This is reproduced from the introduction of the book Phenomena, by John Michell and Robert
Rickard (1977):
"This is not just a book of wonders; it is a book of repeated
wonders. It is about things which are
experienced by people in every generation, themes in life which recur endlessly
but contrive always to elude reasonable explanation. In terms of any rational system of belief they are impossible,
yet they survive every attempt to exorcize or suppress them. They are repetitive and effective. They affect people mentally or physically,
and for that reason we include them among the 'real' phenomena of this
world. On their own level they
correspond to the archetypal themes of mythology and the archetypal images in
dreams. These also, because they pass
the criteria of being repetitive and effective, we allow to be 'real', and we
refer to them in drawing up the inclusive world-view which we call
phenomenalism. This book is meant as an
introduction to an expanded, phenomenal view of reality which, because it is
based on life as experienced rather than as conceived, we offer as a more
complete, practical and satisfactory way of seeing things than the physical
world-view of modern science.
As phenomenalists, we accept everything; we believe nothing absolutely;
we do not explain. Any theories we may
offer are tentative and temporary. Our
study is the content of human experience, things that happen, or are believed
to happen, or are said to happen. Particularly we are interested in the enigmatic range of phenomena whose
existence lies somewhere between the 'hard' reality of nuts and bolts, bricks
and mortar and the 'psychological' reality of dreams.
The father of modern phenomenalism was Charles Fort (1874-1932), a
world-changer, a cosmological revolutionary. From his lifetime's collection of anomalies and irregularities in the
scientific world-image he identified many previously unrecognised types in
phenomenal reality, such as the UFO, the fireball and the teleportation
effect. More than that, he developed,
subtly and humorously, a philosophical view of life capable of adapting itself
to the widest possible range of experience. He delighted in all the products of nature and imagination. He accepted everything that happened in life
and rejected all interpretive myths, even scientific ones. He valued first-hand witness above
second-hand rationalisation. Existence
is one creature. Everything is related
to and merges into everything else, with different levels of reality
interpenetrating. There are no breaks
in the spectrum of phenomena. All
categories, all divisions are man-made and arbitrary, for there is no such
thing as an isolated event any more than there are isolated organs in the body. 'There's a shout of vengefulness in Hyde
Park, London - far away in Gloucestershire an ancient mansion bursts into
flames.'
In the continuous field of phenomena there are peaks, islands of a
submerged mountain range. In the
illustrated section of this book we have chosen phenomena which cluster round
certain peaks, arranging them under different categories. These categories are artificial and for
temporary convenience only, for each one can be infinitely subdivided or merged
with others to produce different patterns of peaks or archipelagos in the
geography of the phenomenal universe. One of our objects is to point out the rich variety of images that can
be projected onto and drawn from experience of life. And we begin our justification of phenomenalism as the least
inadequate of philosophies by suggesting that the best way for anyone to avoid
turning into a mad bore, crank or obsessive is to recognise that nature is
quite equal to the wildest flights of human imagination and quite capable of
manifesting evidence to support the craziest theories than anyone can dream
up. Only with this understanding,
preferably confirmed by experiment in the style of Lewis Carroll's White Queen
('Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast'),
can one fully appreciate such scenes as the learned professor reproving the
enthusiast for not viewing the world in the image of current pedantry and being
screamed at in return for being blind to things that should be clear to any
lunatic.
