Aliens and The Land of Magonia

Around 820 AD, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, France wrote a text with the title “Liber contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de Grandine et Tonitruis”. In the second chapter one can read the following surprising account:

“We have seen and heard many men plunged in such a great stupidity, sunk in such depths of folly, as to believe that there is a certain region, which they call Magonia, whence ships sail in the clouds, in order to carry back to that region those fruits of the earth which are destroyed by hail and tempests; the sailors paying rewards to Tempestarii and themselves receiving corn and other produce. Out of the number of those whose blind folly was deep enough to allow them to believe these things possible, I saw several exhibitions in a certain concourse of people, four persons in bonds-three men and a woman who they said had fallen from these same ships; after keeping them for some days in captivity they had brought them before the assembled multitude, as we have said, in our presence to be stoned. But, after much debate, truth prevailed and those who put them on public display like a false prophet were confused, just like a thief is confounded when he is caught.”

Although the Magonia reference was brought, in 1966, into UFO circles by Raymond Drake, it was Jacques Vallee that endowed the name with marked Ufological overtones. He proposed that underneath these and other similar incidents, including the modern UFOs and alien abductions, there is the same mechanism with invariant features, but the “shapes of the objects, the appearances of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment into which they are projected,”

That may be so, but notwithstanding, the land of Magonia, “a place where gentle folks and graceful fairies dance, and lament the coarse world below”, has something to offer to everyone. In 1670, Montfaucon de Villars wrote “Le Compte de Gabalis, ou Entretiens sur les Sciences Secretes”, were he tells a somewhat different story:

“The famous Cabalist Zedechias, in the reign of your Pepin, took it into his head to convince the world that the Elements are inhabited by those peoples whose nature I have just described to you. The expedient of which he bethought himself was to advise the Sylphs to show themselves in the Air to everybody: They did so sumptuously… What happened?… The people straightaway believed that sorcerers had taken possession of the Air for the purpose of raising tempests and bringing hail upon their crops…The Sylphs decided to dissipate the bad opinion people had of their innocent fleet by carrying off men from every locality and showing them their beautiful women, their Republic and their manner of government, and then setting them down again on earth in diverse parts of the world…One day, among other instances, it chanced at Lyons that three men and woman were seen descending from these aerial ships. The entire city gathered about them, crying out they were magicians.” Then came Agobard, “and having heard the accusations of the people and the defense of the accused, gravely pronounced that both one and the other were false. That it was not true that these men had fallen from the sky, and that what they said they had seen there was impossible. The people believed what their good father Agobard said rather than their own eyes, were pacified, and set at liberty the four Ambassadors of the Sylphs…”