“I realise we may not even have begun to understand what is going on with the phenomenon known as the fairy dance. Still, I repeat my suggestion that it feels like some sort of technology for jumping between worlds, and in particular for entering and leaving this one.” Graham Hancock, Supernatural (2005)
At the end of the excellent documentary The Fairy Faith, the narrator, John Walker, goes with Marie-Rose and her daughter April, to a forest river in Cape Breton Island, Canada, to hear about their faerie encounter several years previously. It’s quite clear that they are authentic, and genuinely recalling the experience as best they can. The encounter consisted mostly of hearing music and singing — Marie-Rose was evidently afraid of the phenomenon and dragged her children away from the river and into the car to get away. As they drove away, April watched out the back window as a group of small faeries were: “jumping around in a circle, holding hands. They were singing… and dancing in a circle. They sort of mixed right in with the background, and I don’t know whether they were see-through or what.”
This is an interesting modern testimony of a very common faerie practice, recorded by folklorists as motifs 261.1.1 – faeries dance in faerie ring, and 262.10.2 – faerie music issues from faerie ring. There are hundreds of stories that include this circular dancing favoured by the faeries, usually with the embedded idea that it’s dangerous to go near them, or even watch them, whilst they are doing it. The proliferance of this motif in faerie-tales suggests it has an important meaning, both to the faeries and to the deeper understanding of the story. It is like a hidden code, installed into the story for those who might look for it and learn from it.
One of the most common folktales of this type involves someone being trapped within the circle of dancing faeries, either by their own volition or by mistake. The Welsh tale Rhys at the Fairy Dance has many variants, and is a typical example of the tale. It tells the story of Rhys and Llywelyn, who, whilst walking home through a wood, were separated after Rhys rushed away when he heard some ‘enchanted music.’ Llywelyn goes home and leaves him, but when check is made next morning Rhys is still missing. Llywelyn is thrown into jail for suspected murder…
… Things remained thus for nearly a year, when a newcomer into the neighbourhood, who had some experience of fairy ways and customs, suggested that he and a company of neighbours should go with Llywelyn to the place where he had parted from Rhys. This was agreed to and they came to a faerie ring.
“This is the very spot,” said Llywelyn, “and hush, I hear music; melodious harps I hear.”
The whole company listened, but could hear nothing, and told Llywelyn so.
“Put your foot on mine, David,” said Llywelyn, whose foot was now upon the outward edge of the faerie circle, to one of the company. David put his foot on Llywelyn’s, and so did they all, one after another: and then they heard the sound of many harps in full concert, and saw within the circle a number. of little figures enjoying themselves vastly. They were dancing round and round the ring with hands joined, and among them was Rhys, footing it with the best of them. As he came whirling by, Llywelyn seized hold of his smock frock and switched him out of the circle, taking great care not to overstep the edge of the ring.
Once out of the ring Rhys insisted he’d only been dancing for about five minutes, and that he was keen to continue. But the company took him home, and as happens in many of these stories, he became depressed, sickened and died soon after.
Another Welsh story tells of a shepherd playing his flute on a hillside:
“… when he was surrounded at a distance by little beings like men, who closed nearer and nearer to him until they became a very small circle. They sang and danced, and so affected him that he quite lost himself.”
Again, his perception of the singing and dancing lasting only minutes is dispelled when he returns home to find three weeks have passed.
These folktales were recorded in the 19th century, but they hold up a mirror to earlier beliefs and perceptions of what the faeries were and what they got up to. The stories of faeries dancing in circles also find common ground in eyewitness descriptions of the same time period, such as that of David Evans and a friend who, in 1862, were walking in the hills of Carmarthenshire in Wales when they saw a troupe of about fifty ‘small people’ walking up a hillside. When they reached the top they formed into a circle…
… After dancing for a short time, one of the dancers turned into the middle of the circle, followed by the others, one by one till they appeared like a gimblet screw. Then they disappeared into the ground. After a while one of them reappeared again, and looked about him in every direction as a rat, and the others followed him one by one and did the same. Then they danced for some time as before, and vanished into the ground as they had done the first time.
From Janet Bord, Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People (1997).
Of course, it would be easy to dismiss both folktales and eyewitness sightings of dancing faeries as works of pure imagination and/or misperceptions of natural phenomena. But the universality of the circular dancing theme trumps such a reductionist view — there’s got to be more going on to the faeries dance to imprint the idea so vividly in the collective memory.
One theory is that the faerie dance was an otherworldy mimicking of circle dances attested to since the medieval period and earlier, such as in this Italian version from the 14th century.
The Allegory of Good Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Siena, 1340
The circle dance was certainly of ancient origin and common throughout the world. It would have been only a small leap of storytelling imagination to transfer the popular forms of dancing in a circle into the culture of the faeries. Modern circle dances such as the kalamatianos from Greece, the mayim mayim of Israel and the Catalonian sardana dance probably had their genesis in earlier forms, and give an idea of the energy, togetherness and social cohesion that can be achieved by linking hands, forming a circle and moving in a choreographed way to music and singing. A particularly interesting modern manifestation is the Sacred Circle Dance, brought from Eastern Europe in the 1970s by Bernard Wosien, first to the alternative community of Findhorn in Scotland, from where it has spread worldwide. Here is a video of the Findhorn Sacred Circle Dance in 2012. It’s not quite clear what the ‘sacred’ represents, but I think it might be bringing us a little closer to the meaning behind the faerie circle dance.
Many circle dances incorporate various ritualised elements, such as placing flowers in the centre, the passing of handkerchiefs between participants and adherence to numbered steps whilst dancing. These elements look like fossilized versions of earlier practices… practices that may have been about taking the participants of the dance into an otherworld through altering their states of consciousness.
The Saan people of Southern Africa continue to use the ritual circle dance of their ancestors for this very specific purpose. The archaeologist David Lewis-Williams describes the dance:
Saan rock art depicting a healing circle dance, c.1000 BCE
The most important Saan ritual was the healing or trance dance. These dances continue to be practised amongst San groups living in the Kalahari today. Dancers stomp in a circle around the campfire for many hours. The women clap the rhythm of the dance and sing powerful songs. After hours of stomping, some dancers start to slip into trance or half-trance. In this altered state of consciousness many have out-of-body experiences. They describe travelling to the spirit realm. The shamans push themselves towards an altered state of consciousness; they enter ‘half-death’. They attain ecstasy simply by means of their dancing, concentration and hyperventilation, with the help of the women’s insistent, complexly rhythmic singing and clapping.
