Do aliens smoke cigarettes?

In a follow-up to her post about an unusual cigarette-purchasing "woman" (briefly discussed here), "Kartott" has offered further description that underscores the unconventional nature of her brief encounter:

Though I could not see her eyes due to the large Jackie-O style sunglasses she wore, other aspects were evident: an unusually long pointy chin. Exaggerated cheekbones out of proportion to the rest of the face. Practically no lips, only enough to discern that there was any mouth. A nose that was almost not there: there was very little structure to it, a small bridge area, and some structure around the nostrils, but not much.

Consciously or not, Kartott is describing a being strikingly similar to the woman supposedly encountered by abductee Antonio Villas Boas, whose experience is described here. 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 extraterrestial, 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 above 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.

Note: This is the latest in a series of speculative essays that I'm using as "source-code" for a book titled "The Cryptoterrestrials." If interested, you can find related musings here, here, here, and here.

From a work-in-progress:

A journeyman ufologist's introduction to the abduction phenomenon usually begins with a recounting of the capture of Betty and Barney Hill in New Hampshire in 1961. Believed at the time to be the first kidnapping of humans by UFO occupants, the Hills' account contains virtually all of the elements contained in later narratives (which reached a near-fever pitch in the mid-1990s, stoked by an obliging media and the success of several influential books).





There's little doubt that something unusual happened to the Hills. At the very least, both Betty and Barney recalled seeing an unidentified object apparently trailing their car. The account becomes more explicit upon Barney's attempt to view the object through binoculars; upon magnification, he witnessed a "pancake"-shaped vehicle sporting triangular fins and red lights. More startling yet, he could discern occupants behind a row of windows, including one raptly staring humanoid he found especially threatening. The ensuing abduction has become the stuff of ufological legend, as has the Hills bout with "missing time," an element that recurs throughout later accounts.

Under hypnosis by Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, Betty recalled a conspicuously chatty alien "leader" whose human demeanor was only slightly less outlandish than his bizarre questions. (Ironically, the Hill abduction -- widely cited as one of the best cases to suggest an extraterrestrial origin for UFOs -- is at least as amenable to indigenous beings engaged in deliberate psychodrama. The "leader's" presentation, complete with 3-D star map showing alien trade routes -- seems staged, his queries sampled from "B"-movie science fiction.

Nevertheless, one comes away from the Hill episode forced to confront what was almost certainly a "real" encounter. But the reigning interpretation -- that the Hills were the victims of a chance run-in with ET interlopers -- owes more of its appeal to the mythological syntax at our disposal than any particular piece of evidence. (Barney's testimony, while deemed sincere by Simon, is notably less explicit than Betty's, and may well betray unwitting contamination from his wife.)





Inquiry into the nascent abduction phenomenon was forced to adapt to the now-familiar reproductive overtones upon the rediscovery of the Antonio Villas Boas case of 1957. Boas, a farmer, claimed a forcible encounter with a UFO in which he had sex with a fair-skinned female. Like today's "Grays," Boas described his seductress as short and large-eyed, with a lipless mouth and pointed chin that suggest the cover painting for Whitley Strieber's best-selling "Communion," not published until 1987. Though exotic, she was far from the specimen expected from mere erotic fantasy; Boas himself described her as paradoxically repellent and desirable. Reading his account (initially censored by the UFO community), one wonders in what ways Boas might have been coerced into his sexual encounter: an ordeal that left him oddly emasculated, resigned to having served as mere breeding stock. (Although critics are quick to point out his possibly self-aggrandizing reference to himself as a "prize stud.")

Before Boas was escorted off the "spaceship," the woman pointed significantly to her abdomen and in the direction of the sky. Advocates of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis have interpreted this as a reference to the woman's ET heritage, but at the same time they've effectively ignored the troublesome prospect of genetic compatibility. Granted that Boas had intercourse with an extraterrestrial, what are the chances that two independently evolved humanoid species could "mate" in any viable sense?

In "Revelations," Jacques Vallee compares the feasibility of conceiving a human-alien hybrid to that of a human attempting to breed with an insect. Certainly, if Boas encountered a genuine ET, then "they" have achieved a most remarkable degree of impersonation -- not an altogether impossible achievement for a civilization capable of traveling between stars but one that arouses substantial skepticism. The law of parsimony begs the speculation that the beings who abducted Boas were human in at least some essential respects.





