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“Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace

“But we have no [Marian] apparitions cautioning the Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centered Universe, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany �� two matters of considerable moral as well as historical import....

Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning “witches�� and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is [the Virgin] Mary always admonishing the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself? Or the King? Or the Pope?”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“It seems, something inside us persistently wants to believe in things, unexplainable by words.”
― Mladen Đorđević, Svetioničar - Pritajeno zlo

“All around the edges of the platform where she sat, elephants stood patiently waiting for their breakfast. Occasionally, one would grunt or snort or flap its ears, but otherwise, they were as quiet as apparitions.”
― Dawn Reno Langley, The Mourning Parade

“One of the most popular legends was the tale of Lady Alexandra Greenwood, who was said to appear whenever something grave was about to happen. Her apparition was supposedly last witnessed weeping in the darkness of the cellar on the night before the death of Mrs Humphrey Devereux.”
― Isaac du Toit, The Greenwood Ghosts

“Apparitions are, so to speak, shreds and fragments of other worlds, the first beginnings of them. There is, of course, no reason why a healthy man should see them, because a healthy man is mainly a being of this earth, and therefore for completeness and order he must live only this earthly life. But as soon as he falls ill, as soon as the normal earthly state of the organism is disturbed, the possibility of another world begins to appear, and as the illness increases, so do the contacts with the other world, so that at the moment of a man's death he enters fully into that world.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“When We Are Small Children We See Ghosts!
Some Say They Are Guardian Angles,
Some Say It Is An Apparition Of A Relative,
The Rest Say,
Stop Believing Or People Will Think You Are Nuts!”
― James Hauenstein

“Unholy by Stewart Stafford

Horrors walk from out a dream,
Apparitions dare reality’s seam,
Gnarly fingers excavate blame,
Sanity stolen in a hellish flame.

No way to think or even breathe,
Or kind worldly goods bequeath,
For Time’s skeletal fingers snap,
Catching souls in a fiendish trap.

Visions boxed, then assail again,
A phantom grin is no one’s friend,
Gasp out awakening perspiration,
Sun falls in creeping desperation.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“For a scientist, the only valid question is to decide whether the phenomenon can be studied by itself, or whether it is an instance of a deeper problem. This book attempts to illustrate, and only to illustrate, the latter approach. And my conclusion is that, through the UFO phenomenon, we have the unique opportunities to observe folklore in the making and to gather scientific material at the deepest source of human imagination. We will be the object of much contempt by future students of our civilization if we allow this material to be lost, for "tradition is a meteor which, once it falls, cannot be rekindled."

If we decide to avoid extreme speculation, but make certain basic observations from the existing data, five principal facts stand out rather clearly from our analysis so far:

Fact 1. There has been among the public, in all countries, since the middle of 1946, an extremely active generation of colorful rumors. They center on a considerable number of observations of unknown machines close to the ground in rural areas, the physical traces left by these machines, and their various effects on humans and animals.

Fact 2. When the underlying archetypes are extracted from these rumors, the extraterrestrial myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries, the observations of the scholars of past ages, and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological description place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts.

Fact 3. The entities human witnesses report to have seen, heard, and touched fall into various biological types. Among them are beings of giant stature, men indistinguishable from us, winged creatures, and various types of monsters. Most of the so-called pilots, however, are dwarfs and form two main groups: (1) dark, hairy beings �� identical to the gnomes of medieval theory �� with small, bright eyes and deep, rugged, "old" voices; and (2) beings �� who answer the description of the sylphs of the Middle Ages or the elves of the fairy-faith �� with human complexions, oversized heads, and silvery voices. All the beings have been described with and without breathing apparatus.
Beings of various categories have been reported together. The overwhelming majority are humanoid.

Fact 4. The entities' reported behavior is as consistently absurd as the appearance of their craft is ludicrous. In numerous instances of verbal communications with them, their assertions have been systematically misleading. This is true for all cases on record, from encounters with the Gentry in the British Isles to conversations with airship engineers during the 1897 Midwest flap and discussions with the alleged Martians in Europe, North and South America, and elsewhere. This absurd behavior has had the effect of keeping professional scientists away from the area where that activity was taking place. It has also served to give the saucer myth its religious and mystical overtones.

Fact 5. The mechanism of the apparitions, in legendary, historical, and modern times, is standard and follows the model of religious miracles. Several cases, which bear the official stamp of the Catholic Church (such as those in Fatima and Guadalupe), are in fact �� if one applies the deffinitions strictly �� nothing more than UFO phenomena where the entity has delivered a message having to do with religious beliefs rather than with space or engineering.”
― Jacques F. Vallée, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact

“I found myself wishing she'd come back as a vampire or a werewolf, something with fangs and a destructive will. As it was, the onus seemed to be on me to make something of the visit.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow