2. Aliens are Faeries

Are aliens just American faeries? One of our hosts read Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia: from Folklore to Flying Saucers and took it literally. UFOs exist, and they are the same phenomenon as faeries and elves but reinterpreted by a twentieth century audience.

This view is met with some scepticism. “They’re all just part of the collective unconscious”. Regular listeners will become familiar with this pattern.

We also talk about Zimbabwean goblins, the interdimensional hypothesis, and how it would feel to be a demon.

The book’s worth a read. It’s shorter than it looks because it’s mostly a long list of alien encounters. Link’s here.

Episode Transcript

In which we argue that UFOs and alien encounters are the same phenomenon as fairies, elves, and goblins — just filtered through a different cultural lens. Drawing on Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia, Zimbabwean goblin lore, and a memorable Reddit post about ants summoning a demon, we explore why a French lavender farmer and a Wisconsin bachelor see the same thing so differently, and what that tells us about the hidden architecture of the mind.

Proxy: "So, man, who here seems principle alone, perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown, touches some wheel, or verges to some goal. 'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole." That's an extract from Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, which is used to introduce the book Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, written by Jacques Vallée, a French computer scientist. In it, he argues that aliens and UFOs are the exact same phenomenon that fairies and elves were in the olden days. I read this book and bought into it entirely, as you'll see. I met with a fair degree of scepticism from my co-host. So, enjoy — and welcome underground.

Cipher: What are the sort of fairies that we're talking about?

Proxy: The old and real fairies — the scary fairies of mediaeval times. If you read any stories from before about 1800 that involve fairies, they are actually terrifying. They are tricksters. They will hurt you or abduct you or play tricks on you.

Cipher: And are we including in this category things like elves, for the northern Europeans and Scandinavians?

Proxy: Fairies is a broad category that includes elves, goblins, dwarves, gnomes — all those things.

Cipher: But aren't they quite different? Maybe this is a question for further on, but elves and fairies are generally conceived of as being attractive, aren't they? Superficially attractive in their manifestation.

Proxy: There's the glamour thing, but a lot of the stories are of little men, often dark and three feet tall. They come in a range of types, or they choose to appear in various ways. Part of the thing about fairies is they can control their appearance and how they appear to us.

Cipher: So that's the broad category we're talking about here.

Proxy: And to illustrate — my mother always taught me a poem when I was very young: "Up the airy mountain, down the rushing glen, we dare not go a-hunting for fear of little men." Which is quite different to Tinker Bell, if you're actively avoiding an area of woodland.

Cipher: Quite.

Proxy: So that's what I'm arguing UFOs are related to, or are the same phenomenon as.

Cipher: Perhaps you have an example of a UFO story, so we know what we're talking about.

Proxy: In the book I picked up — Passport to Magonia — the author is Jacques Vallée. He was a Frenchman, an astronomer, but then moved to the US and did a PhD in computer science at Northwestern University. He was big in the tech scene. He worked at ARPA for a time. He was on the team that invented the internet. Since then he's become a venture capitalist, sat on the boards of very successful technology startups, been a prolific investor — he still lives in San Francisco to this day.

But he's also got a dark side. In the fifties, he witnessed a UFO — I don't know the details. But more interestingly, when he was starting out as an astronomer working in Paris for the government, he witnessed records being destroyed of a strange object in orbit. They had detected a satellite in retrograde orbit, meaning orbiting the earth in the opposite direction to the earth's rotation.

Cipher: And when you say satellite, we're not talking about a man-made object here.

Proxy: It's an object in orbit. It could just be a rock. Could be aliens. But they thought it was a rock because there were no rockets on earth powerful enough to put an object in retrograde orbit at the time. They thought this was an asteroid captured by Earth's gravity, and as such it was very interesting. It could have been a space goblin, but he never got to find out, because suddenly officials from some random office came in and destroyed all the files.

Cipher: A classic tale. But from a pretty serious, intellectually high-powered sort of chap.

Proxy: Pretty serious guy. Basically a high-end industrial engineer and computer scientist.

Cipher: French, though.

Proxy: French, yes. And he hung out with some dodgy people later in his life in the seventies. Because he was well known on the alien scene, he was quite close to a lot of counterculture people.

