent cases that took place in the 19th and 20th centuries will suffice. In the summer of 1884, the Isle of Man postal coachman began one fine evening, as usual, collecting the mailbags. They expected him back at one thirty in the morning, but he returned only at half past five.
When interviewed by local folklore collector William Martin three years later, the coachman cited a typical fairy tale about elves to justify his tardiness, which also contained elements of traditional poltergeist behavior:
“He said in all seriousness that six miles from home, he was besieged by a whole army of elves, dressed in smart red suits and armed with lanterns. The elves stopped his horse, threw the mailbags on the road and began to dance around them in their usual manner. The unfortunate postman tried unsuccessfully to resist them. Before he had time to put one bag in the carriage, he was immediately thrown back onto the road. This continued until dawn."
The second encounter with the dancing elves happened on August 10, 1977, and involved Hull police officer David Swift. He walked around his site an hour or two after midnight and saw an unusual strip of fog over the playgrounds. When he came closer, he saw three dancing figures in the fog, which he took at first for drunks. The man wore a "sleeveless jacket and tight-fitting trousers" and the two women wore "caps, shawls and white dresses."
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All three had one hand raised, as if - made a later guess - they were dancing around an invisible maypole. Before Swift had time to approach them, all three figures disappeared. When the constable reported the incident to the sergeant on duty, he realized that no one would believe him. When the local newspaper told about this case, Swift was subjected to such ridicule that he himself no longer wanted to say anything about him.
It is surprising that the elves survived until the 20th century. The most striking thing about the reports of modern meetings with them lies in the details that indicate that little people are changing in step with the times.
Witness Marina Fry from Cornwall recalled (many years later) how one night in 1940, when she was three years old, she and her older sisters heard a humming sound. The girls looked out the bedroom window and saw a little man about eighteen inches tall, with a white beard and a red pointed hat. He "made circles in a tiny red typewriter."
It could be a fantasy, a dream, or a false memory. But in September 1979, something similar happened to a group of children from four to eight years old in Wallaton Park, Nottingham. Similar stories of the children were recorded by the school principal, who interviewed each one individually (but after they had had time to discuss the details of the incident with each other). It was already dusk when …
“The children saw about 60 little people about their height. They had long white beards with red tips (although one boy claimed that the beards were black) and wrinkled faces.
They wore hats in the shape of old-fashioned nightcaps with a pompom on the top of their heads. The upper part of their clothes was blue, and the tights were yellow. For almost the entire 15 minutes that the children saw them, the little men remained in their tiny cars.
There were 30 cars in total - two people in each. (One boy claimed that the cars were green and blue; another that they were red; a third that they were red and white.) The cars did not have steering wheels, but such round things with handles.
The engines did not make any sound, but the cars were fast and could jump over obstacles such as logs. Little men chased after children, but did not catch up with them, although they could. The kids thought it was such a game."
There was even one incident with a fabulous airship: in 1929, an eight-year-old boy and his five-year-old sister, playing in their garden in Hertford, saw a tiny airplane (apparently, it was a biplane like most planes of the time), in a big way twelve or fifteen inches of wings, glided over a hedge, landed at a dustbin, then took off again and flew away. The pilot was a small man in a leather flight helmet, and as he flew away he waved his hand to the children.
Many readers will take such incidents as fantasies, and a few details suggest that they are a figment of the imagination. Remarkable is the very fact that only children reported about “mechanized” fairy-tale characters.
There is no need to believe in the truth of such cases to understand their meaning. After all, if elves who used to walk or ride on horseback can now drive cars and fly airplanes, why not pilot UFOs too.
Prominent ufologists have suggested that direct contacts, in particular alien abductions, may be closely associated with such behavior of fairy-tale characters. In many folk tales, such characters loved to kidnap people.
As an example, we can cite cases of substitution, when an ugly child of an elf was placed in the cradle instead of a golden-haired human child carried away to the kingdom of fairy tales (compare the common goal - to strengthen the fairytale tribe with human features with the theory of ufologists about the alien program for creating hybrids).
Fairy kidnapping
At the same time, many stories are told about men and women who entered the circle of dancing elves and could never get out of it, or about those who were allowed to visit the underworld of the elves and who could not leave it.
