I have been reading The Fairy Tradition in Britain by Lewis Spence at the same time that the Roswell Slides drama has been unfolding. I don’t find it surprising that the assumption that any nonhuman remains or artifacts would be indications that aliens from another plant must be here is so universal. But I certainly don’t agree with it. (This does NOT mean that I therefore think that they are not that. I feel that the question isn’t closed.)

As I read Spence’s careful description of this folklore, I am struck again and again how closely it resembles the abduction literature, including my own experience. The same mysterious abductions, the same strange sense of lost time, the same combination of wisdom and danger are all present, just as we see in the abduction stories. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the current UFO folklore is an extension of the fairy folklore.

What appears to have happened is that this ancient human experience has be re-stated in a terminology (aliens and UFOs) that fits our present understanding of reality—which is, in fact, a very new understanding. During the time that this phenomenon was being interpreted as fairy folklore, we had essentially no knowledge of the true scope of the universe around us. Ours was a world drawn by horses and lit by fire. The greatest mysteries we could face were the vastness of the forests and the limitlessness of the oceans. So we responded to the phenomenon by seeing it as part of those mysteries.

The debate about whether or not there were galaxies external to our own was not resolved until 1925, when Edwin Hubble identified variable stars in what was then referred to as a nebula and thought of as part of the only galaxy–our own. A change in our vision of the world around us was under way. During World War I, we had already discovered murderous depths within ourselves that we had not previously suspected were there, and which we could not understand. Now we were discovering the glorious heights in which this complicated, wonderful and dangerous species we call human lives.

Through these years, the fairy faith retreated into the most rural corners of Europe, drawing into the minds of those least affected by the strange, mechanical clatter of the modern world. To find the fairies, one needed to listen to the whisper of the night wind, and catch the flicker of a reflection on a drop of dew.

Meantime, the modern world was developing a vision of reality far removed from the old one, in which the greatest of mysteries might linger in the shadows of dusk and those at the edge of dawn.

In 1927 J.B.S. Haldane commented in his book “Possible Worlds,” that “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Our vision of mystery had shifted from the disappearing forests and oceans being made smaller and smaller by ever more efficient means of travel. Now, we were looking up, and seeing in that unimaginable darkness a new unknown. Out of it came the terrifying Martians of Orson Welles’ shocking Mercury Theater radio play, “War of the Worlds,” which terrified the nation.

Haldane was more right than he knew with regard to the universe, which we know understand is trillions of times larger than he thought.

When Kenneth Arnold made his sighting of strange objects flying near Mt. Rainer in 1947, Lewis Spence was writing his book, commemorating the vast literature of the fairy faith. Spence was constructing a history of what he assumed was folkloric fiction. It would not become clear until much later that folklore generally has its origins not in the imagination, but in observations that cannot be understood. As, indeed, does the alien abduction folklore. So it’s not a term that emerges out of imagination, at least not entirely, but also out of actual experience. The fairy lore and the abduction lore are both mixtures of real experience and imagination—the same real experience, I believe, but very different imaginative approaches.

Shortly after Arnold’s sightings engaged our collective imagination, like a flicker of summer lightning, the Roswell Incident flashed across the media. And then came the flood of flying disk stories that have continued to identify our era.

In the old days, they came from the forest. Now they come from space. I encountered them in the forest, but also heard their craft whispering over our house, and one of my neighbors used to see a bright light forty or fifty feet above our roof, and hear emanating from it soft cries.

If there is a nonhuman species here, far older and more advanced than us, but less numerous, and also as fragile and vulnerable as the bodies in the Maussan slides and the Howe photos suggest, it might be very much in their interest to get us looking skyward for them, rather than searching what is left of the forests. After all, over the past two hundred years, we have destroyed 90% of Planet Earth’s forest cover. Perhaps our so-called visitors are clinging to life in what little space remains to them.

I have spent some time looking at the picture of the body that lay in the White’s City Museum, and reflecting on the last two times the visitors came into this house. Both times, they were extremely fast and very small, and at once captured my mind into another realm. There was intensity in them, fury, and what I would describe as vividly deep life.

The first time, in 2007, I thought that they were a pack of dogs that had somehow gotten in and gone under our bed. There followed a marvelous, mind-bending excursion into an entirely new way of seeing reality. I was living in six different lives at once, perhaps more. It was fabulously mind opening, deeply disturbing and intellectually radicalizing. In a few seconds, it fundamentally, permanently revised my vision of myself and of what it means to be human. To read what I wrote about it at the time, click here.

