From Fairies to Aliens: Abductions, Changelings, and Ships in the Sky

Long before the UFOs of 20th century folklore, people feared abduction from the Fair Folk living just beyond the hedgerow.

Happy New Year to the Crossroads community! I hope you’ve had a restful holiday season. This week, I’ve pulled an old favorite from the archives that explores the connections between the fairy stories of prior centuries and contemporary tales of aliens. I’ve selected this essay because I’ll be doing a deep-dive on the development of fairy folklore in an upcoming patron series.

The following essay was originally published on January 16th, 2024. I hope you enjoy it.

- Nicole Miras

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The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, Joseph Noel Paton ca. 1849. Via Wikimedia Commons.

You’re standing by a lake in the crystalline blue of summer, listening to the sound of the wind snaking its way through the grass. Nestled in a valley surrounded by towering mountains, your fishing spot is free from the intrusions of civilization. There are no cell-towers, no paved roads—indeed, not a soul to disturb your peace, but the chirping of wild birds and the rustle of hares and wood mice. Just one tall creature against the green; the valley holds you in its palm.

Until the sky breaks.

Suddenly, the clouds roll in, and a great mist chokes your view of the land. A storm is coming. You hastily gather your things as the wind roars its discontent. The shadows of the long grass appear jagged on the edge of the lake. The birds who make their homes in the valley leap into the sky in unison and scatter, fearing what is to come.

And then, at the peak of the tallest mountain, you see it.

The mist parts, and against the backdrop of a fiery sun, an enormous ship makes its landing.

If you’re reading this in 2024, the scene above likely registers as an alien invasion from a faraway galaxy. With heightened interest in UFOs thanks to recent U.S. congressional hearings, which will supposedly bring “disclosure” to the public (more on that later), today’s cultural lexicon would place a story like the one I shared squarely in the realm of little green men and flying saucers.

But in fact, it is one version of a founding myth from Celtic folklore, explaining how the Tuatha Dé Danann (pronounced too-ah day danan) arrived in Ireland.

The Tuatha Dé Danann are a supernatural race from Irish mythology who are thought to represent pre-Christian gods, and were sometimes interpreted as fairies after Christianization. Unfortunately, the Irish Celts did not write down their legends until after their conversion, so as with all folklore, the stories are bound to have evolved since pagan times.

But if you look, legends of flying crafts and saucers long predate the alien stories of the 20th and 21st centuries, from the celestial chariots of the Bible—

The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels: the Lord is among them… -Psalms 68:17

—to the bizarre Edo-era legend of the Utsuro-bune, in which a vessel that looks a lot like a flying saucer allegedly washed ashore on the coast of Japan’s Hitachi province in February 1803. Aboard the ship was a young woman who could not speak Japanese, in some accounts had bright red hair and pale skin, and was clutching a little box that the fishermen who found her were not allowed to touch. Not knowing what to do with her, the fishermen in the story pushed her vessel back out to sea.

A depiction of the Utsuro-bune ship that allegedly arrived on the coast of Japan’s Hitachi province in February of 1803. Illustration from the early to mid-1800s, artist unknown. Public domain.

There are also medieval European legends, such as this rather frustrated account from Liber de Grandine et Tonitruis, Chapter XI, by Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons (b. 779, d. 840):

We have, however, seen and heard many men plunged in such great stupidity, sunk in such depths of folly, as to believe that there is a certain region, which they call Magonia, whence ships sail in the clouds, in order to carry back to that region those fruits of the earth which are destroyed by hail and tempests; the sailors paying rewards to the storm wizards and themselves receiving corn and other produce. Out of the number of those whose blind folly was deep enough to allow them to believe these things possible, I saw several exhibiting in a certain concourse of people, four persons in bonds—three men and a woman who they said had fallen from these same ships; after keeping them for some days in captivity they had brought them before the assembled multitude, as we have said, in our presence to be stoned. But truth prevailed.

