EPISODES: INTRODUCTION | The Egryn Lights | The Welsh Roswell | The Pembrokeshire Wave | Pentyrch and Smilog Wood | UFolk | Wee Folk Pt 1 | Wee Folk Pt 2
Episode 8 of: UFOs, Aliens and the Fairy Kingdom by Nigel Graddon.
They are fairies; he that speaks
To them shall die:
I’ll wink and couch: no man
Their works must eye.
—William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
The idea that the universe might contain intelligent entities exhibiting powers of organisation that no human model can presently replicate on the basis of currently classified concepts is theoretically plausible. The behaviour of such beings would then necessarily appear random or absurd, or go undetected, especially if they possessed physical means of appearing and withdrawing at will beyond the human range of perception. Naturally, such physical actions would appear on scientific records as mere random accidents, easily attributable to instrument error or to natural causes. If one considers the UFO phenomenon as a special instance of this fundamental realisation, we are presented with the issue of long-term non-solvability and of continued manifestation. Rejecting the naïve theory that the phenomenon is caused by the activities of little green men from Mars, Jacques Vallée proposed two alternative lines of speculation for consideration:
1. There exists a natural phenomenon whose manifestations straddle the borders of the physical and mental strata of consciousness. It is a medium in which human dreams can be implemented, and is the mechanism by which UFO events are generated;
2. For centuries, a superior intelligence that may conceivably reside in a plane of existence invisible to normal human perception—an integral part of a “greater” Earth that comprises our physical planet and an unquantifiable number of neighbouring dimensions—has been projecting into our environment (for reasons best known to that intelligence) various artificial objects or ultra-realistic paranormal contructs whose creation is a pure form of art.
After decades of high-level involvement in UFO research, Professor Allen Hynek (1910-1986)[1] developed similar lines of thought:
The conclusion I’ve come to after all these years is that… the subject is much more complex than any of us imagined. It has paranormal aspects but certainly has very real physical aspects too… If we are finally forced by the evidence to go into the paranormal, then we will… I am inclined to think in terms of something “metaterrestrial,” a sort of parallel reality, slipping in and out of a sequence with our own.
Adding his support to an expanding “metaterrestrial” hypothesis, Gordon Creighton in a report for the British Flying Saucer Review said,
There seems to be no evidence yet that any of these craft or beings originate from outer space.
Brad Steiger (1936 – 2018), an American writer of nearly 200 fiction and non-fiction works, including 22 on UFOs said:
…we are dealing with a multidimensional paraphysical phenomenon which is largely indigenous to planet earth.
From these observations one may draw a number of conclusions about the archetypal nature of UFOs, including, of course, a number of craft seen and encountered in the Welsh Triangle:
Ø They are already here. In some way they appear to be emanating from our own planet;
Ø They are visible yet do not seem to be real physical entities. In other words, they do not seem to be bound by the same physical laws as the rest of our material/natural world;
Ø They and/or their occupants are sometimes willing to be seen, but do not appear to want to make open and friendly contact on a large scale.
As Hynek and Vallée said in their book, The Edge of Reality:
If UFOs are, indeed, somebody else’s “nuts and bolts hardware,” then we must still explain how such tangible hardware can change shape before our eyes, vanish in a Cheshire Cat manner (not leaving a grin), seemingly melt away in front of us, or apparently “materialise” mysteriously before us without detection by persons nearby or in neighbouring towns. We must wonder, too, where UFOs are “hiding” when not manifesting themselves to human eyes.
Where indeed?
Hynek’s “metaterrestrials” evidently enjoy sewing puzzlement among humans, John Keel remarking:
UFOs… seem to be nothing more than transmogrifications tailoring themselves to our abilities to understand. The thousands of contacts with the entities indicate that they are liars and put-on artists. The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon.[2]
Linda Moulton Howe was contacted in May 1994 by U.S. government agents seeking access to her recent book.[3] They were given a copy and later provided a cassette tape of comments in which they said that the Department of Defense was seeking to exploit David Bohm’s quantum physics ideas. Disturbingly, they said that NHEs were carrying out human abductions and mutilating thousands of animals in a manner designed to create a grand smokescreen of deception. They explained that the motive behind these actions is to ensure that while fingers are being pointed into outer space for aliens, and while public focus remains fixed on UFOs, secret government projects, satanic cults and the like, no one was dwelling on a realisation that NHEs are dimensional in origin.