As phenomenalists we recognise no certainties. Yet all around us there are certainties variously contrived, the
certainties of tyrants, psychiatrists, high priests of science and religion,
cranks and fanatics, each one consisting of different selections from the
common source material, the world of sensory perception, and each one a rival
to the others. There are wars between
world-views for the status of dominant reality. Mental imperialism. We
think these certainties are best avoided. They are maintained by studied ignorance and selective blindness. Finally they have the same irritating effect
as the wearing of blinkers. When the
cherished beliefs of a lifetime are confronted with experience that contradicts
them, the beliefs should know how to give way gracefully. Ourselves, we take pleasure in all beliefs
and theories; we are benign to all interpretations and school of thought, and
we look kindly on stern orthodoxies and passionate heresies alike. Each one reflects an aspect of human nature
and each one has a positive contribution to make to the stock of human understanding. Yet we would rather sample them all than
swallow any one whole. Throughout this
book we advance numerous theories to account for the odd events and apparitions
assembled in it, but through all of them are useful in explaining some of the
evidence, there is none which covers the full range of phenomena in any
field. We appreciate theories as works
of art, and we create our own in the same spirit, preferring always to study
reality at its source, in the products of nature, rather than through the
images people have made of it.
The advantages of a phenomenal world-view are demonstrated by the
following event recorded in John Aubrey's Miscellanies.
In 1655 a man who should have been in
Goa, the Portuguese colony in India, and who actually had been in Goa some
moments previously, was suddenly found to be back in Portugal. He had been carried mysteriously through the
air. He was given a fair trial, found
guilty and burnt at the stake.
The ecclesiastical authorities in Portugal at the time, like all
defenders of orthodoxies everywhere, were not phenomenalists. They wanted explanations, and they explained
in terms of the dominant reality. That
reality included magicians and witches, enemies of the faith yet part of it, a
kind of official opposition. One of the
characteristics of these enemies, by which they could be recognized, was their
tendency to fly through the air. No one
but a recognised saint or a magician did such things, and since the man from
Goa was no saint he must be a magician. This logic was followed out to the point of burning him.
The tragedy was caused by the authorities' moralistic attitude towards
phenomena. We can not now tell whether
the man actually was transported through the air from Goa; there are no
details, although the evidence at the time was strong enough to convict
him. But we do not believe that he was
necessarily a magician. In the
seventeenth century there was sufficient proof, for anyone who cared to look
for it, of LEVITATION AND SPONTANEOUS FLIGHT, and since that time many good
cases have been recorded, from abductions of people attributed to fairies to
modern UFO-linked teleportations. Examples are given in our sections STRANGE DISAPPEARANCES, TAKEN AWAY
AND BROUGHT BACK and TELEPORTATION. Many of these appear to have occurred
spontaneously rather than by magic and witchcraft; and we believe that the now
fashionable UFO attribution is as arbitrary as the earlier explanations. Had the Portuguese authorities been able to
review dispassionately the history of spontaneous levitation instead of merely
accepting the current explanation of it, they could not have justified burning
the man from Goa.
Many are the misunderstandings, injustices and miseries which could have
been avoided at the time by a touch of phenomenalism: visionaries sent to
madhouses, UFO contactees put out of work, scientists discredited for
unorthodox findings, Joan of Arc and many others burnt for conversing with
spirits. Fort recorded several instances
where unaccountable disturbances of the 'poltergeist' variety were blamed
unfairly on children in the household, often on some wretched servant girl who
may have been the unconscious medium for such disturbances. Inevitably, with the modern confusion of all
creeds and in reaction to the oppressive certainties of the great
nineteenth-century theory -mongers, phenomenalism is becoming more generally
appreciated for its inclusive approach to reality. With it comes a new and welcome tolerance. Policemen can spot pumas in Surrey or chase
UFOs in Devon and still remain policemen. People mysteriously transported through the air are no longer burnt;
sometimes they are even believed. Scientists view, and write papers on, such products of extra-scientific
reality as fire-walking and spoon bending. Humanists, freed from such once obligatory concepts as spirits or the
primacy of matter, study the divining rod and survival after death through the
neutral evidence of their associated phenomena. There are even some psychiatrists who will listen uncensoriously
to the impossible experiences of their patients. Meanwhile, exclusionism as Charles Fort called it, the tendency
to adopt a rationally coherent part of reality as a true substitute for the
more than rational whole, still flourishes in the academic world which informs
the political one. The only revolution
we look forward to is that which will free the toiling masses of downtrodden
phenomena, raise them from their condition of neglect, and allow them an equal
say in governing our conception of reality.
