Ill Met by Moonlight I

Of aliens and changelings

[As you can see, my son Patrick and I wrote this article together (on a matter of obviously burning importance); we will be releasing it in two installments. We were moved to take quill in paw by certain recent events. The occasion is the congressional hearing conducted this past week on UFOs—or UAPs as they are now officially designated—which established beyond all shadow of doubt that such things as ‘congressional hearings’ actually do exist.]

It was in something of a spirit of vexation that poor Archbishop Agobard of Lyon (c. 769-840) composed his treatise of 815 De Grandine et Tonitruis (Concerning Hail and Thunder). He was not an early meteorologist or even a natural philosopher of any particular kind; weather was not some special fascination on his part. Rather, he was moved to write as part of his largely hopeless campaign to convince the local peasantry that recent storms that had appeared to devastate their crops had not been conjured up magically by Frankish sorcerers (tempestarii) in the pay of ‘Magonians’ in order to hide what was actually an enormous plundering of grain from the fields. For some time, the story had been spreading that somewhere over the rainbow, way up high, there was a magical land called Magonia whose inhabitants had mastered the art of sailing the clouds in flying vessels, though apparently not the arts of celestial agriculture; in fact, many of what looked like clouds were themselves airships, whose holds were filled with hailstones and whose oars were plied by abducted children. Agobard had even at one point been obliged to intervene to save the lives of four unfortunate strangers in one village (a woman and three men), who had been captured as visitors from that wicked realm, chained up for several days, and scheduled shortly to be stoned to death. Magonia itself, it seems, had been created by sorcerers who had been driven out of the earth at some earlier point in human history, no doubt by concerned neighborhood associations.