Empire unusual suggested

80 PASSPORT TO MAGONIA
sage beside a public house, and when she saw a tall figure lurking
in the shadows Miss Scales hesitated, waiting for her sister who had
fallen behind.
The sister, who described the loiterer as "tall, thin and (save the
mark) gentlemanly," came up in time to see his long cloak thrown
aside, and a lantern flashing on the startled girl. There was no time
to scream; Jack's weird blue flame spurted into his victim's face
and she dropped to the ground in a deep swoon. Whereupon, Jack
walked away calmly.
Vyner suggests that Jack had a rendezvous in Green Dragon
Alley and wanted to get rid of witnesses. A week after the Old
Ford incident, he knocked on the door of Mr. Ashworth's house
in Turner Street and inquired for him. The servant who opened
the door screamed the place down. Jack fled. He was never seen
again, in the London neighborhood at least. Had a contact been
made? It is strange indeed, as Vyner remarks, that Springheel
Jack should have paid two visits within two days to houses less
than a mile apart, whose owners were named Alsop and Ashworth,
respectively. Two of the main witnesses, as in West Virginia, were
young girls. With them, in the two cases, were their sisters. There
seems to be a pattern here. But, rather typically, it is once again
an absurd one.
In 1877, wearing tight garments and shining helmet, Jack was
seen again at Aldershot, Hampshire, England. On that occasion
he flew above two sentries, who fired at him. He answered with a
burst of blue fire, which left them stunned, and vanished, Vyner
believes that Jack was again to blame for the scare in late August,
1944, in Mattoon, Illinois. He was seen at night peering through
windows "as in search for someone known to him by sight." Most
of the witnesses were women; some of them reported falling unconscious
after a device was pointed at them by the visitor, who
left a strange cloying smell.
In the spring of 1960, Italian jeweler Salvatore Cianci was driving
in Sicily, near Syracuse, when a small being in shining clothes
wearing a diving helmet appeared in the beam of the headlights.
It had no arms but two "little wings." Mr. Cianci suEered a
nervous shock.
On Saturday, November 16, 1963, four teen-agers were walking
near Sandling Park, near Hythe, Kent, England. One of the four,
THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH 81
seventeen-year-old John Flaxton, describes how they were frightened
by an object which they first had taken to be a star:
"It was uncanny. The reddish yellow light was coming out of the
sky at an angle of sixty degrees. As it came towards the ground it
seemed to hover more slowly."
A bright light, golden in color, suddenly appeared in the field near
them after the first object had been hidden by some trees:
"It was about eighty yards away, floating about ten feet above the
ground. It seemed to move along with us, stopping when we stopped
as if it was observing us. The light was oval, about fifteen to twenty
feet across with a bright, solid core.
"It disappeared behind trees and a few seconds later a dark figure
shambled out. It was all black, about the size of a human but without
a head. It seemed to have wings like a bat on either side and
came stumbling towards us. We didn't wait to investigate." 3 * 1
Folklore in the making... . From the farfadets, we have drifted
to modern times, with Springheel Jack and The Mothman. And
we have seen our visitors' arsenal become more precise. Jack's
lantern and ray gun have survived in modern tales, in twentiethcentury
comic books, in television series. But the real question is:
Could all this be real? And if not, how can we explain the consistency
of these descriptions, at a time when there were no
comics and no television?
The Italian artist R. L. Johannis had a remarkable experience
in 1947, at a time when the name "flying saucer" was already
popular in the United States, but when the now-abundant documentation
about the landings was nonexistent. The date was, as he
recalls, August 14. He was hiking alone, following a small stream
in the mountainous region between Italy and Yugoslavia. Among
some rocks, he suddenly saw a large, brilliant red, lens-shaped
object, about ten yards in diameter. Close to it, he discovered two
people, whom he first regarded as "kids" until he realized they
were dwarfs—of a type he had never seen before.
The two beings were under three feet tall; their heads were
larger than a man's head. They had no hair, eyelashes, or eyebrows.
Their faces were greenish, their noses straight, their
mouths wide slits, giving them something of the appearance of a
fish, Their eyes were huge, round, and prominent, their color