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Seeing Centaurs
By Jerome Clark
FATE :: August 2004

From time to time, if you’re paying attention to such things or just happen to be in the right place at the right time, you may hear a story that is weird even by weirdness standards. Some years ago, on a pleasant summer evening over a campfire at a state park in South Dakota, a ranger told me that a couple camping there had once made a very strange complaint. They reported - to all appearances seriously - that a strange animal had come tearing into their recreational vehicle and done extensive damage before fleeing. It looked, they said, like something half human and half horse.

The ranger didn’t tell me if they used the word “centaur,” but then he hadn’t talked with them personally. This was just a story that had circulated for some time among park employees. No names and specific dates were attached to it. It was really no more than a local legend. There was no way to know if it was or was not based on an actual claim or incident of some sort. Nonetheless, it was undeniably interesting, and it was good for a chilling sensation down the spine.

Once in a great while stories like this rise into print. Buried somewhere in my files is a short article from a small British Fortean magazine recounting rumors of centaur sightings in rural England. I don’t recall that anything was particularly documented or compelling, but if people can see merbeings, as they used to think they could, I suppose sightings (however one chooses to define that word) of centaurs are at least theoretically possible. If one separates “experience” from “event,” which I believe is often the wise course when one hears extraordinary personal claims, centaurs may be experienced - that is, may seem real in memory and testimony, if unprovable elsewhere.

In the same way, reports of fairy encounters may seem compelling when they come from persons who to every appearance are sincere and sane, but they ought not to persuade us that we share the world with such entities. Some things seem to be there only as long as you are experiencing them, when they have the resonance even if not the substance of reality, and then they’re gone, waiting to be plucked out of the psycho-cultural ether by somebody else.

Even so, do people in the modern world really think they see centaurs and comparable creatures of ancient mythology? It was in the course of my research that I uncovered the stories that follow. For reasons of readability I am not inserting “allegedly” or “supposedly” into the narratives. You are welcome to do that mentally if you are so inclined ...

Read the rest of this article in the August 2004 issue of FATE

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