by Mac Tonnies
The device that crashed near Roswell in the summer of 1947, whatever it was, featured properties at least superficially like the high-altitude balloon trains ultimately cited as an explanation by the Air Force. Debunkers have, of course, seized on the lack of revealingly “high-tech” components found among the debris to dismiss the possibility that the crash was anything but a case of misidentification; not even Maj. Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who advocated an ET origin for the unusual foil and structural beams, mentioned anything remotely resembling an engine or power-plant.
The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis offers a speculative alternative: maybe the Roswell device wasn’t high-tech. It could indeed have been a balloon-borne surveillance device brought down in a storm, but it doesn’t logically follow that it was one of our own. Given the top-secret projects underway in the American Southwest in the late 1940s, one could hardly blame inquisitive cryptoterrestrials for wanting a closer look. And in the midst of possible human experimentation, secretive eavesdroppers might have understandably opted for an unmanned device lest they lose a crewed vehicle to an accident . . . or human aggression. Upon happening across such a troubling and unexpected find, the Air Force’s excessive secrecy begins to make sense.
The Roswell incident may have been the U.S. government’s first direct evidence of an indigenous intelligence. Indeed, subsequent policy decisions can be interpreted as a response to a perceived nonhuman threat.
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I’ve speculated that the diverse humanoid forms encountered by “abductees” and UFO witnesses might be best understood in terms of a “hive society,” replete with “drones” engineered to perform specialized tasks. Given the current state of (known) transgenic research, it’s certainly tempting to wonder if the cryptoterrestrials have been using similar techniques for ages. (The “hairy dwarves” of South America might be attempts to fuse humanoid and primate DNA; likewise, the mantis-like beings described presiding over the ubiquitous Grays might literally be insectile.)
Which invites the obvious question: who or what came first?
One of the tenets of the CTH is that cryptoterrestrials have developed a “technology of consciousness” (to borrow a phrase from Whitley Strieber) that, in many practical respects, rivals our own technological prowess. One outcome of a fully realized technology of the mind is the ability to inhabit and shed bodies at will, much like a scientist “inhabiting” the sensorium of a far-flung robot.
Science fiction writers continue to debate what methods we’ll use when colonizing a planet such as Mars. Ultimately, we might choose to terraform the world into a facsimile of our own. But we could just as easily decide to modify ourselves to tolerate inclimate conditions. A posthuman civilization could take up residence in orbit and populate the surface with lifelike, semi-autonomous drones. Visiting another locale could be as easy as logging into another body stationed elsewhere on the planet. Two or more personae might even elect to inhabit the same body for the sake of economy.
Such a civilization may seem remote, but the general concept is already in practice; if our telerobotic probes continue to increase in sophistication and brain-power, they’ll eventually become indistinguishable from living creatures, at which point we will have effectively achieved the “Singularity” advocated by technoprogressives such as roboticist Hans Moravec and inventor Ray Kurzweil.
If my hypothetical indigenous humanoids practice telepresence at the neurological level—perhaps by manipulating the electromagnetic fields that constitute “consciousness”—the implications are far more disturbing than one might think. The ability to transfer “souls” entails the possibility of “possession.” It also allows for “Walk-Ins” and “Wanderers,” New Age terms for alleged non-corporeal aliens who take command of human bodies.
Taken to its logical extreme, “biological telepresence” offers an expansive—if tentative—explanation for myriad “occult” phenomena. It potentially explains why we seldom see the cryptoterrestrials in the flesh. If they’ve mastered the technique of projecting themselves into our world from the safety of their enclaves, they’d have little reason to “mingle” with us unless compelled by an important purpose. (Displays of apparent technological superiority, for example, might demand the use of physical hardware—although we can’t dismiss the possibility that some UFO sightings, while seemingly physical events, might be enacted on a psychological level. Our own neurological dabbling demonstrates that such techniques are less exotic than some may expect; indeed, if neuroscientist Michael Persinger is correct, radiation emitted from natural phenomena can sometimes result in convincing hallucinations.)
