UFOs, Aliens and The Fairy Kingdom: The Celtic Experience

In its provision of excellent case studies of "otherworldly phenomena", Wales punches well above its weight in comparison with countries of far greater landmass or population. One thirty-fourth the size of Texas, for example, and with a population of a little over 3.1 million, Wales is a Celtic land filled with beauty, magic and mystery. Its legendary cultural fare is epic. In the White Book of Rhydderch, the Red Book of Hergest and the Hanes Taliesin, the three volumes that make up the Mabinogion, the earliest prose stories of Britain, we read marvellous tales of enchantment.

Penarth researcher Nigel Graddon explores these phenomena, including some of the most dramatic UFO events in Wales of the past 120 years: the Egryn Lights of Barmouth in the early twentieth century, the Berwyn Mountains UFO crash and the Pembrokeshire Wave of the 1970s, and the extraordinary events that unfolded over Pentyrch and nearby Smilog Woods, near Cardiff, in more recent years. Witnesses describe the Pentyrch case as "the greatest UFO cover-up of the 21st century."

Graddon draws upon historical, cultural, mythological, and new scientific theories which propose that the phenomenon of strange things seen in the skies has a parapsychological cause. In this new thinking, UFOs are neither extraterrestrial, nor hoaxes or delusions. They neither fly nor are they objects. They materialise and dematerialise, violating all known laws of motion. The Non-Human Entities (NHEs) that "pilot" them are creations from the dreamscape, a dimensional reality that intersects ours at right angles, dubbed the "space between the spaces".

The late Gordon Creighton wrote in The Flying Saucer Review...beings from flying saucers are much more probably creatures who share this earth with us; regarding whom science has not a single word to say; but about whom our own written and oral traditions, in all our civilisations, speak volumes. According to folklore in all nations of the world, humankind has always been sharing the earth with supernatural beings. Up to the pre-industrial period our traditions referred to these beings as fairy folk, unseen life forms intimately connected with the natural world.

Remarkably, the same power imputed to flying saucer people of influencing human events was once the exclusive property of fairies, known in Welsh folklore as the Tylwyth Teg. There are countless tales in myth and folklore of fairies and little green men. Growing evidence theorises that there is little or no difference between them and that the intrinsic nature of these accounts and the entities described is one and the same. By removing the cultural, social and temporal factors that separate these narratives we see them for what they are: encounters with NHEs, although not necessarily non-human like.

In UFOs, Aliens and the Fairy Kingdom Graddon asks the question. Are the UFOs and occupants seen in Welsh skies truly visitors from the cosmos or, remarkably, are they homegrown?