Over the course of the last 60 years or so, the world of Ufology has spawned a truly huge number of books: many very good indeed, a not-insignificant number very bad, and a great deal hovering precariously somewhere in between. Just occasionally, however, a title comes along that is truly revolutionary, ground-breaking and - as far as its potential implications are concerned - thought-provoking in the extreme.
For me, personally, Jacque Vallee's Messengers of Deception and John Keel's UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse both fall into that latter category. Albeit in admittedly different ways, Vallee and Keel made equally strong cases for the existence of genuine UFOs in our midst. But, both Messengers and Trojan delivered to the reader two far more explicit messages: (A) UFOs are real; but that doesn't mean they are necessarily extraterrestrial; and (B) the phenomenon is clearly deceptive and manipulative in nature and intent.
Of course, for many of the longstanding (a.k.a. the bloody old) players within Ufology, any talk of deceptive messengers, or of Keel's super-spectrum, is dismissed as mere speculation and not much else. For them, UFOs have to be extraterrestrial. After all, they have upheld such notions and beliefs for decades; and to relegate them to the rubbish-bin is not an option.
Well, I have a few choice words for those people who are so rigidly set in their ways: the extraterrestrial hypothesis is itself entirely speculative and totally lacking in hard evidence. All we really know for certain is that there most assuredly is a genuine UFO phenomenon. But, as for definitive proof of its actual point of origin or origins? Please! There is none. At all. There is merely a lot of data clearly demonstrating the presence of unidentified "others" amongst us.
Vallee and Keel most assuredly and astutely recognized this. They understood that a puzzle which - at first glance - seemed to be defined by the presence of nuts-and-bolts spacecraft and flesh-and-blood aliens in our midst, was far, far stranger than many within Ufology wanted to admit.
And there was someone else who also recognized this ufological factor: Mac Tonnies. Mac was a very good friend of mine; and like all his friends I was shocked to the core when he passed away suddenly and tragically in October 2009, at the age of only 34.
But, I am pleased to say, Mac's latest - and, inevitably, final - piece of work ensures that his memory, legacy and ability to think outside of the conventional ufological box will live on. That work is The Cryptoterrestrials: A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and the Aliens Among Us.
Like Vallee and Keel, Mac rightly recognized that UFO encounters could not be dismissed as the ravings of lunatics, the tales of the fantasy-prone, or the lies of those seeking fame and fortune. But, he was also careful not to get sucked into the near-viral mindset that practically screams (take a deep breath): UFOs = alien spaceships piloted by little gray chaps from across the galaxy, who are on a mission to save their dying race by stealing our DNA, eggs and sperm.
Rather, Mac - right up until the time of his death - was chasing down the theory suggesting that the UFOnauts may actually represent the last vestiges of a very ancient race of distinctly terrestrial origins; a race that - tens of thousands of years ago may have ruled our planet, but whose position of power was thrown into overwhelming chaos by two things: (A) the appearance of a "debilitating genetic syndrome" that ravaged their society; and (B) the rising infestation of a violent species that threatened to eclipse - in number - their own society.
They are the Cryptoterrestrials. And that violent species that blusters around like an insane, unruly and spoiled child, and that has done more damage in its short life-time than can ever be truly imagined, is, of course, us.
With their society waning, their health and ability to even successfully reproduce collapsing, and their absolute worst nightmare - the Human Race - becoming the new gang in town, the Cryptoterrestrials followed what was perceived as the only viable option: they quietly retreated into the shadows, into the darkened corners of our world, below the oceans, into the deeper caverns that pepper the planet, and in their own uniquely silent and detached way, set about a new course of action.
That course of action - given that they were in some fashion genetically related to the Human Race - was to eventually resurface; to move amongst us in stealth; to pass themselves off as entities from far-off worlds (as part of a concerted effort to protect and hide their real point of origin); and to use and exploit us - medically - in an attempt to try and inject their waning species with a considerable amount of new blood: ours.
In addition, Mac believed, the Cryptoterrestrials were - and, by definition, still are - subtle-yet-brilliant, cosmic magicians. For them, however, there is no top-hat from which a white-rabbit is pulled. There is no hot babe sliced in half and then miraculously rejoined at the waist. No: their tricks are far more fantastic. As well as deceiving us about their origins, the Cryptoterrestrials have - via, perhaps, the use of advanced hologram-style technology, mind-manipulation and much more - led us to conclude that they have an infinite number of craft, resources and technologies at their disposal.
