by Mac Tonnies
The
Cryptoterrestrials
Also by Mac Tonnies
_________________
After the Martian Apocalypse:
Extraterrestrial Artifacts and the Case for Mars Exploration
Illuminated Black and Other Adventures
The Cryptoterrestrials:
A MEDITATION ON INDIGENOUS HUMANOIDS AND THE ALIENS AMONG US
Mac Tonnies
Anomalist Books
San Antonio * New York
An Original Publication of ANOMALIST BOOKS
THE CRYPTOTERRESTRIALS
Copyright © 2010 by Mac Tonnies
ISBN: 1933665815
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Cover image and design by Nadia Sobin
Illustrations by Mike Clelland
Book design by Seale Studios
For information, go to anomalistbooks.com, or write to:
Anomalist Books,
5150 Broadway #108,
San Antonio, TX 78209
Contents
Editor’s Note
Foreword by Nick Redfern
Chapter 1: Looking for Aliens
Chapter 2: Misdirection
Chapter 3: UFOs and Extraterrestrials
Chapter 4: The Abduction Epidemic
Chapter 5: Encounter with a Flower
Chapter 6: Curious Bystanders
Chapter 7: The Superspectrum
Chapter 8: Water World
Chapter 9: Underground
Chapter 10: Among Us
Chapter 11: Final Thoughts
Afterword by Greg Bishop
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
About the Author
Editor’s Note
Mac Tonnies died in his sleep on the evening of October 18, 2009, at the age of 34. He was weeks away from turning in his manuscript on The Cryptoterrestrials. With the help of his family and friends, we have been able to piece together this, his final book.
In particular, I would like to thank:
His mother, Dana Tonnies, for rescuing the hard copy of the manuscript he had left on his desk and had been working on;
David Peeples, for emailing us the digital file of the manuscript that Mac had asked him to print out when his own printer broke down, and for later checking Mac’s laptop, with Dana’s help, for any more recent versions of the file (there were none);
Nadia Sobin, whose striking artwork graces the cover of his book;
Mike Clelland, who contributed the wonderful interior art;
And to Nick Redfern for the Foreword, and Greg Bishop for the Afterword.
I have lost an author; two have lost a son; thousands have lost a friend; and in the face of intractable mysteries, we have all lost a brilliant thinker.
“Instead of looking at the screen, what I want to do is to turn around and look the other way. When we look the other way what we see is a little hole at the top of the wall with some light coming out. That’s where I want to go. I want to steal the key to the projectionist’s booth, and then, when everybody has gone home, I want to break in.”
—Jacques Vallee
“We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extraterrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.”
—Terence McKenna
“We’re on your street, but you don’t see us. Or if you do you smile and say hello.”
—Morrissey
Foreword
As a result of its elusive, ever-changing and (I would strongly argue) seemingly stage-managed nature and appearance, the UFO phenomenon is one that should be firmly recognized by, and appreciated for, its many attendant uncertainties and complexities.
After all, we should never forget that more than 60 years have elapsed since pilot Kenneth Arnold experienced his now historic encounter of the Flying Saucer kind over Mount Rainier in Washington State. And guess what? The “U” in “UFO” still stands for “Unidentified.”
Unfortunately, so many of those who have dared to immerse themselves within the ufological sand-pit since that long-gone, heady day in June 1947 have forgotten—or stubbornly refuse to acknowledge—that stark fact.
For those utterly belief-driven souls, the only answer to the ever-present UFO mystery that continues to intrude upon us at a collective and, sometimes, profoundly personal level, is that the true “unknowns” have extraterrestrial origins.
Yet, the harsh reality is that the likes of the late J. Allen Hynek, Leonard Stringfield, Richard Hall, and countless other souls who became entranced by flying saucers and their forever elusive crews were utterly unable to provide any hard evidence that E.T. really was—or still is—among us.
For all their files (and attendant filing cabinets), their carefully compiled notes, and their myriad interviews with numerous eyewitnesses, they failed to make a definitive case. That’s right: THEY FAILED. Deal with it or don’t, but it’s a fact.
Now, one might reasonably ask: well, just because absolute vindication for the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) has not yet been forthcoming, does that mean the same hypothesis has no merit?
Of course not; however, in my view, if evidence for the ETH has failed to surface—despite decades of hard work and diligent investigations—then maybe we should consider the notion that we are looking for the answers in all the wrong places.
Instead of looking up, maybe we should be looking around us. And, perhaps, even below us, too.
Thankfully, there are a few learned scholars out there who recognize that what, to some, is a relatively straightforward matter—namely, the idea that E.T. is visiting us, sometimes crashes and burns, and has a particular penchant for our DNA—is actually nothing of the sort.
Enter Mac Tonnies.
I rather liken Mac to a Fortean equivalent of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones (Mac would probably prefer I cite the Smiths or R.E.M.; but, hey, that’s how it goes). When, in 1976, both bands firmly saved rock music from the bloated stodge of groups like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, they didn’t do so just because they could. No, their actions were prompted by the fact that (A) the dinosaurs of rock had become utterly irrelevant and redundant; and (B) a new, fresh approach was sorely needed.