In support of the UFO multiverse hypothesis, Howe, Valleée and other eminent researchers have variously recounted abductions stories in which fairies, goblins, elves, and the “Good People” steal away children and adults and take them to fairyland. Valleée also finds in many religious traditions and folk stories other similarities to UFO phenomena, such as missing time, abductees’ perceptions of reality being profoundly altered, and stories of a place where “changelings” (offfspring that are part-human and part-fairy) are born, midwifed by the human kidnap victim. In a remarkable instance of inspired intuition that prefigured Bohm’s scientific thinking, Evan Wentz remarked in 1911:[4]
… Fairyland actually exists as an invisible world within which the visible world is immersed like an island in an unexplored ocean, and that it is peopled by more species of living beings than this world, because incomparably more vast and varied in its possibilities.
In conversations with Linda Moulton Howe, Department of Defence officials basically repeated Evan-Wentz’s claim but introduced a far darker element into the account. They told of a telepathic exchange between an elderly colleague and an NHE retrieved from a crashed disc in New Mexico. The NHE said:
This is not the only universe. Imagine a large silver island of white sand and that each sand grain is a different universe separated from each other by an electromagnetic membrane. And surrounding the island is a cold, dark sea.” Howe asked the agent about the cold dark sea. He said, “You don’t want to know. It will change you forever.
Visionary sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft said much the same thing.[5] In The Call of Cthulhu he said that because of an “induced occluded vision” humanity is wholly ignorant of the true nature of the universe, the disclosure of which would result in mass insanity and violence. Lovecraft described NHEs as ultraterrestrials, which are coterminous with all space and coexistent with all time
The agents went on to describe the dimensional NHEs, purportedly associated with ancient human civilisations, as neither benevolent nor neutral and are an integral element of a vastly bigger picture of the present-day deception of mankind. NHEs, they added, have been industrious in building a foundation to establish themselves as the bringers of all that is good to humanity, while we continue to peer wistfully through rose-tinted spectacles to the far distant past in the “Golden Age” of ancient cultures. The agents suggested that Howe should study Vallée’s Passport to Magonia and the very close parallels between fairy culture and the appearance of NHEs.
Writer Bruce Rux also refers to connections between UFO visitors and past civilisations. In Architects of the Underworld[6] Rux claimed that following the Roswell incident in July 1947, the U.S. Government pursued a growing belief that UFOlk were from a parallel race, variously known as the Watchers, the Anunnaki, Tuatha de Dannan and the Elohim et al, which had its origins in human antiquity.
On the basis of these somewhat alarming speculations a number of talking points arise. Since Kenneth Arnold’s startling UFO experience in 1946, there has been a high frequency of what may be termed colourful rumours in all parts of the world. Predominantly, these episodes feature observations of unknown machines close to the ground in rural areas, physical traces left by these machines, and their various effects upon humans and animals. Each of these factors we have seen featured in Wales’s instances of UFO phenomena.
When various underlying psychological archetypes are stripped from these rumours, the saucer phenomenon coincides to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries, the observations of scholars, philosophers and mystics of past ages, and the universal belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological descriptions place them in the same category as present-day ufonauts. The beings that witnesses report seeing, hearing and touching fall into a number of biological types, among them those of giant stature, men indistinguishable from us, winged creatures, and various types of fearsome monsters.
It is striking, however, that most of the UFO “pilots” are dwarf types, either, i) dark, hairy beings with small, bright eyes and deep, rugged “old” voices, identical to the gnomes of medieval fairy tales; or ii), those that match the description of sylphs of the Middle Ages or the elves of the fairy-faith, with human complexions, over-sized heads, and silvery voices, all of which are described as with or without breathing apparatus. Their reported behaviour is generally described as absurd, the appearance of their craft ludicrous. Both types have been observed at UFO locations in Wales.
Perhaps the first documented appearance of a dwarf-piloted UFO occurred in Iowa in March 1897. Farmer Robert Hibbard saw a large, elongated craft with turbine wheels and a glass section. From the airship an anchor was hanging from a rope. It caught his clothing and dragged him several feet until he fell back to earth. Hibbard described the beings inside the craft as “hideous people”: two men, a woman and three children jabbering together. Subsequently, the manned airship, or one very much like it, was seen in other parts of the United States over a period of months. One such event on 26th April 1897, exhibited a distinctly fairylike appearance and was witnessed by several parties returning from church in Merkel, Texas. Ten minutes after the craft was seen above the town, a man descended the anchor rope. He was wearing a light blue sailor suit and was small in stature. He stopped when he saw parties at the base of the anchor, cut the rope below him and sailed off in a northeast direction.
In fact, an episode much like this was the subject of an Irish account nearly 800 years earlier. In around 1211 ce, while the townsfolk of the borough of Cloera in Ireland were at Sunday Mass, an anchor with a rope attached to it was dropped from the sky by a large craft. The anchor got snagged in the arch above the church door. One of the men on the craft leapt overboard and jumped down to the anchor as if to release it. He looked as if he were swimming in water. The folk rushed up and tried to seize him but their Bishop forbade the people to hold the man, fearing it would kill him. Once freed the man hurried up to the ship where the crew cut the rope and the ship sailed out of sight. The anchor was taken to the church where it was retained as a testimony to the fairy-like episode.
