The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis

What if the aliens are from Earth?

What if we've been living side by side, right here, for thousands of years?

That may sound like the plot of 'made for Sy Fy' movie or series, but it's a theory that's been kicking around since the 1970s, when Jacques Vallee began to compare UFO encounters of the 50s forward to fairy folk encounters of previous centuries.

Now of course the idea of 'ancient aliens' is so popular that cable TV can't seem to make enough shows about it, and any ancient artifact featuring big eyes or a bird in it gets interpreted as proof that we were visited by space beings in early antiquity.

In The Cryptoterrestrials, Mac Tonnies offers a focused essay on why aliens and UFOs may well be creatures from right here on earth. Tonnies died not long after the book came out, which is tragic. He had a nimble mind and brought a critical perspective to a topic woefully short on intelligent criticism.

Here are a few things to think about:

• Why would aliens abduct humans for the purpose of genetic merging? Why would we expect to be compatible in that way? Perhaps we are compatible because we are dealing with one branch of human creatures trying to borrow genetic qualities from another branch of human creatures, like Neanderthals and Cromagnons.
• Alien abductions make the most sense as theater. Using two of the most powerful human emotions--fear and sex--the typical alien abduction seems to parody our science and the way we treat animals in the name of science. Maybe this seeming parody is the point.
• Grey aliens look way too much like human beings. There are creatures right here on earth, countless creatures, which look nothing like us. Why do supposed creatures from 'outer space' look like more fragile, big-eyed versions of ourselves?
• Accounts of kidnappings by otherworldly beings (such as fairies) go back hundreds and even thousands of years. Perhaps 'alien abduction' is just the latest cultural explanation for a terrestrial phenomenon that is much older. 

I personally like the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis and would like to expand up on it future posts, even though it is not all the popular at present.

In the meantime, check out Mac Tonnies' book, if you can get your hands on it.

It's sure the be worth more once it goes out of print.

The Significance of Time in UFO Sightings and Alien Abduction Experiences

Time distortions play an important role in many UFO sightings and in nearly all alien abduction experiences. For example:

• Abductees report episodes of 'missing' time and time distortion most of the time. Sometimes they find themselves unable to account for several hours on a routine trip. Sometimes abductees report feeling like days have passed during the experience when the actual amount of time that passed was hours or minutes.
• UFO sightings are also sometimes accompanied by time distortions. One especially fascinating distortion (which is by no means universal) involves the stoppage of time. Watches, car ignitions, and digital displays shut down in the presence of a UFO, but often time itself also seems to have stopped. When the vehicle clock is checked again, the sighting seems to have occurred outside of time, as if time itself had stopped, not just the watch.
• When UFOs at a distance are sighted by pilots and others, the motion of the UFO is often described as jerky or "like a stone skipping on water." In other words, the UFO does not always move in a straight fluid line. Instead it seems to appear one place, then another, then another, with gaps in between, in much the same way that film appears when the reel is slowed way down. Kevin Arnold, who is often credited with the having seen the first UFO (I think this is not correct but it is a standard description) explained the movement of the objects he saw as jerky in this way. Some observers describe it as the UFO 'blinking in and out.'
• When veteran ufologist John Keel first reported the Men In Black phenomena, he noted that the way these 'men' dressed and spoke, as well as the cars they tended to drive, were 'off' in terms of time. That is, the clothing was from the 40s or 50s, the cars were from that era also, and the slang used was dated to the point of being sometimes comical.
• One of the most frequently used non-explanations of UFO sightings and alien abductions is temporal lobe epilepsy. The temporal lobe is the part of the brain that processes incoming verbal information and memory, and also, our sense of time.

It seems to me that this might be a clue to what is going on with at least some the more unusual sightings, the ones that can't be explained in other ways. I'm not sure the answer is as simple as 'time travel'. But I do think that in many of the stranger examples, distortions of time are important.

Theoretical physics has already discovered that time is more than a sequence of causal events arranged like a line through space.

Human beings perceive time this way, but that isn't how physicists necessarily understand it. We have to be careful about taking complex ideas and reducing them to New Age blather, but then again, it seems that something genuine is going on here. We just don't know what it is.

Yet.

I'd like to go on, but I'm not a physicist and I don't have... um, time.

But it's something to consider, no? 