Cipher: I'd love to be well known on the alien scene in the seventies. Uri Geller, characters like that. He'd have met some very interesting people.

Proxy: I think he did. But anyway — after these two incidents early in his life, his big hobby was trying to work out what the hell was going on with aliens. He'd record all these various cases and try to get to the bottom of it in a scientific manner.

Cipher: Well, is it a scientific manner? I don't want to throw too much shade at Vallée. I've read his book as well. I'm not quite sure it goes about things in a scientific manner — which is not to say it doesn't have value.

Proxy: I think it's more the biologist's approach of classifying things phenomenologically and trying to draw patterns.

Cipher: I'd say it's more of an anthropological or comparative-mythological approach. He collects all these stories and tries to extract patterns from them.

Proxy: He's pretty open about where he collects his stories from. A lot from newspapers, a lot from UFO journals — the Flying Saucer Review was a big source at the time. But he was even more open than that. Do you know Aleister Crowley?

Cipher: No. Tell me about him.

Proxy: He was a well-known Satanist and magician in the early twentieth century.

Cipher: Well known among small circles, or well known generally?

Proxy: Well known among — yes, well known Satanist. Esotericist. Definitely dodgy. He got really into magick — with a CK at the end — and Osiris, and did all sorts of things.

Cipher: The twenties were another good time for that.

Proxy: Exactly. But it turns out he saw some aliens. The report in the book reads: 1896, Arolla near Zermatt, Swiss Alps. The author — that's what Vallée calls Crowley — was walking in the mountains when he suddenly saw two little men. He made a gesture to them, but they did not seem to pay attention, and disappeared among the rocks. From Crowley's book Magick Without Tears.

Cipher: And that would be a classic encounter. Just to clarify — Vallée has labelled that as an alien encounter?

Proxy: This is the appendix to his book, a section called "A Century of UFO Landings," where he listed a few hundred alien encounter stories.

Cipher: But that would also be — you could argue — an absolutely classic encounter with fairies or the gentry. Little folk, in the mountains.

Proxy: It could be both. And the fact that this is 1896 — that would normally have been classified as meeting fairies or some entity. Jacques Vallée's innovation is saying no, actually that could just as well be an alien. It's a very similar pattern.

Cipher: So the idea is that whatever the phenomenon is, whatever reality underlies it, it's the same phenomenon — but we're applying different languages.

Proxy: Exactly. People observing these phenomena from different cultural contexts draw different conclusions. If you are born in the mid-twentieth century, you know that flight exists, you know that space is a thing — rockets, nuclear, you've been born into an extremely technological society. So when you see something you can't explain, you're more likely to reach for a technological explanation than a spiritual or supernatural one that you might have gone for if you were born in the nineteenth century.

Cipher: And what is it then that's happening? Because we get the first UFO sightings supposedly in 1947, where Kenneth Arnold was flying, looking for a crashed aeroplane, and he sees what he calls a sort of strange aircraft flying through the mountains very fast. They move, according to him, like saucers skipping across a lake. The word "saucer" enters the lexicon, it gets picked up by the American media, pumped out as "flying saucers," and then you get this enormous volume of UFO encounters from that point, particularly through the fifties. The US military starts to pay attention with Project Blue Book, and nobody quite knows what's happening.

Proxy: Vallée worked on Project Blue Book.

Cipher: There we are. Serious chap. And nobody's quite sure what to make of this phenomenon, because it's so big and so sudden. Really quite serious people are confused about how to interpret it.

Proxy: There did seem to be an explosion from the 1940s in America, and that's what made Passport to Magonia quite controversial when it came out, especially among Americans, because it went against the narrative that UFOs are a new phenomenon. Vallée is arguing that they've always been with us. As with that Aleister Crowley story, he's taking something that isn't a stereotypical UFO or flying saucer incident and saying it is one — it's an alien encounter.

Cipher: Right.

Proxy: And this could well be shaped by his cultural context. You mentioned he's French. The whole aesthetic around continental European alien sightings is completely different. He mentions a couple — like a UFO landing in an old farmer's lavender field. Or an alien nest.

