After Stars Wars: The Clone Wars came out, I wrote here about how I was intrigued with the history of the Sith. I recently entered the word "Sith" into Wikipedia's search and was surprised to see a fairly extensive entry on the subject. Myth-making in progress.

However, when I was searching the Wikipedia, I wasn't looking for information on George Lucas's Sith at all. I had been looking for the history of the Sith as it relates to Irish fairy tales. I was investigating whether Lucas might have knowingly taken the name from an existing mythology and reapplied it to his Star Wars universe. At the top of the Wikipidia entry for Sith, I found the meaning I was looking for in a redirect message: "For the Irish fairy, see Sithe."

I came across the reference to Sith as fairy folk while reading the book Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. The Cute-Little-Red-Headed-Girlfriend--who is a bit of a ufologist--eagerly gave me the book to read, based on my having expressed interest in the ideas of Jacques Vallee, whose views I had encountered online.

I do not want to summarize the book's thesis here, which is both complex and unexpected. It is, how shall I say, a mindfuck. It reminded me of The Matrix in some ways, as well as the philosophical arguments surrounding the question, "How do I know I am not just a brain in a vat?" Although it is about the UFO phenomena, it also has much to say about the identity of the gods, the nature of reality and the boundaries of human knowledge.