Witchcraft and Aliens: Were Medieval Witches Actually Early Abductees?

Between the 14th and 18th centuries, somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 people on the European continent were tried and executed for witchcraft. Most of these people were burned alive in the public square of the nearest town, and most were also tortured before burning. Between 70% and 80% of all 'witches' executed were women, but many men, children, and even animals were executed as well.

What is most strange about the witchcraft trials of medieval Europe is that, despite being studied in great detail by historians and scholars of many stripes and biases, no single persuasive explanation has emerged for why they took place.

What is also interesting is that medieval 'witches' had much in common with today's 'abductees', and the witch hunters also resemble some of today's abduction 'researchers' in surprisingly consistent ways.

Something fairly powerful has to be going on either inside the public imagination or out in the real world or both, in order to sustain nearly four centuries of torture, carnage, and religious persecution. The Church did not simply try and burn witches: It aggressively sought them out to try and burn them.

The infamous Malleus Maleficarum (compiled in 1486) is a detailed instructional Church manual on how to identify a witch and what to do when you find one. Professional witch hunters, employed by the Church, roamed the European countryside searching out witches and delivering them into the hands of Church inquisitors who usually ended up torturing and killing them to save their souls.

Although the Malleus isn't a word-for-word precursor to Intruders or Missing Time, many elements are similar enough to warrant a closer look. 


How to Identify a Witch or Abductee

Although today we do not burn alive abductees alive, the modern process for identifying an abductee is remarkably similar to the medieval process for identifying a witch. Witches and abductees share the follow characteristics:

• Marks on the Body. Abductees and witches are both thought to be physically marked in some way. In the case of witches the mark might be a mole or birthmark, or if no such mark was found, the examiner  declared the discovery of 'an invisible mark.' In the case of abductees, researchers look for scoop marks, triangle-shaped scars, or evidence of alien implants. 
• Supernatural Sex. Witches were believed to have sexual intercourse with inhuman agents of the Devil called incubi (male demons) and succubi (female demons). Abductees are often believed to have intercourse with inhuman or half human alien beings during the abduction experience. 
• Flying by Night. Witches had the ability to fly through the night sky. Alien abductees often have vivid memories of flying or being transported through the sky or through space. 
• Messing with Animals. Witches were said to possess the ability to kill farm animals without drawing blood. Alien abductions are often associated with bloodless cattle mutilations or the draining of blood from small farm animals (chupacabra incidents are often paired with UFO sightings). 
• Miscarriage and Disappearing Fetuses. Witches were believed to have the ability to cause miscarriage or cause fetuses to disappear. Alien abductees often report disappearing pregnancies or mysterious anomalous events involving human reproduction. 
• Circular Meetings in the Deep Woods. Witches were thought to meet with the Devil in the woods, holding highly sexualized rituals naked in a stone circle. (See drawing above.) Abductees are taken into a circular craft, often from remote or wooded locations, where they are then examined naked on stone or metal slab.
• The Devil and the Greys. The physical description of the 'Devil' of the medieval witchcraft trials (to whom witches were said to agree to a pact or contract) bears remarkable similarities to the tall Greys described by abductees. Tan or grey in color, the Devil and the tall Grey both have cloven feet, strange skin, and demand perverse sexual allegiance. The Devil's eyes are said to 'pierce' the eyes of women and control them in this way. The Greys control by means of their hypnotic huge eyes. 
• Associations with Bright Lights in the Sky. Both Satan and aliens are associated with bright lights in the sky. Satan was said to be the "brightest angel in the sky" before he fell to earth for rebelling against God. Alien abductions are often (though not always) associated with brilliant lights in the sky (UFOs) that come down to earth to release frighting Greys with a baffling sexual agenda. 

David Hufford's The Terror That Comes in the Night

Folklorist David Hufford wrote a landmark paper about the relationship between sleep paralysis and the legend of the 'Old Hag'. This tale occurs in every age and across all cultures. In the story, a sleeping person wakes to find a hideous creature (the 'Old Hag') sitting or pressing down upon his or her chest. The victim is unable to move during this experience, which often includes sexual intercourse with the fantastic other. The incubus/succubus tales of medieval Europe are variants of the 'Old Hag' myth, and Hufford believes many alien abduction stories are modern variants of this universal tale.