This continuity of the circle dance in Southern Africa, unchanged in its basic format for millennia, may suggest how other circular dances developed elsewhere in the world. The dances of medieval and modern Europe may be remnants of an earlier form of prehistoric shamanic dance, designed to alter the state of consciousness of its participants, just as it still does for the Saan people. We cannot find a direct archaeological route into prehistoric ritual dance, but the Neolithic and Bronze Age stone circles of Western Europe are highly suggestive of monuments built for a ritual that involved circular movement.
The Avebury Circle Dance from the TV series Children of the Stones (1977)
In the mind-bending 1977 TV series Children of the Stones (the sort of crazy 1970s children’s television that will leave you dropping your jaw if you’ve never seen it… you can give it a try here Children of the Stones full series), a secret sect uses the energy of the Neolithic stone circle at Avebury to create power for their own nefarious purposes. The painting shown here hangs on the wall of the sect’s leader, and is constantly referred to visually in the series. It shows the stone circle in its prehistoric heyday, a beam of light being generated from the centre by the whirling circular dancing of people. This might be a case of fiction getting close to the truth, with the idea that frenetic circular dancing was a technique to unlock an energy, whatever that energy might be. Folklore certainly embeds the notion that dancing is intimately associated with stone circles. Many stone circles come complete with a legend that the stones are petrified dancers, a pagan theme christianised by stating that the dancers were punished for dancing on the Sabbath. The Merry Maidens stone circle near St Buryan in Cornwall is a good example, where the story tells us that the nineteen stones are young girls turned to stone for non-observance of the Sabbath. In this case there are even two outlier stones, that take the part of pipers in the story (see A modern antiquarian’s view of the Merry Maidens).
The Merry Maidens stone circle near St Buryan, Cornwall, c.2000 BCE
These petrification stories can be multiplied many times at other stone circles, especially in Britain. It’s not too much of an interpretative stretch to suggest that these folktales represent a mythic memory of one of their original purposes – circular sacred spaces for circle dancing. For whilst the stone circles would have been used for various purposes, their shape suggests rituals that saw the circle as sacred – a representation of wholeness and infinity that would have found manifestation in physical activity in and around them. A place to dance to music and singing may have been the main reason for their construction. And in shamanic cultures such dancing was just another method (either alongside or instead of ingesting psychoactive plants) to alter states of consciousness so as to be able to interact with the otherworld of spirit.
So what are the faerie circle dances? One neat theory is that the faeries are one and the same as our psychedelic prehistoric ancestors. Their intense circular dances have embedded them into certain parts of the landscape through the latent emotional energy they generated, to be tapped into by sensitive or stoned individuals in touch with the Collective Unconscious of humanity. The common folkloric motif of people finding themselves trapped within the circles is nothing less than a shamanic experience of travelling to a dimension of reality separated from our own only by a malleable membrane. The sense of unreality and time distortions that usually occur to the protagonists in these stories are very suggestive of an altered state of consciousness. They interact with otherworldly beings, they hear supernal music, and they become caught up in this world completely, to the extent that their perception of the passage of time is altered radically.
Psilocybin faerie ring
It is interesting that the grass circles known colloquially as faerie rings are caused by sub-surface fungal growth, and that many of these rings come complete with above-surface psychoactive mushrooms such as the amanita muscaria and psilocybin. These rings are intimately connected to the folklore of the faerie dance, acting as observable physical markers in the environment for the stories. And whatever the objective reality of the faeries dancing within the rings, the fungal association is highly suggestive that the human protagonists were able to collude with them after partaking of psychotropic mushrooms and entering a non-usual state of consciousness.
This takes us back to the point – what are these faerie-tales about circle dances trying to tell us? The circularity of the dance is evidently important and represents wholeness, oneness, eternity and a complete closed system. The circle may also represent what Graham Hancock calls ring portals, circles of energy providing access to and from this 4D world and whatever dimension the faeries hang out in. But the deep message seems to lie in the circle. These otherworldy faeries may be attempting to convey a message about the importance of understanding the never-ending circularity of life, wisdom better understood by our stone-age ancestors. The message might come in a folktale, or through a reported sighting… or you might find yourself in the circle after nibbling some mushrooms, and unable to resist the music and dancing of the little people who seem to have magically appeared within your reality.
17th-century woodcut of faeries in a circle dance outside their hollow hill, with an amanita muscaria mushroom in the foreground
‘Myth is a story that implies a certain way of interpreting consensus reality so to derive meaning and effective charge from its images and interactions. As such, it can take many forms: fabl…
My little sister, I lost her when she was just a child. One day we were together the next she was gone, suddenly and definitively. Her physical memory has become blurred into an arbitrary, flickeri…
The story of the the Green Children of Woolpit, Suffolk, has always been one of the strangest medieval folktales, and that’s up against some pretty stiff competition. If you don’t know it, it goes a bit like this…
The story is set at some point in the 12th century. The location is the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England. One day during the harvest, the villagers discovered two children loitering around the ‘wolf pits’ (deep excavations designed to trap wolves, which at that time were still relatively common in England) and apprehended them. Apparently, they “had the form of all their limbs like to those of other men, but they differed in the colour of their skin, which was tinged all over a green colour.” They also could not speak English or any language known to the villagers, who escorted them off to a local lord, a knight by the name of Sir Richard de Calne. Here they were offered food but would not eat anything until some beans (probably either broad beans or a type of vetch, both common crops throughout the medieval period) were brought to them. They lived on such beans until they were eventually induced to eat other food within the manorial residence. In a short time the boy sickened and died, but the girl survived, lost her green colour, was baptised and was given a position of some sort within the knight’s household. One version of the story suggests that she was “rather loose and wanton in her conduct.”
The story then reports her words, after learning English, in response to questions about how the children arrived at Woolpit and where they came from. She asserted that they came from a land where all the inhabitants had green skin, ate only green food, and that there was perpetual twilight. “Moreover, a certain luminous country is seen, not far distant from ours, and divided from it by a very considerable river.” On the day they arrived in Woolpit they had been tending their father’s flock (the insinuation is that they are siblings, although this is never directly stated) when they came upon a cave, from which they heard the sound of bells. They wandered into the cavern and after some time emerged into the Suffolk landscape where they were struck senseless by the excessive sunlight and unusual temperature of the air. Frightened and disorientated, they were caught by the harvesting villagers and so the story comes full circle.