This psychotronic interpretation suggests the cryptoterrestrial influence is virtually omnipotent, each of us functioning as a potential node in a sort of planetary internet. A resource of such scope would be dotingly maintained—and fiercely protected against any would-be “hackers.”
I’ve attempted to reconcile the “visionary” nature of encounters with nonhumans described by the likes of Terence McKenna with the decidedly physical episodes recounted by close-encounter witnesses: must the “alien contact” experience be exclusively “real” or hallucinatory? Maybe not.
CHAPTER 5
Encounter with a Flower
Filmmaker Mike MacDonald reports the following encounter with the “other.”
It’s funny how some memories stick with you all your life while others are forgotten, only to resurface after being jogged back by something that happens in the present day. In the case of this experience, it’s one of my earliest memories, and it has always been on my mind. I call it a memory because at the age of 47, there are very few instances in my first few years of life that I can recall with any clarity. Whether this memory is of a dream or an actual waking experience, I can’t say. My intuition tells me that it was a dream experience, but one of those life-altering, never-to-be-forgotten experiences that many of us carry around in our conscious and sub-conscious minds for life.
My guess is this memory is from sometime in the first four years of my life. It’s very simple to recount, but has a deeply resonating emotional effect on me when I recall it. It is in full colour.
I am standing in a cave. Sitting before me, on a throne fashioned out of the rock, is what I can only describe as a very large pansy flower. The kind of flower that looks like it has a face with large slanted eyes (I know, when I saw the Communion book cover 20 years ago I almost had a cow.)
Although the flower creature did not speak to me, I could feel that it was communicating to me somehow in a form of extreme condescention and intelligence. Like it was implying to me that it was in total command. Not necessarily in a malevolent way, but in a way of true authority. By my side was my father. He was extremely upset—terrorized, actually, and possibly even ashamed. This caused me much more grief than the “attitude” emanating from the flower being. I had the feeling that the flower being had my father completely exposed in some way. I can’t really put my finger on it, but the general feeling I had was that my all powerful father, the centre of my four or five year old life, was shaken to the core, and this frightened me more than the flower being itself. I will never forget this dream, nor the feeling of complete helplessness that my father displayed. (At the time, incidentally, he was a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.)
The experience ends there. As I said, I shall never forget it. I have mentioned it to my father, but he has no recollection of anything like that. I wish I could correctly convey the attitude (for lack of a better term) that the Pansy flower displayed; all knowing, condescending, almost cruel, completely humorless, and even ruthless in terms of how it affected us.
Needless to say, since then I have always tended to look at pansies with a measure of suspicion.
I like the shamanistic sensibility of this encounter with the “other.” Ironically, while our conception of the alien has been subject to endless modification by a mass media eager to capitalize on our fascination with the nonhuman, we rar
ely encounter non-humanoid forms. Mike’s description, suggesting nothing less than a sentient plant, recalls the beings encountered by ethnologists who experiment with naturally occurring hallucinogens. (The “large slanted eyes” are an interesting twist. Could the prominent eyes now readily associated with the “Grays” be hardwired in the human brain, destined to recur regardless of the appearance of the being looking out of them?)
Mike might be describing a brush with what psychologist Kenneth Ring has termed the “imaginal realm,” a state suspended between waking consciousness and the enigmatic turf of dreams. William S. Burroughs, for instance, described seeing green reindeer and diminutive gray men in his childhood. He later emphasized his concern that the decimation of the ecosphere constituted a sort of lobotomization of the collective unconscious, strip-mining the fertile soil of Ring’s world of the imaginal as surely as a fleet of bulldozers set loose in the Amazonian rain-forests.