Cipher: It makes a nest. I really love that.

Proxy: And the farmer had fought in the French Resistance, and called the local gendarme to come and look at it. It just feels like the wrong backdrop for an alien story. In the same way that there's another one where an old Italian lady is going to a cemetery to lay some flowers, and some aliens come and steal the flowers. It just hits completely differently to the US flying saucer.

Cipher: It reminds me of those European films that are trying to do an American film in a European context, and it comes across as very bizarre. But I wonder whether that's actually quite an apposite metaphor when we're thinking about this phenomenon — and about media, imagery, and culture.

Proxy: As I said, this book went down very badly in America when it was published. They all said this guy's gone off the deep end. And that's because how he thought of UFOs as a Frenchman was completely different from how an American thought of them, with the mass-media portrayal of flying saucers in the scrublands of the Western states.

Cipher: Do you think the Americans were offended by the idea that this phenomenon isn't a new and uniquely American one — that it's these pesky Europeans claiming it's actually a historical phenomenon predating America?

Proxy: Could well be. Or it could be the other way around — the Europeans clinging onto their relevance in a new world. The book went down very well in Europe, partly due to the slightly different aesthetic context, but also partly because fairies are very much part of European folklore but are not really there in the US. Obviously the Native Americans have similar folk tales, but if you're a good old boy in the fifties in California, you're not thinking about fairies.

Cipher: Thinking of UFOs as American fairies is an interesting way to put it, isn't it? America is this new young society — only really 150 years old, give or take — and pretty much overnight it's become global hegemon from the world wars, particularly the Second World War. Suddenly it's in charge of at least the Western hemisphere, and it's got technological power that other nations previously couldn't have dreamed of. And that has happened so quickly.

Proxy: Cultural power too — Hollywood taking off.

Cipher: And I suppose whenever you have a new kid on the block in terms of power, they are going to have to formulate a mythology that accommodates that. But you're also going to get the normal human mythological tropes processed through that unique cultural experience and language.

Proxy: And I suppose now's a good point to mention the read-across between UFO stories and fairy stories that could be interpreted differently by two different observers. Vallée mentions a lot about crop circles, for example — or alien nests, as he calls them.

Cipher: We should call them nests. A UFO nest. That's so creepy.

Proxy: But he points out it's very similar to fairy rings, or standing circles, or stone circles. So an American looking at what a Frenchman would think is a fairy ring — and would avoid — the American sees a crop circle or an alien nest.

Cipher: Something that's been technologically produced. Because America is a technological society in its conception.

Proxy: Everything they see around them has been created recently, by them, through technology.

Cipher: And so in a sense they're living in a different metaphysical world from a Frenchman.

Proxy: Who's living in an area steeped in millennia of history.

Cipher: Speaking of which — I was doing a bit of reading and came across something: Jung mentions Swiss wizards who he calls strudels. They live in the Swiss Alps, and apparently you could still find traces of them in the fifties, but there are no traces of them at all on the internet. Which is remarkable. A bit of a digression, but there we go.

Proxy: Investigation required.

Cipher: There's a lot of weird stuff going on in Europe. It's deep. Deep pools — don't fall in.

Proxy: So we've got fairy nests. But also a lot of aliens in encounter stories are described as short, dark humanoids, maybe three feet tall — and that's exactly how a lot of the goblins and fairies are described in the fairy stories.

Cipher: So let's think about why. If we accept, as I think I'm willing to, that there's at least a very close relationship between these phenomena — even if I have reservations about whether UFOs map perfectly onto the fairy phenomenon, which is a discussion for the next episode — an interesting question is: what underlies the phenomenon? If we take it as a single phenomenon, then we can start to think about why it manifests itself in different ways in different cultures.

Proxy: You seem to be speaking with the assumption that what underlies the phenomenon isn't literal fairies.

Cipher: I'm not going to claim that it couldn't be. I'm not going to lie that I find that the most compelling explanation. But —

Proxy: I think we can say they're certainly not aliens from outer space. The way these UFOs and purported aliens behave is completely bizarre if you think they're from a different planet.