However, Hufford's groundbreaking thesis was that the 'Old Hag' narrative was universal because it referred to a real human experience. 

This was controversial stuff in the dry, methodical world of academic folklore research. Up until the time of Hufford's paper it was assumed that narrative traditions and physical experience were rigidly separated categories. Stories were just stories. Folklorists collected them.

Folkloric tales were assumed by definition to refer only to imaginary events and experiences passed down by specific cultural groups for various sociological purposes: indoctrination into the mores of the group being one of the main purposes. Hufford was saying that at least some universal myths and legends appeared to be an attempt to convey the content of a genuine experience in the language of the culture and time in which the experience occurred.

So during medieval times when the Church held enormous power and controlled people through vivid descriptions of hellfire, damnation, and the wages of sin, the experience was interpreted as demonic and the abductor as Satan. In ancient Sumeria the experience was intrepreted as divine. In modern technological culture the experience is interpreted as extraterrestrial. But the same experiental elements are repeated in each instance; they are simply spun with a different explanation of what it all means.

Hufford was careful not to ascribe any particular interpretation to the raw experience underlying these stories; he only sought to make the argument that some kind of real experience was at the base of the stories. Hufford made a careful, exhaustive (and rather dry) philosophical argument that the scientific term 'sleep paralysis' is a description (and hence, another myth), not an explanation.

Hufford felt that the experience itself remains unexplained.

We don't know what causes these experiences. We don't know why the experience has these predictable and bizarre elements. We've just slapped a descriptive label--'sleep paralysis'--on something that has apparently been plaguing mankind for as long as man has been able to tell stories about it.

The Problem With the ET Hypothesis

One of the biggest obstacles to understanding UFO and alien abduction phenomena is the ET hypothesis, the belief that visitors from outer space are causing these experiences and events. We really don't know that, but the tendency to interpret all these phenomena through a modern technological filter is so strong that today the term UFO has today become synomymous with 'spacecraft', even though its original meaning was simply something flying through the sky that could not be identified. 'Unidentified Flying Object' means we don't know what it is. And we don't.

If we KNEW it was a spacecraft, then it would NOT be a UFO. It would be a spacecraft.

What are the chances that our current cultural filter is any more correct than the medieval one that ascribed these phenomena to devils, or the ancient one that ascribed them  to Isis, or the medical one that ascribes them to a mysterious brain disorder called sleep paralysis, or the northern Scandavian one that ascribes them to the appearance of the 'Old Hag' (a folkloric harbinger of death)?

Weirdly, Huffords ideas get little uptake in ufology because they are seen as acribing the phenomena to 'myth', which is popularly understood by ufologists (who seem not to actuall read this stuff) to mean 'made up story that isn't true in any way'.

That understanding is the exact opposite of the compelling original argument made by Hufford, an argument that supports the notion that something real is going on, but that we just don't know what it is. Hufford's work could be used to support further scientific or academic study or these phenomena, but in a weird twist of illogic, it is used to dismiss them by both camps.

At least we aren't burning people alive over the experience these days.

But it would be nice to know what it was actually all about.

Alien Encounters as Personal Deconstruction

If you want to feel better about not being able to afford or attend college, pause right now for ten minutes or so and educate yourself about the philosophy of famous 20th Century Frenchman Jacques Derrida, a philosophy more popularly known in academic circles as Deconstruction.

Just click the hot links in the above paragraph and start reading. Then come back.

OK, done yet?

No, it sure doesn't take long to have more than enough of that, thank you very much. In all fairness though, most philosophy reads like that, not just Deconstruction. The only differance between Derridian texts and other kinds of philosophy is sheer Europineal attitude, but then the guy was French.

He had a cultural standard to uphold. Not to mention a sartorial one.

Anyhoo, Derrida's big philosophy idea du jour was that the bit that's excluded or absent from any given text is what makes the whole text meaningful, and that if you locate that bit--that excluded bit that he referred to as differance--if you find that central differance embedded in any given text and invert it, you can then take apart the whole sense of the thing, as in, unravel the text completely (as in, literally de-contstruct it) and render all the meanings therein utterly nonsensical.

Voila!

Start with Shakespeare. End up with overcooked spaghetti!

What could be better than that?