And that is the trick, the ruse: in actuality, their numbers today may be very small. They may well be staging faked UFO events to try and convince us that they have a veritable armada at their disposal when, perhaps, the exact opposite is the case. And, most important of all, they desperately want us to think of them as visitors from the stars. If their plan to rejuvenate their species is to work, then stealth, subterfuge and camouflage are the essential orders of the day.
Of course, the above all amounts to a theory - just like the ETH. And, Mac's book makes it very clear that he is theorizing, rather than being able to provide the reader with definitive proof for such a scenario. He does, however, offer a logical, and at times powerful, argument in support of the theme of his book.
As for so-called "alien abductions": the clumsy, intrusive means by which ova and sperm are taken by a race of beings we are led to believe are countless years ahead of us is addressed. That the ability of the aliens to wipe out the memories of those they abduct is constantly and regularly overturned by nothing more than simple hypnosis is highlighted. And the unlikely scenario that our DNA would even be compatible, in the first place, with extraterrestrial entities is also firmly dissected. Mac's conclusion: all this points not to the presence of highly-advanced aliens who are thousands of years ahead of us; but to the actions of an ancient Earth-based society whose technology may not be more than a century or so in advance of our current knowledge.
Mac also noted how the "aliens" seem to spend a hell of a lot time ensuring they are seen: whether its taking "soil-samples" at the side of the road; equipping their craft with bright, flashing lights; or hammering home the point to the abductees that they are from this planet, from that star-system, or from some far off galaxy. Just about anywhere aside from right here, in fact.
Roswell comes into the equation, too: and in ingenious fashion. Those who do not adhere to the extraterrestrial hypothesis for Roswell point to the fact that many of the witness descriptions of what was found at Roswell, are collectively suggestive of some form of large balloon-type structure having come down at the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, NM on that fateful day in the summer of 1947.
The possibility that ET would be flying around New Mexico in a balloon is absurd. But, as Mac notes, a race of impoverished, underground-dwellers, highly worried by the sudden influx of military activity in New Mexico (White Sands, Los Alamos etc), just might employ the use of an advance balloon-type vehicle to secretly scope out the area late at night.
Perhaps, when elements of the U.S. military came across the debris, they really did assume it was balloon-borne material and probably of American origin. Until, maybe, they stumbled across something else amid the debris, too...
The Cryptoterrestrials continues in a similar vein; to the extent that we are left with a stark and surreal image of a very ancient - and very strange - race of beings who may once have been the masters of this planet; who were sidelined thousands of years ago; and who are now - under cover of darkness and while the cities sleep - forced to grudgingly surface from their darkened lairs and interact with the very things they fear (and perhaps even hate and despise) most of all: us.
Survival is the name of their game. And deception is the means by which it is being cunningly achieved.
Whether you agree with Mac's theorizing or not, The Cryptoterrestrials is a book that is expertly and beautifully written. It challenges the reader to throw out old, rigid views. It represents the careful studies of a man who knew he was going out on a limb - but who, thankfully, didn't give a damn about appeasing the UFO research community in fawning style. And, for me, it truly is a Messengers of Deception for the 21st Century and for Generation-Next.
To learn more about Mac Tonnies' The Cryptoterrestrials, and where to purchase copies, click on the Anomalist Books website.
8 comments:
Nice review of the book, Nick. Thank you very much. For those who wish to take in all of the important possibilities, this seems like a must read.
I'll begin by saying I haven't yet read Mac's book, but that it's definitely on my shortlist.
But I am familiar with his ideas and his inclinations in this area. That they were a nice antidote to the
prevailing UFO cliches and the tired debates regarding the exact extraterrestrial origins of this phenomenon is an understatement. Much of what circulates in the UFO family these days is so lacking in sophistication and intellectual rigor that it has the all the appeal of a whiney teenage know-it-all. Which is to say, it grates and is very embarrassing for those who have grown up and moved beyond such sophomoric declarations, only to find that they have entered a state of deep ambiguity and deeper paradox.