Frequently, in instances of verbal communication with humans, ufonauts’ statements have been wildly misleading as if they revel in indulging in trickster behaviour, one consequence of which is to deter professional scientists from making real-time investigations where UFO action has taken place. It also serves to imbue the saucer myth with its religious and mystical characteristics. Given these facts, it is evident that the behaviour of a superior intelligence that co-exists with humanity on an interdimensional, superconscious, astral or etheric level within the “greater” Earth environment, would not necessarily appear purposeful to a human observer.
Contactees often report that ufonauts state that their mission is to influence human behaviour. For example, they say we should not embark on actions that will harm our environment or misuse atomic power. This same power was once the exclusive prerogative of fairies, a belief that was shared by rural peasantry and learned clerics alike. An illustrative example is that one of the first questions put to Joan of Arc by her inquisitors was, “Do you have any knowledge or have you assisted at the assemblies held at the fountain of the fairies, near Domrémy, around which dance malignant spirits?”
From primitive magic, through mystical experience, to the fairy-faith and religion, this continuum of beliefs has evolved to incorporate the now eighty-year-old modern flying saucer tradition. When once the study of witchcraft was undertaken to throw light on matters for which there was no rational explanation, since the work of Freud and Jung it has been psychiatry and, more latterly, quantum physics to which investigators turn for a “Eureka” moment of revelation.
Jacques Vallee[7] questioned if it was reasonable to draw a parallel between religious apparitions, the fairy-faith, reports of dwarf-like beings with supernatural powers, airship tales in the United States in the late nineteenth century, and the present stories of UFO landings. He concluded that the mechanisms that have generated those various beliefs are identical, and that their human context and their effects on humans are constant. He came to believe that the recognition of this fundamental mechanism is crucial, insofar that it has little to do with the knotty problem of knowing whether UFOs are physical objects or not.
It follows from this line of thought that it is futile to seek to understand the intrinsic meaning and purpose of flying saucers in the skies of Wales and globally, as in former times it was also meaningless to pursue knowledge of the fairy folk. To do so is to make the mistake of confusing appearance and reality. By all means, reflect on the physical naure of “alien” objects but invest greater time and energy in dwelling on the deeper problems of their impact on our imagination and culture.
Nevertheless, Vallee counselled, there is one positive statement one can make without fear of contradiction:
It is possible to make large sections of any population believe in the existence of supernatural races, in the possibility of flying machines, in the plurality of inhabited worlds, by exposing them to a few carefully engineered scenes the details of which are adapted to the culture and superstitions of a particular time and place.
Were the meetings with UFO entities in Pembrokeshire “carefully engineered scenes,” the characteristics of which reflected the cultural elements of our nation’s Celtic heritage? In the United States, they appear as sci-fi monsters, in South America as hot-blooded entities quick to get into a fight, in Ireland as the aristocratic “Gentry” organised like a religious-military order. In Wales they appear as weirdly formed infiltrators from ancient Annwn.
A scientist’s only valid question is to decide if a phenomenon can be decided by itself, or whether that process is impossible to investigate empirically because it is an instance of a deeper problem. The phenomena in Wales’s skies and its diverse landscapes are illustrative of this dichotomy. On the plus side of this seemingly intractable puzzle is that the UFO story allows one to observe folklore in the making, a journey which may lead the ardent observer into the most recondite regions of human imagination.
Bulgarian hikers capturing a photo of a grey NHE in Yundola forest, 2 December, 2013
[1] American astronomer, ufologist and scientific advisor to UFO studies undertaken by the U.S. Air Force under three projects: Project Sign (1947–1949), Project Grudge (1949–1951) and Project Blue Book (1952–1969).
[2] Keel J., Operation Trojan Horse, San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 1970.
[3] Howe, L.M., Glimpses of Other Realities Volume 1: Facts and Eyewitnesses, Linda Moulton Howe Productions, 1993
[4] Evans-Wentz, W., The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, Glastonbury, The Lost Library, 2010 (first published by Henry Frowde in 1911).
[5] Lovecraft, H.P., The Call of Cthulhu, Weird Tales Magazine, 1928
[6] Rux, B., Architects of the Underworld, Frog, Ltd, Berkeley, 1996
[7] Vallée, J., Passport to Magonia, Brisbane. Daily Grail Publishing, 2014
EPISODES: INTRODUCTION | The Egryn Lights | The Welsh Roswell | The Pembrokeshire Wave | Pentyrch and Smilog Wood | UFolk | Wee Folk Pt 1 | Wee Folk Pt 2