Did the fairy-aliens open my mind to a new level of reality, feed my imagination, deceive me? The event happened just as I finished my novel 2012, which is about living in parallel universes. Were strange little beings there to tell me that I was right, or did it all unfold in my mind—or, for that matter, in a parallel universe?

I look at the enigma of the images, and I wonder not only who they are but who we are. Above all, I find myself wondering, if these really are bodies of intelligent nonhuman beings, who came first, us or them?

My best guess: it was them.

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16 Comments

  1. Whitley, I have just put in a
    Whitley, I have just put in a Lewis Spence request from my library. Here are some interesting quotes from Spence and ALSO EDGAR CAYCE regarding brownies, pixies, fairies, and gnomes.

    http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/779603-british-fairy-origins

    British Fairy Origins Quotes (IS THIS FIRST QUOTE REFERRING
    TO CROP CIRCLES)?????

    “In like manner the fairies in Ireland were chased away from the midsummer bonfires by casting fire at them. At the first approach of summer, the fairy folk of Scotland were wont to hold a “Rade,” or ceremonial ride on horseback, when they were liable to tread down the growing grain.”

    “At Bealltainn, or May Day, every effort was made to scare away the fairies, who were particularly dreaded at this season. In the West Highlands charms were used to avert their influence. In the Isle of Man the gorse was set alight to keep them at a distance. In some parts of Ireland the house was sprinkled with holy water to ward off fairy influence. These are only a mere handful out of the large number of references available, but they seem to me to reveal an effort to avoid the attentions of discredited deities on occasions of festival once sacred to them. The gods duly return at the appointed season, but instead of being received with adoration, they are rebuffed by the descendants of their former worshippers, who have embraced a faith which regards them as demons.

    In like manner the fairies in Ireland were chased away from the midsummer bonfires by casting fire at them. At the first approach of summer, the fairy folk of Scotland were wont to hold a “Rade,” or ceremonial ride on horseback, when they were liable to tread down the growing grain.”
    ― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

    “Quite a number of writers comment on the decidedly human character of the fairies, but it must be obvious that practically all supernaturals partake of human traits, more usually unpleasant ones, being as they are the projections of man’s fear and imagination and created by him, psychologically, in his own image. Fairies are frequently described as being peevish, irritable, and revengeful to a degree. Grant Stewart says rather unmercifully of the Scottish fairies that “their appetites are as keen as their inclinations are corrupt and wicked.”
    ― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

    “Robert Kirk believed the fairies to be the doubles or, as he called them, the ‘co-walkers’ of men, which accompanied them through life, and thought that this co-walker returned to Faerie when the person died.”
    ― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

    “Some discussion of the nature and temperament of the fairies is necessary in view of its possible bearing on their origin. J. G. Campbell tells us that in the Highlands of Scotland they were regarded as “the counterparts of mankind, but substantial and unreal, outwardly invisible.” They differ from mortals in the possession of magical power, but are (((strangely dependent in many ways on man))). They are generally considered by the folk at large as of a nature between spirits and men. “They are,” says Wentz, “a distinct race between our own and that of spirits.”
    ― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

    “To sum up: all nature-spirits are not the same as fairies; nor are all fairies nature-spirits. The same applies to the relationship of nature-spirits and the dead. But we may safely say that a large proportion of nature-spirits became fairies, while quite a number of the dead in some areas seem to take on the character of nature-spirits. We cannot expect any fixity of rule in dealing with barbaric thought. We must take it as it comes. It bears the same relationship to “civilized” or folk-lore theory as does the growth of the jungle to a carefully designed and meticulously labeled botanical garden. As Victor Hugo once exclaimed when writing of the barbaric confusion which underlies the creative function in poetry: ‘What do you expect? You are among savages!”
    ― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

    http://www.edgarcayce.org/venture_Inward_sample/understanding_the_UFO_Phenomenon.htm

    By Gregory L. Little, Ed.D. (December, 2005).

    Edgar Cayce also often related that there were elemental beings, which consisted of vibrations (similar to electrical energies).Under some conditions, these vibrational forces could manifest into physical forms. During his youth, Cayce played with these physical beings, which he called fairies (294-128). In other readings (1298-1), he called elementals “the warp [vibrational] and woof [texture] of materiality.” Cayce mentioned brownies, pixies, fairies, and gnomes as examples of these materialized forms. These readings have strong similarities to many modern UFO abduction reports, and will be a topic addressed during the conference.

  2. Whitley, I have just put in a
    Whitley, I have just put in a Lewis Spence request from my library. Here are some interesting quotes from Spence and ALSO EDGAR CAYCE regarding brownies, pixies, fairies, and gnomes.

    http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/779603-british-fairy-origins

    British Fairy Origins Quotes (IS THIS FIRST QUOTE REFERRING
    TO CROP CIRCLES)?????

