The Cherokees believed in three groups of mischevious wrong-doers who reach as high as your knees. The worst of these, the rock people, would steal your children if you disturbed them.

The Dwende are taller than rock people, about half as tall as a Filipino, which means they really are quite small. They live in a mound of dirt in the jungles of the Philippines, and if you get too close to their jungly dirt mounds, they'll kill you.

They aren't too far off from the Menehune people, tiny Hawaiian elves - mischievous and rarely seen forest dwellers who avoid sight by building giant caves and ditches at night.

Everywhere there are mythological little people from our various cultural pasts. Humans have common sets of fears and imaginations - like a rabbit born with an instinctual fear of fangs. We come up with answers for our unknown fears and mysteries. In an age where forests are no longer the unknown, and simple mythologies no longer work, our minds pull together the most plausible fears for our time. Little gray people represent every fear of the secular, suburban American - space, conspiracy, technology, dominance over the untouchable West. The dark wood no longer encapsulates our fears, especially in a land of diagrammed suburbs and vast, empty spaces.

Some popular polls say that sixty-five percent of Americans believe that their government is covering up evidence of aliens. And they are quite familiar with the stories that still emanate from Roswell, New Mexico...of little people with gray skin and big, black eyes, long fingers adept at punching instructions into computers, or of a captured extraterrestrial craft hidden in an Area 51 hangar and a dozen white-coats taking it for test drives in the secrecy of night.

There is a lot of tension between UFOlogists and the regular old scientist. UFOlogy may be crackpot science - a mix of faith and scattered logic that makes the genuine search for life in space - a much more interesting field - seem silly to those who can't distinguish the two. It's rigorous scrutiny versus face value, but is UFOlogy harmful?