Such is the case with the beliefs of many of the long-term players within ufology, who are, today, about as relevant to the actual subject matter as is a pterodactyl or a woolly mammoth to the 21st century.
Even a relative novice cannot fail to notice that the UFO issue has a distinct atmosphere about it that screams “manipulation, deception, and stage-managed trickery.” In other words, yes: there is a real UFO phenomenon. And, it has nothing to do with Pentagon generals, CIA spooks, mistaken identity, or outright hoaxing and fakery. But it may have nothing to do with literal extraterrestrials either.
What if there exists alongside us, in distinct stealth, a race of incredibly ancient beings who may be native to our planet; who were perhaps—eons ago—our technological masters, but who, today, may well be on the wane?
What if, as a means to move amongst us, they have ingeniously passed themselves off as visitors from far-off worlds? And what if we—those of us who delve into the world of the UFO, and those who have encountered such entities—have fallen for their Machiavellian ruses time and time again?
Such are the questions that are at the heart of Mac Tonnies’ The Cryptoterrestrials.
As Mac skillfully demonstrates, UFOs and their shadowy crews most assuredly do exist, and their ties to us are both long-standing and vital. They want us to believe they are extraterrestrials. Arguably, they even need us to believe they are extraterrestrials. But, in
reality, they are merely Oscar-deserving actors, endlessly performing stage-plays that have successfully kept the human race in the dark for countless generations.
With the long-awaited publication of Mac’s The Cryptoterrestrials, however, their era of deceit and manipulation may well be coming to a close—providing, that is, we do not continue to be seduced and enchanted by their cosmic lies.
– Nick Redfern
CHAPTER 1
Looking for Aliens
Looking down from a sufficient distance, human habitation recedes to the merest glimmer. As night devours the continents, our seeming dominion vanishes, replaced by scattered constellations, the haughty gleam of our cities suddenly as substantial as a skein of campfires. As the dark deepens, we realize with mounting unease just how tenuous our presence is; the mountains, prairies and lakes, denuded of daylight, taunt us with their enormity.
Then there are the oceans, almost entirely vacant of man-made lights. Our seas, so often taken for granted, are like vast tombs from which even the most unseemly phantasms might emerge; we ply their waters at our own peril, distantly aware that we might find ourselves in the company of others.
The Earth is ancient, its biosphere only slightly less so. For four billion years our world has secreted life. The advent of homo sapiens is alarmingly recent in comparison. We’re like foundlings washed upon some alien shore, stifling our fears by pretending to a feeble omnipotence. Having launched spacecraft to the outer planets and inspected the crater-pocked wastes of Mars through the unblinking eyes of rovers, it’s easy to entertain the idea that we’re the first, evolution’s sole successful stab at the phenomenon we casually term “intelligence.”
Yet as we watch night erode the familiar highways and stadiums and ever-encroaching suburbs, our confidence falters. Already, technological forecasters envision a near-future populated by our artificially intelligent offspring. Perhaps as our most cherished certainties crumble in the glow of a new century—full of danger, portent and enigma—it’s become relatively easy to contemplate the presence of the Other; not an other new to our planet, but one predating our own genetic regime. Something unspoken and ancient yet nevertheless amenable to science . . . an intelligence with an almost-human face, until recently content to abide by the shadows of our complacency.
But since the middle of the last century it seems to have asserted itself with a vigor hitherto found only in the domain of folklore. Understandably daunted, we’ve relegated its existence to the margins of perception: hallucination, war fever, misunderstood natural phenomena, delusion, butchered recollections of dreams best left forgotten. We see lights dancing in our sky and invoke impossible meteors. Landed vehicles accompanied by surreal humanoids become military test aircraft and their diminutive pilots. The emaciated creatures seen aboard apparent spacecraft—or, more portentously, within rock-walled caverns—are summarily dismissed as sheerest fantasy or, at best, as the spawn of novel brain dysfunctions.
In the decades since 1947, dawn of the contemporary UFO era, we’ve confronted a parade of strangeness that has rallied uncritical enthusiasts and rattled entrenched authority, leaving a bizarre residue that defies attempts at categorization as certainly as it elicits hypotheses.
I began this book pursuing the commonalities between the UFO phenomenon and the equally bewildering spectacle of our emerging technological future. I was especially intrigued by the prospect of humans becoming something other than strictly biological, increasingly viewed as a necessary evolutionary step in the wake of an imminent “Singularity,” a moment in history in which our intelligence, augmented and disseminated by machines, transcends the imaginable.
My working hypothesis—that alien visitation was best viewed in cybernetic terms—remains a valid paradigm for interpreting the arrival of an alien intelligence on this planet. But the more I read and contemplated, the more my “postbiological” theory seemed lacking; while I could readily envision a global “invasion” directed by an unseen machine intelligence, the enduring nature of the UFO spectacle forced me to rethink my assumptions.