Phenomenal varieties and
explanations
We are concerned with symptoms rather than causes; with symptoms of
existences that exist only in their symptoms; with objects falling from the
sky, or disappearing into thin air, or being or not being where they should not
or should be; with repeated occurrences of impossible creatures; with events
and phenomena encountered on the physical plane yet obeying the laws of
dreamland rather than those of physics. We conceive of three modes of reality, 'hard', 'psychological' and
between the two, 'phenomenal', all active and effective, all merging. Events on one level relate to those on the
others, with causes and effects indeterminate. Does smoking cause cancer or cancer cause smoking or are they both of
some other origin? Does the future air
disaster cause the premonition or the premonition the air disaster or are they
both provoked by something else? Throughout the different levels of reality there are
correspondences. Strange objects in the
sky, monsters by land and sea, humanoids and unearthly men. These are the archetypal stuff of dreams,
creatures of universal myths and fairy stories, yet spilling over at times into
phenomenal reality to shock or amaze human witnesses, and sometimes approaching
though never quite achieving hard reality with such ambiguous credentials as
strange footprints and blurred photographs. And among all the mass of evidence, the hints and apparitions, scarcely
an item of 'solid' proof, scarcely a nut or bolt to convince those whose notion
of reality is limited to such things. This aversion to giving hard evidence of their existence is a striking
feature of our phenomena. It may be the
best clue we have to their nature. Perhaps it is deliberate. We are
led on only to be cut off. John Keel
the UFO writer has some interesting things to say about the delusions visited -
from somewhere - on the UFO prophets after an initial period of
inspirations. Unidentified flying
hoaxes in a cosmic send-up; a universal treasure hunt with clues in a dead
language and the course booby-trapped. We will write again when we know.
Suppressions are another thing. Museum curators are rarely phenomenalists. They label in terms of other labels, or they reject. No one wants the odd piece that belongs to
another jigsaw puzzle. When the
religious people ran the museums, exhibiting sacred relics and objects of
miraculous origin, the evidences of our phenomena were more prominently
displayed. But they were explained,
religiously. The explanations supported
the myth behind the religion, and when the religion changed the explanation
changed with it. And the process
continues. Here is an illustration. Many of our phenomena are connected with
certain spots, the sites of old churches and places traditionally sacred. As phenomenalists, we think that the
sanctity of these spots arose in the first place from something that happened
there, something that may happen there still. Mysterious lights, miraculous cures, visions and spectres: these are
most commonly associated with ancient sacred places, and the association is a
very old one. The various qualities of
the spots later to be called sacred were recognised in very early times. Later they were explained. The cures or visions were attributed to
local gods, then to other gods of other religions, then to saints or legendary
holy men or Buddha or the Virgin Mary. A modern development of the tendency to explain in terms of current myth
is the theory, born of the space age UFO cult, that identifies the great sanctuaries
of prehistoric civilizations as the work of extra-terrestrial spacemen.
The two enemies of phenomenalism: suppressions and explanations.
Charles Fort, the connoisseur of phenomena, was a connoisseur also of
explanations. In 1881 there was a storm
over the English city of Worcester (see FALLS OF CREATURES AND ORGANIC
MATTER). tons of winkles and mussels,
with a few crabs thrown in, fell from the sky, littering streets, back yards and
gardens. Of course they did not really
fall from the sky because there are no winkles, etc. up there in the first place. So a local explanation arose. A
fishmonger with unsaleable stock had dumped them. The Worcester fishmonger became Fort's favourite character. He stood for all the inadequate, hopelessly
overstretched explanations that rationalism, for want of anything better, must
sometimes make do with. Fort painted a
lively picture of the Worcester fishmonger, processing quite unnoticed though the
city streets with his many carts loaded with superfluous shellfish. His assistants are busy shovelling them into
the road. They climb walls and shovel
them into back yards and onto roofs. This done, they vanish without trace. Enquiries showed that no winkles or other shellfish had been on offer
that day in Worcester market.
