Credible People Telling Perfectly Incredible Stories

“Just because you have never seen a fairy does not mean that no one else has. This truth is apparent from the new book Seeing Fairies, by Marjorie T. Johnson.” That’s from an article entitled “Leave Your Wings at the Door” by Michael Tortorello in the October 1, 2014, issue of, yes, The New York Times. It’s not often that one of our books gets mentioned in old The Grey Lady, so we are thankful for the plug. That said, the book has been a catalyst for some very thoughtful reviews. One of them, by James McClendon, appeared in the excellent journal Paranthropology and is worth quoting at length: “Collections of anomalous experiences are valuable in that they allow evaluation of hypotheses regarding the incidence and nature of unusual perceptions. This endeavor sheds light on the nature of human consciousness….Marjorie Johnson’s collection of fairy accounts is in harmony with this theory in that many experiencers believe in what they perceive. People with a propensity for anomalous experience are unable to remain skeptical; their experiences generate belief. . .There are also a number of secondary elements within these experiences that support the idea that the propensity for fairy experience has genetic basis. All over the world, people have noted that propensity for anomalous experience runs in families. Johnson’s accounts support this hypothesis….The interpretation of anomalous experiences may be shaped by belief but they are not completely products of belief…Seeing Fairies is worth reading by anyone curious about the diversity of anomalous experience available to human beings.” More thoughtful commentary came from Malcolm Smith, whose review, entitled “What Sort of People See Fairies?” is also worth quoting at length: “If we discarded all [fairy] cases where we suspected, however weakly, that the witness had been in an altered psychological state at the time, and if we culled out, fairly or unfairly, all those who claimed ‘second sight’ or more than one encounter, we are still left with a couple of hundred testimonies for which the only reason for not believing them is that they are, well, unbelievable. Even if we further reject all those whose witnesses were pre-teenagers at the time, we still have a large number of first hand accounts which would be taken seriously if they involved a crime, or some other mundane event. It is the old Hynekan quandary: what do you do when perfectly credible people tell perfectly incredible stories?”

Read more at Anomalist Books