Page Content (OCR)
At this point, Mrs. Leboeuf fled in terror and hid in a nearby thicket. When she tried to locate the entity, there was nothing to be seen, but all the dogs in the village were furiously barking. All of a sudden, a large metallic, circular object rose from behind some trees and took off toward the northeast. People who had heard the witness's cries soon gathered around her. At the site where the disk had been seen to rise, a circle was found, about ten feet in diameter, where shrubs and bushes +044 14 From one of the acacia trees at the edge of this circular imprint hung down a branch more than three inches thick, broken by pressure from above. The branch of another acacia, which hung over the circular mark eight and a half feet above the ground, was entirely stripped of its leaves. The first few yards of wheat, in the path of the object as it took off through the field, were flattened out in radiating lines. I hardly need underline the similarity between the depression left by this object and the various kinds of rings or nests already mentioned. Let us now return to the fions, the dwarfish race that accompanies the korrigans, the fairies of Brittany. They are seen only at twilight or at night. Some carry a torch like a Welsh death candle. They have swords no bigger than pins. According to French author Villemarque, a careful distinction should be drawn between korrigans and dwarfs. The latter are a hideous race of beings with dark or even black hairy bodies, with voices like old men and little sparkling black eyes. A man who wrote to me after reading one of my books pointed out that although he was unconvinced about the existence of the unidentified flying objects, he had discovered something he thought might be of interest to me. And he continued thus: I have spent several years doing research on the Cherokee Indian, which is a branch of the Iroquois tribe. When the Cherokees migrated into the hills of Tennessee they came upon a strange race of "moon-eyed" people who could not see in the daylight. The Cherokees being unable to understand "these wretches” expelled them.... nos wan wat , we c 1 a Barton in 1797 states "these people were a strange white race, far advanced, living in houses." Heywood, 26 years later, states the invading Cherokees found white people near the head of Little Tennessee with forts extending down as far as the Chickamauga creek. He wood at on on Confirmation of my correspondent's report is found in Robert Silverberg's excellent book Mound Builders of Ancient America — the Archaeology of a Myth. It would be nice to hold on to the common belief that the UFOs are craft from a superior space civilization, because this is a hypothesis science fiction has made widely acceptable and because we are not altogether unprepared, scientifically and even, perhaps, militarily, to deal with such visitors. Unfortunately, however, the theory that flying saucers are material objects from outer space manned by a race originating on some other planet is not a good answer. However strong the current belief in UFOs from space, it cannot be stronger than the Celtic faith in the elves and the fairies, or the medieval belief in /utins, or the fear throughout the Christian lands, in the first centuries of our era, of demons and satyrs and fauns. Certainly, it cannot be stronger than the faith that inspired the early contributions to the Bible — a faith that seems rooted in personal experiences regarded as angelic visitation. Those who assume that modern UFO sightings must be the result of alien experiments — of a "scientific" or even "superscientific" nature — conducted by a race of space travelers may be the victims of their ignorance of the old folklore. The academic pedants, through a common bias that psychologists could perhaps explain if they were not its first victims, have covered the fairy-faith with the same ridicule as other pedants now cover the UFO phenomenon. Such tales set in motion powerful mental mechanisms making acceptance of the facts very difficult. The facts in question ignore frontiers, creeds, and races, defy rational statement, and turn around the most logical had been crushed: gives the location of three of these forts.