The Cryptoterrestrials – Mac Tonnies

The Cryptoterrestrials – Mac Tonnies
Anomalist Books – 2010

Aliens are real and they do abduct people, but they’re not from a different planet. I have encountered this idea before, but Mac Tonnies, in The Cryptoterrestrials, takes this concept one step further and claims that the reason we think that these aliens are extraterrestrial (from space) is because they have deliberately been misleading us.

A species or race of highly intelligent beings has been running a disinformation campaign against the human race so that they can avoid detection. These beings are probably not, as others (Whitley Strieber, John Keel and Kewaunee Lapseritis to name a few) have suggested, inhabitants of another dimension who occasionally cross over to ours. They are just as likely the descendants of a tribe of Asian people who went to live in a cave system hundreds of thousands of years ago. Their technology is more advanced than ours, and they can use it to send telepathic messages and to induce hallucinations.

Why should we believe this? Well, an awful lot of abductees claim that they were abducted for the purpose of creating a human-alien hybrid, but if you think about this for any amount of time it seems absurd. Dogs and cats are physically very similar and share common ancestors, but they can’t breed. How could a human possibly breed with a lifeform that evolved on a different planet? Nope, if these visitors are actually trying to breed with us to replenish their population, they must share a fairly recent common ancestor with us. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that they are slowly dying out as we destroy the planet. That’s why they need our DNA to reproduce.

The afterword in the book suggests that the author did not take the ideas in this book to be literally true and that this book was more an attempt to get people to rethink the UFO and abduction phenomena rather than to provide a definitive and factual explanation for these phenoma. There’s certainly some interesting ideas in here, but ultimately I think the book goes a bit overboard with its speculations.

When faced with the question of the existence of extraterrestrial aliens who abduct innocent human beings, most people will pick one of two explanations. Either they accept the notion of little men coming down in a spaceship and kidnapping/violating innocent farmers, or they dismiss it and assume that the farmers who gave the accounts were crazy and/or mistaken. There are of course other possible explanations, but if these explanations are no simpler than the two already mentioned then we can use Occam’s Razor to slice them off our list of considerations. Accepting the existence of extraterrestrials is already the more challenging option, and complicating this notion further by positing that the beings are actually Earth dwelling cryptids with a penchant for trickery is a step too far for this to remain a sensible line of reasoning.

I’m not saying that all abductees are wrong or that there isn’t weird forms of life that we don’t understand. I just think that the idea that these beings are deceiving us in such a complicated manner is too unlikely to take seriously.

Mac Tonnies died in 2010 when he was only 34. He was a fellow blogger, and he wrote a book about aliens being cryptids. It seems to me that he was probably a real cool guy. RIP.