The pronounced authoritarian demeanor of the flower-like entity offers some support for Burroughs’ intuitive sense that nature is angry at humanity’s transgressions and more than capable of letting its displeasure be known. It’s worth remembering that a hallmark of the archetypal “alien abduction” is a graphic ecological warning, suggesting that perceived ETs harbor a stalwart interest in Earth’s environmental sustainability. Indeed, students of shamanism might argue that the Grays are thought-forms generated by the Earth itself as a means of communication. And at least a few UFO researchers have taken note of their apparent vegetable nature; as the memetic ancestors of the archetypal “little green men,” the Grays can be viewed as chilly avatars of our fragile biosphere—bent on revenge, enlightenment, or perhaps a curious fusion of both.
Nor is Mike’s memory of encountering a potent nonhuman intelligence within a cave without precedent. Contemporary “abductees” describe their nocturnal journeys to caverns with earthen walls, leading to the natural assumption that they’ve been transported to underground alien installations. But just as unannounced encounters with bizarre nonhuman beings are far from a modern phenomenon, rock-walled caverns populated by strange beings and bewildering technology enjoy a lively role in world mythology. For example, folklorists have pointed out suggestive parallels between “alien” dwellings and the subterranean domain said to await victims of lustful faeries (whose behavior, more often than not, mirrors that of today’s ufonauts).
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A commenter on my Posthuman Blues blog, left the following report.
Lately I’ve been thinking about a strange encounter I had as a child that makes some sense to me within the framework of the cryptoterrestrial theory. I thought you might it interesting, so here goes:
I’m guessing I was around 10 years old (so it was sometime in the early 1990s). I was sitting with my little brother and three friends on a street corner in suburban Port Chester, NY. Summertime. Just a bunch of children enjoying the warm weather, doing whatever it is children do. A man’s voice suddenly began to speak, in clear and polite diction, from what seemed like immediately in front of us. I don’t recall anything particularly strange about this voice, except for the fact that there did not seem to be any person attached to it. It’s often said that children are naturally more open-minded than adults, and therefore more perceptive to the “supernatural.” I think that as adults we expect to understand our surroundings. We assume that there is a comprehensible explanation for whatever occurs. As kids, the whole world seems very alien. We often don’t understand why adults do what they do, or why nature does what it does. Sure, this disembodied voice struck me as odd, but then again so did thunder and lightning and grown-ups’ taste for beer. I don’t remember that any of us were afraid or even slightly uneasy.
Naturally, we asked the stranger where he was. He told us not to worry about that and to not bother looking, because we wouldn’t find him. He just wanted to ask us a few questions. Now here’s where it all gets blurry. He couldn’t have talked to us for more than a few minutes, but I honestly can’t remember a single word from the rest of the conversation. I only have a vague recollection of how the tone of it all felt to me at the time. He struck me as a grown-up looking for clinical information, the way a good teacher or doctor might ask questions intelligible to a kid, without sounding patronizingly child-like.
When it was all over, I became determined to figure out the source of the voice. I didn’t rule out that someone was pulling a prank on us, even though none of this seemed to strike me as funny. Like many other kids, I liked to play with walkie-talkies. Though the voice lacked the typical fuzziness of a walkie-talkie, I still began to wonder if there was some sort of device hidden somewhere nearby. There were no sewer grates around, no parked cars, just a road, some well-mowed lawns, and perhaps a couple small bushes. My friends and I went across the street and began rooting around every nook and cranny, but came up empty-handed.
Years later, I read Whitley Strieber’s Communion and was immediately struck by the similarity of an encounter he described, in which he and his wife were addressed by a voice on the radio. Strieber could not recall any of the conversion, except for the voice saying something like “I know something else about you.” I recall that line giving me goosebumps like little else in that book. There was a familiarity embedded in my own encounter, which, in retrospect, freaks the hell out of me. Did I, on some level, recognize the voice?
So what happened to us that afternoon? Have you ever heard of anything like this? Were we interviewed by some cryptoterrestrial anthropologist?
