"The UGE cases started just before the Indians used shamanistic magic to get
portions of the western American states ceded to them. Magic, for lack of a 
better word, was altering much of the world. Some children, born of human
parents, suddenly began to transform into another species. Some were short and 
stocky, others tall and thin, with long ears. The media started calling them
dwarfs and elves, as if they were living embodiments of mythical creatures. But, 
of course, they weren’t. They just happened to match the image of dwarfs and
elves from children’s stories. They were homo sapiens, just a new
subspecies. What the media called dwarfs were homo sapiens pumillonis, and
what the people called elves were homo sapiens nobilis."