Long before anyone spoke of flying saucers, people disappeared with the fairies.
They vanished from roads, hillsides and fields. They followed music nobody else could hear, stepped into fairy rings, entered strange halls beneath the earth or simply failed to come home. Sometimes they returned believing they had been gone for minutes, only to discover that hours, years or even generations had passed. Others remembered little of what had happened to them at all. Then, during the twentieth century, the visitors changed.
The fairy lights became strange lights in the sky. The journey beneath the hill became a journey aboard a craft. The beautiful or grotesque inhabitants of another realm became beings from another world. Once again people described paralysis, altered states, missing time and encounters with entities who seemed to possess powers beyond ordinary human understanding.
The similarities are irresistible. They are also dangerous if taken too far. Fairy abduction stories do not prove that alien encounters are ancient. UFO accounts do not prove that fairies were extraterrestrials. What they do show is that human beings have been telling remarkably persistent stories about being taken from the familiar world into somewhere else for a very long time. Perhaps the visitors changed. Perhaps we did.
Or perhaps some stories are simply very good at surviving.
Today, your card is –
XX – The Abduction
Being carried away by the fairies was once a perfectly serious possibility.
Not necessarily in the sense that everyone in Britain believed it unquestioningly, because folklore has never been that simple, but fairy abduction formed part of a recognisable body of belief and storytelling. Babies might be stolen and replaced with changelings. Women were particularly vulnerable around childbirth. Musicians could be lured away by supernatural music. Travellers might stumble into fairy gatherings and discover that leaving was considerably more difficult than entering.
Sometimes the captive returned. That did not necessarily mean everything was fine. One of the most persistent features of fairyland is that time behaves badly there.
The folklorist Edwin Sidney Hartland devoted an entire section of his 1891 book The Science of Fairy Tales to what he called the “supernatural lapse of time in fairyland”. He collected stories in which people entered the otherworld for what appeared to be a short period and returned to discover that far longer had passed outside. Wikisource
One Welsh tale concerned two men named Rhys and Llewelyn. Rhys became caught up in a fairy dance and believed that he had been dancing for only a few minutes. To everyone outside the fairy circle, however, a year had passed. Variants collected in Wales repeated the pattern, sometimes requiring the missing person to be dragged from the dance after a year and a day. Wikisource
The experience was not merely geographical. The person had crossed a boundary where ordinary rules no longer applied.
Thomas the Rhymer provides one of Britain’s most famous examples. The legendary thirteenth-century Thomas of Erceldoune encounters the Queen of Fairy and travels with her into the otherworld. Later versions of the tradition have him spending seven years there before returning with prophetic abilities. Internet Sacred Text Archive
The details vary enormously because there was never a single British handbook explaining precisely what fairies did with abductees. Folklore grows locally. One village’s fairy hill is another village’s haunted wood. One captive is stolen, another willingly follows, another enters through curiosity and another is seduced by music, food, beauty or promises. But certain ideas return again and again. There is a boundary. There is an encounter. Normal perception is altered. Time cannot necessarily be trusted. And afterwards, the witness must somehow explain an experience that took place outside the rules of everyday life.
Then came the flying saucer.
After the Second World War, particularly following the explosion of public interest in “flying discs” in 1947, strange things in the sky acquired a new vocabulary. By the 1950s and 1960s, reports were no longer restricted to distant objects. People began reporting occupants, landings and increasingly intimate encounters. Eventually, some witnesses said they had been taken.
The modern alien abduction narrative developed its own recognisable features. A person encounters a strange light or object. There may be an interruption to an ordinary journey. Time appears to be missing. Memories can be confused or fragmented. Some accounts include paralysis, medical examinations, communication with non-human entities or the sensation of being returned to the place from which the experience began. It sounds strikingly familiar.
In 1969, French-American researcher Jacques Vallée published Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers and pushed that similarity directly into UFO research. Vallée argued that reports of modern UFO occupants should not automatically be treated as evidence of extraterrestrial visitors arriving in spacecraft. He drew attention instead to older traditions involving fairies, elves, demons, supernatural visitors and mysterious aerial beings, suggesting that the modern UFO phenomenon might belong to a much older pattern of extraordinary encounter narratives. Jacques Vallée
This was a significant departure from the increasingly popular extraterrestrial interpretation. If somebody in 1965 described being confronted by strange humanoids emerging from a glowing craft, the obvious modern question was whether they had encountered beings from another planet. Vallée asked a different question.
What if people had been telling variations of this story for centuries?
That does not mean he proved fairies and aliens were the same thing. He did not. It means the comparison itself deserves attention.
Take missing time. Today it is strongly associated with UFO abduction stories. Yet centuries before anyone imagined extraterrestrial spacecraft, folklore already contained stories in which witnesses returned from supernatural encounters with radically different perceptions of how much time had elapsed.
Take strange lights. Folklore is full of mysterious lights associated with dangerous landscapes, spirits, fairy gatherings and otherworldly places. Modern encounter narratives place lights in the sky, above roads or hovering over fields.
Take paralysis or inability to move. Experiences of supernatural restraint have appeared in traditions involving witches, demons, ghosts and nocturnal visitations. Today we also know that sleep paralysis can produce an intensely convincing sensation of waking while unable to move, sometimes accompanied by the perception of figures, presences or pressure in the room.