There is even an analogy here with the familiar theme of wasted time: in many fairy tales, in which a person does return from a fairyland, believing that he has been absent for only one day or a week, and discovering that several years have passed in the human world. (Perhaps this is a consequence of the state of a kind of trance.)
Of all the fairy tales known to folklore gatherers, face-to-face contact with aliens most closely resembles an incident told by Welshman David Williams of Penrindydrate in Gwynedd. One night, like a faithful servant, he followed his mistress on the way home. When he entered her house, he was told that she had returned three hours earlier, although he was sure that he was no more than three minutes behind her.
As an excuse, he said that … “he watched a bright meteor, followed by a ring or circle of fire, and inside the circle stood a man and a small woman in beautiful clothes … When the ring reached the ground, both creatures jumped out of it and immediately began to draw circle on the ground.
As soon as they finished it, instantly a multitude of men and women appeared and began to dance in this circle to the most pleasant music that anyone has ever heard. The sight was so fascinating that David stood for several minutes, it seemed to him, watching the dance. Everything around him was illuminated with soft light, and he could discern every movement of these creatures.
After a while, the meteor that attracted David's attention reappeared, followed by a ring of fire. When it reached the circle of dancers, the ladies and gentlemen who had arrived in it jumped into it and disappeared just as they had appeared. David was alone and in complete darkness."
If you add pointed ears and clothing to the classic gray aliens, how will they differ from the faeries?
Other ufological motives can be found in old tales. The idea that UFOs are capable of drowning out the engines of cars, making it impossible for their drivers, for example, to escape, is analogous to the "invisible barrier" set up by the elves.
One such incident took place in about 1935 at Lees Ard, a fort in County Mayo, Ireland, when a girl tried to leave a hill, but she was unable to get through a gap in the outer embankment. Whenever she approached this passage, some force turned her 180 degrees and pushed her back into the center of the fort.
As the twilight deepened, the girl more and more “felt” how hostility was building around her. When she called the members of the search party, which, armed with lanterns, climbed the hill after her, the rescuers did not hear her.
She was able to break free only when the invisible barrier mysteriously disappeared. This incident can rightfully be compared to those cases when people were snatched from cars with stalled engines and kept in UFOs until the ufonauts released them and did not allow them to leave.
Some researchers went further and suggested that such tales are, in fact, folk memories of genuine encounters with alien abductors, told in the only terms known to a non-technological society.
Others, such as the French ufologist Jacques Vallee, have suggested that both fairy-tale characters and alien abductors are the product of a phenomenon of the same order, which manifests itself in a way characteristic of each culture. (There has never been a proper discussion of whether this phenomenon is internal - in other words, a form of fantasy or hallucination, these characteristic products of the human brain - or external, perhaps even part of some kind of mysterious extraterrestrial system of government, as Vallee once suggested.)
On the other hand, 20th century contacts may well be modern folk tales, reflecting nothing more than a very incomprehensible universal fear of abduction.
The idea of kidnapping can be found in the legends of many, many different societies. For example, the people of Haiti believe that they are systematically suppressed by powerful voodoo sorcerers (zobots) who constantly kidnap people for sacrifice during horrific magical rituals.
In the early 1940s, there were rumors in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince that a ghost car (motor-zoboz) with sorcerers circled the island at night, transporting victims to such ceremonies. The car could be identified by the unearthly blue light emitted from its headlights.
One day, Divion Joseph, another voodoo magician, collided with a motor zoboz. As he drove up to a deserted intersection late at night, he was suddenly blinded by a bright blue light and passed out. He came to himself in a motor-zoboze, surrounded by disgusting demihumans in masks. After offering him money so that he would not tell anyone about what had happened, the masks threw him out of the car, and Joseph was at home in bed.
Ufologist John Rimmer, who first drew attention to Joseph's story, commented on this strange encounter:
“This story contains many obvious analogies to the abductions carried out by UFOs. First, blinding light and unconsciousness are most often featured in descriptions of the initial stages of such abductions. Secondly, the common thing for almost all abductions is the subsequent awakening surrounded by strange demi-humans.
In the above example, Divion saw people in masks, which is natural, because it is more familiar to a voodoo priest than aliens in space suits. And a number of other aspects of Haitian history testify to its close connection with UFOs - abductions, in particular the behavior of the percipient and the abductors: in essence, it is illogical to abduct a person and then offer him money so that he does not tell anyone about it - as if the abduction had no no other purpose."
