In March 1967, as a 16 year old boy, I had an experience that changed my life and the way I saw things in what was for me, a traumatic way. I had at the time, never heard of the Little People or ever believed in anything along those lines.

I was hunting rabbits in a secluded area along the Purgatory River in a place called Nine Mile Bottoms south of Higbee, Colorado. The area was and still is very sparsely populated. The closest farm or house was approximately 7 miles away so I was surprised to come across the bare foot prints of a small child. I knew the area very well as I had cut cedar fence post for my uncle there for a couple of years. I also knew that no families lived anywhere around that had small children. I immediately became concerned, believing that I had come upon the tracks of a small child that had somehow gotten lost in the area. The area is very rugged and desolate. Filled with steep side canyons and rock slides.

The tracks were approximately 4 1/2 to 5 inches long, bare foot and headed away from the river into a side canyon. The area around the river was sandy and I could clearly see that the child had came out of the river and headed in a straight track in a westerly direction. The tracks I believed were less than a day old so I quickly set out to find the child. I followed the trail for about 2 miles until I lost them in the rocks. It was in late March and snow patches still spotted the shaded areas. I could clearly see that the child, even being bare foot, had not avoided the snow, but had continued in a straight line. I believed that the child was delirious perhaps and in a bad way. As soon as it became apparent that I had lost the tracks and could not find the child, I headed back as fast as I could to the nearest house where we reported the incident to the sheriff.

When the sheriff and his deputy arrived, the rancher at whose house I had made the report from and I joined them. With their Four wheel drive, I took them to the location where I had first found the tracks. After examining the foot prints, all agreed that it definitely was a child's tracks and called in a local man who had tracking dogs by radio to help with the search. When the dogs arrived, to everyone's bewilderment, they refused to track the child. Whining and whimpering with there tails between their legs around their owners feet. After first smelling the tracks, no matter how much coaxing or begging anyone did, no one could get the dogs to participate. With great disgust the Sheriff and the men started out with out them on what turned out to be a 2 day fruitless search. The tracks were picked up and followed several more miles beyond where I had lost them, but vanished eventually along a very rocky canyon bottom. As no lost children or further reports were received the case was closed as a mystery.

Several months later, as the whole affair continued to bother me, I mentioned the incident to an old Indian fellow I knew who lived in Lamar, Colorado. He only smiled at my concern and said that I should never be worried about the Little People. That they were earth spirits and very elusive. He said that since I had been the one to come across the tracks first, I should take it as a sign that they wanted me to know about them and learn everything that I could from them. So thirty years later I am still tracking them. I have had many experiences with them since and have learned a great deal about them. But he was right for sure about one thing. They are elusive indeed.

Origination:
Due to cultural similarities I believe that perhaps the Little People are the ancestors of Pictish tribesman from Northern England, Ireland and Scotland. The general description of these people are vague, however it is generally believed that they were small in stature, perhaps three and a half to four feet tall. They were know to live in underground hill burrows and entire villages could only be located by the smoke from their peat fires wafting up through smoke holes. They were hunter gatherers and goat raisers. Their goat herds were kept in underground pens at night and only let out to forage on the grassy hill sides when they felt safe. Their Celtic neighbors were suspicious and afraid of them and had very little intercommunications. The Picts were thought to be magical because they could vanish without a trace. The only known and reliable information that I can locate on possible interaction concerns medical administrations and minor trade exchanges. The Picts were know for their medical and herb lore and were brought in as midwifes and doctors on a regular basis. Trading seems to be confined to the men only. Goat hides and dried herbs were traded for grain and fish it seems.

The Picts were fierce fighters and very territorial. They were armed with short spears and darts. Their favorite means of attack seems to be to dig pits and cover themselves with grass mats in open areas. When the enemy moved in amongst them in what appeared to be empty land the Picts would attack with darts, unseen and hidden from sight. Thus grew the fable that they were invisible. Historically, the Picts joined forces with their Celtic neighbors to defend the British Isle against the Romans. They painted themselves with woad, a blue dye they considered sacred and tattooed their faces in blue geometric designs. As the Islands became more populated it seems that their invading neighbors out of fear drove them out. They continued to migrate until finally they were either driven out or exterminated. I believe, due to legends and scant historical records that these people perhaps joined early Irish and Norwegian explorations and fishing journeys and little by little via Iceland gradually made their way to the New World. This migration started no later than 100 BC. Numerous artifacts and Pictish type structures have been located and excavated in Nova Scotia and new England to support this theory. New World legends amongst the natives began to circulate through out Indian cultures of the Little People about this time.

The many Little People artifacts in my possession collected from numerous sites throughout Colorado are identical in design to Pictish artifacts recovered from Scotland and Ireland and supports this hypotheses. A Pictish and Celtic form of writing known as Ogam has been found throughout Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

Being deciphered by well known world expert Barry Fell, an approximate date has been ascribed to these sites at around 300 BC to 800 hundred AD. Working personally with William Mclone, author of Ancient America, and an associate of Mr. Fell's, I have visited many of these sites and concur that they are indeed very similar to Celtic and Pictish locations in the United Kingdom.