Contemporary abduction reports are fraught with much of the same ambiguity. While an abductee's surroundings may seem bizarre enough to an addled witness, evidence of extrasolar origin is at best superficial. Occasionally an abductee reports visionary episodes (apparently instigated by the abductors with the assistance of audio-visual technology that recalls Betty Hill's famous star map). Abduction researchers like Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs are forever on the lookout for hypnotically derived alien symbols, perhaps glimpsed on walls or uniforms, in hopes of finding validating tools for future research.

But what too often passes unmentioned is the relative dearth of reports involving transport from the abductee's normal environment to that of the supposed ETs. In many cases, no mention is made of a UFO or "spaceship"; the transition from "here" to "there" proceeds with unnerving haste, often accompanied by partial amnesia and a wordless certainty of having been taken vast distances. (Reports of actually visiting otherworldly locales, common fare in the heyday of the contactees, are seldom encountered in the abduction literature.)





The quintessential alien environment is spartan, unencumbered by decor. The aliens are characterized as colorless, dispassionate creatures whose behavior resembles that of hive-dwelling insects or even machines. As in the Hill case, there's sometimes a "leader" in attendance, although the tone of the abduction is far from conversational. Any "wisdom" imparted by the aliens is predominantly vague or philosophically obstinate. And while the beings can seem terrifically unearthly in the flesh, they avoid explicit references that might shed light on their origin or purpose.

Debunkers have pounced on the endlessly elusive nature of the abduction experience in order to expediently dismiss it. In "The Demon-Haunted World," for example, Carl Sagan laments the fact that abductees have yet to emerge with artifacts that would demonstrate the physical reality of their experiences.

Chile: Intraterrestrials in the Chilean Desert?

In Chile, according to residents of the communities of Chusmiza, Poroma and several places within the nation's 1st region, the existence of a race of diminutive bipeds has been known and discussed in hushed tones for generations. These entities measure some 15 to 17 centimeters tall and are the inhabitants of an underground realm that exists beneath the sands of the Atacama Desert. They are known to local elders as "the gentiles."

Click here for Mondolithic Studios' take on the "Hollow Earth" premise. If you've endured my posts on cryptoterrestrials, I doubt you'll be disappointed . . .

'Little people' e-mail zips through rural Alaska

Ircenrraat (singular: ircenrraq; say "irr-chin-hhak" with a harsh hh and you're getting close) are a recurring theme in traditional Yup'ik teachings and legends, "little people" who dwell in the tundra, usually underground. They disorient, discomfort and trap unwary humans.

(Via The Anomalist.)

Greg Bishop on one of my all-time favorite UFO encounters:

Don't Believe Too Much

The being addressed him, asking "Are you the watchman of this place?" Schirmer said sure, and after assurances that he wouldn't shoot at the ship, they took him on a short tour of the interior. The Ufonauts all wore tight-fitting uniforms with fabric that covered their heads. On the right breast of their clothing, there was a patch or embroidery depicting a winged serpent.

An image of a winged serpent? On an extraterrestrial? Readers of my "cryptoterrestrial" posts probably understand my reservations.

Aliens Beneath Our Feet - The Legend of the Green Children of Woolpit

There are several different stories about these children, but all are similar. In every story a girl of about ten years old with a boy of a few years younger were found at the mouth of a cave dressed in clothes that were unknown to anyone. Some described their clothing as being made of a strange metallic cloth. Their skin was green and the villagers that found them said that the language they spoke was like no other they had ever heard before.

The story of the "green children" has intrigued me since childhood. This article goes into considerable detail about what little is known and what remains conjecture.

Author, researcher and comrade-in-arms William Michael Mott takes on the "UFO Iconoclasts" (see comments).

I encountered Mott's work well after I began writing the first of the essays that have since found their way into "The Cryptoterrestrials" and was surprised to find that our take on the UFO enigma was intriguingly similar.

To explore Mott's ideas online, click here.

My last book opened with a triple-barreled epigraph by Carl Jung, Thomas Kuhn and R.E.M., respectively, so it's only fair that Morrissey gets a word in this time around:

"Instead of looking at the screen, what I want to do is to turn around and look the other way. When we look the other way what we see is a little hole at the top of the wall with some light coming out. That's where I want to go. I want to steal the key to the projectionist's booth, and then, when everybody has gone home, I want to break in."

