Feature
Behind the Veil
The Truth We Don’t Know About Fairies, Leprechauns, UFOs, ETs & Other Entities
Do you believe in fairies and leprechauns? What about UFOs and ETs? Most people would say no to the first question but would hesitate to give a flat-out yes or no to the second. Fairies, elves, gnomes, trolls, ogres—all those quaint folklore characters—are out of fashion these days, whereas serious belief in extra-terrestrial creatures and extra-sensory perception is becoming more mainstream all the time.
What are we to make of this odd fact? What kind of reality, if any, are we dealing with? Do we have more reason to believe in ETs than in fairies? Does it matter?
No Respect for Elves
The critters in the “Fairy & Elf” category are not taken seriously; they’re not given scientific-sounding labels like “paranormal phenomena.” Nobody founds or funds university chairs to study them, except insofar as they have psychological or literary interest.
Investigators don’t try to find them. They don’t set up double-blind experiments—like J. B. Rhine’s ESP tests in the 1930s at Duke University—to work out mathematically whether people who see leprechauns are seeing something that’s out there in the real world, nor do they use surveyor’s tools to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Chemists don’t come rushing to examine the ground where somebody saw a circle of fairies dancing, to see whether its composition is different from that of the surrounding soil—which is what happens when somebody calls the police or the media to report that a glowing, saucer-shaped object just departed from his backyard, leaving a circle of suspicious color and texture and maybe even some burn marks.
The U.S. government, in case you didn’t know, is spending heaven knows how much of our tax money on planning for a possible Close Encounter or Visitation (and I’m not talking about the Second Joyful Mystery of the Rosary) or maybe an invasion by small people with large heads, dark eyes, and advanced weapons. There are already political hawks and doves taking sides about whether or how we should wage this very hypothetical war. Gazillions for extra-terrestrials but not a penny for leprechauns: Is that fair?
Even the Vatican is getting into the show, setting up observatories, listening for messages out of the blue, and hiring scientists who assure the world that ETs almost certainly exist, though these same scientists are a little skittish on the question of whether there is a God. (He may evolve into existence one day if we’re patient enough.) I suspect that some of these people may be Jesuits, but I don’t want to know. The Catholic Church is understandably anxious to convince the world that the Galileo trial (or rather, the mythic version of it that passes for history) is not the norm for the Christian relationship with science. It never was, but in the public mind one good myth outweighs a heap of facts.
No Proof For or Against
But hold on a minute: Isn’t it simply that that We Now Know that fairies and elves don’t exist?
Not really. Nobody has ever proven that elves or leprechauns or unicorns don’t exist. There’s nothing about their supposed nature that makes their existence impossible or self-contradictory. And proofs of a negative (“fairies do not exist”) are rather scarce. The sighting and capture of one tiny female creature with diaphanous wings and long hair, peeking out of a crater on the far side of the moon, would blow the whole argument.
Marilyn Prever (marilyn.prever@myfairpoint.net) is a retired homeschool teacher, mother and grandmother of a large family, whose articles have appeared in Homiletic & Pastoral Review, New Oxford Review, Second Spring, and other publications. She lives in Claremont, New Hampshire, with her family, and they worship at St. Joseph's Catholic Church.
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