by Mac Tonnies
It might take the world a little while to catch up. Mac admits early on that his proposal is anything but modest and is almost guaranteed to turn off both the seasoned UFO chaser and the casual dilettante. This volume is probably not for the uninitiated, or those who don’t accept the idea that we are interacting in some way with something that is not us. Once we allow this as a serious possibility, a whole host of questions rear their scary heads. Mac used this as a working hypothesis, but since he was not a card-carrying paranormal researcher, he was never anointed by the UFO cognoscenti, and he most assuredly didn’t care.
In our conversations, he never once mentioned any involvement in a nighttime “UFO watch,” nor had he interviewed a UFO witness and filed a report, or critically questioned an abduction researcher. For many, this brings up the scary specter of “armchair research,” the bugaboo of ET believer and skeptic alike. We spoke on a few occasions about the as-yet unchristened discipline of “theoretical ufology” and how this should not be considered a derisive term.
Perhaps the main purpose of The Cryptoterrestrials is to encourage the fermentation of ideas. I wrote a commentary on this subject for the UFO Mystic blog recently:
This method [theoretical discourse] is of course well established in other, more conventional disciplines as a way of pushing research into new areas. Perhaps one of the best examples is in the area of physics, where theory often has real-world applications. Of course the study of UFOs is not a science, but methods of reaching for new knowledge applies here too. The fact that no one has come to any verifiable conclusions about the subject in over fifty years should make some realize that the pain will stop once we stop banging our heads on the wall.
The complaint that many of the old guard (and some of the new) level against theories without field work may be wearing thin. Many theories come into being by observing and collating data. Some of the more robust ideas are further backed up by repeatable results. Since we cannot do this with UFO sightings, we are left to sift data that has been painstakingly collected over many years.
Don’t think for a minute that Tonnies believed wholeheartedly in what you read here. His speculation is sincere. His thoughts are well reasoned. But he was not ready to latch on to any theories (even his own) to the exclusion of others. In the UFO field, those who do are guaranteed to look like fools sooner or later. Tonnies adopted this attitude not to avoid ridicule, but because it appears to be the only sane approach. This book is an honest pursuit of ideas that might lead to some greater understanding of the paranormal and the existence of an apparent non-human intelligence. The concepts expressed herein will germinate in new generations of UFO students, as thinkers like John Keel, Jacques Vallee, Jim Brandon, and even Whitley Strieber kindled new ideas in us. If there is a dividing line between the old and new in this field, Mac’s last book highlights that line with a fluorescent glow.
The time in which Mac Tonnies came of age arrived when I was well into my 30s. In college, I did research in libraries and typed my term papers on an IBM PC Junior with a whopping 64 kilobytes of random access memory and a nimble processor speed of 3.5MHz (my basic Macintosh now runs 4,500 times faster and cost me much less). In many ways, I am dangerously close to being a dinosaur. Mac moved in the world of cyberspace as a native, and his thinking was forged in the more abstract and nonlocal popular logic of the last decade. He taught this postmodern language to me in our many phone and internet conversations, as well as on the few occasions that I was lucky enough to hang out with him.
This is why The Cryptoterrestrials will find its most lasting home amongst generations Y and Z—in an age where numerous “experts” have lost their halos after getting it wrong so many times, or in the loud denial of a phenomenon which continues to assert itself through reports from thousands of sincere and often educated witnesses from all over the world.
Blinded by the stark black-and-white of witness testimony (often procured with leading and narrow questions), researchers are often working under the assumption that with UFOs, what you see is what you get, and damn the anomalous data that doesn’t fit the ET mold. Many excite themselves with what I refer to as “UFO porno”—sighting reports, government documents, and the occasional out-of-focus video. The majority of purveyors and consumers of these artifacts are not really interested in any answers. They already have one. With no commonly accepted proof to back up their claims, they already know that it’s aliens from outer space. That attitude is not necessarily wrong, but it is incredibly limiting.
We have no solid answers to the UFO puzzle and those who realize that fact should be excited by new ideas. While some might dismiss Mac Tonnies’ writings as “psychological mumbo-jumbo,” the inquiring and circumspect among us should take his arguments under serious advisement. Evolution does not come to a reverent halt simply because a generation wants to think that they are at (or nearly at) the venerated end of a long search for the “truth.” Prejudices blur our view, and we should be aware of this while in pursuit of a phenomenon that seems to take advantage of our emotional responses.
The Cryptoterrestrials asks us to consider the role that we play in creating our UFO myths. We might perceive the ufonauts as kindly, since the “invasion” appears benign to us, in the sense that it does not affect the daily lives of most people. These intrusions might be affected in a way that is so subliminal that our psychological and cultural overlay is virtually all that remains in thousands of reports of “aliens” and “UFOs,” with only a slight whisper of the real source left to puzzle us. Whether this comes from outer space or closer to home, it could be what an intelligence outside our own may do to introduce themselves, or are perhaps attempts to do so time after time over millennia. The UFO “reality” is probably co-creation. Our cultural background and expectations combined with the phenomenon itself produces a result that is more than the sum of its parts, and many of us continue to insist on looking at the finger rather than where it may be pointing.