Or this story from the 1594 posthumous edition of Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires Prodigieuses, which includes the description of an event that allegedly took place outside of Tübingen, Germany on December 7, 1577:

About the sun many dark clouds appeared… Out of these clouds have come forth reverberations resembling large, tall and wide hats, and the earth showed itself yellow and bloody, and seemed to be covered with hats, tall and wide, which appeared in various colors such as red, blue, green, and most of them black… It is easy for everyone to think of the meaning of this miracle, which is that God wants to induce men to amend their lives and make penance. May Almighty God inspire all men to recognize Him. Amen.

Or this account from none other than Goethe, writing about an experience he had while traveling by train to the University of Leipzig in September 1768:

All at once, in a ravine on the right-hand side of the way, I saw a sort of amphitheatre, wonderfully illuminated. In a funnel-shaped space there were innumerable little lights gleaming, ranged step-fashion over one another, and they shone so brilliantly that the eye was dazzled. But what stiff more confused the sight was, that they did not keep still, but jumped about here and there, as well downwards from above as vice versâ, and in every direction. The most of them, however, remained stationary, and beamed on. It was only with the greatest reluctance that I suffered myself to be called away from this spectacle, which I could have wished to examine more closely. On interrogating the postillion, he indeed knew nothing about such a phenomenon, but said that there was in the neighbourhood an old stone-quarry, the excavation of which was filled with water. Now whether this was a pandemonium of will-o'-the-wisps, or a company of shining creatures, I will not decide.

These examples are just a handful of countless tales of supernatural phenomena scattered across folklore. Whether you see these stories as proof of alien visitors, or a facet of spiritual phenomena beyond human understanding, or just plain nonsense: what comes across is the human instinct to look to the skies to explain the unexplainable.

I’m particularly fascinated by fairy folklore—I find the old stories captivating for what they reveal about our evolving relationship with nature and how our myths change to suit our industrial development. Fairies have been especially victimized by industrialization. Once the mighty rulers of forests and hills, and a source of true terror, fairies have been reduced to the size of butterflies—the stewards of our tulip beds, shrunken down to fit a suburban garden.

But one thing that strikes me while reading about these alleged sightings and accounts is that the fear and mystery that the Fair Folk inspired has not disappeared. Instead, it’s been transplanted onto aliens and UFOs.

The Shepherd’s Dream, from ‘Paradise Lost,’ Henry Fuseli ca. 1793. Via the Tate.

One aspect of this are the alien abduction stories that have proliferated in the past century, in which an unsuspecting person is carried away by a foreign craft and experimented upon by beings from another planet. In these accounts, I’m reminded of the deep legacy of abduction within fairy folklore. As folklorist Richard Sugg points out while discussing child abductions in Fairies: A Dangerous History, “Much later, that iconic Other of our own times, the alien abductor, updated this basic assault with clinical probings or the removal of human eggs or sperm. In the pre-scientific cultures of the fairy or the witch, however, the most potent emblem of life was simply one’s own baby or child.”

Cases of fairy abductions permeate the folklore of Ireland and Britain. In some cases, this had gruesome results—such as the concept of “changelings,” in which a “healthy” human baby was believed to have been swapped for a fairy child. In many cases, these supposed “changelings” were just children with physical or developmental disabilities, and they faced horrific abuse and torture as a twisted means of coaxing the fairies to come back for “their” child.

But there are also plenty of accounts of able-bodied children and adults claiming to have been stolen by the fairies. Take this story from the elderly Annie McIntire, which Sugg references in Fairies: A Dangerous History. McIntire was applying for a pension in Donegal in August of 1909; when unable to give her exact age, she recalled being stolen by the “wee people” on Halloween, 1839:

Yes, by good luck my brother happened to be coming home from Carndonagh that night, and heard the fairies singing and saw them dancing round me in the wood at Carrowkeel. He had a book with him, and he threw it in among them. They then ran away.

Note that Carrowkeel is the site of Neolithic passage tombs, a type of Megalithic monument found across Ireland, that are believed to have served ritualistic purposes and whose openings are sometimes aligned with celestially-significant dates like the solstices. Prior to the archaeological excavations of the 20th century, these sites (to which Annie McIntire alluded in her account before the Pension Committee) were often believed to be fairy forts.

