The universal fable: How the Bear Lost Its Tail

I have been reading "The Legend of Starcrash" by Dolores Cannon. Imagine my surprise when I read the Finnish folk tale I grew up with, "How the Bear Lost Its Tail," on the pages of the book. 

In the story, the fox tells the bear that he can catch a lot of fish in the winter with his tail if he makes a hole in the lake ice and goes there during the night when all the stars are shining brightly. The fish will bite his tail and in the morning he can pull his tail up, all the fish will be attached to it, and he will get to enjoy a big meal.

The bear does exactly what the fox suggests. It is a freezing cold night, made colder without a cloud cover in the sky. The bear plunges its tail into the freezing waters through a hole in the ice, sits down, and waits. Whenever he feels pain, the bear thinks it's the fish biting on the tail. 

The bear wakes up in the morning. As he pulls up mightily, he doesn't realize the water has frozen on his tail and it snaps off. The bear doesn't pull up any fish and loses its tail in the process.

Apparently this is an indigenous North American folk tale, as well, familiar at least to the Ojibwe and Iroquis tribes. How could this story be so universally known? In Cannon's book, the storyteller is a man who is descended from the intermingling of a space race whose ship crashed on our planet with an indigenous tribe somewhere near the Arctic Circle. One of Cannon's hypnosis clients went into this past life as a hunter for a tribe where their knives came from the metal of the crashed ship.

Maybe we are all descended from "aliens." Maybe the "aliens" are us. Maybe we are all one big, happy family!