Cipher: But they would be alien, wouldn't they? Your use of the word "certainly" there —

Proxy: It would be extremely alien to just keep visiting us and probing us and saying hello over a hundred years when you have the power to move millions of light years. You can probably scan things from far away without having to actually visit and take samples of cows.

Cipher: Who knows what they're about, anyway. But your point is taken.

Proxy: They move in exactly the same way you'd expect from a sensor anomaly.

Cipher: Or a weather inversion, or a heat inversion, or a weather balloon. But no — I'm not assuming they don't exist. I do think it's worth thinking about what the underlying phenomenon might be. It could be that there are fairies and aliens. But let's think about all the possibilities. What do you think?

Proxy: Should we start with an example?

Cipher: OK.

Proxy: I'll give you one you can try and explain away. This is an example Vallée gives that feels quite like a fairy incident. A lot of the mythology around fairies involves the exchange of food, or the offering of food, or food being a gift from the fairies. There are lots of stories from Ireland where someone does a fairy a favour and they give him food, or make his bin of oatmeal ever overflowing. It's an important thing. Even more recently, you might leave a saucer of milk out in your hearth or your house as an offering to the fairies.

Cipher: Or Father Christmas.

Proxy: Father Christmas.

Cipher: Linked phenomenon. But yes — leaving offerings, which obviously is a deep religious constant, isn't it? A very pan-cultural ritual activity, very much within the lexicon of human behaviours around this kind of thing.

Proxy: And you receive an offering in return.

Cipher: That's the interesting part, isn't it? But go on.

Proxy: So: the time was approximately 11am on April 18, 1961, when Joe Simonton was attracted outside by a peculiar noise similar to knobby tyres on a wet pavement. Stepping into his yard, he faced a silvery saucer-shaped object, brighter than chrome, which appeared to be hovering close to the ground without actually touching it. The object was about twelve feet high and thirty feet in diameter. A hatch opened about five feet from the ground, and Simonton saw three men inside the machine. One of them was dressed in a black two-piece suit. The occupants were about five feet in height, smooth-shaven. They appeared to resemble Italians. They had dark hair and skin, and wore outfits with turtleneck tops and knit helmets.

So — so far, so UFO.

Cipher: Well, yes and no. The idea of it wearing a two-piece suit and looking Italian — I'm not trying to say anything about Italians, but that doesn't come across as alien to me at all. It comes across as fairies, or elves.

Proxy: But they are in a flying saucer that's brighter than chrome.

Cipher: They're in a silver entity, yes. Go on.

Proxy: It only gets weirder. One of the men held up a jug, apparently made of the same material as the saucer. His motions to Simonton seemed to indicate that he needed water. Simonton took the jug, went inside the house, and filled it. As he returned, he saw that one of the men inside the saucer was frying food on a flameless grill of some sort. The interior of the ship was black, the colour of wrought iron. Simonton could see several instrument panels, and heard a slow whining sound similar to the hum of a generator.

When he made a motion indicating he was interested in the food being prepared, one of the men — who was also dressed in black but with a narrow red trim around the trousers — handed him three cookies, about three inches in diameter and perforated with small holes.

The whole affair had lasted about five minutes. Finally, the man closest to the witness attached a kind of belt to a hook in his clothing and closed the hatch in such a way that Simonton could scarcely detect its outline. Then the object rose about twenty feet from the ground before taking off straight south, causing a blast of air that bowed the nearby pine trees. Along the edge of the saucer, the witness recalls, were exhaust pipes six or seven inches in diameter. The hatch was about six feet high and thirty inches wide, and although the object has always been described as a saucer, its shape was that of two inverted bowls.

Cipher: There are so many interesting details in that, so specific. One thing you need to say straight away is that the explanation that this chap is just lying strikes me as absurd. It's an absurd lie to tell.

Proxy: It gets even funnier, because he called the police — they saw no evidence — but he did have the cookies submitted for analysis. He ate one of them and thought it tasted like cardboard. The one he sent to the Air Force, they analysed it: the cake was composed of hydrogenated fat, starch, buckwheat hulls, soybean hulls, wheat bran. Bacteria and radiation readings were normal for this material.

