The relationship between Henry Akeley and the Outside Beings

Henry Wentworth Akeley’s relationship with the Outside Beings is defined by a startling reversal: the Vermont farmer who first treats them as a danger to himself and humanity later presents himself as their chosen interpreter and ally. His letters trace that change from reports of surveillance, threats, and a siege to claims of peaceful contact and shared knowledge. Because the transformation is abrupt and known chiefly through Akeley’s own correspondence, the supposed reconciliation never becomes fully secure.

Inherited suspicions and first evidence

Akeley begins from a landscape already shaped by stories about beings in the hills. Local legends describe strange tracks, disappearances, imitated human voices, and recluses suspected of having allied themselves with nonhuman visitors. Accounts differ in their explanations: some settlers cast the beings as familiars of the devil, while traditions associated with Celtic settlers compare them to malign fairies. Pennacook myths offer another account, describing the Winged Ones as visitors from the stars who mine earthly hills for stone and harm people who approach or spy on them. In those stories, their buzzing imitation of human speech and their lack of any apparent need for human food make them both recognizable and radically alien. These legends establish a pattern of secrecy and dangerous proximity, but they do not by themselves establish what Akeley’s relationship with the beings will become.

Akeley tells Albert N. Wilmarth that his own evidence is more immediate. He reports seeing footprints near his home on Dark Mountain and hearing voices in the woods. He takes a phonograph with a dictaphone attachment to record one voice, then appeals to Wilmarth to hear the recording and ask older local residents about its resemblance to the voice in inherited stories. The record is presented as something that might corroborate his account, not as a complete explanation of the beings or their intentions.

His account of their purpose is initially guarded but fearful. Akeley believes that the visitors come from another planet, can travel through interstellar space, and mine metals beneath the hills. He thinks they will leave humans alone unless people become too curious, but warns that a human attack on their colony could bring a larger force from beyond Earth. He also suspects that they intend to kill him or take him away because he has learned too much. The black stone he found on Round Hill, marked with partly worn hieroglyphics, is part of the discovery after which, he says, everything changed. At this stage, contact means exposure: knowledge makes him feel more, not less, vulnerable.

From observation to armed resistance

Akeley’s fear becomes a prolonged confrontation. His letters describe dogs barking at night and signs of hostile presences along the lonely roads he travels. On August 2, a tree trunk blocks his route through a wooded stretch; the dogs with him bark at what he cannot see. Further disturbances follow on August 5 and 6, including a shot that grazes his car. Akeley responds by refusing to travel without at least two dogs, making their presence part of his practical protection against a threat he cannot directly identify.

In a letter received on August 15, Akeley describes a more serious attack during the night of August 12–13. Bullets pass outside his farmhouse, three of his twelve dogs are found dead in the morning, and claw-prints appear alongside human tracks attributed to Walter Brown. When Akeley tries to telephone for additional dogs, the line fails. He later learns that the main telephone cable has been cut in the deserted hills north of Newfane. He returns from Brattleboro with four dogs and ammunition. The episode turns his account of the Outside Beings from a private investigation into a defensive struggle: he feels watched and threatened, while the loss of communication and the repeated interference with travel deepen his isolation.

A later letter intensifies that sense of entrapment. Akeley says the beings have spoken to him in their buzzing voice and warned him of intentions he will not repeat. He believes they mean to take him alive, not only to Yuggoth but farther beyond the galaxy. He says he cannot get to California, feels held back even when he considers escaping to Brattleboro, and reports that six more dogs have been killed. His request that Wilmarth destroy the phonograph record reflects how evidence has changed meaning for him: what he once hoped would substantiate his case now seems liable to draw further danger. The letters show a relationship in which Akeley seeks knowledge while also trying to keep its material traces—and himself—out of the visitors’ reach.

The claimed change of understanding

In a letter dated September 6, Akeley recasts the preceding conflict. He says that his earlier descriptions of the phenomena were real, but that his fearful interpretation of them was mistaken. In response to signals, he has admitted a messenger associated with the Outside Beings, whom he identifies as a fellow human. The messenger, Akeley reports, explained that the visitors’ aims had been misunderstood because their allegorical speech was interpreted through human cultural assumptions. What Akeley had considered shameful or threatening now appears to him awesome and intellectually enlarging. The letter presents the change not as a denial that contact occurred, but as a new account of what that contact meant.

Akeley also revises his understanding of the violence. He regrets the harm he says he caused the visitors during their nightly skirmishes and claims that they bear him no grudge. He now describes them as having been wronged and spied upon by humans, rather than as aggressors seeking to harm people. In this revised account, Walter Brown was an inferior human agent whose conduct had prejudiced Akeley against them. Akeley further attributes some stolen correspondence to emissaries of a malign human cult, not to the Outside Beings. The reversal redistributes responsibility: the beings become the guarded party, while human interference and hostility account for the apparent conflict.

Akeley’s new description of their aims is explicitly relational. He says they want peace, freedom from molestation, and a greater intellectual rapport with humanity. As human inventions extend knowledge and movement, he argues, it becomes harder for their necessary outposts on Earth to remain secret. He presents communication as a practical way to prevent future danger and establish a workable coexistence, and dismisses the idea that they intend to enslave or degrade humankind. His own knowledge of them, he says, has led them to choose him as their primary interpreter on Earth. He expects further information orally and in writing, and says he may eventually travel beyond Earth by means that exceed ordinary human experience. In this account, the former target of a siege becomes a mediator between species.

Wilmarth’s doubts and the unresolved alliance

The reversal does not persuade Wilmarth without resistance. Reading Akeley’s new letter, he feels both relief and unease because its shift from terror to composure and even exultation is so swift. He notices not only a different attitude but changes in wording, spelling, and sentence rhythm. To him, Akeley’s manner seems altered deeply enough to make it difficult to reconcile this self-assured correspondent with the writer of the previous frantic reports. The letter therefore supplies Akeley’s account of reconciliation while also giving Wilmarth reason to question whether the speaker has remained unchanged.

When Wilmarth later visits the farmhouse, Akeley’s reported alliance acquires a more immediate but no less troubling form. Akeley speaks in a darkened room about what he has learned since making his pact with the Outside Beings. Wilmarth says that the information concerns the structure of infinity, dimensions, and the place of the known cosmos within a larger order; he refuses to set out the full implications. The exchange suggests that Akeley has gained access to knowledge he regards as almost unbearable, but it does not independently settle whether the beings’ motives are benevolent or whether the transformation Wilmarth noticed has another explanation.

The relationship consequently remains balanced between two accounts. In Akeley’s later letters, fear gives way to a deliberate alliance founded on non-interference and intellectual exchange. In the earlier correspondence, contact is inseparable from surveillance, road attacks, disrupted communications, and his belief that he may be taken away. Wilmarth’s attention to the abrupt change in Akeley’s language keeps those accounts in tension. Akeley becomes the proposed human intermediary, yet neither the promises of peace nor the evidence of threat fully resolves what that role means.