by Mac Tonnies
Consciously or not, Kartott is describing a being strikingly similar to the woman supposedly encountered by abductee Antonio Villas Boas. Indeed, the pointed chin, exaggerated cheekbones and vestigial nose and mouth are commonly reported characteristics of ostensibly “alien” entities and crop up with compelling frequency in the UFO literature. The visage has become synonymous with that of the “Gray,” a commonly portrayed UFO occupant type with massive black eyes and fetal characteristics. (The Grays are often described as sexless or even robotic, stirring discussion that they’re in fact biological robots or even genetically atrophied human time-travelers from our own ecologically impoverished future.)
Although the being described by Villas Boas is perhaps the most obvious example of an apparently alien woman, one has to look no further than the cover of Whitley Strieber’s iconic 1987 best-seller Communion for another. (Often assumed to depict a male extraterrestrial, the text of Communion and subsequent books by Strieber emphasizes that the being on the book’s cover is female.)
In a disquieting twist, researchers have noted a conspicuous resemblance between the Communion alien and “Lam,” the “magickal” entity allegedly summoned by controversial occultist Aleister Crowley. Like Strieber’s female contact and Villas Boas’ seductress, Lam’s portrait emphasizes a memorably tapered face with dramatically pointed chin and minimal nose and mouth, suggesting a common origin. (At least some of the infamous “Men In Black” would also seem to fit the mold.)
Kartott’s “cigarette lady” seems to fit the pattern. Even the purchase of cigarettes—however seemingly preposterous—is in keeping with reports by self-proclaimed abductees, who have described the smell of cigarette smoke in the context of their encounters. (The distinctively repellent odor of sulfur is a more common variant, with both mythological and folkloric antecedents.)
I propose—tentatively—that the beings featured in this encounter are “alien” only in the sense that they seem exceedingly strange to us. Their predominantly humanoid manner and ability to function in “normal” human reality—if fleetingly—argue that they’re denizens of our own planet. Perhaps they’re materializations of the sort postulated by John Keel in such books as The Mothman Prophecies and The Eighth Tower.
Of course, the unmistakably elfin qualities described by UFO witnesses suggest Jacques Vallee’s heretical notion of a “multiverse” inhabited by all manner of humanoid intelligences, a hypothesis that begs a scientific analysis of unlikely “contact” reports attributed to indigenous beings such as fairies.
Alternatively, liminal beings like Kartott’s cigarette woman might represent a race of human-alien “hybrids,” as argued by Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs. Apparently unable to pass among us for great lengths of time, the hybrids’ overseers might be content to allow their creations to practice certain basic social skills in a relatively unbounded setting.
Of course, the answer could be a fusion of any of the above possibilities . . . or we could be dealing with a phenomenon generated at least partly by the psyche. The supposed aliens that witnesses see within and outside of UFOs might be examples of what Dr. John Mack termed “reified metaphor”—a physical intrusion of repressed archetypal forces. If so, it’s all-too-tempting to speculate that the daimonic reality traditionally accessed by shamanic cultures has begun to spill over into waking consciousness, manifesting as a veritable onslaught of beings quietly seeking to reassert their influence.
In a mechanistic society, the “Other” might find itself faced with extinction; violations of restricted airspace and face-to-face encounters with unsuspecting observers could amount to a kind of existential assertion, begging the possibility that our capacity for belief is somehow integral to our visitors’ reality . . . if, indeed, “visitors” is the proper term.
*
In Transformation, Whitley Strieber’s follow-up to his best-selling Communion, he relates an unusual encounter between Bruce Lee, a colleague in the publishing business, and two “people” with their faces obscured by scarves, hats, and sunglasses.
The beings, short in stature, were rapidly thumbing through copies of Communion and commenting on it. Intrigued, Lee asked them what they thought of the book, which had just hit bookshelves. Only then did he notice that, despite attempts to conceal their features, they appeared not unlike the iconic “Gray” featured on Communion’s cover.