OK, a lot of things could be better than that. OK, ok.

But here's my point:

What if UFO encounters are personal, experiential deconstructive moments?

Think about what happens to an individual's view of reality and self after such an encounter. At first, the experiencer may just feel a bit stunned and awed by the whole incident, but as minutes, hours, days, and eventually months tick slowly by, more and more questions about the very nature of reality and self begin to present themselves, whether that person is ready for such questions or not.

Often, the experiencer becomes increasingly aware of a little glob of 'missing time', a break in the normal personal narrative of memory that seems to attach itself to other bits of existing memory that once seemed fairly solid, but now, not so much.

It's a contagious little bit of nothing, this 'missing time', and it seems to have a penchant for dissolving all the little certainties and assumptions that make life possible and pleasant. Gradually, lots of things the person thought he or she 'knew' for sure about the present and the past and about who he or she actually is seem to be up for grabs, interpretively speaking.

In the end, the contagion may spread to the experiencer's very sense of self. Many abductees eventually come to see themselves as having dual identities: one human, one alien; and they discover that these blank moments of absence stretch all the way back to their earliest childhood recollections.

When strung together, these deconstructive moments create an alternate history that is bizarre in the extreme, a sort of shadow self and shadow reality that looks like the direct inverse of this one. 'Real' life at this point becomes somewhat dreamlike and the dreamlike alien encounters become primary.

When things get to this stage, we pretty much have our pile of deconstructive spaghetti.

But why?

Well, that's the gazillion dollar question. Why indeed!

Here are a few possible answers:

(What? You thought I was going to give you the one right answer just like that, just off the top of my head? Au contraire, sugar bear!  Clearly you haven't been reading UFO stuff for very long if you actually thought that was going to happen...)

1. Somebody is actually doing this on purpose to individual people: the government, evil magicians, aliens, guys who wear too much black clothing and smoke funny little cigarettes... who knows? The thing is, we know it can be done on purpose, so maybe someone or some thing is doing it on purpose for reasons we have yet to understand.
2. The organizing structure of the experiencer's consciousness has lost all functionality, and the deconstructive alien encounter is a sort of massive spontaneous 'reset' experience; kind like rebooting a computer when it's all bugged up or frozen, or reinstalling the operating system. 
3. The deconstruction of individual personality and personal history is part of an initiation experience similar to the kind of vision quest sought by shamans in premodern cultures. Post-experience, many abductees and contactees exhibit increased psychic abilities, and many also develop an acute awareness of how permeable the membrane that separates dream states from waking states really is. 
4. The experience is exactly what it seems to be, and the whole of what we refer to as 'real' life is implanted into our consciousness by creatures with big eyes and suction cup fingers--kind of like in The Matrix. Sometimes I do wonder if people aren't actually larval aliens and the whole fabric of our lives isn't just one big pupated dream. We'll wake up one day on Zeta Reticuli.

None or all of the above could be true. We just don't know, really. And we aren't likely to find out any time soon. But since most of us are out of a job these days anyway, throwing out ideas is not a bad way to pass a Thursday afternoon. Derrida probably wouldn't like it.

But he's just another dead white guy now.

Alien Abduction and Dissociation

Dissociation is a term from clinical psychology that refers to a pathological state of detachment.

An online medical dictionary describes the condition as follows:

Dissociation: In psychology and psychiatry, a perceived detachment of the mind from the emotional state or even from the body. Dissociation is characterized by a sense of the world as a dreamlike or unreal place and may be accompanied by poor memory of the specific events, which in severe form is known as dissociative amnesia. 

Over the course of the 1990s, dissociation became a sensational topic on talk shows and in the popular press under the rubric of multiple personality disorder. 

MPD  has since that time been changed to the more clinically precise dissociative identity disorder.

The concept of personality is vague, subjective, and currently out of favor with clinical psychologists, (who BTW change their minds a LOT). Identity is--at least for now--seen as a more neutral term that refers to the individual characteristics by which a thing or person is recognized or known.

Abductees and researchers alike take great pains to 'prove' that abduction experiences are not the result of mental or emotional pathology, and yet even a casual observer can recognize problems of dissociation and dissociative identity in alien abduction accounts.

Many abductees say openly that since remembering their abductions, they have realized that they possess a 'dual identity', and now understand themselves as both human and alien.