And in case you were wondering—Annie McIntire did get her pension.

An excellent resource for fairy stories is Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz’s The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, published in 1911. Evans-Wentz, then a scholar at Oxford, spent the early 1900s traveling through Ireland, Brittany, and the United Kingdom to collect folklore and alleged fairy sightings from villagers. Without him, so many of these stories would be lost, as many of the old folks with whom he spoke were illiterate. Because he was American (with an Irish mother), Evans-Wentz gained access to rural communities from which the typical Oxford gentleman might have been rebuffed, or at least, not trusted.

Thanks to him, we have colorful accounts like this one from John Boylin of the village of Kilmessan. As with Annie McIntire’s account, John Boylin lived just a few miles from another significant prehistoric site: the Hill of Tara in County Meath, Ireland, home to a Neolithic passage tomb, the Lia Fáil (a standing stone also known as the Stone of Destiny, which features in several Irish myths) and Neolithic and Bronze Age burial mounds:

We were told as children, that, as soon as night fell, the fairies from Rath Ringlestown would form in a procession, across Tara road, pass round certain bushes which have not been disturbed for ages, and join the gangkena or host of industrious folk, the red fairies. We were afraid, and our nurses always brought us home before the advent of the fairy procession. One of the passes used by this procession happened to be between two mud-wall houses; and it is said that a man went out of one of these houses at the wrong time, for when found he was dead: the fairies had taken him because he interfered with their procession.

Or this one, from a peasant (who chose to remain unnamed) in County Sligo, Ireland. He relayed a story from his young adulthood about how he narrowly escaped capture from the fairies while hunting with a friend:

… as we were walking around Ben Bulbin*, [I] saw one of the gentry for the first time. I knew who it was, for I had heard the gentry described ever since I could remember; and this one was dressed in blue with a head-dress adorned with what seemed to be frills. When he came up to us, he said to me in a sweet and silvery voice, “The seldomer you come to this mountain the better. A young lady here wants to take you away.” … As we were leaving the mountains, he told us not to look back, and we didn’t.

*Benbulbin (or Ben Bulbin/Benbulben) is the site of several Irish myths such as The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne.

Plucked from the Fairy Circle, T.H. Thomas ca. 1880. From British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions pp. 74. Via Wikimedia Commons.

And then, of course, there are the infamous fairy rings—circles of mushrooms or flattened grass that act as portals to the Otherworld. As a Protestant minister from the Western Hebrides of Scotland told Evans-Wentz regarding how to prevent abduction:

I remember how an old woman pulled me out of a fairy ring to save me from being taken… If a mother takes some bindweed and places it burnt at the ends over her babe’s cradle, the fairies have no power over the child… As a boy, I saw two old women passing a babe over red-hot coals, and then drop some of the cinders in a cup of water and give the water to the babe to drink, in order to cure it of a fairy stroke.

The fairy rings of yesteryear can be found today in stories of alien crop circles. And the odd sightings that fill the pages of The Fairy Faith have evolved into congressional hearings and the stories of bewildered U.S. Navy pilots, confronted with aerial phenomena beyond even their highly-trained understanding. Perhaps this is conspiratorial, but I think the slow drip of “disclosure” from the U.S. government has an earthlier cause. After decades of pointless war and a ballooning defense budget, Americans have grown increasingly weary of foreign intervention. But defense contractors are still major donors to both political parties, and they will want access to our tax dollars one way or another. Could this new period of “disclosure” be a way to cement their funding in the future by creating a new threat for the public to fear?

Only time will tell, I suppose. While I’m not against the idea of life on other planets in an infinite universe, the aliens of contemporary folklore often present as the materialist answer to fairies—for those uncomfortable or unwilling to wrestle with the possibility of a spiritual realm, aliens allow them to engage with paranormal phenomena from a “biological” or “technological” perspective.

Whether it’s modern aliens, angels, fairies, or the myriad mythological creatures who populate folklore across the globe, what can’t be denied is that ordinary people will continue to see things they cannot explain, and culture will fill in the gaps.