Cipher: Should we be doing this in a French accent? Is this the French Air Force?

Proxy: No, this is the US. Wisconsin. Chemical, infrared, and other destructive tests were run on this material. The Food and Drug Laboratory of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare concluded the material was an ordinary pancake of terrestrial origin.

Cipher: Well, yes. But the notion that he has just made this up is absurd. And there are so many interesting details — like the idea of exhausts on it, which is so clearly twentieth-century human technological language for describing what he's seeing.

Proxy: You've got the aesthetic of 1960s Wisconsin. I'm seeing muscle cars here.

Cipher: It goes without saying that it's extremely unlikely these beings have crossed interstellar space with an internal combustion engine and an exhaust.

Proxy: And extremely unlikely they've crossed space, landed, and they're making a pancake but didn't have water.

Cipher: When you think about this story and try to conceive of it as somebody attention-seeking by claiming to have met aliens, it doesn't make sense on its own internal details. You'd just tell some other story. They wouldn't look like Italians. But thinking about it as a fairy encounter with twentieth-century technological language layered over it — that makes much more sense.

Proxy: Exactly. Instead of a fairy hill opening up and seeing a fairy kingdom inside, it's a machine that's landed and you're seeing a workshop full of instrument panels.

Cipher: Wrought iron — psychoanalysts would have a field day. So many interesting details. But what we were talking about was the exchange of food. What is the significance of that in these stories, and how does it give us insight into the underlying phenomenon?

Proxy: What is the purpose of it? It crops up a lot in the traditional fairy stories — offerings of food, or receiving food in exchange, or a gift that might be food or fairy gold. It's a recurring motif, and one that continues to this day. My in-laws have a current issue with goblins. I drop that in casually.

Cipher: They're from the Shona culture, in Zimbabwe.

Proxy: I had a pastor explain to me what was happening with these goblins, what form they took. He explained that you can make a deal with the goblins: you receive success in life, but there's always a cost, and it's not always clear what that cost will be.

So let's say you're getting married and you want a successful life. You'll go to a sangoma — a witch doctor — and they will hook you up with some goblins. These goblins are now yours, attached to you and to your family forever. Initially they can yield results, as they did in this case — the family became very successful. I'm not saying this is the mechanism that applied to them specifically, but the general pattern is that initially the goblins start asking for an offering of milk or water. So you put a little jar of water in the corner of your house.

Cipher: I can see where this is going.

Proxy: But then you want more. You've received one promotion, but now you're a senior associate rather than a junior associate. You want to make partner. But the next promotion is going to take a bit more than water, isn't it? Next it might be cooking oil. Then milk. Then eventually, as you climb higher, they might start asking for meat. For blood. Chicken blood.

But then it starts getting dark. Particularly if there are two of you competing for one job, and you've both got goblins helping you. Which goblin is going to work harder — the one who's been given cooking oil, or the one who's been given chicken blood?

Cipher: And what happens after chicken blood?

Proxy: Well, then it does get dark. It can get onto human blood, and then even the quality of human blood. If you really want that top job — no one's going to beat you if you start giving either the blood of your mother or the blood of your daughter.

Cipher: So it escalates.

Proxy: And although it's not clear at the outset that's going to be what happens, it creeps up on you insidiously as you start giving more and more to get greater and greater success. You end up in a spiral.

Cipher: I find this extremely interesting. This is modern, I should say. This is happening now. And outside the European context.

Proxy: Yes.

Cipher: Perhaps it's — I don't know. It feels almost impolite to ask this question, but what do you think is actually happening? When you say you go to a witch doctor and the witch doctor hooks you up with goblins, you make the deal — what is actually going on? If a third party was in the room, what would they see?

Proxy: And again, as with all these fairy and alien stories, there are two narratives you can attach. One in which the goblins exist, and one in which they don't.

Cipher: Or there's a third way, as we've talked about before — that they exist in some form you might not initially expect. You could argue they might be part of the human collective unconscious, an archetype that manifests in certain situations. So they're from within us, but they do exist in some sense.

Proxy: Almost as parts of our consciousness. Sub-routines, or we're anthropomorphising some part of our mind or our actions.