What can be made of this story? For a medieval folktale it has the unusual quality of authenticity about it. There is no Christian moral, places and people are named, and it appears to be a unique incident, reported in the chronicles much as more everyday historical occurrences were mentioned. These two chronicles were those of Ralph de Coggeshall and William de Newburgh, both written in, or shortly before, c.1200, compiling both earlier texts and oral testimony. In Ralph’s case, some of the oral testimony came from the knight Sir Richard de Calne himself, and it is clear that both chroniclers made the effort to retrieve the story from villagers who were alive at the time of the incident. William puts the timeframe of the tale as within the reign of King Stephen (1136-54), but Ralph implies that it happened under Henry II (1155-89). Whatever the exact date, and whatever folktale motifs have been overlain on the story, this seems like a chronicled version of something that actually happened. So how can it be explained?
Prosaic Explanations In a concerted effort to dispel any supernatural elements from the story, Paul Harris (in a 1998 article for Fortean Times) put forward the theory that the children were Flemish orphans, displaced from their community after Henry II’s co-ordinated persecution of the Flemish population in Eastern England, culminating in a military offensive in 1173. Left to their own devices, they lived in the woods before wandering into caves (Harris suggests the Neolithic Grimes Graves in Norfolk), following tunnels and emerging near Woolpit, green through malnutrition and speaking a foreign language that the locals couldn’t understand. But as with many materialistic-reductionist explanations of strange stories, it is soon found to be baloney. Grimes Graves is 40km from Woolpit, there are no known tunnels extending beyond the locality and even if there were, they do not extend to the clay geology of northern Suffolk. Flemish immigration to Suffolk had been happening since the 11th century and so the linguistic argument also breaks down – the villagers would have been well-acquainted with the Flemish language, even if it were a dialect or (even more so) an Anglicised version of Flemish. And an educated aristocrat like Sir Richard de Calne would definitely have recognised their speech. Despite being cited as the most likely interpretation in several retellings of the story, it’s actually a non-starter.
Historian Derek Brewer avoids any such tortuous interpretative-bending, and reduces the story even further, suggesting that:
The likely core of the matter is that these very small children, herding or following flocks, strayed from their forest village, spoke little, and (in modern terms) did not know their own home address. They were probably suffering from chlorosis, a deficiency disease which gives the skin a greenish tint, hence the term “green sickness”. With a better diet it disappears.
The possibility of the children suffering from Chlorosis (or Hypochromic anemia) is an interesting hypothesis. This condition is usually caused by an iron deficiency and can tinge parts of the skin green, which will return to normal colour when the iron is replaced in the diet. This might explain the children’s colour and their losing it after starting to eat the local food. However, there is no historical mention of the condition before 1554, and even in the cases noted after this date the green colouration is restricted to parts of the body, such as around the eyes and neck. In most cases there is no discolouration. So although Chlorosis might offer an exceptional explanation for the children being green, it is reliant on their having been subject to a long period of malnutrition, which is not part of the story. If the explanation were that simple, why did they not tuck into the food they were offered on arrival at Richard de Calne’s household? We’ll come back to the colouration issue, but whatever the true explanation is, the green colour of the children cannot be taken as an independent part of the story, divorced from the other surreal elements. And let’s remember, this is a very surreal story.
Out-there Explanations In his 2012 book Children from the Sky, Duncan Lunan presents a highly unorthodox theory of alien intervention in 12th-century England. Lunan goes into considerably more historical detail than any other writer on the subject, and his close reading of the historical sources teases out the context of the story and the characters involved. Of particular importance is his interpretation of the original texts, pointing out the usages of language by the two medieval chroniclers, and how the original Latin has been skewed by later translators and story summaries. But the historical detective work soon gives way to a ‘speculative interpretation’ that suggests the Knights Templar (he identifies Sir Richard de Calne as a Templar) were in contact with an alien civilization, who were abducting humans to populate a colony world – a world where it was always twilight due to a synchronous orbit, and where genetically modified algae turned the inhabitants green. The green children were part of this colony and were accidentally transported to Earth due to a matter transmitter malfunction. Sound wackadoo? You bet. But the sci-fi angle taken by Lunan is a lot of fun and allows for some free-thinking speculation on the oddities of a story that refuses to fit in with a reductionist interpretation. A mind-bogglingly melodramatic National Geographic documentary has Lunan dashing around the Suffolk countryside in a Morris Minor in pursuit of the alien connection. You might want to take a look here: Ancient X-Files (from 25.50).
Folkloric Explanations The folkorist EW Baughman suggests the story is the only example in English folklore of the motif: Inhabitants of lower world visit mortals, and continue to live with them. It is certainly an inversion of the common faerie-tale motif of mortals travelling to faerieland and living there for various periods of time, either willingly or not. But the fact that the children come from underground is important, as the faeries were commonly thought to reside under the earth, usually beneath hollow-hills or burial mounds, but also in caves. The strange description of their world being always twilight also fits in with many folkloric descriptions of an underground faerieland. With this in mind, the story may be a jumbled attempt to overlay faerie motifs onto an historical incident. It does seem that both medieval chroniclers categorised the story as a faerie-tale that fitted in with their other accounts of supernatural beings interacting with humans. But the green children do not behave like folkloric faeries. They have none of the faeries usual attributes or magical powers. They really do seem like lost human children.
However, as usual with folktales, deeper meaning can be read into story by asking what it is telling us about the human condition. A follower of the Carl Jung school of psychoanalysis would immediately spot the archetype of the outsider/s (see The Deeper Meaning of Faerie-tales). The children were green, came from an unknown and strange land and spoke no known language. They represented an otherworldy intrusion into the regular, consensus reality of the 12th-century villagers, that may have been treated as a threat. In a time of Christian fundamentalism their fate may have been to be seen as demonic beings in need of persecution. Things could have ended badly for them. But they were also vulnerable and frightened, and the story is never about the threat of outsiders but rather of tolerance and kindness to them. As has already been discussed, there had been largescale immigration into eastern England through the 12th century, and communities would have been forced to come to terms with foreign ideas and behaviours within the space of two or three generations… sound familiar? In the case of the green children they were accepted, protected and then integrated into the dominant society. We can see the story as a folkloric method of teaching tolerance of outsiders by using an archetypal concept.
But instead of using real foreigners, such as Flemish immigrants, the story is made timeless and archetypal by turning the children into faeries. Their otherworldy status makes the tale bigger and more fundamental – it becomes a tool for teaching us about ourselves. The story embeds certain faerie motifs, such as their green colour. The most common colour of the faeries was green (usually their clothing, but also sometimes their food and their skin), and people hearing the tale in the Middle Ages (and beyond) would have automatically understood and accepted that they were associated with an otherworld, most usually represented as faerieland.
Whatever the deeper meaning though, the story is still strongly grounded in a specific time and location. Something material and real happened in a small Suffolk village in the 12th century, which will never be fully understood or explained, because so much of the story is strange and edged with the supernatural. Despite the uncommon and inverted motifs, it is in effect a faerie-tale that uses an historical event as a vehicle for telling a story with a lesson. But then that’s usually what faerie-tales do.