I once asked Strieber about this incident in an online chat, curious if the beings Lee had supposedly seen were big-eyed Grays or more human-like, perhaps fitting the general description of “hybrids.” Strieber insisted the people in the bookstore were identical to the creature on the cover of Communion; further, he was convinced Lee had told him the truth. Strieber added that he had personally seen human-looking beings working with the Grays, but didn’t elaborate. Given his more recent musings on the nature of the abduction experience, one is left to wonder if the humans seen in the midst of apparent nonhumans are themselves alien in some crucial respect—or else nonhuman beings in exceptionally clever disguises.
Of course, many dismiss Strieber. Some of his assertions, while governed by a curious internal logic, seem too outlandish—or simply too frightening—to conscience. But similar episodes have been recounted by others. Taken together, these accounts paint a bizarre picture of “aliens” in our midst—some predominantly humanoid in appearance, others conforming to the “Gray” archetype.
Regularly described as frail or even sickly, these little-remarked visitors play a quiet but important role in the cryptoterrestrial agenda. They behave skittishly, as if painfully aware of the possibility of detection. Paradoxically, they can also act with surprising confidence, establishing a deep rapport with “normal” humans . . . and disappearing just as mysteriously. Like the fairies of Celtic mythology, these “emissaries” are enticingly liminal, at once worldly and wary. While they seem entirely physical, their home turf seems to be a Keelian interzone, as if their passport to our domain forever hovers on the verge of expiration.
Despite differences in appearance, commonly reported traits suggest a common origin. Cryptoterrestrials, like the Grays typically encountered in altered states or aboard evident vehicles, tend to have long fingers, pointed chins and large heads. Their complexion, usually pale or ashen, has also been described as olive or even sun-burned. Perhaps most revealingly, their eyes are almost always described as slanted and Asian-like, begging the possibility that, in an abstruse way, they are Asian, perhaps descendants of some lost colony that diverged from the genetic mainstream tens of thousands of years ago. Ever-reclusive, their successors may thrive below-ground or beneath bodies of water. (Geologists sometimes complain, with justified exasperation, that we know more about the surface of the Moon than the topology of our home planet.)
Incidentally, the “little people” of folklore are regularly sighted emerging from underground communities—a thread that we rediscover among recent accounts of alien abduction and even the enduring conspiracy lore of the American Southwest, where spindly beings from Zeta Reticuli are said to have established subterranean cities in conjunction with human scientists.
Visitation from the sky is at least as common. In The Invisible College, Jacques Vallee points out that all known creation myths involve beings from above. Anthropologists attribute this to our innate fascination with the Cosmos just above our heads, which plays such a pivotal role in the formation and sustained existence of our communities. But it’s just as possible that some of these mythical accounts stem from actual encounters with airborne “gods,” posing the notion that the cryptoterrestrials, despite their maddening ambiguity and disciplined stealth, may view themselves as our benefactors.
Indeed, ancient accounts of nonhuman intervention throw the modern spectacle of UFO abductions and sightings of humanoids into a disorienting light; while to all appearances it’s the “others” in dire need of us, there’s at least some reason to think we owe our existence to them. As we continue to sort through the subterfuge and misdi
rection, we find ourselves in a troublingly Escher-like territory, our own genetic legacy abruptly lost in the depths.
We find ourselves treading an existential ledge, wondering what role we ultimately play. The trite dichotomy of “humans” and “aliens” is revealed as inadequate; the truth is metamorphic, and so ancient that our co-existence with indigenous humanoids has become oddly invisible, a secret kept just out of conscious reach.
*
If the cryptoterrestrials are real and indeed “living among us” (or at least secluded in enclaves), they must have a sense of ethics, a guiding morality. Or at least it’s comforting to think so.
The simple fact that they haven’t taken over the planet could be proof that they harbor no genocidal grudge. But it could just as easily mean that they need us, either for our genes or for esoteric reasons. But this kicks up its own share of questions.