    “In like manner the fairies in Ireland were chased away from the midsummer bonfires by casting fire at them. At the first approach of summer, the fairy folk of Scotland were wont to hold a “Rade,” or ceremonial ride on horseback, when they were liable to tread down the growing grain.”

    “At Bealltainn, or May Day, every effort was made to scare away the fairies, who were particularly dreaded at this season. In the West Highlands charms were used to avert their influence. In the Isle of Man the gorse was set alight to keep them at a distance. In some parts of Ireland the house was sprinkled with holy water to ward off fairy influence. These are only a mere handful out of the large number of references available, but they seem to me to reveal an effort to avoid the attentions of discredited deities on occasions of festival once sacred to them. The gods duly return at the appointed season, but instead of being received with adoration, they are rebuffed by the descendants of their former worshippers, who have embraced a faith which regards them as demons.

    In like manner the fairies in Ireland were chased away from the midsummer bonfires by casting fire at them. At the first approach of summer, the fairy folk of Scotland were wont to hold a “Rade,” or ceremonial ride on horseback, when they were liable to tread down the growing grain.”
    ― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

    “Quite a number of writers comment on the decidedly human character of the fairies, but it must be obvious that practically all supernaturals partake of human traits, more usually unpleasant ones, being as they are the projections of man’s fear and imagination and created by him, psychologically, in his own image. Fairies are frequently described as being peevish, irritable, and revengeful to a degree. Grant Stewart says rather unmercifully of the Scottish fairies that “their appetites are as keen as their inclinations are corrupt and wicked.”
    ― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

    “Robert Kirk believed the fairies to be the doubles or, as he called them, the ‘co-walkers’ of men, which accompanied them through life, and thought that this co-walker returned to Faerie when the person died.”
    ― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

    “Some discussion of the nature and temperament of the fairies is necessary in view of its possible bearing on their origin. J. G. Campbell tells us that in the Highlands of Scotland they were regarded as “the counterparts of mankind, but substantial and unreal, outwardly invisible.” They differ from mortals in the possession of magical power, but are (((strangely dependent in many ways on man))). They are generally considered by the folk at large as of a nature between spirits and men. “They are,” says Wentz, “a distinct race between our own and that of spirits.”
    ― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

    “To sum up: all nature-spirits are not the same as fairies; nor are all fairies nature-spirits. The same applies to the relationship of nature-spirits and the dead. But we may safely say that a large proportion of nature-spirits became fairies, while quite a number of the dead in some areas seem to take on the character of nature-spirits. We cannot expect any fixity of rule in dealing with barbaric thought. We must take it as it comes. It bears the same relationship to “civilized” or folk-lore theory as does the growth of the jungle to a carefully designed and meticulously labeled botanical garden. As Victor Hugo once exclaimed when writing of the barbaric confusion which underlies the creative function in poetry: ‘What do you expect? You are among savages!”
    ― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

    http://www.edgarcayce.org/venture_Inward_sample/understanding_the_UFO_Phenomenon.htm

    By Gregory L. Little, Ed.D. (December, 2005).

    Edgar Cayce also often related that there were elemental beings, which consisted of vibrations (similar to electrical energies).Under some conditions, these vibrational forces could manifest into physical forms. During his youth, Cayce played with these physical beings, which he called fairies (294-128). In other readings (1298-1), he called elementals “the warp [vibrational] and woof [texture] of materiality.” Cayce mentioned brownies, pixies, fairies, and gnomes as examples of these materialized forms. These readings have strong similarities to many modern UFO abduction reports, and will be a topic addressed during the conference.

  3. Great post Carollee! Very
    Great post Carollee! Very informative. The Fairy Folk of olde must have been terrifying. Like the Visitors sometimes appear nowadays. They also seemed to have much more substance. Maybe the whole thinking that belief in them makes them more physical is at play.

    “At the first approach of summer, the fairy folk of Scotland were wont to hold a “Rade,” or ceremonial ride on horseback, when they were liable to tread down the growing grain.”

    Sounds like a crop circle to me as well.

  4. Great post Carollee! Very
    Great post Carollee! Very informative. The Fairy Folk of olde must have been terrifying. Like the Visitors sometimes appear nowadays. They also seemed to have much more substance. Maybe the whole thinking that belief in them makes them more physical is at play.

    “At the first approach of summer, the fairy folk of Scotland were wont to hold a “Rade,” or ceremonial ride on horseback, when they were liable to tread down the growing grain.”