Cipher: As you know, in the next episode we're going to talk about my view on this. I swallow the more Jungian view about archetypes and the collective unconscious. I think you can get quite far explaining these phenomena by going down that route — some quite satisfying and interesting explanations. But I'm interested in what you think.

Proxy: There are three explanations, and they all feel different. One is the goblins exist, and in exchange for an offering of food they're helping you out — nobbling your opponents, or whispering in your boss's ear, or creating opportunities in the background. Which is difficult to believe in. And irrationally, what's in it for the goblin? Cooking oil is nice, but it's not that exciting. What are these beings getting out of it?

Cipher: But then, what is any god or any spirit getting out of the relationship with us?

Proxy: I came across this incredible analogy on Reddit, to account for why a demon might be interested in helping a human warlock who's trying to summon it. Imagine you get home after a hard day's work and there's a ring of ants on the floor, chanting your name.

Cipher: An unexpected situation. This would definitely catch your attention.

Proxy: It would catch your attention. And in all the stories about people trying to summon demons, the demon's true name is very important. If the ants are just in a circle talking gibberish, you might ignore them. But if they actually know your name and are chanting it —

Cipher: I personally wouldn't ignore ants in any configuration. But it would be particularly powerful if they were saying your name.

Proxy: So you'd be curious. You look a bit closer. And then imagine the ants say, "We've made this circle of salt and done this ritual, so you're now trapped and have to do what we ask." You go along with it.

Cipher: OK — what do you want?

Proxy: And they say, "We want you to kill this other ant."

Cipher: Or smash this other colony.

Proxy: Or "I want this ant to fall in love with me." And now I'm quite invested in this, because it's hilarious. But I just don't quite know how to help them. And the problem is, in doing what they ask, I might get it a bit wrong.

Cipher: You almost certainly will. And the only thing you're going to be able to do effectively at your scale is destruction. If they ask you to destroy the ant colony over the hill, you can probably do that.

Proxy: But there's going to be some collateral damage.

Cipher: And these ants are not going to be able to conceive of what's about to happen.

Proxy: No — it's a different scale.

Cipher: And if they ask, "Can you make Esmeralda the ant fall in love with me?" — you'll probably end up squishing Esmeralda as you try.

Proxy: Or certainly Esmeralda's friends.

Cipher: Even if you're well-intentioned. So in this metaphor, obviously, we're the ants and the demon is the human.

Proxy: And possibly goblins. The idea is that these goblins could be an unimaginable intelligence — just working along completely different lines — and we think we understand them and can make a deal with them.

Cipher: It's a very interesting idea. But one of the things about the secret commonwealth, as all of these elves and fairies and goblins are sometimes called — they're always conceived of as roughly half our size. They're conceptually smaller than us. And they are, in a sense, limited personalities. They're not full personalities. They're curtailed versions of us, both more and less than us. Sort of closer to animals, but also closer to God.

Proxy: The spirit realm. They're not fully material.

Cipher: So I wonder whether the ant metaphor is the right one for goblins and fairies, or whether it might be better suited to a demon, or a god.

Proxy: Fair. Then we get back to — well, why are they valuing this cooking oil? One of the hypotheses Vallée proposes — because he ended up rejecting the extraterrestrial hypothesis, having argued for it quite hard initially. As we said, the idea that aliens travel millions of miles just to probe us is absurd.

Cipher: Just trolls. Texan airmen.

Proxy: But he ended up proposing a multi-dimensional hypothesis — that these aliens aren't from far away, they're from here, but from a dimension we can't access. A realm parallel to where we are right now. And so these goblins have liberty sometimes, or under certain mental states you can access that world and see these people.

Cipher: Once again, I would apply Occam's Razor and say that's just a different way of saying they come from a different part of our mind that we don't normally access. Because then you don't need the other dimensions — you just need what we already know we have, which is an unconscious and hidden bits of ourselves.

Proxy: There is a difference between a hidden bit of ourselves manifesting and a part of the material world around us that we just can't normally sense. Maybe parts of our brain can sense things we don't have conscious access to.

Cipher: You're right, there is a difference. But Occam's Razor would argue for our brain being weird rather than the world being more complicated than we expect.