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A recent detailed and exhaustive examination of the story by historian and folklorist John Clark, with the original sources printed in full, can be found here: John Clark’s The Green Children of Woolpit. This correlates all the sources and secondary literature into a fully referenced article, that deals comprehensively with most interpretative aspects of the story. It will most likely become the standard reference point for all future discussion about The Green Children of Woolpit.
The cover image is by my friend and artistic colleague Katalin Polonyi.
Who are the faeries? In 1969, the astrologer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee, in his book Passport to Magonia, put forward the theory that they were one and the same as the alien beings who h…
Who are the faeries? In 1969, the astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee, in his book Passport to Magonia, put forward the theory that they were one and the same as the alien beings who had been purportedly abducting people around the world for a couple of decades by that date.
His hypothesis is that there is a commonality to the experiences reported in alien abduction scenarios, and the reports of interactions with faeries in folklore. He suggests the aliens and the faeries are essentially the same phenomenon, tuned through the cultural receptors of the time and then interpreted accordingly. He makes special reference to the regular motifs in faerie-tales of the abduction, by various means, of humans by faeries. There’s a lot of data here – it’s the commonest motif in faerie folklore. For a variety of reasons humans are taken to faerieland in the stories, either as midwives or nurses for faerie children, as servants to the faeries, for sex, as punishment or reward, or just because the faeries feel like it. They were also keen on abducting babies, and replacing them with changelings; wizened old faerie creatures who would usually die before the end of the story if a ruse to return the human baby wasn’t discovered. These motifs, of course, coincide with many aspects of the monumentally strange phenomenon of alien abductions, reports of which have grown at an exponential rate since the early 1950s. Vallee uses a range of evidence to tie-up faerie abductions from folklore and alien abductions from modern reports, and goes as far to state:
… the modern, global belief in flying saucers and their occupants is identical to an earlier belief in the fairy-faith. The entities described as the pilots of the craft are indistinguishable from the elves, sylphs and lutins of the Middle Ages. Through the observations of unidentified flying objects, we are concerned with an agency our ancestors knew well and regarded with terror: we are prying into the affairs of the Secret Commonwealth.
The Secret Commonwealth was the term coined for the faeries by the Reverend Robert Kirk in a manuscript of 1691. Rumour is that Kirk himself was taken by the faeries for revealing too many of their secrets, but not before leaving us with a detailed description of their appearance, habits and exploits. It’s a remarkable and deeply strange (in a good way) book that was evidently produced by a man either psychologically disturbed or psychically enhanced… or both. A full version of the book with an introduction is here: The Secret Commonwealth, and there is a fuller investigation of Kirk and his writings in another blog post here. But, as Vallee points out, Kirk’s descriptions of the faeries and their modus operandi bear more than a passing resemblance to the alien visitors of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Amongst their attributes were an ability to float through the air with insubstantial and fluid bodies, that they could make appear and disappear at will. This allowed them to ‘swim’ through the air and carry off mortals, usually to large circular abodes, that Kirk presumed were underground, and which were lit by a dim, unknown illumination. They even had ‘ætheriall vehicles’ to carry them around the sky. Kirk also asserted that the faeries had a nature intermediate between humans and angels.
Their habit of abducting humans was usually for the purpose of wet-nursing faerie children or as midwives; a theme that fits in with the deluge of recent alien abduction reports (mostly unknown to Vallee in 1969) that would suggest one of the main reasons for abduction is to obtain wet-nurses for hybrid human-alien offspring. Vallee quotes the 19th-century folklorist Edwin Hartland’s suggestion that such a programme of hybridisation was right up the faerie’s street:
The motive assigned to fairies in northern stories is that of preserving and improving their race, on the one had by carrying off human children to be brought up among the elves and to become united with them, and on the other hand by obtaining the milk and fostering care of human mothers for their own offspring.
In 2005, Graham Hancock followed Vallee’s lead and took the comparison of faerie and alien abduction much further in his book Supernatural. He compiled a range of faerie-tales from various time periods and geographical locations and set them against modern-day alien abduction events. He pays special attention to the faerie abduction of young women, such as Mrs Sheridan, an Irish woman, who seems to have spent much of the last decade of the 19th century being whisked off by the fairies for wet-nursing duties.
Where they brought me I don’t know, or how I got there, but I’d be in a very big house, and it was round, the walls far away that you’d hardly see them, and a great many faeries all about… but they wouldn’t speak to me nor I to them.
These ‘long-faced’ faeries had a definite purpose for kidnapping her and weren’t too concerned with her tearful appeals to release her – she had a job to do, and that was feeding their faerie babies. The correlation between these types of folkloric encounters and the alien abductions of women is striking. Hancock surveys the work of the late Harvard psychiatrist John Mack and David Jacobs, a cultural historian, who have made extensive studies of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, often using hypnotic techniques to extract memories from amnesic events. It’s a minefield subject, but John Mack in particular is a convincing advocate of the notion that whatever the experiences represent, they are genuinely real to the participant (this is a good overview presentation of the phenomenon: John Mack on alien abduction). The abductee, after being floated or beamed aboard the UFO is taken to a part of the ship where there seem to be drawers or tanks of hybrid alien-human babies, which they are expected to nurse. There is a consistency to these experiences (there are thousands of them) that provides a dataset of testimony that Mack and Jacobs insist must be taken seriously as a phenomenon. For the abductees, the experience is often highly traumatic (Mack states that the best psychiatric diagnosis for many abductees is post-traumatic stress disorder), and no wonder, when they are confronted with alien hybrids often described as more like foetuses than babies. One abductee described to Mack their appearance, which is fairly typical:
“Their bodies were short for their heads. Their heads seemed oversized. They had very blue eyes. They had very thin, wispy hair… I would say they were probably three and a half feet tall, but they all looked the same age. ‘You’re our mother and we need you,’ they said.”
The evidence presented by Jacques Vallee and Graham Hancock makes a convincing argument for the tight relation between faerie abductions in folklore and alien abductions in the 21st century. The experiences are culturally coded to time and place, but the correlations and similarities are intriguing, and suggest a common source for the phenomena. But what is that source? Are there really faeries and aliens who are able to abduct humans at will? And if there are, where do they hang out when they’re not on abduction duty? This is where things need to get deeper… much deeper.
