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of its race, generally, we are told, some spot where peculiar coughing sounds are heard, or to some barrow, or stone circle, and lay it down. An offering of bread, butter, milk, cheese, eggs and flesh or fowl must accompany the child. But sometimes more radical methods have been used, and we can only pity any poor children who may have been ill-treated because their superstitious parents thought they looked like elves! As late as May 17, 1884, it was reported in the London Daily Telegraph, two women were arrested at Clonmel and charged with cruelty toward a child three years old. They thought he was a changeling and, by ill-treating him, hoped to obtain the real child from the elves! And there is no question that in medieval times the same superstition has led to the death of children who had congenital defects. Sometimes the same treatment applies to adults who have been "changed," and Hartland gives a 1 c 1 A tale from Badenoch represents the man as discovering the fraud from finding his wife, a woman of unruffled temper, suddenly turned a shrew. So he piles up a great fire and threatens to throw the occupant of the bed upon it unless she tells him what has become of his wife. She then confesses that the latter has been carried off, and she has been appointed successor. But by his determination he happily succeeds in recapturing his own at a certain fairy knoll near Inverness. Of course, the UFO myth has not yet reached such proportions, but we are perhaps not quite far from it. American television series such as "The Twilight Zone" have capitalized on this aspect in episodes that assume that the human race has been infiltrated by extraterrestrials who differ from humans in small details only. This is not a new idea, as the belief in changelings shows. What was the purpose of such abductions? The idea advanced by students of folk tales is again very close to a current theory about UFOs: that the purpose of such contact is a genetic one. According to 2 re ee Hartland: The motive assigned to fairies in northern stories is that of preserving and improving their race, on the one hand 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 1 a coal cc Similarly, Budd Hopkins, the researcher and artist who has become one of the most visible "experts" on the abduction reports, wrote in 1987: Do the UFO occupants want to lessen the distance between our race and theirs in order to Dee Or do these aliens merely wish to enrich their own stock and then depart as mysteriously as they arrived? Such is not always the purpose of abduction, however, and people are often returned by the elves after nothing more than a dance or a game. But a strange phenomenon often takes place: the people who have spent a day in Elfland come back to this world one year, or more, older! This is our fourth point, and quite a remarkable one. Time does not pass there as it does here. And we have in such stories the first idea of the relativity of time. How did this idea come to the storytellers ages ago? What inspired them? No one can answer such questions. But it is a fact that the nonsymmetry of the time element between Magonia and our world is present in the tales from all countries. they do? Hartland says that a method in favour in the North of Scotland is to take the suspected elf to some known haunt funny example of such a case: of human mothers for their own offspring. Discussing this supernatural lapse of time, Hartland relates the true story of Rhys and Llewellyn,