Mac will be missed as someone who could help us find a safe passage through this maze and mystery.
Having said that, I sometimes find myself questioning a line of speculation that still cleaves to a materialist way of thinking, albeit in a way that is seductively exotic and new. In other words, we may be missing an opportunity to evolve our thinking on this problem in a way that allows us to re-state the question. Crucially, I think we may need to shift the locus of our investigations away from its exterior position and move it to the center, the center that is everywhere. That may seem pretty cryptic, but given the circumstances of our dilemma, and true to Mac's spirit, cryptic is the message that needs to be solved, the unknown language learnt, the story revealed so that its meaning can be told.
We barely understand the operations of our own mind, though the materialists would trot out the nihilistic analogy of computation and mechanism, and say that once we've dismantled the universe, we can reverse engineer God's own toy, and put together a better machine that whirs and whizzes with such efficiency and speed that it will annihilate mystery and ambiguity and establish an eternal tyranny of reason over absurdity. Perhaps that's a gross caricature of scientific materialism, but I think it draws a crude but accurate picture of where we're at with much of our thinking.
If we wiggle free of the scientists' firm grasp, maybe what we discover is that this is really a story about a radical participation in reality, where the elements of time and space provide a rich fabric for invention and creativity. In this place we find that nuts-and-bolts are a fuzzy metaphorical substance that seem to hold an evolving narrative together. Terence McKenna once said that the world is made of language, and perhaps this is literally true, so to speak. What kind of revelation would it be to wake up and discover that you were somehow the author of a universe of your own design, not a solipsitic prison, but a vast, active, living, intelligent narrative that grows and shapes itself according to the myriad plotlines that emerge from the deep places within, which are actually all without as well. Inside, outside, the false dichotomies surrender to a newer perception that we are indivisably united in a project whose artistry is so richly realized and expressed that nothing so crude as a theory or explanation could ever do it justice. Art for art's sake, the eternal reward in the experience itself.
But what of these aliens, these crypto-terrestials? If we abandon the idea that inside and out are somehow mutually exclusive domains, but are rather deeply comingled in a type of creative intimacy that produces every conceiveable novelty that can ever imagine itself into being, then we may take several steps closer to what it is we do as the authors of reality. Perhaps, just perhaps, we are the dreamers' dream, now dreaming other dreams, in an ever expanding fractal dimension that exists only because something so beautiful MUST exist, and everything in it is the sweet reflection of God's own face.
This book has just become a must read for me! Thanks so much for the review!
If I may... there was a similar theory that was batted about back in the '70s by some semi-evangelical types who forwarded the proposition that most know today as the UFOs-are-angels/demons concept.
These folks, who were on the tail end of the old Jesus freak movement, believed that UFOs were either angelic; aka: good or demonic; aka bad. Further, they believed that the bad ones were out to discover how to reinvent themselves so that they could procreate.
Evidently, being immortal is not all it’s cracked up to be because they are a static race that cannot grow in numbers or evolve beyond what they are now. But in humanity, there is that spark of the divine that allows for a soul, for self-replication and evolution of both the body and spirit.
We are indeed both envied and despised.
Anyway, it's still one helluva theory that I am glad to see come back around again.
Best :)
Thanks for the posts, Guys! Mac's book is definitely provoking a lot of commentary and observation.
Great review, can't wait to get the new book, and hope that the new http://macbots.wordpress.com/ can help keep the memory (and energy) of Mac alive...!!!
Good God! Richard Shaver and Raymond Palmer must be giving each other high-fives right now!
I sorely wish I owned a copy of this book; if I had gainful employment, you can rest assured I would own a copy. With that said, I have been an advocate of what I'll term the Crypto-Terrestrial Thesis for most of the previous decade. I largely came to it on my own, after having read books by John Keel and professor David Jacobs.
In any event, here's a little essay I wrote on the topic about four years or so ago. I hope people find it to be of interest:
I've read quite a lot on the subject of Unidentified Flying Objects, "alien abductions," and the like, over the last three decades (the best writers on the subject are, in my opinion, independent researcher John Keel, San Jose attorney William Bramley, and Professor David M. Jacobs of Temple University in Philadelphia), and while I have come to very few entirely firm conclusions on the topic, I have largely come to embrace a fairly unusual theory.