People who believe abductions are real say that abductees experience something similar to PTSD post-abduction because the experience is so terrifying. Symptoms such as amnesia for the event, hypervigilance, nightmares, confusion, persistent anxiety, etc., are all common.

People who believe that abductions are fantasies, dreams, or out of body experiences suggest that people who already suffer from PTSD for some violent earthly trauma can be induced to believe they were abducted by aliens as a kind of 'screen' for the memory of the real event.

At first glance, the idea that alien abduction memories make good 'screen memories' might seem ridiculous. Abduction researchers commonly protest that the consequences of coming forward with an alien abduction story are so negative (people accuse abductees of being crazy or of being attention-seekers, for instance) that no one would choose to do this unless the experience was genuine.

This point only makes sense however if the alternative is saying nothing and feeling fine. If a person is already feeling anxious and disturbed, or is plagued by nightmares, or is baffled by a relatively non-emotional instance of missing time, the mind has a strong inclination to resolve this tension.

What is less upsetting in this context? The notion that you might have blocked out a brutal assault, rape, or murder--which, seriously, no one wants to hear? Or the possibility that you were abducted by aliens, which, although upsetting and bizarre, lots of people are ready to validate?

I'm not saying the alien abductees are all victims of earthly trauma suffering from PTSD and a culturally suggested delusion. All I'm saying here is that researchers often fail to ask hard questions because they want so badly to believe the phenomenon at face value.

In fact, MPD came under fire for similar reasons shortly after it made the rounds of the talk show circuit back in the 1990s. Debunkers appeared hot on the heels of the dramatically damaged, armed with 'false memory' research, damning studies, and convincing examples of lying and hysteria.

After a time, clinical psychology had to to admit that at least some of the 'multiple personalities' who had written books based on their supposed early sexual traumas were not what they appeared to be, and some of the therapists who had been treating them were quacks.

The problem was that some of the MPD patients were not lying and their originating traumas could be proven. Many reputable psychologists came forward to defend dissociation as a clinical reality.

In the furor and uproar that ensued, both at universities and within clinical practice, much confusion was generated and little was accomplished. In the end, the DSM-IV changed some terms around and refined diagnostic categories, pitching the term 'MPD' in favor of 'DID', and adding subcategories and variants that were meant to provide clarity.

Is anyone feeling better yet?

Well, not really. PTSD is now one of the most common mental illnesses, and dissociation is pretty much a feature of everyday life for most people.

It always was, really.

Who hasn't had the experience of driving home from work only to realize that absorption in some issue or thought process has all but blanked out the entire trip? Who doesn't act one way in one situation and another way in another, to the point that it sometimes feels like two different identities altogether? It's hard to hold a corporate job these days if you don't know how to put on a identity and remove it on command as if it were a three-piece suit.

I personally believe that something real and interesting is going on with abduction experiences, but that we are asking all the wrong questions--those of us who are even asking questions.

"...a perceived detachment of the mind from the emotional state or even from the body..."

Doesn't that describe the normative way we approach the world as a culture? Doesn't science always attempt to detach itself from emotion? Isn't the body seen as separate from the mind? Aren't human beings seen as separate from nature?

Maybe, just maybe, abduction experiences happen not so much to provide us with the answers we seek, as to get us to ask better questions, different ones.

Or, maybe I'm just being too detached about it all.

Aliens and Faeries

The ET hypothesis in ufology is more controversial than its adherents like to admit.

Briefly, the ET hypothesis is the notion that UFO sightings and alien encounters are instigated by intelligent creatures from outer space. Some branches of ufology even name the specific part of the galaxy the visitors call home.

Betty Hill, who was abducted with her husband Barney from a rural New Hampshire road in 1961, claimed under hypnosis that the aliens who abducted her had shown her a star map--a map which she was later able to reproduce and which coincided accurately with a cluster of stars around Zeta Reticuli.

Thereafter the Hill abduction came to be known as "The Zeta Reticuli Incident."

But many of the most prominent features of alien abduction experiences, as well as some of the features of UFO sightings (that is, experiences that do not include direct contact with alien beings) were present for hundreds of years in faery lore.

Today faeries mostly inhabit children's books. At least, that's what we tell ourselves. 

