CFZ CANADA: Faeries at the bottom of the garden

Faeries, or fairies, may be more than fanciful products of fiction. In fact, faeries seem to have a real (if murky) foundation in fact, and have been feared for centuries.

Read on...

KARL SHUKER ON THE GENETICS OF FAIRIES

http://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2011/03/genetics-of-fairies.html

Victorian fairy painting

BEACHCOMBING ON FAIRYS.

There is a melancholy time in rural communities when belief in fairies dies – a moment in a village life comparable to the moment in a child’s life when he sees his grandfather’s face behind the Santa beard. Wentz examined this fairy death in Ireland and Scotland and Wales in The Fairy Faith in Celtic Lands (another post another day), while in much of England the death of the little folk was connected with the Reformation. However, there were some outlying English regions where belief in fairies continued up into the nineteenth century.

Beachcombing particularly enjoys the following story that straddles the period of belief, disbelief and, inevitably, incredulity. Come, reader, to Ilkley in deepest Yorkshire at the Wells, the local baths. The event described took place in about the year 1815 and we are in the company of William Butterfield ‘a good sort of a man, honest, truthful, and steady, and as respectable a fellow as you could find here and there’.

Read on

LIZZIE CLANCY: Dead Fairy Blues

There have been quite a few hoaxes in the crypto news recently. Some have been old, some new, and some in particular have caught the imagination of the readers of this bloggo. Lizzie writes:

Hi Jon

My friend Annie sent this link to me, which I thought you might find interesting.

http://www.lebanoncircle.co.uk/DeadFairy_redirect.htm

Liz xxx

I would like more information on the history of this clever hoax...

FAIRY PHOTOGRAPH: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF HUMAN STUPIDITY

Last summer someone emailed me a copy of the photograph on the left. I took a cursory look at it. It's a dead cat, I thought. I showed it to Richard Freeman who agreed, and then promptly forgot about it.

Some bright spark in the fortean/crypto community dubbed it `The Montauk Monster` (which is particularly silly because there is nothing the slightest bit monstrous about it) because it had been washed up near Montauk, New York in July.

The only thing that mildly interested me about it was that it was alleged in certain quarters that it had come from Plum Island, home of the U.S.Government animal diseases research facility. This only interested me because at the time I was being mildly obsessive and reading all of Nelson deMille's thrillers in order, and one of them was set on (and named after) Plum Island.

However, we basically ignored it, considering it to be a non-story. The mystery was solved by our old mate Dr Daz at Tetrapod Zoology who had got tired of the media furore surrounding it, and correctly identified it as a dead racoon, bloated by putrefecation. However, as he admits bewildered during the days when he was covering that story his daily hits increased something like tenfold, proving that people can get ridiculously obsessed over nonsense.

Now, this picture hit the headlines a couple of weeks ago, and somehow we overlooked it. However it turned up in our inbox this morning with someone claiming that it is the image of a "fairy". The picture, by the way, was allegedly taken at La Pampa in Argentina in early January.

Hmmmmmmm.

We did a bit of searching, and the Daily Telegraph covered this on January 14th, writing:

"According to the uncorroborated story that accompanies the picture on dozens of cryptozoology websites and blogs, the photographer spotted the fast-moving "being" but was only able to take a single photo before it flew away.

He reportedly sent the photo to local UFO study group which decided it showed a creature of "high strangeness" and forwarded it on to the police.

The blurb with the picture claims that officers used high-tech equipment to enhance the image, revealing that the animal had eye sockets and a beak. The special criminal division estimated that the creature could be up to 2ft 7 in tall, it is claimed. But the story have been met with scepticism among experienced photographers, who point out that it would be impossible to tell the size of the object without knowing how close it was to the camera. More mundane and plausible theories include that the photo is a long exposure shot of a bird, or an insect that flew too close to the camera. "

Well I remember from Peter Pan what happened to Tinkerbell when people say that they don't believe in fairies, but to my eyes this is almost certainly a blurry picture of a bird. It's got a beak for heaven's sake!

Over to you guys...