Cave paintings from Hunan Province, China, c.10,000 BCE
Not content with suggesting that alien abductions are modern folkloric faerie-tales for our technological age, Graham Hancock puts forward the hypothesis that the shamanistic cultures of the Stone Age were also interacting with these beings. Around 50,000 years ago there was an explosion of symbolism in human culture, primarily represented by cave art. This cave art is usually located in hard to access underground spaces that must have had significant meaning for the artists and those who would have been experiencing these strange images by torchlight. And strange they are. Much of the cave art represents therianthropic beings, that is half human, half animal shape-shifters. There are also many beings that seem to be distorted humans, sometimes even suggesting the ‘Greys’ of alien abduction reports. And this gets to the core of the subject. Hancock makes the convincing argument that these cave paintings were produced to represent reality as perceived in an altered state of consciousness. Twenty years ago this idea was anathema to anthropologists, but since the work of the anthropologists David Lewis-Williams, Thomas Dowson and many others, the theory has tipped over to become an accepted orthodoxy. There are motifs by the hundred in the cave paintings that correlate with the visionary states of people in an altered state of consciousness, brought about most especially by the ingestion of a psychotropic substance. Lewis-Williams’ exhaustive study of this phenomenon is nicely summarised here: Art, Shamanism and Entoptic Images. The basic premise is that the shamans of these stone age cultures transported themselves into altered states of consciousness and then painted the results of their experiences — experiences that frequently included therianthropic beings.
Cave painting showing entoptic imagery from Pech Merle cave, France, c.25,000 BCERock shelter art from Nawarla Gabarnmung, Australia, c.30,000 BCE
These works of art are manifest throughout the world over a vast prehistoric time period and demonstrate a universality of experience, from the entoptic images (dots, spirals and geometric patterns) frequently seen by trippers, through to the imagery of time-lapse perception, often called tracers. It is convincing evidence that our prehistoric ancestors were dabbling with psychotropic plants and mushrooms in order to gain a state of consciousness that was fundamentally important to them. The cave paintings could be seen as the earliest folklore, told in pictures. Further investigation into the cultures of modern indigenous tribes confirms the importance of induced changes in conscious perception, to what are still shamanistic peoples. The best example is the extensive use of the substance Ayahausca by Amazonian tribes. Here is a brew that might make you projectile vomit and clean out your bowels, but which also reveals a reality that includes many non-human intelligences (usually called simply ‘spirits’ by the shamans), that can be interacted with directly. There is usually a highly-charged feminine element to the Ayahausca experience, but reports will also consistently describe therianthropic beings, reptiles, the ability to fly and yes, even grey humanoids with big black almond eyes.
This brings us back to the source of all these experiences. If shaman spirits, faeries and aliens are all part of the same phenomenon, what is that phenomenon? The evidence from modern and archaic shamanistic cultures confirms that an altered state of consciousness was/is required to access the places where the ‘spirits’ lived. It’s more difficult to prove that faerie-tales were generated from information gathered in an altered state, but there is a predominance of mushroom imagery historically associated with the faeries, most especially the highly psychedelic red and white Amanita Muscaria (fly agaric) mushroom, and the psilocybin mushroom, both prevalent in Europe and Asia. These may have been responsible for purposeful or accidental psychedelic trips, but there are a range of other triggers for altering states of consciousness (such as sleep deprivation, trauma, illness etc.) that may also have contributed to people travelling to faerieland and bringing back the experiences as faerie-tales.
17th-century woodcut showing faeries dancing outside their dwelling to the tune of the fly agaric mushroom
As discussed in a previous post The Deeper Meaning of Faerie-tales, most faerie-tales contain dream-like situations, where the laws of physics are suspended and the experienced reality is different than the usual five-sense reality. It’s no accident that the tales are often described as trippy. They can be seen as basically describing events from a participatory altered state of consciousness, that have then gestated and formed into oral faerie-tales until fossilized into literature by folklorists at various times in the 19th and 20th centuries. So what about alien abductions? They represent an outrageous transformation of reality, but what is causing them?
The answer may lie with a substance called N,N-Dimethyltryptamine – DMT. This molecule is one of the main active ingredients in the Amazonian Ayahausca brew, but it is also produced endogenously in everyone’s brain, probably (but not definitely) in the pineal gland. It’s usually safely dispersed around the brain and body for functional duties, but it seems that under certain circumstances, it can be released in higher quantities, causing an altered state of consciousness. There is some evidence that this can happen during a frontal lobe epileptic seizure. So are abductees thrown into their experiences through a flood of DMT in their brain, which takes them into an altered state of consciousness, where reside alien beings, not altogether unlike the faeries and shaman ‘spirits’? The late and great Terence McKenna was an enthusiastic user of the synthesized form of DMT to access different realities, and coined the term self-transforming machine elves for the creatures he regularly found there. He can be heard talking about them here: Terence McKenna and the self-transforming machine elves.
As if to confirm Terence’s assertions, a research study conducted between 1990 and 1995 in the General Clinical Research Center of the University of New Mexico Hospital, by Dr Rick Strassman found that volunteers on the study injected with varying amounts of DMT underwent profound alterations of consciousness. This involved immediate cessation of normal consciousness and transportation to a different realm of reality inhabited by a range of creatures described as elves, faeries, lizards, reptiles, insects, aliens, clowns (yes, clowns) and various therianthropic entities. One woman even describes a pulsating entity that she described as ‘Tinkerbell-like’. The experiences, especially at higher doses, represented to the participants a parallel reality that was ‘super real’, not an hallucination, not a dream, but a substantial built reality with full sensory interaction + telepathy. Strassman published the results as DMT: The Spirit Molecule, which has been made into a documentary here: DMT – The Spirit Molecule.
The experience reports from the study are irrational, absurd, frightening, illogical and surreal… much like alien abductions and (sometimes) faerie-tales. It’s worth reading the book or watching the documentary to get the full range of what are incredible records of accessing very different realities. Unlike the alien abductions, there is no question of any of the volunteers physically leaving the hospital bed during their experiences, but for all of them (without exception) the DMT-world was every bit as real as the one their minds left behind. After the injections participants frequently talked about ‘blasting through’ or ‘breaking through a barrier’ after which they found themselves in a realm with its own laws of physical space and movement, and its own inhabitants. Here is an abbreviated version of one of the volunteer’s description of his experience; 50 year old Jeremiah. After hurtling through a void he found himself:
… in a nursery. A high-tech nursery with a single Gumby, three feet tall, attending me. I felt like an infant. Not a human infant, but an infant relative to the intelligence represented by the Gumby. It was aware of me but not particularly concerned… Then I heard two or three male voices talking. I heard one of them say “he’s arrived.” … I was in a big room… there was one big machine in the center, with round conduits, almost writhing – not like a snake, more in a technical manner. The machine felt as if it were rewiring me, reprogramming me… This is real. It’s totally unexpected, quite constant and objective… an independent, constant reality… I’m lucid and sober.