Proxy: But the world is more complicated than we expect, and the brain is sensing all sorts of stuff that we don't have conscious access to. Like blindsight.

Cipher: Blindsight is a book by Peter Watts that we are a bit obsessed with.

Proxy: Everyone should read it. But you'll spend as much time reading Wikipedia.

Cipher: You might need therapy afterwards.

Proxy: But it's named after a phenomenon where some blind people — the problem isn't with their eyes. Their eyes work, but the connection between the eyes and the brain is broken, or the brain isn't receiving the signals properly. So the eyes are completely functional, but they don't have conscious access to the visual information.

Cipher: It's to do with the way the visual cortex processes the signal.

Proxy: Exactly. But some of these people — you can throw them a ball and they will catch it without being able to see it.

Cipher: Under certain circumstances.

Proxy: The idea is that their brain does have access to these signals, they just don't have conscious access. So there's something in the subconscious that is seeing the ball and reacting to it.

Cipher: If the stimulus is only going through the spinal reflex system, for example, then it will work. If you really just lob the ball at them to the point where we would react unconsciously, they will also react unconsciously, because the signal can be used by that part of the system.

Proxy: So given that that exists, you can imagine a whole load of other stuff around us that we cannot consciously sense, but that various bits of our system are reacting to, or able to react to, or know is there.

Cipher: When we conceive of what we have conscious access to — both in our own system and in the wider world — we only have access to a very limited part. There are phenomena out there, and there are parts of us as a system operating independently of consciousness. And there is stuff in the external world that we have no conscious access to, but it is happening and it is affecting us.

Proxy: And in terms of the bits of your mind doing things you can't really think about — there are all sorts of examples around the nervous system. But imagine when you're driving and you're not paying attention, you're listening to music or thinking about something random or looking at the view. Who's doing the driving?

Cipher: And it's not a zombie. It's not an automatic system. People sometimes think of it as pre-programmed actions, but that's not right, because it is dynamically reacting to stimuli and making decisions, exactly as the conscious you would. But you are not conscious of it. You're not paying attention. I know there's a big philosophical debate about whether there's any difference between attention and consciousness, but I don't think you need to get into the weeds of that to accept that there is something quite strange in that experience. A part of you does the driving, but it is not the conscious or attentional part of you. And one way of conceiving of that is that there is a sub-personality, or a subconscious routine, that gets split off from the main consciousness and takes care of it.

Proxy: Which suggests it's possible to split off sub-entities within yourself to do certain things.

Cipher: Yes.

Proxy: Almost multiple personalities. But as you were mentioning the other day — if you're wondering whether to have a doughnut, there's a tasty doughnut in front of you but you know it's bad for you. Should you eat it? You have two fully fledged versions of yourself, one of which wants the doughnut and one that does not, and they're having a debate.

Cipher: I would argue they are actually two bits of the system. There's one part of you that wants the sugar, the fat, the calories, and it's got good reasons for wanting those things — it's evolved to want them, and it has its own needs and objectives. But then there's another part of you, a module or entity within the larger system, that has conflicting objectives, saying no, you need to stay fit and healthy. And of course that entity has its own desires, its own personality. These two different bits of you are sub-entities within the larger entity that is you, and you can tell they are different because they come into conflict. One is going to be stronger in that moment, and the larger system sides with one or the other, and then you either eat the doughnut or you don't. In different people, those different personalities will have different strengths — which is why some people reliably eat the doughnut and some reliably don't.

I don't know how else to conceive of that process. Some listeners will say that's absolutely absurd, there's no sub-person choosing. But I don't experience it like that. I don't know what a choice would be without a debate.

Proxy: That attention is required, otherwise it wouldn't be a choice. You wouldn't even think about it.

Cipher: So I'm not saying I can prove that. But I find it compelling, and I hope others do too. To go back to the point: if you accept that these sub-entities or sub-personalities exist within you, and that they have a kind of personality because they have desires and wants and needs — I don't think it's a massive leap from there to start thinking about goblins.