As well as the Worcester fishmonger, For identified another common type
of explanation, the partial masquerading as the total. A house is attacked by mysterious forces; a
'poltergeist' classic. Stones fly,
objects float, fires break out, blows are felt - and then a boy is caught
throwing stones. The phenomena cease,
and obviously the boy was responsible for the entire episode.
A subtle principle in nature which Fort was the first, at least since
the days of the old alchemists, to remark, is the tendency of scientific
experiments to yield results gratifying to the experimenter. There was the trivial case of the obliging
snails. In August 1886 snails fell out
of the sky near Redruth, Cornwall. One
correspondent to the Redruth Independent
thought they were sea snails. He put
some in seawater and they thrived. Another thought they were fresh-water snails. The ones he put in seawater died. We suspect no one of dishonesty, remembering ther new doctrine of
the sub-atomic physicists that the act of observation affects the thing
observed. We know what they mean. Professor Paul Kammerer for example. He had a theory, an heretical one, to do
with the inheritance of acquired characteristics. To prove it, the toads in his laboratory should develop rough
black feet. They did so. A specimen was sent to England for
inspection, was inspected and found to be as stated. Other scientists disliked the heresy. They also inspected the toad, hoping to discredit it, and found
the black feet doctored with Indian ink. The matter was explained by all parties, variously, but nothing in the
explanations was more interesting than the phenomenon itself. Kammerer desired black-footed toads and was
answered. His opponents desired no such
thing and they too were obliged. The
Piltdown hoax: a similar sort of case. Darwin claimed it was only the imperfection of the fossil record that
prevented the discovery of missing links between the species. A generation of scientists strove to find
the most important of the hypothetical missing links, the one between men and
ape stock. Evolutionism and a
world-view depended on it. There was
intense desire for it. It was duly
found, and in England too, matrix of empire and orthodoxy. For forty years the Piltdown skull, half man
half ape, only too literally so, stood as hard evidence of the truths of
evolutionism. It converted the last
waverers. Old Boyd Dawkins, an original
opponent of Darwin, confessed his errors on the strength of it. In 1953 it was exposed as a clumsy
fabrication, but who did it? The
detectives say that more than one person must have been involved, all the
suspects leading evolutionists, and one, Teilhard de Chardin, promoter of an
evolutionary religion. Perhaps they
were all in it. The evidence points
that way, but we find it hard to credit such mass, fanatical dishonesty so long
maintained. We are left with the simple
phenomenon: an ape-man skull was desired, and the desire was answered.
Many of our phenomena are like the Piltdown skull, wish-fulfillers,
need-satisfiers, related to the thought-forms of eastern magi as creatures of
the imagination made manifest. The
sensitive folk of the Rocky Mountains dream of hairy giants lliving up on the
high peaks. Not only do they dream of
them, they actually see them. They even
see them sober, and so the Himalayan yeti has an American cousin, 'Bigfoot',
THE GREAT AMERICAN MONSTER, with his phenomenal credentials of footprints,
strands of hair and inconclusive snapshot photographs. Psychologists have much to say on this sort
of thing, all of it relevant, but when they descend to explanations they tend
to allow the partial to masquerade as the total. Phenomena cannot be explained away by descibing them or their
witnesses in clinical terms. Yet many
of our phenomena are definitely related to the state of mind of the people to
whom they occur. Fire-walking for
example, or levitation; these are certainly physical feats but they can also be
called imaginary ones since they are performed in states of trance or
ecstasy. It is the same with
apparitions - monsters, werewolves and so on - which relate to unconscious
desires, to atavistic images and yearnings. But we do not follow the psychologists in locating the source of our
phenomena in the unconscious mind. There is no certainty. It is no
less likely that the images in the unconscious mind were imprinted there by
phenomena in the first place rather than vice versa: that the thing preceded
its reflection. True, philosophers give
primacy to the mental world over the physical, but when it comes to such
questions as whether perception preceded the perceived, futility overwhelms and
we return to our present and sufficient source of madness, the study of
phenomenal reality.