--Jacques Vallee

"We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us."

--Terrence McKenna

"We're on your street, but you don't see us. Or if you do you smile and say hello."

--Morrissey

I've decided I'm going to put my paid vacation days to good use and finish "The Cryptoterrestrials," a book that's been far too long in the making. I've already written a good chunk (and posted portions online). A lot of the remaining work is assembly and polishing; I need to take what I've already written and render it into passable book form. I'm cautiously hopeful that I can finish a first draft in a week.

Dustin (OddThings) writes:

Imagine where we are as a worldwide society and where we've come over the past 12,000 years. Early societies formed, everything continued to grow. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but always growing, moving forward. Technology grew, our ability to access it grew, but at the same time much was lost.

[. . .]

The more I research, the more I'm convinced that this is exactly what happens every 12,000 years. I think it explains out of place artifacts. I think it explains much of mythology, and particularly shared mythologies from many places. I think it explains megalithic constructions around the world.

I think there's a great deal of explanatory potential here. The mainstream will scoff, of course, having tired of the notion after too many brushes with "Chariots of the Gods?" and similarly untenable ideas. I look forward to Dustin's future posts on the subject.

Looking down from a sufficient distance, human habitation recedes to the merest glimmer. As night devours the continents, our seeming dominion vanishes, replaced by scattered constellations, the haughty gleam of our cities suddenly as substantial as a skein of campfires. As the dark deepens, we realize with mounting unease just how tenuous our presence is; the mountains, prairies and lakes, denuded of daylight, taunt us with their enormity.

Then there are the oceans, almost entirely vacant of man-made lights. Our seas, so often taken for granted, are like vast tombs from which even the most unseemly phantasms might emerge; we ply their waters at our own peril, distantly aware that we might find ourselves in the company of others.





The Earth is ancient, its biosphere only slightly less so. For four-billion years our world has has secreted life. The advent of homo sapiens is alarmingly recent in comparison. We're like foundlings washed upon some alien shore, stifling our fears by pretending to a feeble omnipotence. Having launched spacecraft to the outer planets and inspected the crater-pocked wastes of Mars through the unblinking eyes of rovers, it's easy to entertain the idea that we're the first, evolution's sole successful stab at the phenomenon we casually term "intelligence."

Yet as we watch night erode the familiar highways and stadiums and ever-encroaching suburbs, our confidence falters. Already, technological forecasters envision a near-future populated by our artificially intelligent offspring. Perhaps as our most cherished certainties crumble in the glow of a new century -- full of danger, portent and enigma -- it's become relatively easy to contemplate the presence of the Other: not an other new to our planet, but one predating our own genetic regime. Something unspoken and ancient yet nevertheless amenable to science . . . an intelligence with an almost-human face, until recently content to abide by the shadows of our complacency.

But since the middle of the last century it seems to have asserted itself with a vigor hitherto found only in the domain of folklore. Understandably daunted, we've relegated its existence to the margins of perception: hallucination, war fever, misunderstood natural phenomena, delusion, butchered recollections of dreams best left forgotten. We see lights dancing in our sky and invoke impossible meteors. Landed vehicles accompanied by surreal humanoids become military test aircraft and their diminutive pilots. The emaciated creatures seen aboard apparent spacecraft -- or, more portentously, within rock-walled caverns -- are summarily dismissed as sheerest fantasy or, at best, as the spawn of novel brain dysfunctions.

In the decades since 1947, dawn of the contemporary UFO era, we've confronted a parade of strangeness that has rallied uncritical enthusiasts and rattled entrenched authority, leaving a bizarre residue that defies attempts at categorization as certainly as it elicits hypotheses.

(Work continues on "The Cryptoterrestrials" . . .)

Searching for microbial "cryptoterrestrials":

Are Aliens Among Us?

A more exciting but also more speculative possibility is that alternative life-forms have survived and are still present in the environment, constituting a kind of shadow biosphere, a term coined by Carol Cleland and Shelley Cop­ley of the University of Colorado at Boulder. At first this idea might seem preposterous; if alien organisms thrived right under our noses (or even in our noses), would not scientists have discovered them already?

My Book of THoTH interview with Jeremy Vaeni has been posted. Hope you enjoy it.