That the ufonauts use a form of mind control is practically taken as a given by most abduction researchers. But once we concede that our visitors are able to induce or dampen perception at will, where does one draw the line? Who’s to say the bulk of abduction narratives can’t be interpreted in an illusory context? Perhaps some incredible abduction reports, while sincere, reflect an intimate brush with virtual reality rather than encounters with literal extraterrestrials.
The psychedelic realm has the visual flexibility of a multimedia installation or high-bandwidth website, forcing me to consider that it’s actually designed as a communications system, a sort of neurochemically derived “chatroom” populated by all manner of colorful “avatars.”
It’s conceivable that “trippers” can access this interzone, even if inadvertently. The beings seen—described similarly in UFO and drug narratives—might be the equivalent of neuropharmacologists and system operators. (Online environments like Second Life, while fanciful, abide by many of the conceits and laws that govern the real world, if only for the sake of convenience. It’s likely that an alien intelligence versed in nonlocal communication would apply similar reasoning when constructing a virtual environment.)
If access to the shamanic realm hinges on the brain’s production of DMT, as argued by University of New Mexico psychiatrist Richard Strassman, then the “aliens” may be attempting to promote organic DMT production through germ-line engineering. Abductees’ frequent allusions to insects (and suspiciously similar depictions offered by DMT trippers) suggests a literal “hive mind” at work—a concept that receives circumstantial support from recent breakthroughs with quantum “entanglement.” Tellingly, dialogue aboard UFOs is usually reported to be telepathic—a fact that speaks potential volumes about the CTs’ culture and society (if they have one in any distinguishable sense). The CTs may well have a communications infrastructure, but of a sort we don’t recognize until we find ourselves snared in its web.
CHAPTER 6
Curious Bystanders
In contemplating the nature of apparent “aliens,” I’ve assumed that the UFO intelligence adapts to fit the prevailing psychosocial matrix, effectively camouflaging itself by insinuating itself into a given culture. But there’s the equally appealing possibility that manifesting in terms comprehensible to witnesses reflects the perceptual constraints of the contact experience.
“Aliens,” whether perceived as gnomes or fairies or demons or even humans (as in the cas
e of the mysterious airship sightings of the late 19th century), may be forced to appear as they do by the cultural biases and limited expectations of the witness. Thus we have a pageant of fantastic beings of all descriptions: robot-like monsters, winged entities such as the infamous “Mothman,” furry giants, all manner of “little men,” and, of course, the ubiquitous “Grays.” However, most if not all of the above may share a common psychical origin; only by appealing to our collective unconscious can they take form at all. As such, they constitute an ongoing waking dream; they are “true hallucinations”— quantum composites that, while objectively real (as revealed by physical effects on the environment), demand a level of unconscious participation on behalf of their wide-eyed spectators.
Jacques Vallee conducted a noteworthy study of reports in which UFO occupants were seen outside their craft, usually engaged in such bewilderingly innocuous tasks as taking soil and plant samples. He concluded that, given a statistical distribution of apparent UFO landings, there are simply too many landings for the extraterrestrial hypothesis to remain tenable. But if in fact UFO events require the presence of at least one observer, then Vallee’s rogues’ gallery of “absurd humanoids” makes more sense: Landings aren’t as numerous as they may seem because they only occur when witnessed. From this, we can only conclude that at least some close encounters are staged events.
Similarly, the genetic hybridization program supposedly conducted by Gray aliens, recounted in Budd Hopkins’ Intruders and David Jacobs’ Secret Life, makes more sense when viewed as a paraphysical agenda. Abductee Whitley Strieber has famously described the abduction experience as an attempt at “communion” between two radically different kinds of intelligence. From his narrative and others, it indeed seems as if “they” want or need something from us. But I doubt that that “something” is genetic material in the usual sense; it seems more likely to me that encounters with hybrid children and distressingly intimate “exams” are attempts to encourage belief that Grays are flesh-and-blood ET anthropologists. Their antics, while horrifying, may be as bogus as the many sightings of alien beings taking soil specimens.
