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Everyone-or almost everyone-agrees that there are no such things as fairies nowadays, and probably never were. They seem to belong to the class of mildly amusing, spooky things mentioned in urban fantasies for fun and in antireligious tracts to suggest that believing in God is just as silly. To wonder what fairies are, and what it would mean to "believe in them," are questions lost in time-relevant if we wish to understand the poet W. B. Yeats, perhaps, but not to a "modern" sensibility. After years of such skepticism, though, it is perhaps time to entertain another view: that banishing the little people from our lives was only a prelude to dispensing with the notions of God and the soul of man. If we cannot believe in fairies, we cannot properly believe in anything at all.
Of course, our fictions and even our serious thinking about the terrestrial past or the astronomical present are full of things like fairies. Once upon a time there were many almost-human species whom our ancestors encountered with mingled fear and wonder. Nowadays we call them Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, and the like. Our immediate ancestors perhaps remembered them instead as elves, dwarves, giants, goblins, and even (maybe) mermen. According to folk memory, particularly in Europe, dwarves were cunning artificers, while elves liked dance and revelry. Of course, we may be wrong to think that we truly remembered those long-lost almost-humans: Perhaps instead they were only speculative imaginings to explain old bones and arrowheads, fossils and mysterious cave paintings- just as our own stories about Neanderthals are also, mostly, fantasies.
It is also very likely that there are species out there beyond the Sun as sapient as we are. What we imagine about them shows much more about ourselves than about biological possibility. How probable is it that we would recognize intelligence in some utterly alien form when it takes so much effort even to acknowledge that wolves or octopuses or bees have their own lives and thoughts?
Of one thing at least we can be confident: The other human species are no more, and there are probably no galactic visitors here, either. For now, there are only us, and the stories we tell are always of creatures who...