A window on the phenomenal
world
The trouble with rationalistic cosmologies is that they can never
entirely accord with experience. The
discrepancy sets up irritations and the innocent suffer. Normal people are declared or declare
themselves mad; talents and genius are suppressed or distorted; the world
appears duller than its natural hue; low-mindedness is institutionalised. No rational system can amalgamate and
reconcile all our phenomena. So we must
be rational ourselves and follow this conclusion by looking for an irrational
cosmology. A religion seems the first
obvious answer. Religious systems make
room for the irrational, are founded on it. But closer inspection shows that these irrationalities appear as such
only from outside the system. Within
all is sweet reason, because all is explained, relatively. The children at Fatima saw and spoke to a
radiant lady. It was explained to them
that they had been granted a shared vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary - in the
jargon of phenomenalism a BVM sighting. There are many such records both within and outside religious
contexts. Howard Menger in America
during the early 1950s claimed contact and conversations with another (or the
same) radiant lady. He wrote a book
about her, From Outer Space to You,
explaining her in the context of the UFO cult as a wish-fulfilling space
missionary. The idea of the time
conventionalizes her identity. She has
been variously described as the Queen of the Fairies, as Isis or/as the White
Goddess. Her names are legion but
behind them all is the same experience - an encounter with a sympathetic lady,
glowing.
There is something to be said for all conventionalisations that allow
the phenomenon it due reality. People
who see the radiant lady, whatever she is called at the time, are at least
permitted to believe that they have seen something. In many ways the modern psychological explanation is the least
satisfactory of all, since by locating the source of the vision exclusively in
the seer it reduces its content to the chance projection of a disturbed
mentality. The experience becomes
illegitimate, no longer a source of wonder but of shame, a symptom of sickness,
a portent of evil, a suiable case for treatment. This way of seeing things is excessively low-minded . Psychology has made a useful contribution to
the study of our phenomena by drawing attention to the relationship many of
them have with unusual mental states; yet the phenomena themselves,
fire-walking, stigmata, radiant bodies, land and water monsters, aerial battles
and all, remain as they always have been, unexplained. Their one constant feature is the
reality-status they all share - less than 'hard', more than 'psychological'.
An inclusive cosmology, that is what we have in mind: a total world-view
which accepts, without moral judgments and without rationalistic censorship,
the entire range of repeated human experience. Obviously there can be no such thing within the canon of science or
organised religion. Both pretend to
offer a total world-view but can maintain it only by suppressing experience or
by explaining it in terms of their own basic assumptions. To find precedents for the sort of thing we
are looking for, we must recede into the distant past, before the rise of dogmatic
science and religion.
Charles Fort was very much a man of his time. He mistrusted the past. All his data were of contemporary or quite recent incidents. And from the data alone he developed a view
of reality which seemed in his generation to be one of unprecedented
craziness. Yet it was not
unprecedented. There were Forts in
antiquity; there have always been Forts; but in modern times they have been
classed as heretics and suppressed by the religious or scientific orthodoxy. For respected, unsuppressed Forts we must
look to the ancient philosophers, the humorous sages of Taoist China or the
pre-Socratic westerners. Socrates
himself had the Fortean view that he was the most informed of men because he
alone realised that he knew nothing, but by his time the high priests and
defenders of orthodoxy were in control, and he was put to death for opposing
relativism to the official certainties of state religion. He pointed out that there were other gods
besides the state ones, as Fort pointed out other phenomena besides the
scientific ones.