Little People facts:
1. They have been reported as being blue.
2. They wear animal skins and hoods or stove-pipe or cone shaped hats
3. They either live underground and in caves or they have mastered a lost technology that allows them to use time barrier gates as mentioned in legends of Druids and the megalithic builders that used Ley Line energy from the earth. This energy today is called Crystal Magnetic Energy or Crystal Lattice Web.
4. New Ogam like writing and markings accompanied by crude animal paintings are still being found in areas where Little People are being sighted in Colorado and New Mexico.
5. The Little People are curious about anything in their territory but refrain from human contact in all but extreme rarity.
6. They seem to like to indulge in the use of superstition as a means of keeping people at a distance and have been seen wearing religious and strange ceremonial costumes in this practice. They seem to delight in masquerading as demons, ghosts and frightening apparitions to scare people away. Note: this was also a favorite ploy of the Picts.
7. Only males are ever seen. Females and children are protected and hidden much the same way as in the old Pictish culture.
8. The men are seen occasionally with staffs of rods. This also is a characteristic of the Picts, Celts and Druids. The staffs were called Dodder staffs and were used as dowsing rods called doddering in the Gaelic tongue. They were also used to detect Ley lines, called Sun Paths and as surveying sticks as well.

I have never heard the Little People called 'Water Babies' before, however that is not to say that they have not been called that. I have heard them called many things by different people. In my 46 years of experience and 30 years of research I have found it expedient to call them Little People when speaking of the 3 to 2 foot species and Tiny People when speaking of the 6 to 8 inch variety. I believe that they are two, entirely different peoples and that the smaller species have become extinct.

The last reliable public sighting I have been able to recover of the Tiny People occurred in 1935 by 3 Mexican hunters in Cucharas Canyon area west of Trinidad, Colorado. Although one reliable source known to me, related that he himself had seen a male, approximately 9 inches tall for several minutes in 1986. It was a clear sighting in broad day light at about 4 o-clock in the afternoon. The little fellow was about 20 feet from the observant, dressed in a one piece brown garment that appeared to be of leather. He was wearing loose, ankle length foot gear and what the observant could only call a Robin Hood type cone hat. The little man, as the source called him, was noticed standing beneath a Pinion tree as the observant was digging out a tree a few miles west of Walsenburg in Santa Clara Canyon. He related that he watched the little man for about ten minutes and then the little guy ran off through the brush as quick as a rabbit when a co-worker called out to him. As I said the informant is not only reliable but very secretive about his experiences, feeling they are of a religious nature being devote Catholic.

I personally have never seen a Tiny Person. I have seen several tiny stone and flint artifacts that have been collected by a few old timers however from ant hills in the Purgatory country. I have acquired two of these myself. One is an arrow head made of agate and it measures just under 1/8 inch and is perfect. Second I have a black stone ax complete with part of the wood handle intact. Rather than having the head tied to the handle as American Indian artifacts of normal size, it has a hole drilled through the ax head length wise, similar to modern European metal axes and the wood shaft wedged in place. This ax head is smaller than a dime.

The information I have gathered about the Tiny People leaves me to believe that they lived in mud structures suspended from narrow canyon walls similar to Swallow nests. Hense the early American name Swallow People. From old accounts, it seems that these Tiny people were unfriendly for the most part in there encounters and were feared by native American and Mexican peoples that came in contact with them.

I have collected many stories of these little folks.

By far my biggest interest is in the Little People of which I myself have seen two. I have many of their artifacts and have studied them and tracked them for 30 years. I have absolutely no doubts about their existence and believe there still remains a large number of them living in secluded areas of south western Colorado and New Mexico. They are no larger than 3 feet tall. The women although very rarely seen, are smaller. They seem to be a talented and diverse culture. From my studies I believe I have pieced together a strange but plausible history for them and believe that unlike the bigfoot, have not only interacted at times with other more known cultures, but have influenced the beliefs of those cultures immensely. But alas, those encounters have always ended tragically it seems for the Little People and over the last 50 years their interaction and sightings have become almost nil.

Unlike Bigfoot, physical remains of the Little People have been found and studied, including one mummified specimen from Wyoming. As far as weird and far out sightings such as what we many times come across when researching the oddity, with the Little People even these strange reports make a strange kind of sense. For example. Many reports of the Little People sighted for over 4 hundred years throughout the continental US and Mexico have been accompanied by the statement that these Little People were blue! Taken as a whole this sounds ridiculous, but on closer examination, I believe that this is not only possible but probable due to the amount of accounts reporting it. I believe these people dye, paint, tattoo and decorate themselves at times in a dark blue color as a religious expression. The ancient Celts and Picts painted themselves with the same color for the same reasons with woad.

© Paul Wilson 1996-7

In the early days of the Internet, Kyle Mizokami had a website with portions devoted to the mystery of Bigfoot and other things. Originally, Paul Wilson's "Bigfoot and Little People" Pages were part of Kyle's website. That data was lost to us when Kyle quit research and took down his website.

In an effort to salvage and review early internet correspondence stored on one of my old computers, I came across the above story that Wilson copied to me in 1996.

With the Homo Floresiensis aka 'hobbit' media frenzy of late, I thought it worthy of uploading this effort again.

Enjoy,
Bobbie Short


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