If they’re underpopulated and need humans to refresh their gene-pool, forsaking secrecy and claiming the planet on their own terms would allow their population to expand to viable proportions. We’d no longer be needed. So why are we allowed to continue to exist? By almost any ecological standard, we’re terrible neighbors. Do they feel sorry for us? Are they convinced that, through careful psychological engineering, they can improve our “relationship” (albeit without our consent), thus steering the biosphere from the brink of collapse?
Or are they even now eyeing our endeavors with mounting alarm and suspicion? Will there ever come a point that brings the CTs out of hiding—if only to turn the tables on their uneasy truce with our civilization?
Perhaps they’d like to but can’t. The evidence suggests they’re accomplished illusionists and insidiously clever strategists endowed with abilities once ascribed to the domain of magic. But they give little indication of violence, at least in a military sense. Perhaps their technology, remarkable as it is, isn’t conducive to the kind of effort required to invade and conquer; indeed, with our nuclear missiles and arsenal of “black ops” aircraft, we might pose a considerable threat to them. Like the vampires in Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger, the CTs might be a race in decline. Stealth, it seems, comes with a price: the lack of infrastructure we take for granted.
Maybe the CTs have no real plans for overt colonization. We tend to project our own tendencies onto “aliens”; if we were in their place, we’d inevitably feel subjugated, even claustrophobic. Inevitably, at least some of us would choose to fight back, even if our efforts were desperate and feeble. But the CTs remain strangely pacifist. Either they really are at the mercy of our omnipresent postindustrial society or they have plans in store that we have yet to discern.
In The Threat, David Jacobs argues that alien hybrids will ultimately reign, with humans reduced to a secondary role. One could reasonably argue that the CTs are waging a long-term war of attrition, slowly but methodically creating an army of hybrids to inherit and transform the human world. But folkloric evidence begs us to look in other directions. If “they” merely wanted the planet they could have taken it from us long ago, before the invention of doomsday weapons and modern surveillance technology. Instead, they seem to have left us to take our own route—or at least leave us with this impression.
Given that they’re content to remain marginal, we must consider that we’re more than a reserve of DNA. The CTs must have other, less pragmatic, motives. Witness accounts offer tantalizing hints that the CTs are at least as intrigued by our minds as they are dependent on our genes. If so, we could be more than we think we are.
The CTs could be reaping an invisible harvest grown in the fertile soil of Mind itself. Limited to short-term agendas and materialistic obsessions, we wouldn’t necessarily notice. But if the CTs’ penchant for psychodrama persists through the next century—and so far it shows no signs of stopping—we just might catch a more expansive look at their goals.
But will we like what we see?
CHAPTER 11
Final Thoughts
Greg Bishop posits that brushes with the paranormal, just like encounters with genuine art, convey meaning by remaining purposefully elusive. My own creative powers (such as they are) suffer when I try to adhere to a template, which is one of the reasons I try to keep away from writing “how-to” texts, as seductive as some of them are. But when I relax my guard—never an easy trick—I find that meaning and structure often arise as if of their own volition.
The field of ufology suffers from a related problem, the toxic assumption that UFOs and other elements of forteana must necessarily yield to a single consciously derived explanation—whether the hallowed Extraterrestrial Hypothesis or something else.
I’d argue that Budd Hopkins’ insistence that the small, white-skinned entities are literal “aliens” is as lamentably simple-minded as Susan Clancy’s own wholesale ignorance of the abduction enigma as portrayed in her book, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. “Aliens in jumpsuits” may simply be how the modern Western mind reacts to a “reality-transforming” stimulus.
In a similar manner, explaining the beings as ancestral ghosts could be equally valid. In each case, the mind accesses a comprehensible psychic vocabulary to describe an event that may defy empirical analysis.