To this can be added the fact that the waiting factor should be borne in mind (Joseph undoubtedly knew that the appearance of a bright light at night precedes the abduction by a motor-gobop, as many current abduction victims mistake bright lights in the night sky for UFOs and "know" that aliens visit earth to abduct us), and the final detail - the victim wakes up in his own bed. It can be assumed that everything described is no more than a fantasy or even a vivid dream, which could explain the illogicality indicated by Rimmer.
The spread of kidnapping rumors in Western countries is commonplace. At the end of the 19th century, ominous tales of the "white slave trade" circulated throughout most of Europe: young girls were first seduced into prostitution and then sold to sheikhs from the desert.
As recently as May 1969, the French city of Orleans was alarmed by rumors that young girls were being snatched in dressing rooms, euthanized, and smuggled into the Middle East. Particularly ominous in the panic was the allegations that it was taking place in Jewish-owned shops, which fueled anti-Semitism.
To show the ridiculousness of such stories, the head of the local Jewish association started a rumor that the girls who were being sent into slavery were being escorted through a network of underground passages to the Laura River, where a submarine was waiting for them. The very next day, the rumor returned to him in the form of an indisputable fact.
From our point of view, the most interesting thing in this case is that it shows how literally out of nothing a clearly absurd rumor arises: during the whole time of panic in Orleans, not a single girl or woman disappeared, but hundreds and even thousands of people believed in him who themselves - perhaps unconsciously - fed and reinforced this rumor, constantly repeating and discussing one or two of the original messages.
And yet it would be risky to rely too much on the supposedly folkloric backstory of alien contact and abductions. Researcher Michel Merger recently noted that there is no evidence of continuity between ancient rural beliefs and modern urban mass beliefs, and admitted that searching for analogies between them distorted a complex problem.
And he comes to the following conclusion: “The search for purely formal analogies has overshadowed the obvious rootedness of the main part of UFO stories in a specific time (in the second half of the 20th century) and in space (initially in the USA).
Merger believes that all elements of the alien abduction scenario can be found in science fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Naturally, science fiction stories regularly included medical examinations and surgeries, typical of the typical abduction incident but never seen in fairy tales, and were based - apparently - on the now forgotten, but characteristic of the 19th century, fears of body snatchers and vivisection.
In the famous book "War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells, the Martians abduct people in order to seize their blood.
Cheap adventure comics from the 1930s often portray the aliens and villains of the future as large-headed creatures with slender limbs ruling a fully mechanized universe - "an abnormally developed head is a morphological sign of a superman."
Cover of 'Uncanny Tales' magazine (1939)
Quite often in such stories impassive scientists-surgeons act, revealing captured people, with whom they act as a person, anatomizing a lower animal without any pity.
Other narratives feature long-needle surgical machines typical of abducted UFO stories.
Taken together, such similarities between the motives of ufological abductions, on the one hand, and folklore and science fiction, on the other, are striking enough to suggest that even the most ingenious descriptions of alien abductions are unconscious fantasies of witnesses, inspired by fears common to all people and the usual baggage of source material accumulated by many generations and familiar to almost everyone in the West, and to many representatives of other cultures.
This theory, like the extraterrestrial hypothesis, seems to explain the similarities between individual abduction cases and the general pattern of such contacts, as well as the illogicality and inconsistencies characteristic of such cases, the analogies between abductions and other strange phenomena, the peculiarities of the psychology of witnesses and the lack of physical evidence of abductions even better than an extraterrestrial hypothesis.
This idea finds confirmation not only in the almost complete absence of convincing evidence that some kind of abduction by aliens really took place or that it was witnessed by someone other than the abducted, but also in the fact that the abductors themselves are too much like people to to be "genuine" aliens whose technology and society are thousands, if not millions of years ahead of those on Earth.
We have no reason to believe that any aliens we finally encounter will in any way look like us, let alone share our quest for discovery and our desire to explain. Indeed, the sexual and medical ideas of the average "Gray" are too accurate for our own and may well have a psychological explanation.
While the exact mechanism by which the human brain turns to the source material under consideration here and uses it to elaborate on what appears to be perfectly real experiences still remains unclear, it still seems that, at least in the case of abduction, strange images folklore and fiction can provide very worthwhile research directions.
By Mike Dash, chapter from Secrets of the Beyond