Firstly, let's examine an idea that has become somewhat cliched in recent years, which to say the notion that people in the past (say over one thousand years ago) were also plagued by UFOs, alien abductions, etc., but that due to the time in which they lived, they interpreted those experiences differently, as elves, fairies, leprechauns, trolls, goblins, sorcerers, magic, and the like.
Today, in an industrio-technological society, people don't claim to have been whisked off by elvenfolk to some magical faery realm beneath the toadstool rings, but rather they claim to have been taken aboard an interstellar spacecraft. Instead of claiming to have had sexual relations with a demonic succubus (or an incubus, for the ladies), they claim to have been involved in experimentation and/or procedures involving the stimulation and activation of the human sexual reproductive system.
The problem with the frankly arrogant and unimaginative mindset that dominates the Western materialist frame of reference (and please don't get me wrong; I'm pretty much a committed Western materialist my own darn self, irrespective of my criticism of certain Fundamentalist and/or dullard strains within the Western materialist milieu) is that when presented with the facts in the previous two paragraphs, the adherent to the Western materialist mindset tends almost inexorably to view the experiences of people in the 11th century as so much fanciful hogwash, while interpreting the confused ramblings of contemporary contactees as potentially akin to Holy Writ (obviously, most Western materialists are extremely skeptical of the entire UFO/alien abduction phenomena; I'm speaking of those who even give the subject the serious and rational consideration which is its due, rather than merely dismissing it with the haughty disdain religious heretics the world over have come to know and, er, "love," I guess).
But just suppose for an instant that not only are the perceptions of spacecraft and extraterrestrial beings not accurate in themselves, but that the ancient observations made by Celtic peasants and Lakota hunters were actually closer to the mark. That's not a thought that occurs to very many people ie., that elves & faeries are a better explanation of the UFO narrative than are E.T.s, but it occurred to me recently that just maybe it is, and the more I've thought about it, the more it seems like perhaps I just may be onto something.
I sorely wish I owned a copy of this book; if I had gainful employment, you can rest assured I would own a copy. With that said, I have been an advocate of what I'll term the Crypto-Terrestrial Thesis for most of the previous decade. I largely came to it on my own, after having read books by John Keel and professor David Jacobs.
In any event, here's a little essay I wrote on the topic about four years or so ago. I hope people find it to be of interest:
I've read quite a lot on the subject of Unidentified Flying Objects, "alien abductions," and the like, over the last three decades (the best writers on the subject are, in my opinion, independent researcher John Keel, San Jose attorney William Bramley, and Professor David M. Jacobs of Temple University in Philadelphia), and while I have come to very few entirely firm conclusions on the topic, I have largely come to embrace a fairly unusual theory.
Firstly, let's examine an idea that has become somewhat cliched in recent years, which to say the notion that people in the past (say over one thousand years ago) were also plagued by UFOs, alien abductions, etc., but that due to the time in which they lived, they interpreted those experiences differently, as elves, fairies, leprechauns, trolls, goblins, sorcerers, magic, and the like.
Today, in an industrio-technological society, people don't claim to have been whisked off by elvenfolk to some magical faery realm beneath the toadstool rings, but rather they claim to have been taken aboard an interstellar spacecraft. Instead of claiming to have had sexual relations with a demonic succubus (or an incubus, for the ladies), they claim to have been involved in experimentation and/or procedures involving the stimulation and activation of the human sexual reproductive system.
The problem with the frankly arrogant and unimaginative mindset that dominates the Western materialist frame of reference (and please don't get me wrong; I'm pretty much a committed Western materialist my own darn self, irrespective of my criticism of certain Fundamentalist and/or dullard strains within the Western materialist milieu) is that when presented with the facts in the previous two paragraphs, the adherent to the Western materialist mindset tends almost inexorably to view the experiences of people in the 11th century as so much fanciful hogwash, while interpreting the confused ramblings of contemporary contactees as potentially akin to Holy Writ (obviously, most Western materialists are extremely skeptical of the entire UFO/alien abduction phenomena; I'm speaking of those who even give the subject the serious and rational consideration which is its due, rather than merely dismissing it with the haughty disdain religious heretics the world over have come to know and, er, "love," I guess).
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