Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

they do? Hartland says that amethod in favour in the North of Scotland is to take the suspected elf to some known hauntof its race, generally, we are told, some spot where peculiar coughing sounds are heard, or tosome 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 whomay have been ill-treated because their superstitious parents thought they looked like elves! As lateas May 17, 1884, it was reported in the London Daily Telegraph, two women were arrested atClonmel and charged with cruelty toward a child three years old. They thought he was a changelingand, by ill-treating him, hoped to obtain the real child from the elves! And there is no question thatin 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 afunny example of such a case:A tale from Badenoch represents the man as discovering the fraud from finding his wife, awoman of unruffled temper, suddenly turned a shrew. So he piles up a great fire andthreatens to throw the occupant of the bed upon it unless she tells him what has become ofhis wife. She then confesses that the latter has been carried off, and she has been appointedsuccessor. But by his determination he happily succeeds in recapturing his own at a certainfairy knoll near Inverness.Of course, the UFO myth has not yet reached such proportions, but we are perhaps not quite farfrom it. American television series such as "The Twilight Zone" have capitalized on this aspect inepisodes that assume that the human race has been infiltrated by extraterrestrials who differ fromhumans in small details only. This is not a new idea, as the belief in changelings shows. What wasthe purpose of such abductions? The idea advanced by students of folk tales is again very close to acurrent theory about UFOs: that the purpose of such contact is a genetic one. According toHartland:The motive assigned to fairies in northern stories is that of preserving and improving theirrace, on the one hand by carrying off human children to be brought up among the elves andto become united with them, and on the other hand by obtaining the milk and fostering careof human mothers for their own offspring.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 toland, eventually, and join us on our planet?.... Or do these aliens merely wish to enrich theirown 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 elvesafter nothing more than a dance or a game. But a strange phenomenon often takes place: the peoplewho 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. Andwe have in such stories the first idea of the relativity of time. How did this idea come to thestorytellers ages ago? What inspired them? No one can answer such questions. But it is a fact thatthe nonsymmetry of the time element between Magonia and our world is present in the tales fromall countries.Discussing this supernatural lapse of time, Hartland relates the true story of Rhys and Llewellyn,