This brings us finally to the crux of the matter. If there is a common source for these experiences of shaman ‘spirits’, faeries, aliens and the creatures in DMT-world, that can be accessed via an altered state of consciousness, are the experiences real? The crux is; what is consciousness? A reductionist materialist would tell us that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain, and so whilst they might accept that all these experiences happened subjectively, due to an altered state of consciousness, they can all simply be reduced to the brain making it up. Brain chemistry changes, experience is imagined in the brain, stories are told about that imagined experience. Simples. But to dismiss the subjective experience is to dismiss consciousness itself. There is a reason reductionist materialists call consciousness the hard problem – it’s because consciousness is all we have and nobody has ever captured it. It exists purely as a subjective experience in a closed system. As the old metaphor goes; looking for consciousness inside the brain is like looking for the radio announcer inside the radio. S/he isn’t there, s/he is an electro-magnetic projection being tuned into by the receiver.
Aldous Huxley called the brain a ‘reducing valve for Mind at large’. We are transceiving consciousness not producing it. This corresponds with the philosophy of Idealism, beautifully articulated in recent times by Bernardo Kastrup, and just about every Oriental spiritual movement for the last several thousand years. Put shamanism and Gnosticism into the mix and we find a cohesive hypothesis for consciousness creating reality, not the other way round. But what trumps everything is direct, personal experience. This is the only true route to understanding existence – what Zen masters call direct pointing at reality. And that’s exactly what is happening in shaman journeys to the spiritworld, faerie-tales, alien abductions and DMT trips. They are experiences, accessed through altered states of consciousness, that are direct participations in Huxley’s Mind at large, a reality that exists to the consciousness of the observer but which is at the same time greater than the observer. But only by experiencing these realities through direct encounter can they be understood to be real. Nobody can tell you about them, you have to know them. Perhaps, for our benefit as a species, we need to take more notice of the stories that are brought back.
This is a blog site about the otherworldly creatures most often known as faeries. They have taken many forms over the centuries, and interact with humanity in a myriad of ways. Are they nothing but…
‘Myth is a story that implies a certain way of interpreting consensus reality so to derive meaning and effective charge from its images and interactions. As such, it can take many forms: fabl…
My little sister, I lost her when she was just a child. One day we were together the next she was gone, suddenly and definitively. Her physical memory has become blurred into an arbitrary, flickeri…
‘Myth is a story that implies a certain way of interpreting consensus reality so to derive meaning and effective charge from its images and interactions. As such, it can take many forms: fables, religion and folklore, but also formal philosophical systems and scientific theories.’ Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On religious myth, truth and belief (2016).
Faerie-tales are a type of mythology. They have spent much time debased to the level of children’s stories; just amusing tales pulled up from an archaic folkloric past that bear little relevance to a modern society saturated with every imaginable storytelling media, from IMAX to Xbox. But if we just give them a chance and scratch the surface a little, they begin to offer up and to demonstrate something much deeper: meaning. And anything that offers to demonstrate a deeper meaning to existence should probably be valued, in a world where meaninglessness seems to have become endemic.
The best faerie-tales are never one-offs, but seem to cluster as a single form from many sources, which are dispersed geographically and chronologically. In Europe and America they were mostly collected by folklorists in the 19th and early-20th centuries, from both oral and written sources, and then disseminated from there. But where did they come from, and more importantly, why were they there in the first place?
The Aarne-Thompson catalogues of folktale types and motifs were first put together in 1910 by the Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne and completed by Stith Thompson in 1958. They consist of several doorstop volumes, which index every conceivable story type and motif from around the world. It’s been suggested that the catalogues actually codify every human experience, distilled into story. Anyone brave enough to venture into this multi-volume information overload soon realises that they are capturing something special; an index of our collective memory as a species, realised through the medium of mythology. And after all, what is our collective memory apart from the storytelling of mythology? Amidst the catalogues are the story types classed as faerie-tales, each containing hundreds of separate motifs; they are the descriptors of a vast array of myth. And once we head off to find the actual stories outlined in the catalogues we soon discover that they are packed with meaning at many levels. These are not simple tales told to pass the long winter nights (although that was always one use for them), but rather, they are sophisticated tools that can be used to interpret human experience and to help understand the reality we find ourselves in.
The Aarne-Thompson motif index of folk literature — not light reading
So if we hone down to pick up a folktale type with its motifs from the Aarne-Thompson catalogue, we can find a story and use it as an example — a case study to explain what a faerie-tale might tell us about ourselves and our beliefs. Type ML-4075 is ‘Visits to faerie dwellings.’ Add some motifs such as ‘Faeries made visible through use of ointment’ (F235.4.1) and ‘Faeries take human nurse to care for faerie child’ (F372), then we can narrow things down to a distinct group of folktales containing these elements, from India, Russia, Scandinavia, Lithuania, Britain, France and Ireland; all with their own idiosyncrasies but quite clearly from the same story-stock. The narratives suggest a relatively short gestation period before being collected in the 19th century and catalogued in 1910, although many of the story elements do seem to incorporate much older themes (Gervase of Tilbury records some of the motifs in a 13th-century French story). And the stories wide geographical dispersal suggests the messages they hold have a universal quality — their geneses seem to be local and organic, but tapping into an unknown non-local source. My favourite is one of the Cornish versions collected by the folklorist Robert Hunt in 1865: Cherry of Zennor. It goes something like this:
The time-setting is mid 19th century. Cherry is sixteen and lives in the village of Zennor on the north Cornish coast with her family in respectable poverty. She heads off to seek a job in service, but lethargy and a certain work-shyness get the better of her and she sits down for a mope on the moors, next to an ancient stone cross. Out of nowhere a well-dressed gent appears, flatters her, flirts with her, and tells her he’s a widower and wants her to come to his home, where there is a child to look after. She agrees enthusiastically. There is an interesting sequence where they walk what seems to be miles, but always downwards and through sunken lanes where the overhanging trees formed a tunnel-like descent. The house and gardens are beautiful and so is the little boy, who is to be Cherry’s charge. Unfortunately, for Cherry, the ex-mother in law is still hanging around and she’s a surly sort, who goes out of her way to make Cherry’s life difficult.
Here we are introduced to the magic ointment, which Cherry has to balm the child’s eyes with each morning. She is advised by the mother in law to never apply it to her own eyes (I think you’ll guess what might happen later with that loaded concept). The old woman then takes Cherry through dark corridors in the house (another tunnel-like journey) into a forbidden room, where there are (bizarrely) a group of human statues, some complete, others not. The insinuation is that they’re real humans turned to stone. When Cherry is ordered to polish a ‘coffin-like box’ containing one of the statues, they start to come to life. Quite reasonably, Cherry faints, a ruckus is caused and the master turns up. He kicks out the mother in law, forbids Cherry to enter the room again, and then turns on the charm for a few days, kissing and flirting with Cherry in the garden.
