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certain type of grass. They were supposed to have incredible strength, and in one story an Indian exposed to one of these creatures suffered from a swollen face afterward. As in northern Europe, the “‘little people” of the Rocky Mountains reputedly kidnapped children from the Indian tribes frequently. An anthropologist from Berkeley, California, Brian Stross, uncovered some interesting ‘‘little men”’ stories while studying the Tzeltal Indians of Tenejapa in Chiapas, Mexico. The local name for the three-foot-tall hairy humanoids is ihk’al. Legend claims that the ihk’al fly about with some kind of rocket attached to their back, and they occasionally carry off people. A little farther south, similar beings supposedly live in caves and are able to fly through the air. They are said to kidnap women and force them to bear children. Far in the interior of Brazil, according to the explorer Lieutenant Colonel P. H. Fawcett, there thrives a dreaded group of ‘‘bat people”’ who live in caves and possess telepathic powers. Why haven’t any of these entities ever been photographed? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle performed a celebrated investigation into one set of photos of fairies taken in England by a couple of children in 1917. Sixty-six years later, in 1983, one of them signed a written confession, explaining how the pictures had been faked. For some reason, children seem to see the little people more often than adults. Back in 1966, I chatted with a man on Long Island who told me the following story after extracting a promise that I wouldn’t use his name. One night that spring, he said, his small daughter ran into the house and told him that there were some little men in silver suits running about the backyard. He tried to shrug her off, but she was insistent. Finally he glanced into the backyard to appease her, and he was amazed to see three tiny figures darting around in the grass. They were less than 2 feet high and were wearing skin-tight metallic suits of some sort. He cautiously opened the door and stepped outside, and the three figures instantly ran to the far end of the yard and vanished. The historical records certainly indicate that the little people have always existed all over this planet; that they possess the power of flight, the power of invisibility, and, to varying degrees, the power to dominate and control the human mind. We call them elementals, too. In story after story, the witnesses encountered them near swamps, lakes, and rivers, often carrying out the same actions so often reported by UFO witnesses. Flying lights and spheres are said to accompany some fairies and little people. Witnesses 206 / Operation Trojan Horse