Like ufologist Jacques Vallee, I viewed our response to the appearance of apparent nonhuman vehicles in our skies as the work of deliberate psychological conditioning (probably, but not necessarily, benevolent). Contrary to popular perceptions, UFOs are far from a recent occurrence; written and oral accounts point to an experience of exceptional age and patience. If “alien encounters” were the work of some godlike artificial intelligence, an omniscient pacemaker sowing memes in an effort to ensure our evolution conformed to some unknown alien ideal, then we might reasonably expect it to remain “hidden.”
This would neatly account for the lack of “hard” evidence that would force the UFO question out of theoretical limbo and into the mainstream. A postbiological overseer—something along the lines of the inscrutable black monolith in 2001—would have a vested interest in obscurity. As biological beings, we might even lack the perceptual acumen to properly discern its presence. This, I reasoned, explained the UFO phenomenon’s recurrence in world folklore; perhaps it had succeeded in insinuating itself into our collective unconscious. As abductee Whitley Strieber has suggested, “alien” contact—whatever “alien” might ultimately mean—might be what the process of evolution looks like to the human mind.
The primary challenge to this mythological approach was the explicitly physical nature of so many encounters—including, but by no means limited to, the relatively recent epidemic of “abductions,” in which witnesses report being kidnapped from workaday surroundings and subjected to novel medical tests. This seemed remarkably crude for an intelligence as subtle and abiding as the entity I had imagined. If recent developments in our own technology are any indication at all, we will probably harness much less intrusive techniques within the next few decades; for an intelligence thousands or millions of years superior to our own to stoop to such clinical levels struck me as absurd.
Of course, the very idea of an artificially emplaced psychosocial conditioning system hinges on absurdity. Vallee and John Keel, author of the paranormal masterpiece The Mothman Prophecies, have written extensively on the nonsensical element that accompanies so many accounts of assumed extraterrestrial visitation. This absurdity only makes sense if the phenomenon isn’t as it seems but rather appeals to our collective unconscious (for reasons we can only guess).
Or so I thought. Finally, I wondered the unthinkable: what if the antics of the “absurd humanoids” documented by Vallee weren’t the work of some overarching intelligence? What if they happened just as reported, without the need to invoke externally imposed psychosocial thermostats?
This notion struck me as deliciously ironic. It suggested that the encounters with nonhumans that haunt our folklore were real, not necessarily projections preying on our gullibility. Could “fairies” and “elves”—and all their mythical successors—be distorted representations of an actual species?
While curiously appealing, the idea seemed totally orthogonal to science. Psychologists maintain that legendary “little people” are beings of the mind, the brain’s instinctive attempt to populate the darkness. They’re also quick to point out that modern accounts of spindly gray aliens are almost certainly due to fantasy-prone personalities, poorly trained therapists, and hallucinations experienced during episodes of sleep paralysis.
This analysis is attractive on several levels. It neatly does away with the specter of the Other we repeatedly encounter in myths. It also assuages our fears that our world might be fair game for dispassionate ET scientists, with their glittering probes and omnipotent saucers.
Alas, it fails.
This book documents a most unconventional slant on the enduring UFO mystery. In The Cryptoterrestrials, I attempt to reconcile mythological and contemporary accounts of “little people” into a coherent picture. In many ways, the image that emerges is at least as frightening as my original cybernetic premise: it’s much closer to home, vastly less abstract, and—tantalizingly—ame
nable to scientific testing.
I propose that at least some accounts of alien visitation can be attributed to a humanoid species indigenous to the Earth, a sister race that has adapted to our numerical superiority by developing a surprisingly robust technology. The explicitly reproductive overtones that color many encounters suggest that these “indigenous aliens” are imperiled by a malady that has gone uncured throughout the eons we have coexisted. Driven by a puzzling mixture of hubris and existential desperation, they seek to perpetuate themselves by infusing their gene-pool with human DNA. While existing at the very margins of ordinary human perception, they have succeeded in realms practically unexplored by known terrestrial science, reinventing themselves at will and helping to orchestrate a misinformation campaign of awe-inspiring scope.
Is the intelligence behind the close-encounter experience using science-fictional devices as a way of interacting with us, much how a primatologist “communicates” with an orphaned monkey via hand-puppet? If so, how to account for descriptions of bug-like entities from populations who haven’t been primed to know what an alien “should” look like? Maybe the ubiquitous “Gray” is simply a costume that works, in which case one can’t help but yearn for a glimpse of next year’s fashions . . .
For too long, we’ve called them “aliens,” assuming that we represent our planet’s best and brightest.
Maybe that’s exactly what they want us to think.
CHAPTER 2
Misdirection
Every few nights I get out my laser pointer and indulge my cats in a frenetic game of “chase.” Cats are natural hunters, and they’re effectively incapable of not looking at the quickly moving red dot that I project onto the carpet, walls, or any piece of furniture that happens to be in its path.