All’s well for a while — Cherry looks after the child, gets her romance-lite and is generally enamoured with her new life. But when she — inevitably — decides to use the ointment on her own eyes things take a change for the weird: “Everything now looked different about the place. Small people were everywhere, hiding in the flowers sparkling with diamonds, swinging in the trees, and running and leaping under and over the blades of grass.” She sees the master playing with some of the little ladies in a well, and then the following evening spies him in a surreal musical communion with the stone statues through the keyhole of the forbidden room, where sure enough they had all come to life.
So the next day, when he comes on hot with some hanky-panky, she slaps his face and tells him what she saw and how jealous she’s been. That’s the end of the road for Cherry — her use of the ointment and her betrayal of trust means she has to go home. The master takes her back (uphill through the tunnel-like sunken road) to the downs and cross where she first encountered him and leaves her there. She wails for a bit and then returns home (more time has passed here than in her faerie home) with a story no-one believes. Her remaining life consists mostly of depression and hanging out on the downs hoping to see the master again. But he never comes.
In some of the other variations of this story, the girl encounters the master (or the mother in law) again, usually at a market or fair, and when she is asked which eye she sees him with he blinds her in that eye, and she sees faeries no more.
But what can be made of this strange story? What does it mean? Time to apply some interpretations…
A reductionist-materialist interpretation This interpretation might see the whole story as a load of baloney, predicated on deluded rustics making it all up from fevered imaginations and promulgating it to the gullible by way of fireside stories over the years, until some gentleman folklorist turned up and recorded it. This is the rigid interpretation to be expected of a modern Western sceptic, but it doesn’t explain the commonality of the story type and motifs over a wide geographical area without mass communication. It also suggests a worldview that has become tightly dogmatic and refuses to accept meaning or reality in anything that does not adhere to its own self-built belief-system based on a universe knowable only through the scientific method. Aldous Huxley called this the disenfranchisement of consciousness. But then such is the world we live in.
A Jungian interpretation As usual, Carl Jung, and adherents to his psycho-mystical outlook, have much more interesting things to say. A Jungian analyst would immediately start looking for archetypes, mythological themes common to humanity, which find their way into these types of folkloric fables for the purpose of teaching us something about existence. According to Jung, these archetypes reside in the Collective Unconsciousness of humanity — the sum total of all knowledge and memory stored in a transcendent Mind, accessed through dreams, stories and mythology. They would find plenty of archetypes in Cherry of Zennor. One archetype is the need to understand that the breaking of social taboos has consequences. This is a universal archetype, that can be applied in most social groups as a life lesson. Cherry breaks the taboo of using the ointment as well as the prohibition against looking into the forbidden room. If she’d kept her mouth shut about seeing the master playing music with the animated stone statues and playing with the faerie ladies in the well, she might have been allowed to stay in faerieland. But that was never going to happen — the story is aware to the fact that people cannot expect to get away with breaking conventions that seem to have a higher purpose, even when that purpose is never explained… it’s just the way of things. It may seem culturally conservative, but it is a lesson embedded in the story. It’s a reinforcement of social mores, disguised within the narrative; a subliminal message based in the collective experience of humanity. Likewise, the innocent maiden, the critical old woman, the all powerful master, and the opportunity to see reality behind the illusion — all are archetypes that can be applied as metaphors and analogies back in the consensus reality of the listener to the story. But a Jungian interpretation such as this requires us to accept that there is a Collective Unconscious that is being tapped into for the purposes of spreading the knowledge contained therein through the telling of faerie-tales. This Collective Unconsciousness is an alluring and convincing idea that finds its way into many philosophical, psychological and scientific theories of how things work for us. But for now its complexity and mind-boggling nature might need to wait for another time… although if you’re interested, this is a good intro. to Jung’s Collective Unconscious.
The faerie-story is a dream This allows common ground between followers of the first two interpretations. Jung would have been happy to contend that the archetypes in faerie-stories may have originally surfaced in dreams, but also that this would not detract from their value as tools for understanding consciousness. For a Western sceptic, a dream is simply another type of epiphenomenon produced in the brain for no particular reason. Its subsequent retelling as a faerie-story can be safely reduced to meaninglessness. But once again, the commonality of the story type and motifs through space and time sits happier with a Jungian interpretation. Whether it started as a dream or dreams isn’t as important as where the dream/s came from in the first place, because those dreams are plugging into the Collective Unconscious and sending us messages to learn from. There are certainly dreamlike elements to the story, most especially the statues coming to life and the sudden appearance of a bunch of humanoid entities at the application of some ointment to the eyes. This does give some clout to the dream-made-into-story interpretation, but only if we accept that the widespread geographical sources of this story type have a collective source for the dreams.
The story is a retelling of events experienced in an altered state of consciousness Once more, this interpretation is dependent on a single type of experience finding its way to lots of people in dispersed locations and in different times, before modern means of mass communication. But its an interpretation of faerie-tales that has begun to gain a lot of traction in recent times, best articulated by Graham Hancock. The basic premise is that when, for whatever reason, we enter an altered state of consciousness, we contact different realities than the one we normally experience. The altered state can be brought about by ingesting chemicals, meditation, trauma, excessive physical exertion, disease and illness, or even spontaneously without any apparent reason. We could also include the dreams from interpretation number 3 as an altered state, as it is the most common way humans experience a fundamentally different reality . Once the mind is in the altered state the usual physical rules of the universe no longer apply and anything can become possible. Cherry’s story certainly includes many components of various induced altered state of consciousness: moving through a tunnel, time dilation, humanoid entities appearing suddenly, non-organic lifeforms, entering a beautiful landscape, and even depression on return to normal reality. Adherents to a reductionist interpretation would be able to agree this is a viable interpretation, but would also remind us that everything experienced can be written off as an hallucination, explained by changes to brain chemistry. However, anyone who has experienced an extensive altered state of consciousness beyond a dream, will be able to associate with the super-reality of the experience. There can be a sense of touching something every bit as real as regulation reality. What the mind finds there can be brought back, in this case in the form of a faerie-story. The two motifs of the faerie ointment and the potential traumas Cherry experiences, such as weeping on a desolate moor, are embedded clues as to the means of her reaching the altered state of consciousness. There’ll be a blog post going into detail on this possible interpretation for the interaction with faeries very soon. Meanwhile, here’s the late, great Terence McKenna talking about faeries and DMT: The DMT experience, with faeries included.