Showers of creatures and objects from the sky, for example. By all good accounts this is by no means a
rare occurrence. Yet the modern
treatment of this fairly harmless - and sometimes beneficial - phenomenon has
been disgraceful. For all its
impressive documentation it has been victimised by scientific certainty,
excluded, suppressed or explained - partially. The same with many other types of repetitive events, such as those
illustrated in our sections. We look
for a cosmology which includes them all, not only to prevent the injustices
which them all, not only to prevent the injustices which arise through
ignorance of them but also because the science which is not informed on them
lacks the complete data for its investigations. From the evidence gathered in this book we suggest there may be
principles or active forces in nature which science has so far ignored because
they are not strictly within the realm of physical law with which it
deals. Curiously enough, science has
begun to recognise the most insubstantial level of reality, the world of
psychological types, before acknowledging the intermediate level of phenomenal
reality, which has roots in the objective and subjective worlds alike. In the universe, which combines and
harmonises all levels of reality, we detect the characteristics of a living
organism. Self-regulation is a feature
of all living creatures. A wound
activates the process of healing; needs cry out and are satisfied; deficiencies
attract compensations, sometimes excessively. Cravings for water have led to people blowing up at oases. So it is universally. One year there is a shortage of toads, not
that anyone cares very much; but there is compensation and next year a
glut. Toads swarm out of the water,
rain down from the skies; people shovel them out of their houses. We note with Fort this hermaphroditic
tendency in nature to satisfy its own desires, a tendency which provides the
mechanism of magic. Fort's world-view
was a spontaneous revival of that which informed the writings of the old
mystical philosophers. If one desires
to attract anything in nature, wrote Plotinus in the third century AD,
referring to the shrines and invocation centres of the ancients, one should
construct a receptacle designed to receive it. For virtually the entire course of history this view of things has
prevailed. Behind every magical act,
ritual and prayer meeting is the idea that desires can be artificially
implanted in nature to produce their fulfilment. Thus tribesmen dance to attract rain and bird-lovers hang up
nesting boxes in their orchards. Many
of our phenomena can be related to this self-compensating, reflexive tendency
of the universe to respond both to the needs which arise naturally within its parts
and to those injected into it by concentrated human will. Some mixed examples: the newly dug pond,
suddenly and unaccountably teeming with fish; the wedding ring stigmata
appearing on the finger of a dedicated and virginal bride of Christ; manna from
heaven to the faithful in the wilderness; a friend intensely thought about and
soon afterwards heard of, or from, or encountered; all miracles, coincidences,
inspired puns and poetic justices; the levitating force by which the ecstatic
soars aloft after his thoughts; monsters in children's imaginations and in Loch
Ness or the Himalayas; ape-men in the imaginations of Darwinians and in the
Piltdown gravel beds.
An inclusive cosmology is the prerequisite for an inclusive science, one
which is based on total observation. Such a science would deal in probabilities rather than pretend to
certainties. It would detect rhythms,
patterns in occurrences, correspondences between events unapparently
linked. In ages past our phenomena were
highly regarded, officially. Provincial
governors in China and ancient Babylon were expected to include in their annual
reports to the central government everything strange which had taken place that
year, peculiar objects in the sky, apparitions, monstrous births,
irregularities in nature, popular delusions or unrest, every subtle symptom of
psychological and thus of social disturbance. The Chinese, and no doubt other administrations, had fixed tables giving
the correspondences between the various symptoms and specified inadequacies in
government and court ritual, and the symptoms were treated or accommodated by
the appropriate changes in central orthodoxy. The advantages of this phenomenal approach to science are recognized by
the present regime in China. Their
system of predicting earthquakes, the only one in the world which actually
works, depends on the ancient practice of observing omens. The giant pandas at Peking zoo are
consulted, unusual developments are noted in the course of nature and, as we
have just read in the newspapers, 3 June 1976, the Chinese claim that their
success in predicting recent earthquakes is due to the peasants being
encouraged to report strange behaviour in animals and changes in the levels of
local watercourses.