This isn’t to say Hopkins is wrong; perhaps we really are dealing with more-or-less comprehensible biped aliens with white skin and a penchant for shiny jumpsuits. But the UFO encounter evidence has roots that go far deeper than the contemporary infatuation with “abductions.” When the phenomenon is examined historically, it seems more likely that the “aliens” insinuate themselves into a given cultural matrix by appealing to ready-made mythological constructs—thus the near-endless procession of elves, dwarves, fairies, and saucer-pilots that haunt our attempts to discern the “other.”
I think someone is here. But to ascribe nonhuman visitation to Hopkins’ meddling intruders is to play into a long-standing perceptual trap . . . and the toll might not be merely intellectual.
If we’re dealing with a truly alien intelligence, there’s no promise that its thinking will be linear. Indeed, its inherent weirdness might serve as an appeal to an aspect of the psyche we’ve allowed to atrophy. It might be trying to rouse us from our stupor, in which case it’s tempting to wonder if the supposed ETs are literally us in some arcane sense.
*
I alternate between grave misanthropy and chomping-at-the-bit optimism. If the human species is destined to fail—wiped out by its own toxic excesses or slaughtered by warfare—I see no real point in continuing; an extraterrestrial biologist could argue that we’re simply taking up time in which the planet could excrete a new biosphere from which a more promising intelligence might arise.
But of course we don’t know where we’re headed. So we make educated forecasts and hope that our warnings are heeded before it’s too late. All too often this seems like an exercise in futility. Sometimes I fear that we’ve reached a critical threshold, that the human population will be decimated before we can ensure a meaningful, abundant world for ourselves and our descendants (who may well not be human in the contemporary sense). For Earth and its teeming billions of passengers, the end is always nigh; for too long we’ve relied on blind luck and narrow escapes. Despite brushes with cataclysm and the rigors of evolution, we’ve survived—but only barely.
Although I harbor serious reservations about humanity’s ability to make the evolutionary cut, I’m not without hope. I sense great things in the making. I enjoy experiencing this dire, ever-accelerating point in our species’ history; our potential as genuine cosmic citizens challenges the imagination and stretches conceptual boundaries to dizzy extremes.
I’m willing to embrace transcendence or endure extinction. I must perpetually concede either possibility, no matter how dramatically different, regardless of how exciting or dismal. I walk a fine existential edge, fearing and cherishing, enlivened by a vertiginous sense of astonishment and horror.
Afterword
Mac Tonnies was a
kindred spirit and an inspiration to me because he always seemed to be able to express difficult and exciting concepts in an eloquent manner. In his quiet, but insistent way, Mac was also metaphorically smacking UFO researchers in the back of the head, asking them to consider an idea that is so old that it’s new: What if “aliens” aren’t from other planets?
The extraterrestrial belief that has a stranglehold on many of us will loosen its grip when popular views of physics and perception move away from the late 19th century models that have dominated them for so long. When “now” becomes the “everywhen,” and we fully absorb the implications of the effect of the observer on the observed and our complicity in the continuous creation of our reality, UFOs and other paranormal phenomena may hold less mystery for us. The Cryptoterrestrials is one of the first boulders hurled at the modern citadel of entrenched conventional wisdom.
This book is reaching us at the right time. Perhaps the worst thing about Mac’s tragic early death at age 34 is the realization that there were so many more books he was going to write—not all on UFOs and non-humans, but speculative titles delving deeply into the connections between science fiction, futurism, cutting-edge science, and the paranormal, and how they affect each other and therefore our popular views on the unexplained. He immersed himself in these subjects and found insight, which he passed on to readers.
The Cryptoterrestrials could do for the paranormal what Colin Wilson’s 1958 volume The Outsider did for modern philosophy: ask the difficult questions and offer insights that almost no one had thought of. Wilson dealt with the inner workings of the creative mind; Tonnies surfs modern ideas about UFOs and “aliens” and probes the tributaries that most others prefer to ignore. If this book can cause a tempest in the teacup that is “ufology,” then perhaps it can spill over into the mainstream culture.