The faeries of old were experts in messing with human perception. They could appear to humans in any form them wished and could alter the experience of time. Like the aliens of today, faeries abducted children and young people, and were especially drawn to young women, with whom they were thought to mate in order to strengthen their line. Faeries sometimes took human babies and left faery children--called 'changelings'--in their place.

Faeries depicted as cute, Disney-like imps that flutter around trees and flowers are not the same faeries of medieval times and earlier. Before the rise of science, faeries were considered dangerous, and every culture had them. Being taken by the faeries was like being taken to the realm of the Dead. You might not ever come back, and if you did return, you might not be right ever again.

Like today's abductees, people taken by faeries typically went missing for a period of hours, days, or even longer, and then reappeared suddenly with no memory of what had happened to them and no sense of the amount of time that had passed. When the memories of faery abductees did begin to return, they included the recollection of coming upon small beings unexpectedly, and being invited into their circle.

Today's abductees usually do not remember what happened at first either, but only notice that some time is strangely missing from their lives. Their memories come later, under hypnosis, in dreams or in spontaneous surreal fragments.

Documented examples of fairies arriving in small airships are also plentiful The similarities between these creatures and the smaller 'grey aliens' described my modern abductees are striking, though saying so won't usually garner a round of applause in ufology circles.

It may not be the case that fairies and aliens are one and the same creature, but it seems to me at least worth considering that SOME 'aliens' are possibly not from outer space at all, but from right here on earth.

Every other culture, except ours has thought so.

Aliens, True Believers, Debunkers, and Me

I saw a comment on Facebook the other day that sort of snagged my attention. I resisted the impulse to respond to it directly because I've had this discussion before and it never goes well.

The comment went something like this:

"I don't even talk to people who don't believe in alien abductions anymore. They're so boring."

Really? You don't even TALK to people unless they believe in alien abduction? How do you buy groceries? How do you work out problems on your telephone bill? How do you meet girls?

One thing you discover fast when you start to study this topic is that UFO researchers and alien abductees sort into about four general categories and none of them like each other very much:

1. True believers. This camp includes the ancient astronaut theorists, the New Agers who see aliens as trying to teach us about peace and whatnot, the creepy 'researchers' like David Jacobs and Budd Hopkins who sit on the bedsides of young women and ask them to recount weird alien/human sexual encounters under hypnosis, and pretty much anyone else who takes the phenomena at face value.
2. Skeptics and Debunkers.  The mirror image of true believers, these guys can ONLY question and discredit, even if their methods of discrediting individual stories are as hypothetical and beside the point as the stories themselves. People like Joe Nickell and magazines like The Skeptical Inquirer (the printed arm of CSICOP) see only hokum and BS in UFO stories and pretty much devote their lives to exposing it. They are the lid to the True Believer's pot.
3. The Mythologists. This group examines alien abductions in the context of myth, magic, and humanistic psychology. Although few people realize it, psychoanalyst and famous Freudian antagonist Carl Jung wrote a treatise on the psychoanalytical importance of UFO phenomena as early as 1953, so this  group is hardly new. They get no respect and are generally misunderstood. They are scorned by both True Believers and Debunkers. That's because the modern understanding of myth as "dumb made-up story explaining something science has since figured out much more coherently" is not the understanding of myth they deploy, and you can't explain their point of view in a sound byte. So they lose. All the time.
4. Me. I don't think I fall cleanly into any of these camps (probably because I myself am an alien life form) but also because I am especially personally fascinated by the persistent cultural divide between the realm of the imagination and the realm of intellect. For this reason I am forever getting bludgeoned by all three groups whenever I open by mouth about aliens or UFOs, and I am forever whining a sad response along the lines of, "Why can't we all just get along?" 

 That's right: I am the Rodney King of alien abduction lore.

Seriously though, why can't we use the best of all these perspectives? Why can't we think critically about the phenomena and apply some science while acknowledging that the human imagination is not an annoying vestigal pathology for which science will soon find a cure? When a story takes on this kind of cultural strength and power, why can't we admit that that is, all by itself, kind of a big deal and deserves to be examined carefully and thoughtfully?

Anyway, I just thought for now I'd lay out the cast of characters and explain what role I play in this particular form of Kabuki theater.

Stay tuned for drama!