Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

own.I asked them once if they ever died and they said, No; "we are always kept young." Oncethey take you and you taste food in their palace you cannot come back. They never tasteanything salt, but eat fresh meat and drink pure water. They marry and have children. Andone of them could marry a good and pure mortal.They are able to appear in different forms. One once appeared to me and seemed only fourfeet high, and stoutly built. He said, "I am bigger than I appear to you now. We can make theold young, the big small, the small big."The cakes given to Joe Simonton were composed of, among other things, buckwheat hulls. Andbuckwheat is closely associated with legends of Brittany, one of the most conservative Celtic areas.In that region of France, belief in fairies (fees) is still widespread, although Evans-Wentz and PaulSebillot had great difficulty, about 1900, finding Bretons who said that they had seen fees. One ofthe peculiarities of Breton traditional legend is the association of the fees or korrigans with a race ofbeings named fions.Once upon a time a black cow belonging to little cave-dwelling fions ruined the buckwheat field ofa poor woman, who bitterly complained about the damage. The fions made a deal with her: theywould see to it that she should never run out of buckwheat cakes, provided she kept her mouth shut.And indeed she and her family discovered that their supply of cakes was inexhaustible. Alas! Oneday the woman gave some of the cake to a man who should not have been entrusted with the secretof its magical origin, and the family had to go back to the ordinary way of making buckwhet cakes.The Bible, too, gives a few examples of magical food supplies, similarly inexhaustible: the socalledmanna from Heaven. Moreover, stories narrated by actual people provide close parallels tothis theme. Witness the following account, given by Edwin S. Hartland, a scholar of populartraditions, in his book The Science of Fairy Tales:A man who lived in Ystradfynlais, in Bredknockshire, going out one day to look after hiscattle and sheep on the mountain, disappeared. In about three weeks, after search had seenmade in vain for him and his wife had given him up for dead, he came home. His wife askedhim where he had been for the last three weeks. "Three weeks? Is it three weeks you callthree hours?" said he. Pressed to say where he had been, he told her he had been playing hisflute (which he usually took with him on the mountain) at the Llorfa, a spot near the VanPool, when he was surrounded at a distance by little beings like men, who closed nearer andrearer to him until they became a very small circle. They sang and danced, and so affectedhim that he quite lost himself. They offered him some small cakes to eat, of which hepartook; and he had never enjoyed himself so well in his life.Evans-Wentz also has a few stories about the food from fairyland, gathered during his trips throughthe Celtic countries in the first few years of the present century. John Mac Neil of Barra, an old manwho spoke no English, told Michael Buchanan, who translated the story from the Gaelic for Evans-Wentz, a pretty tale about a girl who was taken by the Gentry. The fairies, he said, took the girl intotheir dwelling and set her to work baking cakes. But no matter how much she took from the closet,there was always the same amount left on the shelf. And she had to keep baking and baking, untilthe old fairy-man took pity on her and said:I am sure you are wearying of the time and thinking long of getting from our premises, and Iwill direct you to the means by which you can get your leave. Whatever remainder of mealfalls from the cakes after being baked put into the meal closet and that will stimulate mywife to give you leave.Naturally, she did as directed and got away. John Mac Neil, who was between seventy and eightyyears old, gave no date to the story, but since he said he saw the girl after her experience, the event