Proxy: Well, you can draw two conclusions from that. One is that some of these sub-personalities become their own beings, or you start to perceive them as their own thing. Or — some parts of you that you don't have conscious access to do have access to a material reality that includes goblins.

Cipher: So you still want to maintain the idea that there's a possibility that —

Proxy: I don't think we should fully discount it.

Cipher: No. OK.

Proxy: But the same mechanism leads to both conclusions. Either there is a broader reality that we don't have conscious access to, or our mind is creating stuff.

Cipher: The way I would seek to unify the positions is this: if there are these sub-systems or sub-entities within us, they've presumably evolved adaptively over deep time. We're three and a half billion years old as organisms. There must be so much under the bonnet that's grown up adaptively in that time, and that is adaptive for certain circumstances, and under certain rare conditions will suddenly manifest itself — because sometime in the Precambrian, it was useful.

Proxy: You'll reproduce at a higher rate if you have it.

Cipher: So I wonder whether a goblin is an entity deep within the system — an archetype within the lizard brain, or something like that — that you can't access consciously, can't access rationally, because it's from a different part of the system from where rationality lives. So of course you have to approach it symbolically and ritually, because you have to set up certain psychological conditions within yourself that allow it to come out. And obviously that's going to be a very hit-and-miss process, because we're talking about an unbelievably complex system. We don't even know how our own neural network computer systems work in their nuts and bolts — they just evolve. Let alone knowing how our own biological system works in its deep mechanics. So of course you have to produce these things using ritual.

Proxy: OK, so we've got two arguments here. One is that fairies exist — we just don't have access to them all the time unless under specific circumstances. And there's your argument that they do exist in a very real way, but as entities within our minds. It would be remiss not to include the third option: that they don't exist at all.

Cipher: True.

Proxy: And it's interesting — with these Zimbabwean goblins, in an attempt to get rid of them because they were starting to cause more harm than good, they first consulted one pastor, an apostle, to get rid of the goblins. He took a look into it and backed off very quickly — said he wasn't qualified, they were too strong. But the second person they approached ended up spending a day with the family, and it turned into a family therapy session. An extremely healthy and non-supernatural session where everyone aired their truths and reconciled. And after that the pastor said the goblins won't come back.

Cipher: I would argue that gives a lot of support to my thesis. And in my thesis, I think they're infra-natural rather than supernatural. "Infra-natural" as in they exist in the natural spaces we don't normally have conscious access to — within the inaccessible parts of our own mind. But what I'd add is that they are adaptive. These bits of us are responding to elements of reality that we do have to deal with — things like chance, misfortune, randomness, or what appears to be randomness to us. And we've developed them over deep time as a way of handling that.

I think you could start to make sense of the goblin story that way. You bargain with this element of yourself at the outset of a marriage, because there's a huge amount of chance and uncertainty about what's going to happen. How do you deal with that? You go to the goblin, which is the part of you that wants to try and control it. And ultimately the relationship becomes harmful because you can't control it, but the goblin is the part of you that's attempted to do so. Maybe you've outgrown it — maybe as an organism we've outgrown it — and that's why it's generally not a good idea to try. But it's still there, walking around under the bonnet. Something like that.

Proxy: So I count four explanations now. The first two are that goblins exist — either in the material world, in objective reality, or as part of our minds. They're still real, but they're part of our minds.

The other two are that they don't exist. Either they're being made up, or they're arising out of other conflicts and mental processes — hallucinations.

So — they actually exist in material reality: not much we can do to prove or disprove that. They don't exist at all: I don't buy it, as we were saying with that story of the aliens making cakes on a UFO. You wouldn't make that up.

Cipher: No. If they didn't exist at all, you would have to assume that thousands and thousands of people are lying, or that thousands of people are having completely meaningless hallucinations. Which just isn't plausible.

Proxy: So we've got one we can't falsify or prove — you may as well set it aside. One that's just implausible. And the other two are basically the same thing: this is some effect of our mind, of our consciousness and subconsciousness. I think that warrants a whole extra episode.

Cipher: We should leave it there and think about how we'd explain that concept.

Proxy: We shall read some Jung and reconvene.

Cipher: Very good. Till next time.

Proxy: Till next time. Bye.