William Michael Mott, a freelance artist and writer who has researched Fortean and paranormal phenomena for over 20 years, has published an encyclopedic overview of humankind's mysterious hidden neighbors right here on planet Earth.

In Caverns, Cauldrons, and Concealed Creatures, Mott has combed mythology and folklore throughout the world, the Bible and Apocrypha, modern science-fiction and fantasy literature, and contemporary UFO, abduction, and monster reports for evidence that Homo sapiens throughout its history has been exploited by hidden underground races with a passion for interbreeding and creating hybrids. These race, which are strictly of terrestrial origin, are responsible for ancient, medieval, and modern legends and reports of all manner of strange beings and creatures. The author here echoes writers like John A. Keel, Jacques Vallee, Janet and Colin Bord, and Patrick Harpur, who have likewise compared modern UFO, abduction, and mysterious animal reports to each other and to traditional folklore beliefs, suggesting a continuity between fairies, UFOnauts, and mystery beasts.

Human history and culture are full of long-standing tales of firsthand encounters with mysterious others. They are not human beings, though most of them are somewhat human looking ( or apelike ), and though most of them have a compulsion to interbreed with us or steal our genetic material. They often break natural laws, or the laws of physics, thus seeming to be supernatural, as much like ghosts or spirits as flesh-and-blood creatures.

These beings, existing at the periphery of our awareness, have gone by a great variety of names. Traditionally, they have been variously called fairies, elves, trolls, goblins, brownies, leprechauns, djinn, ifrits, vampires, incubi, succubi, werewolves, mermaids, etc. More recently, they have been called Greys, reptoids or reptilian aliens, Nordic aliens, hairy humanoids, Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, chupacabras, Lizard-Men, the West Virginia Mothman, the Men in Black, etc. Some are relatively human-looking, some look like hairy hominids or apemen, and some have a scaly, reptilian, frog-like or lizard-like look.

While some of these seem to have more substantial basis in physical reality than others, Mott believes that a close examination of the accounts reveals that, not only are all such entities interrelated, but also that they come from a subterranean cavern and tunnel world that has largely been ignored or dismissed as fantasy. They come from this underground and undersea realm of our own planet, and not from another planet, galaxy, dimension, or vibratory level. The creatures of this alternate reality are both furtive and parasitical, demonstrating their intrinsic hostility toward us.

Their parasitism on us, says Mott, is above all sexual, genetic, and reproductive. They have a tremendous need to interbreed with us and to appropriate our genetic material. Mott deduces the need that these creatures have for fresh human genetic material from child-snatching and changeling legends about fairies and their habit of stealing human children, stories like Rumpelstiltskin and the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and tales of the sexual assaults of succubi, incubi, and demon lovers. And then there are the modern UFO abduction reports with their reproduction-experiment and hybridization accounts. Ugly Frog Princes and beautiful Fairy Princesses have their parallels in the hideous Reptoids and handsome Nordics reported by modern abductees. The fascination of UFO aliens with reproduction, interbreeding, and sexuality, from the Villas-Boas and Barney and Betty Hill cases onward, is one sign of their obsession with interbreeding with us. Modern cattle mutilations are identical to the traditionally reported fairy interest in cattle.

Mott has produced a fascinating, informative, groundbreaking work.

--T. Peter Park
June 2001, FATE Magazine