Ill Met by Moonlight II

Those magnificent fey in their flying machines

[Again, the authors of this piece are myself and my son Patrick, as the byline above now indicates, despite the first-person singular of the voice. Given the extraordinary importance of this topic—one rivaled only by the importance of tales of the Loch Ness Monster and other ‘cryptids’—it seems only right that full credit be accorded to the whole team of researchers, without predilection granted to seniority or any contributor to the project being veiled behind some dismissive ‘et al’.

We are keenly conscious of the dangerous forces with which we are trifling here.

As we stated previously, the occasion for these reflections was the recent congressional hearing on UFOs, which captured the imagination of untold dozens of persons around the beltway.]

I left off last time with legends and reports about celestial objects and terrifying abductions…

First, though, I need to revise something from the previous installment. There I mentioned that I knew someone who had caught sight of a UFO in New Mexico many years ago. I had the details quite confused. The person in question is my eldest brother Addison, who has given me permission to divulge his identity and correct the record, and the event occurred in South Carolina. He moved to New Mexico not long thereafter, and hence my error. In any event, in 1990, while out after dark walking his dog, he did indeed see an enormous triangular object with lights at each of its vertices hovering above several large pine trees and passing overhead without making any sound. Now, as it happens, there are plenty of military airbases throughout the Carolinas as well, and his first reaction was to assume that this was some item of experimental technology (that part of the tale I got right); it was only after returning home that he realized that he had had a depressingly classical UFO experience—a close encounter of the second kind. That same year, as it happens, unidentified flying triangles of that sort were reported in various places, chiefly in Belgium, although the most famous photograph of one of them (vide infra) has since been disavowed by the person who took it, claiming that it was a hoax (which, given my brother’s experience, makes the matter all the more mysterious). Whatever the case, the source is unimpeachable, at least as far as UFO’s are concerned, so I cannot write the thing off as pure fantasy. I do suspect that, if the object was piloted by beings from a different world (or another dimension), their principal interest was in the dog, not the ape at the other end of the leash. But who can say?

There are not only, I should note, old tales about objects seen at a distance or unwilling visits to the flying abodes of strange hosts to consider. There are as well all those reports of uncanny guests—otherworldly or magical visitors who have appeared among us, like Princess Kaguya, but not only in fairytales. Consider the twelfth-century story of the Green Children of the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, as related originally by William of Newbury (1136-1198) and Ralph of Coggeshall (d. after 1227) and then occasionally mentioned in passing in such works as Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and Godwin’s The Man in the Moone. As the story goes—and it does not purport to be fiction—two small children, a brother and a sister, appeared one day in Woolpit unattended by any adults; this in itself would have been an only slightly mysterious event had it not been for the additional details that their skin was green, they spoke a wholly unknown language, and they could tolerate no food other than uncooked broad beans. They were taken in by the villagers, taught to speak English and to eat other foods, and in time were baptized. By this point, their skin had assumed a rosier hue and they came to look for all the world like ordinary children. The boy, however, was unable to thrive and soon thereafter died. The girl survived and, other than a certain habit of contumacity that never left her, adjusted to village life and in time was able to tell the villagers something of her brother’s and her history before arriving in Woolpit. Their true home was a land bathed in perpetual twilight, she said, perhaps subterranean, from which they had wandered into this realm by accident and to which they had been unable to find their way back. Today, perhaps, the story is best known for having provided the premise of Herbert Read’s novel The Green Child (1935)—an exquisite if sometimes too exquisite manifesto of mystical aestheticism—but for UFO enthusiasts its interest is of quite a different kind. For them, the tale is almost certainly evidence, however distorted by folk belief and narrative embellishment, of one or more encounters with beings from another world (or dimension). And surely, many of them believe, all those stories of changelings or of elfin figures with lithe little bodies and bright bulging eyes, and perhaps with verdigris complexions and pointy hats, contain clues to visitations from the same wise and powerful beings who once raised the ziggurats of Yucatán and who in our time roust people from their beds or their Volvos to ask… well, probing questions.