    Sounds like a crop circle to me as well.

  5. I highly recommend any of
    I highly recommend any of Jacques Vallee’s books on this topic. Whitley actually wrote the ‘Foreward’ for ‘Dimensions’, Vallee’s excellent book from 1988. I read the book way back when it first came out, and I re-read it again about a month ago. It is still a very relevant and compelling read of case studies going back hundreds of years, and Robert Kirk’s studies are featured in ‘Dimensions’. (He too disappeared mysteriously). Jacques Vallee has been a real trailblazer for a long time, especially in regards to the idea that we may not be dealing with beings from ‘outer space’ at all.

    Great post, Whitley!

    …And my first thought on seeing the little being displayed at ‘The Million Dollar Museum’, and discussed at Earthfiles? Due to it’s extremely small stature, I was thinking that this was probably one of the beings referred to as ‘The Ant People’ by the Hopis.

  6. I highly recommend any of
    I highly recommend any of Jacques Vallee’s books on this topic. Whitley actually wrote the ‘Foreward’ for ‘Dimensions’, Vallee’s excellent book from 1988. I read the book way back when it first came out, and I re-read it again about a month ago. It is still a very relevant and compelling read of case studies going back hundreds of years, and Robert Kirk’s studies are featured in ‘Dimensions’. (He too disappeared mysteriously). Jacques Vallee has been a real trailblazer for a long time, especially in regards to the idea that we may not be dealing with beings from ‘outer space’ at all.

    Great post, Whitley!

    …And my first thought on seeing the little being displayed at ‘The Million Dollar Museum’, and discussed at Earthfiles? Due to it’s extremely small stature, I was thinking that this was probably one of the beings referred to as ‘The Ant People’ by the Hopis.

  7. Sometimes, I think, that our
    Sometimes, I think, that our spiritual selves may be what controls the visitors. While we moved through the universe in spiritual form for billions of years, maybe they were created to be a tool to deal with the physical nature of the universe, while we were not incarnate but in spiritual form.

    Once we incarnate into something they would be there to shepherd us along our path.

    Maybe they watch over us, because that is the task we gave them.

    I’ve heard it said that anyone can see god, but that just like the rays of the sun passing through an object, our view of what god is, is colored by our consciousness. Much as a colored fragment of glass colors a light beam passing through it. If your consciousness is colored by evil then you will see demons. Maybe when our consciousness, becomes uncolored we will finally be able to see clearly what we are dealing with.

    Lots of Maybe’s..

  8. Sometimes, I think, that our
    Sometimes, I think, that our spiritual selves may be what controls the visitors. While we moved through the universe in spiritual form for billions of years, maybe they were created to be a tool to deal with the physical nature of the universe, while we were not incarnate but in spiritual form.

    Once we incarnate into something they would be there to shepherd us along our path.

    Maybe they watch over us, because that is the task we gave them.

    I’ve heard it said that anyone can see god, but that just like the rays of the sun passing through an object, our view of what god is, is colored by our consciousness. Much as a colored fragment of glass colors a light beam passing through it. If your consciousness is colored by evil then you will see demons. Maybe when our consciousness, becomes uncolored we will finally be able to see clearly what we are dealing with.

    Lots of Maybe’s..

  9. Many wonderful thought
    Many wonderful thought provoking comments everyone. I would love to read what comments MACE might have!

  10. Many wonderful thought
    Many wonderful thought provoking comments everyone. I would love to read what comments MACE might have!

  11. This could be the most
    This could be the most important journal that you have done, and I mean not only on the topic.

    I ask myself (as I have heard you say on many Dreamlands) “Why aren’t the most intelligent and smartest of our species paying more attention to this phenomenon?” Because it takes more than smarts – it takes SOUL smarts, vision, and compassion I think.

    Luckily we have you.

  12. This could be the most
    This could be the most important journal that you have done, and I mean not only on the topic.

    I ask myself (as I have heard you say on many Dreamlands) “Why aren’t the most intelligent and smartest of our species paying more attention to this phenomenon?” Because it takes more than smarts – it takes SOUL smarts, vision, and compassion I think.

    Luckily we have you.

  13. fascinating and compelling.
    fascinating and compelling.

  14. fascinating and compelling.
    fascinating and compelling.

  15. I am reading missing 411
    I am reading missing 411 books and can’t help but imagine that there once was a time when “fairy folks” could have been blamed for the missing children.

  16. I am reading missing 411
    I am reading missing 411 books and can’t help but imagine that there once was a time when “fairy folks” could have been blamed for the missing children.

Comments are closed.