Parallel universe proof boosts time travel hopes

But the existence of parallel worlds offers a way around these troublesome paradoxes, according to David Deutsch of Oxford University, a highly respected proponent of quantum theory, the deeply mathematical, successful and baffling theory of the atomic world.

He argues that time travel shifts between different branches of reality, basing his claim on parallel universes, the so-called "many-worlds" formulation of quantum theory.

The new work bolsters his claim that quantum theory does not forbid time travel. "It does sidestep it. You go into another universe," he said yesterday, though he admits that there is still a way to go to find schemes to manipulate space and time in a way that makes time hops possible.

Suppose someone's figured it out. They're wouldn't be violating causality, so they could enjoy a surprising degree of freedom. If they're a version of homo sapiens, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect them to be interested in us, in which case some UFO testimony begins to make sense.

As Deutsch is careful to note, quantum time travel doesn't seem to be possible anytime soon. So if popularly described "aliens" are in fact terrestrial visitors from a version of our own future, how advanced are they?

How to prepare for alien invasion

Taylor and Boan started thinking about how to respond to an aggressive extraterrestrial attack during a 2001 discussion about defending against terrorist attacks.

"One thing that popped into my mind was that the only way Americans would be in an asymmetric war on the other side would be if we were attacked by aliens. Everyone chuckled, but then after a minute the comments started setting in," Taylor said.

"Then we really got to talking about it and we thought, well, you know, we really might need this contingency plan anyway."

(Via The Anomalist.)

This is, of course, a great source for speculation. But it assumes -- as do all remotely mainstream treatises on alien visitation -- that the ETs have yet to get here. While this may be the case, I certainly wouldn't bet my life on it.

Assuming for sake of argument that they are here, why haven't we been thoroughly demolished? The abduction mythos suggests that "they" are here for our DNA, in which case we constitute a valuable natural resource. Of course, this forces us to wonder why an extrasolar species would have any interest in a molecule that many scientists consider unique to this planet. Initially, at least, it seems implausible that ETs would have any practical use for human genetic material. Then again, given the sheer novelty of our biological heritage, is it excessively arrogant to consider ourselves worthy of prolonged ET scrutiny?

And don't get me started on the motives of possible cryptoterrestrials . . .

A brand-new interview with me appears at EERIE Radio. You can download the MP3 by clicking here. Enjoy!

My my, what a big head you have

The fragile aliens of contemporary mythology owe much to Lamarck and his influence, through Wells, on pulp science fiction. As a race, they are ancient, feeble, and slipping inexorably into collective senility. Their power derives solely from their technology. They are already half dead, and like Wells's over-evolved Martians who inject themselves with our blood, they can only survive by preying upon younger, more vital species.

Rather than serving as Lamarckian caricatures, could the diminutive, often feeble-seeming Grays be suffering a genetic illness hastened by a shortage of genes? Or perhaps they're so casually reliant on their technology that they're effectively "postbiological," eager to jettison physical brawn in favor of better, faster brains.

Loren Coleman waxes cryptoterrestrial . . . or have I been waxing cryptozoological? (To my knowledge, Coleman has yet to entertain the idea that one or more species of mystery primates has actually eclipsed Homo sapiens' technological ability. If I'm wrong don't hesitate to let me know.)

Meanwhile, the first draft of my new book, "The Cryptoterrestrials," nears completion. Teaser forthcoming.

Seven riddles suggest a secret city beneath Tokyo

"Subway officials treat me as if I'm a drunk or a madman," Shun notes with a wry smile. "Tokyo is said to have 12 subways and 250 km of tunneling. I'd say that last figure is closer to 2,000 km. It's clear to me that the tunnels for the Namboku, Hanzomon and O-Edo lines existed before decisions were made to turn them into public subways."

What most concerns Shun is not the existence of this network, but why it is a carefully preserved secret. He can understand why maybe before World War II the government thought it prudent that the public remain in ignorance. "Not wanting the enemy to know, it was decided to tell no one and let the population survive as best it could."

(Via The Anomalist.)

Physicist and ufologist Stan Friedman argues that it's overwhelmingly likely that some UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft. I'd argue with equal tenacity that it's just as likely we're dealing with beings living virtually next-door, perhaps utilizing an infrastructure deeply entangled with our own.