That offers a plausible explanation for some experiences. It cannot simply be pasted over every account. The important point is that the same broad human experiences can be interpreted through very different cultural frameworks.
Imagine waking in seventeenth-century Britain unable to move while a figure stands beside your bed. You do not have aliens. You do not have spaceships. You do have witches, spirits, demons and fairies. Now imagine the same terrifying experience after decades of films, books and television programmes featuring extraterrestrial visitors. The experience may be similar. The story available to explain it has changed.
That does not mean witnesses are lying. Quite the opposite. A person can experience something profoundly frightening and genuinely inexplicable without the explanation they later attach to it necessarily being correct. Memory is not a recording device. Perception is not infallible. Human beings interpret unfamiliar experiences using familiar ideas.
Folklore does much the same thing on a larger scale. It gives the unknown a vocabulary.
There is another fascinating similarity between fairy encounters and modern abduction narratives: liminal places. Fairies traditionally inhabit boundaries. Hills, caves, ancient monuments, crossroads, woods and places where one landscape becomes another repeatedly appear in supernatural tradition. They belong neither entirely here nor entirely elsewhere. Modern anomalous encounters also frequently occur during journeys and transitions. Roads at night are particularly effective stages for the unexplained. The witness is between destinations, often alone, surrounded by darkness and moving through a landscape reduced to whatever appears in the headlights. Then something interrupts the journey. A light. A figure. Something standing in the road. A period of time that does not seem to fit.
We should be cautious here too. Roads are common settings for strange encounters partly because millions of people travel on them. Darkness reduces visual information, fatigue affects perception and unfamiliar objects can become difficult to identify.
But folklore does not require a supernatural explanation to be interesting. The pattern itself is interesting. Human beings appear particularly receptive to stories about boundaries because boundaries represent uncertainty. Inside and outside. Day and night. Known and unknown. Human and other. Our world and somewhere else.
Fairyland once occupied that somewhere else remarkably well. Outer space does too. And perhaps that is the most important connection between fairy abduction and alien abduction. Not spacecraft. Not technology. Not proof that medieval peasants were being hauled into flying saucers while everybody else inexplicably failed to notice. It is the idea of visitation. Something exists beyond the ordinary human world. Sometimes it comes here. Sometimes it takes us there. Those who return struggle to describe what happened because the place they visited does not obey familiar rules. The inhabitants possess knowledge or abilities we do not understand. And the witness comes back changed. That story is far older than the flying saucer. It may be far older than the fairy. What changes is the costume.
A fairy queen riding from beneath a hill makes sense in one cultural landscape. A technologically advanced being descending from the stars makes sense in another. Neither proves the objective reality of the other. Both reveal something about the extraordinary persistence of the human encounter with the unknown. There is also something slightly uncomfortable about the comparison.
We like to imagine that modernity replaced superstition with rationality. We have satellites, particle accelerators and machines wandering around on Mars. Surely our mysteries ought to be more sophisticated than those of our ancestors. Then somebody sees a strange light on a lonely road. The clock says an hour has disappeared. And suddenly we are standing exactly where people have always stood. At the edge of the known world, trying to explain where we have been.
Perhaps nobody took us anywhere.
Perhaps psychology, memory, sleep, expectation and culture can eventually account for much of it.
Perhaps some cases will remain unresolved simply because the evidence required to resolve them no longer exists.
And perhaps that is enough. Because the most interesting question may not be whether the fairies became aliens.
It may be why, after centuries of changing explanations, we still tell stories about being taken somewhere beyond the edge of our world and brought back again.
The door never disappeared.
We just changed the name on the other side.
The Meaning of the Card
The Abduction is the card of displacement, altered perspective and the unsettling experience of finding yourself somewhere you did not expect to be.
It appears when something has pulled you away from familiar ground. That may be a person, an idea, an obsession, a sudden change or an experience you cannot easily explain. The temptation is to concentrate entirely upon what took you there, but The Abduction asks you to look instead at what has changed since you returned.
Your perception may no longer match that of the people around you. Something that felt brief may have had lasting consequences. Something you dismissed at the time may now demand attention.
The card also warns against forcing an explanation simply because uncertainty is uncomfortable. An experience can be real without your first interpretation of it being correct. Memory changes. Stories grow. Expectations fill gaps.
Sometimes wisdom lies in being able to say, “Something happened. I do not yet know what.”
When The Abduction appears, ask yourself: What has taken me away from familiar ground, and what have I brought back with me?
Sources
Edwin Sidney Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales, 1891. Particularly Chapters VII to IX on supernatural lapses of time, fairy abduction and traditions of humans entering and returning from fairyland. Wikisource
Donald A. Mackenzie, Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend, 1917. Includes the traditional account of Thomas the Rhymer, his journey with the Fairy Queen and his seven-year absence in Fairyland. Internet Sacred Text Archive
Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology. A major nineteenth-century collection of European fairy traditions, including British material concerning Fairyland and encounters between mortals and supernatural beings. Internet Sacred Text Archive
Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, 1969. Vallée’s influential comparison of modern UFO encounter reports with much older traditions of supernatural visitors, aerial beings and otherworld encounters. Jacques Vallée
Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia archive