The story really happened This interpretation might reside comfortably with the altered state of consciousness theory. If it’s accepted that perceived reality can be achieved through a variety of consciousness states, then what really happens can be extended beyond experiences in five-sense reality. However, the insinuation of interpretation number 5 is that the world of faerie has been encroaching on our consensus reality and interacting with it at a material level. If that’s the case, then where is that world, how is it crossing over into ours, and why is it doing so? I’ll talk about the Quantum Mechanics of faerieland in a future blog post, but for the purposes of this discussion, it is worth mentioning that certain current quantum theories suggests that in order for our physical universe to operate as it does, we are required to take into account at least seven extra dimensions of reality, and perhaps many more. These enfolded dimensions exist as implicate spaces, that can presumably hold many different forms of reality than the one we accept as the absolute reality (who lives in the 11th dimension?). If this is the case, then what resides in these dimensions may be able to seep through to ours when the conditions are right. It might be difficult for most people brought up on a diet of classical, materialistic Western science to stomach such a proposal, but in the wackadoo-world of quantum physics the unbelievable is the usual, and our entire universe is made up of this crazy sub-atomic reality where time doesn’t seem to exist, and no particles are present until someone observes them. Compared to some of the current mind-bending scientific theories about the way our universe works, a parallel faerie world only slightly tweaked from the one we seem to live in, and interacting with it, begins to look a lot less insane.
Many things are possible in an altered state of consciousness
So what do we conclude? There is probably much truth in all five interpretations, and certainly much overlap. We could also greatly expand the interpretations here and add further theories (how about the theory from Solipsism that suggests that the story does not exist at all until you the observer come across it and allow its subsequent creation in your own conscious awareness). But hopefully, it is clear that faerie-tales such as Cherry of Zennor hold depths of meaning within them; coded meaning that just needs unscrambling to reveal some secrets direct from faerieland. It’s a strange place… but then reality is strange.
To finish, you might like to try this very trippy faerie cartoon from the 1970s. It’s highly odd, but made by people who demonstrate great attention to faerie detail.
At the end of the excellent documentary The Fairy Faith, the narrator, John Walker, goes with Marie-Rose and her daughter April, to a forest river in Cape Breton Island, Canada, to hear about their faerie encounter several years previously. It’s quite clear that they are authentic, and genuinely recalling the experience as best they can. The encounter consisted mostly of hearing music and singing — Marie-Rose was evidently afraid of the phenomenon and dragged her children away from the river and into the car to get away. As they drove away, April watched out the back window as a group of small faeries were: “jumping around in a circle, holding hands. They were singing… and dancing in a circle. They sort of mixed right in with the background, and I don’t know whether they were see-through or what.”
Another Welsh story tells of a shepherd playing his flute on a hillside:
Prosaic Explanations In a concerted effort to dispel any supernatural elements from the story, Paul Harris (in a 1998 article for Fortean Times) put forward the theory that the children were Flemish orphans, displaced from their community after Henry II’s co-ordinated persecution of the Flemish population in Eastern England, culminating in a military offensive in 1173. Left to their own devices, they lived in the woods before wandering into caves (Harris suggests the Neolithic Grimes Graves in Norfolk), following tunnels and emerging near Woolpit, green through malnutrition and speaking a foreign language that the locals couldn’t understand. But as with many materialistic-reductionist explanations of strange stories, it is soon found to be baloney. Grimes Graves is 40km from Woolpit, there are no known tunnels extending beyond the locality and even if there were, they do not extend to the clay geology of northern Suffolk. Flemish immigration to Suffolk had been happening since the 11th century and so the linguistic argument also breaks down – the villagers would have been well-acquainted with the Flemish language, even if it were a dialect or (even more so) an Anglicised version of Flemish. And an educated aristocrat like Sir Richard de Calne would definitely have recognised their speech. Despite being cited as the most likely interpretation in several retellings of the story, it’s actually a non-starter.
Out-there Explanations In his 2012 book Children from the Sky, Duncan Lunan presents a highly unorthodox theory of alien intervention in 12th-century England. Lunan goes into considerably more historical detail than any other writer on the subject, and his close reading of the historical sources teases out the context of the story and the characters involved. Of particular importance is his interpretation of the original texts, pointing out the usages of language by the two medieval chroniclers, and how the original Latin has been skewed by later translators and story summaries. But the historical detective work soon gives way to a ‘speculative interpretation’ that suggests the Knights Templar (he identifies Sir Richard de Calne as a Templar) were in contact with an alien civilization, who were abducting humans to populate a colony world – a world where it was always twilight due to a synchronous orbit, and where genetically modified algae turned the inhabitants green. The green children were part of this colony and were accidentally transported to Earth due to a matter transmitter malfunction. Sound wackadoo? You bet. But the sci-fi angle taken by Lunan is a lot of fun and allows for some free-thinking speculation on the oddities of a story that refuses to fit in with a reductionist interpretation. A mind-bogglingly melodramatic National Geographic documentary has Lunan dashing around the Suffolk countryside in a Morris Minor in pursuit of the alien connection. You might want to take a look here: 
But instead of using real foreigners, such as Flemish immigrants, the story is made timeless and archetypal by turning the children into faeries. Their otherworldy status makes the tale bigger and more fundamental – it becomes a tool for teaching us about ourselves. The story embeds certain faerie motifs, such as their green colour. The most common colour of the faeries was green (usually their clothing, but also sometimes their food and their skin), and people hearing the tale in the Middle Ages (and beyond) would have automatically understood and accepted that they were associated with an otherworld, most usually represented as faerieland.
His hypothesis is that there is a commonality to the experiences reported in alien abduction scenarios, and the reports of interactions with faeries in folklore. He suggests the aliens and the faeries are essentially the same phenomenon, tuned through the cultural receptors of the time and then interpreted accordingly. He makes special reference to the regular motifs in faerie-tales of the abduction, by various means, of humans by faeries. There’s a lot of data here – it’s the commonest motif in faerie folklore. For a variety of reasons humans are taken to faerieland in the stories, either as midwives or nurses for faerie children, as servants to the faeries, for sex, as punishment or reward, or just because the faeries feel like it. They were also keen on abducting babies, and replacing them with changelings; wizened old faerie creatures who would usually die before the end of the story if a ruse to return the human baby wasn’t discovered. These motifs, of course, coincide with many aspects of the monumentally strange phenomenon of alien abductions, reports of which have grown at an exponential rate since the early 1950s. Vallee uses a range of evidence to tie-up faerie abductions from folklore and alien abductions from modern reports, and goes as far to state:
deadbutdreaming 