Empire unusual suggested

42 PASSPORT TO MAGONIA
excellent saucer story, a hunter beholds a basket that comes down
from heaven. The basket contains twelve young maidens of ravishing
beauty. The man attempts to approach them, but the celestial
creatures quickly reenter the "basket/' which ascends rapidly out
of sight. However, witnessing the descent of the strange object
on another day, the same hunter uses a trick to come close to it
and succeeds in capturing one of the girls, whom he marries and
by whom he has a son. Nothing, unfortunately, can console his
wife for loss of the society of her sisters, who have gone away with
the flying vehicle. So, one day she makes a small basket, and,
according to Hartland,
having entered it with her child she sang the charm she and her
sisters had formerly used, and ascended once more to the star from
whence she had come.
She had been back in that heavenly country two years when
she was told:
Thy son wants to see his father; go down therefore, to the earth
and fetch thy husband, and tell him to bring us specimens of all the
animals he kills.
She did so. And the hunter ascended with his wife, saw his son,
and attended a great feast, at which the animals he had brought
were served.
The Algonquin story offers a complex mixture of themes. Some
of them are present in modern-day UFO stories; others derive
from traditional concepts, such as the exchange of food, which
we have already discussed. The new elements are: (1) the desire
expressed by the celestial beings to receive specimens of all the
animals the hunter kills, and (2) the idea that intermarriage between
the terrestrial and the aerial laces is possible. This latter
aspect will be examined separately in Chapter Four.
So far, we have seen our visitors stealing plants and requesting
various items. But have they actually killed animals themselves?
Have they taken away cattle? If we are to believe the stories told
by many witnesses, they have. But the interesting fact is that, here
again, we find a trait common to both the ufonauts and the Good
People. On page 53 I shall have occasion to quote, in another
context, a story describing a crowd of fairies chasing a deer on
THE GOOD PEOPLE 43
the island of Aramore. The storyteller added that, at another time,
"similar little people chased a horse." And in the same conversation
with Walter Wcntz, recorded before 1909, the storyteller,
"Old Patsy," told the following story about a man "who, if still
alive, is now in America where he went several years ago":
In the South Island as night was coming on, a man was giving his
cow water at a well, and, as he looked on the other side of a wall,
he saw many strange people playing hurley. When they noticed him
looking at them, one came up and struck the cow a hard blow, and
turning on the man cut his face and body very badly. The man might
not have been so badly off, but he returned to the well after the
first encounter and got four times as bad a beating.
On November 6, 1957, twelve-year-old Everett Clark, of Dante,
Tennessee, opened the door to let his dog, Frisky, out. As he did
so, he saw a peculiar object in a field a hundred yards or so from
the house. He thought he was dreaming and went back inside.
When he called the dog twenty minutes later, he found the object
was still there, and Frisky was standing near it, along with several
dogs from the neighborhood. Also near the object were two men
and two women in ordinary clothing. One of the men made several
attempts to catch Frisky, and later another dog, but had to
give up for fear of being bitten. Everett saw the strange people,
who talked between them "like German soldiers he had seen in
movies," walk right into the wall of the object, which then took
off straight up without sound. It was oblong and of "no particular
color.""
In another of the extraordinary coincidences with which UFO
researchers are now becoming familiar, on the same day another
attempt to steal a dog was made, this time in Evcrittstown,
New Jersey.*
While the Clark case had taken place at 6:30 A.M., it was at
dusk that John Trasco went outside to feed his dog and saw a
brilliant egg-shaped object hovering in front of his barn. In his
path he found a being three feet tall "with putty-colored face
and large frog-like eyes," who said in broken English: "We are
peaceful people, we only want your dog."
* liy yet (mother coincidence, the name of the town in the second case
is similar to tht name of the witness (Everett) in the first one.