Explorer and treasure hunter Ron Quinn discussed his book Little People about real life encounters with leprechaun-like beings, as well as the 'Mysterious Plateau' in Southern Arizona. As a 10-year old in 1942 in upstate New York, Quinn said he heard a tapping at the window and was astonished to see standing on the ledge, a little man, about one feet high. When he became an adult he wrote an article for a newspaper about the experience and people in the Catskills area then sent him similar stories describing encounters with beings that were 1, 2, and 3 1/2 feet tall. The Little People tended to be middle-aged, and have very large eyes, big smiles and longish grey hair, he noted.

In one account sent to him, a trapper described hearing the screams of a 2 ft. tall man who he picked up off the ground. Curiously, he said could feel the man's body but there was no weight to it. In another of Quinn's collected stories (which he titled 'The Enchantment') a girl told of hearing many tiny giggling voices as she slept under a tree.He conjectured that the Little People are either living physical creatures or they inhabit another dimension.

In 1956, while treasure hunting near Arivaca, Arizona, Quinn and his brother saw strange greenish lights disappear behind the mountains. They began to hear unusual tales about apparitions and an archway on a plateau in the mountains there. According to the local Indians, the archway (which was made of lava) may have been a portal to another dimension or time.For more on the Arizona oddities, see this article published in Tucson Weekly.