| Remember, previously, in Princess Nobody, the elves go in and sleep at exactly midnight, because that’s when the mushrooms start to grow. That’s very similar to what we just read from Wentz’s “witness,” In the next paragraph, Wentz is sharing the insights of a woman who has some knowledge of the workings of “fairyland”: “Our next witness to testify is a direct descendant of the ancient MacNeils of Barra. Her name now is Marian MacLean; and she lives in the mountainous centre of Barra at Upper Borve. … ’My father and grandfather knew a man who was carried by the hosts from South Uist here to Barra. I understand when the hosts take away earthly men, they require another man to help them. But the hosts must be spirits, my opinion is that they are both spirits of the dead and other spirits not the dead. A child was taken by the hosts and returned after one night and one day and found at the back of the house with the palms of its hands in the holes in the wall, and with no life in its body. It was dead in the spirit. It is believed that when people are dropped from a great height by the hosts they are killed by the fall. As to fairies, my firm opinion is that they are spirits who appear in the shape of human beings’.” (117) From what I gather when I read this last paragraph, early beliefs in fairies mixed and possibly confused with beliefs in UFO occupants, and one phenomenon was the same as the other, to some of the common people. Clearly, we can see a pattern establishing itself that fairies were associated with UFOs and abductions as early as the 17th century in discussion of “elementals” in Discourses on the Secret Sciences, and into the beginning of the 20th century, as in this previous case mentioned. It appears to me that some of these accounts are spoken with absolute sincerely. Not all of them, but I see no reason (on the surface) to doubt this women’s testimony. Despite the fact that this is mythology it does sound a lot to me like some of the UFO stories from medieval England and the European countryside. Elijah gets lifted up by the Lord This last case sounds very much like Elijah, who is lifted up in a whirlwind from 2 Kings: (11) As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. (12) Elisha saw this and cried out, “My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel!” And Elisha saw him no more. Then he took hold of his garment and tore it in two. (13) Elisha then picked up Elijah’s cloak that had fallen from him and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. (14) He took the cloak that had fallen from Elijah and struck the water with it. “Where now is the Lord, the God of Elijah?” he asked. When he struck the water, it divided to the right and to the left, and he crossed over. (15) The company of the prophets from Jericho, who were watching, said, “The spirit of Elijah |
is resting on Elisha.” And they went to meet him and bowed to the ground before him. (16) “Look,” they said, “we your servants have fifty able men. Let them go and look for your master. Perhaps the Spirit of the Lord has picked him up and set him down on some mountain or in some valley.” (2 Kings 2:11-16) We read earlier about Vulcan who has a son named Cacus who was killed by Hercules for stealing some of the giant Geryon’s cattle as Virgil relates in Book VIII of the Aeneid. Vulcan is himself, a fire deity. Cacus is described as a monstrous fire-breathing thieving deity who terrorized the countryside. Could this part of the myth have been relating to UFOs? Next Wentz offers an example of a group hallucination: “I am greatly indebted to the Rev. Canon Kewley, of Arbory, for the valuable testimony which follows, and especially for his kindness in allowing me to record what is one of the clearest examples of a collective hallucination I have heard about as occurring in the fairy-haunted regions of Celtic countries: -- A Collective Hallucination. –‘A good many things can be explained as natural phenomena, but there are some things which I think cannot be. For example, my sister and myself and our coachman, and apparently the horse, saw the same phenomenon at the same moment: one evening we were driving along an avenue in this parish when the avenue seemed to be blocked by a great crowd of people, like a funeral procession; and the crowd was so dense that we could not see through it. The throng was about thirty to forty yards away. When we approached, it melted away, and no person was anywhere in sight’.” (118) I’m going to interject one of my own experiences here, briefly, which finds direct relevance. One time I was on LSD when I was a teenager, with two friends. All evening we experienced group hallucinations. A carton of styrofoam “s” were in the dark in an alleyway as we approached, bending and twisting and we all thought the road was covered with maggots until we got closer and realized what it was. All of us saw three police cars pull up, a total of six police officers exit and start walking towards us. We walked away and when one of us looked back, about 30 seconds later, there was only one car, one person, and he was not a policeman. A group of motorcyclists were hanging out in a park parking lot at 2:00 AM, blasting their radios with their girlfriends with no tops on and they all had berets on their heads and machine guns strapped to their chests. Mind you, we all agreed on these things as we could not understand how this could be happening. This happened all night long. There are just the highlights. I should also add this was the only time I ever hallucinated like this on LSD. I only wish I could find that Goony Bird again, from 1988. (117) ibid, p.. 109 (118) Wentz, Fairy Faith P. 126 |