One feature of a phenomenalist system of government which disturbs
Fortean purists is its tendency to invent myths. A myth is a sort of explanation - a suspect word in phenomenalist
circles. Yet we have already confessed
our partiality to explanations and theories of all sorts, through on one
condition, that they really do server to explain, that they cover the
phenomenon wholly, not partially. If
they do this it does not matter how absurd and fantastic they are. If they make people laugh, so much the
better. Children will like them the
more, so will the old people, and everyone can believe them or not as he or she
pleases. If myths are necessary, as we
suspect they are, they should be enjoyable and harmless, not taken too
seriously by responsible people nor insisted upon as compulsory beliefs. An example of an explanatory myth which
covers the phenomenon as experienced, does no harm and gives people pleasure is
the old Japanese solution to the mystery of things dropping down from the
sky. The reason given is that there is
a hole in the sky and sometimes things just fall through it. Objects which have appeared in this way are
preserved as sacred curiosities in Shinto temples. Different, equally bland reasons for the same phenomenon are
given by the official explainers of other societies, and they all do well
enough. Fort's humorous but logically
irrefutable myth of an atmospheric Super-Sargasso Sea as a receiver and
occasional dispenser of terrestrial bric-a-brac is of the same traditional
order. The least adequate approach to
any aspect of experienced reality is to deny it, not even to explain it but to
explain it away. The nineteenth-century
treatment - which continues into the present - of the 'falls' phenomenon was to
dismiss every incident as a hoax, delusion or error. Even at the start of this century there were authorities who
denied the reality of meteorites on the scientific grounds that stones could
not fall from a stoneless sky, and falls of other matter as described in our
sections are still widely disbelieved from the same logic. Neglect of what actually happens in favour
of what someone's theory says should happen has the effect of dividing people
and authority in a way which benefits neither.
Neo-phenomenalism,
the science of the future. With nothing
to prove, no faiths, theories or taboos to inhibit, we shall look at the
universe directly by considering all the evidence of itself it chooses to
offer. There will be discoveries of
other phenomenal archetypes, many more than we have illustrated in this book,
or their periodicities and geographical associations and of the types of people
and states of mind most commonly affected by them. A Bureau of Signs, Omens and Recurrent Freaks will collect and
process our data and detect links. And
behind the links we will find causes in the form of universal characteristics
unapparent to the eye of reason. Perhaps, if it seems worth the effort, we will go on to become
magicians, masters of levitation for personal and commercial transport,
werewolves at will, invokers of lightning to kindle our fires, of fish showers to
stock our ponds, of manna in the desert or ladybird swarms when the greenfly
infest our roses. In any event we will
make the world a richer place by extending recognition to every one of its
picturesque realities, by widening the field of phenomenal experience which a
sane person can admit to enjoying, and by finding significance in happenings
which the officially encouraged, unnecessarily low state of mind of the present
is conditioned to ignore or devalue."
[from the section of this book entitled "Little People", p.
116]
"If we were to write a history of Europe from a phenomenal angle,
drawing our material from contemporary records of the things people experience
in different ages, part of the general pattern of events would be that from the
earliest time there was intimate contact between our race and another, more
diminutive and less material; that the link between the two peoples gradually
weakened; and that the smaller race retreated from areas of human habitation
into the wilder regions, finally retiring into the upper atmosphere from which
they now and then descend on brief visits, transporting themslves in luminous
discs or globe-shaped vessels.
The 'fairy' phenomenon, which was still quietly active even through the
darkest days of rationalist scepticism, made a remarkable come-back in the
middle of the twentieth century. The
little people who, by unanimous report, played an intrusive part in daily life
up to the Middle Ages, had long been dwindling from their accustomed haunts
when suddenly they reappeared, airborne and technologised (being traditionally
fond of aping their human contemporaries) and up to all their same old
ticks. We refer of course to the 'UFO
people'."
home inexplicable secrets of creation