For the generic UFO researcher and most of the public, the extraterrestrial hypothesis is that comforting finger. It flatters our prejudices and extrapolates neatly from concepts embedded deeply in western culture from at least the early 20th century. The meme may have been planted perhaps as far back as 1727, when Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, which described a race of beings obsessed with mathematics who live on a flying island called Laputa. In 1892, Australian Robert Potter produced a novel entitled The Germ Growers, which described a stealth invasion by aliens who make themselves appear human and develop a disease to wipe out the dominant species. Six years later, H.G. Wells published War Of The Worlds. Wells actually contemplated an alternate ending to his story concerning a future where humans move underground to conduct a generations-long guerilla war against the conquering Martians, much as Mac proposes in this volume, albeit with Homo sapiens playing the part of the “invaders” and the crypto-race fighting for survival in the face of encroaching modernity.
One of Mac’s favorite authors was Charles Fort, compiler of strange natural anomalies who famously wrote “I think we’re property” in his Book Of The Damned, which reached astonished readers in 1919. Fort speculated that at least some of the witnessed phenomena he culled from scientific journals and the popular press of his time could be ascribed to a vast intelligence which existed outside of contemporary concepts of reality, and whose machinations appeared absurd from our point of view. Fort imagined a godlike entity that messed with humanity for its own ends and perhaps even for amusement. Later in the century, after decades of sightings and close encounter cases, we have devolved into narrowly bifurcated discussions of evil or benevolent space visitors. It seems that we have not kept pace with our expected intellectual evolution.
At the dawn of the 21st century, advances in nanotechnology allow us to speculate on devices so small that almost infinite numbers of them could invade and change our world undetected. The garden-variety UFO researcher usually ignores this tributary in favor of flashy ships from Zeta
Reticuli. As Tonnies writes: “While scintillating ‘spaceships’ and irradiated landing sites are certainly cause for wonder and scientific concern, they appear suspiciously mired in the science fantasies of the previous century.” Mac is extrapolating here with postmodern technology and insights, breaking free of the old science-fiction model that has mired the study of UFOs for so long.
One month before his death, Mac was a guest on the popular Coast to Coast radio show, reaching an audience of millions. He sounded at ease and confident in his opinions, and presented himself and his ideas like a pro: clearly and simply. After he went off the air, I called to offer post-interview encouragement and to hear what he thought about his appearance. In contrast to what I expected, he was thrilled with the experience and humble in its afterglow, with little of the self-doubt I expected based on his feelings about his past media exposure. The hell of it now is that he was poised to become the one of the most eloquent spokesman for a new popularization of the anti-ET school.
On reading Mac’s last book, what we are left with is a mind cutting through much of the self-satisfied, bloated fundamentalist fat of the last fifty years with the deft touch of a surgeon and the encyclopedic knowledge of a veteran. Keep this book on your shelf. It will be an important reference for years to come.
– Greg Bishop
Acknowledgments
Many people have assisted in and supported my writing The Cryptoterrestrials, but a few stand out as particularly gracious and encouraging. In no particular order:
Elan Levitan
Nick Redfern
Paul Kimball
David Biedny and Gene Steinberg
Greg Bishop
Patrick Huyghe
William Michael Mott
“Mr. Ecks”
Michael Garrett
And, of course, everyone who’s taken the time to
comment on my weblog, Posthuman Blues.
Bibliography
Colin Bennett, Looking for Orthon (Paraview Press, 2001)
Marc Davenport, Visitors from Time (Greenleaf Publications, 1994)
Richard Dolan, UFOs and the National Security State (Keyhole Publishing, 2000)
John Fuller, The Interrupted Journey (Souvenir Press Ltd.)
Timothy Good, Alien Base (Harper Perennial, 1999)
Budd Hopkins, Intruders (Ballantine Books, 1997)
Budd Hopkins and Carol Rainey, Sight Unseen (Pocket Star, 2004)
Patrick Huyghe, The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials (Avon Books, 1996)
David Jacobs, Secret Life (Touchstone, 1993)
John Keel, The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings (Tor Books, 2002)
John Keel, The Eighth Tower (Signet, 1977)
John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies (Tor Books, 2002)
John Mack, Abduction (Ballantine Books, 1997)
Ivan Sanderson, Invisible Residents (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2005)
Ivan Sanderson, Uninvited Visitors (Spearman, 1969)
Whitley Strieber, Communion (Avon, 1988)
Richard Thompson, Alien Indentities (Govardhan Hill, 1995)
Jacques Vallee, The Invisible College (Dutton, 1975)
Jacques Vallee, Dimensions (Ballantine Books, 1989)
R.A. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger (New Falcon Publications, 1991)
About the Author
Mac Tonnies (1975-2009) was an author and blogger whose work focused on futurology, transhumanism, and the paranormal. Tonnies grew up in Independence, Missouri. He was the author of two other books, a collection of science fiction short stories entitled Illumined Black, and After the Martian Apocalypse, an examination of the anomalies on the surface of Mars. His popular blog was called Posthuman Blues. Tonnies died at the age of 34 in Kansas City, Missouri.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Second Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Editor's Note
Foreword
Chapter One: Looking for Aliens
Chapter Two: Misdirection
Chapter Three: UFOs and the ETH
Chapter Four: The Abduction Epidemic
Chapter Five: Encounter with a Flower
Chapter Six: Curious Bystanders
Chapter Seven: The Superspectrum
Chapter Eight: Water World
Chapter Nine: Underground
Chapter Ten: Among Us
Chapter Eleven: Final Thoughts
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
About the Author
