Cryptos Part I: Laying the Groundwork

"We have always shared our planet with one or more hidden civilizations of an advanced nature, which are generally inimical, parasitical, or indifferent to humanity."

This is the first in a series of articles exploring the possibility of a cryptoterrestrial presence on Earth and its relation to the UFO phenomenon.

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In my experience, a majority of the UFO literature out there today is unfeasible to quantify or endorse as a comprehensive answer to this mystery.

Luckily there are more legitimate scientific angles being explored in recent years by bona fide academics, including The Extratempestrial Model by anthropology professor Dr. Michael Masters and Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Harvard's top astronomer Avi Loeb.

But when it comes to the endless assortment of theories that range from the basic lore of extraterrestrial occupants to consciousness-based interdimensional beings, it's pretty much impossible to conjure up a theory of everything that incorporates all of these often-conflicting ideas.

Contrary to how my own speculation might be perceived, I don't objectively "believe" anything written in a UFO book if it's not backed up by hard data. But that doesn't mean the literature around this phenomenon featuring unprovable stories of crashes, abductions, and psi abilities is useless.

It’s quite the opposite, actually.

I utilize these narratives as anecdotal evidence to establish jumping off points in my research. I take pieces of what I consider most relevant to recent scientific developments and try to deduce what might be applicable to the phenomenon.

Every new science article I read gives me a chance to make a connection with some previous thread I may consider to be a worthwhile consideration, but have no tangible proof of its veracity. In a way it almost feels like reverse-engineering evidence. I'm sure some will take issue with this strategy, but I've found it's the one that works best for me.

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Making Connections

There have been a few times I've come across a book where the author has come to so many eerily similar and unique conclusions, completely separate from my own research, that it's hard to brush off as mere coincidence. Even if just a random synchronicity, I feel as if I am somehow reading my own writing at times; never the same style, but very much the same content.

The most recent "coincidence" of my research syncing up with an author happened this past week when I finally picked up the book Cryptoterrestrials: A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and the Aliens Among Us by the late Mac Tonnies.

The cryptoterrestrial hypothesis flies in the face of most UFO lore. Instead of aliens from other solar systems or entities from another dimension, the CTH proposes a non-human species from our home planet is the source of these impossible objects in the sky, observed on a surprisingly routine basis by our most skilled military pilots and experienced radar operators.

I've explored many avenues of possibility in my attempt to find undeniable patterns within UFO mythology, and can count on one hand the number of times an author has tied together multiple threads of my own current research I hadn't considered before.

Mac Tonnies’ words achieved this multiple times throughout his book, which was published posthumously after his sudden death in 2009. He was working on laying out his interpretation of the CTH when he passed away from cardiac arrhythmia at the age of 34, coincidentally the same age I am as of this writing.

Tonnies credits the work of William Michael Mott as an inspiration for him, and with good reason. Mott’s ideas cited by Tonnies accurately encapsulate my suspicions about this pseudo-alien enigma as well.

Since I began writing about indigenous aliens in early 2006, readers have pointed out parallels with similar esoteric theories (usually involving interdimensional travel of some sort). To be fair, the cryptoterrestrial prospect isn’t as new as it might seem to readers new to forteana. This was struck home upon encountering the work of William Michael Mott, a researcher enamored of mythological tales of lost civilizations and underground habitats. His book Caverns, Cauldrons, And Concealed Creatures suggests that there is very strong circumstantial evidence—based on folklore, mythology, religion, archeology, geology, history and also on eyewitness and anecdotal accounts— that indicates that we have always shared our planet with one or more hidden civilizations of an advanced nature, which are generally inimical, parasitical, or indifferent to humanity.

Before reading Tonnies’ book this past week, I had been investigating for months the idea of a hominin ancestor splitting off into a kind of breakaway civilization and I began incorporating some of those findings into my articles and tweets.

I even dedicated an article to the theory where I gave the example of Homo naledi being possible proof of a more technologically advanced species existing alongside our own. (I would suggest reading it in full to understand the larger context of this current article, but it's obviously not a mandatory prerequisite by any means.)

The gist of that piece was based on weighing the implications of recent findings related to the cognitive abilities of Homo naledi, an ancient hominin species existing within a separate branch of our genus's evolutionary tree.

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The Definition of Non-human

Remains of Homo naledi were found inside South Africa's Rising Star cave system by a team of archaeologists led by Lee Berger back in 2013. More recent discoveries announced at the time I published the article revealed evidence that these non-human hominins — with brains the size of an orange — had harnessed fire before our species as they lived alongside us 335,000–236,000 years ago.

A momentous discovery in South Africa could turn our understanding of human history on its head. A non-human creature dubbed Homo naledi was discovered nearly a decade ago — and researchers now believe the creature may have had a head start on Homo sapiens, or humans, in using fire as a tool.

Renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger drew sharp criticism for hypothesizing Homo naledi was deliberately placing its dead in a dark, dangerous underground chamber in the Rising Star caves just outside Johannesburg, South Africa. Some argued it wasn't possible to navigate the complex chamber without light.

"And the reason they didn't believe it was because Homo naledi, with its tiny little brain just bigger than a chimpanzee, couldn't have had fire," Berger told CBS News.

As I've covered this story at length previously, I won't go into the details of how they were discovered or the evidence of these claims. But the implication is both simple and astounding.

Comparison of skull features of H. naledi with other small-brained Homo.

The UFO phenomenon represents a more advanced non-human intelligence exhibiting technology beyond our comprehension, and Homo naledi's use of fire before and alongside Homo sapiens would be historical proof of that scenario being plausible.

Another fascinating species of a smaller hominin named Homo floresiensis — and nicknamed "the Hobbit" — was discovered in 2003. Although the evidence has been declared "unreliable," H. floresiensis was initially believed to have harnessed fire as well.

In an article promoting his book, Between Ape and Human, University of Alberta anthropology professor Gregory Forth posits a somewhat startling hypothesis: that the small hominins are still walking among us, hiding from the view of Homo sapiens on the Indonesian island of Flores.

Coming from a professional anthropologist and ethnobiologist, my conclusions will probably surprise many. They might even be more startling than the discovery of H. floresiensis—once described by paleoanthropologist Peter Brown of the University of New England in New South Wales as tantamount to the discovery of a space alien.

Unlike other books concerned with hominin evolution, the focus of my book is not on fossils but on a local human population called the Lio and what these people say about an animal (as they describe it) that is remarkably like a human but is not human—something I can only call an ape-man.

My aim in writing the book was to find the best explanation—that is, the most rational and empirically best supported—of Lio accounts of the creatures.

These include reports of sightings by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly. And I conclude that the best way to explain what they told me is that a non-sapiens hominin has survived on Flores to the present or very recent times.

Obviously, I think it's very telling that the original anthropologist equated his discovery of Homo floresiensis with that of a "space alien."

One more figure — probably drawing the most ire from the anthropological community — is Graham Hancock, who most people probably know from his Netflix documentary series Ancient Apocalypse. Hancock's theory is in the same vein as the growing realization that mankind's history may have to be rewritten as we discover more about our planet's history.

Hancock hypothesizes that an advanced civilization of antiquity lived alongside humanity at the end of the last ice age around 12,000 years ago. In his series, he analyzes ancient structures and suggests certain geometrical attributes that could only be attributed to a species of higher intelligence than ourselves at the time.

Deep ventilation well in Derinkuyu Underground City, one of the locations featured in Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse series. By © Nevit Dilmen

From what I can tell, and in spite of these recent developments, the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis as an explanation for the origin of UFOs doesn't seem to be a favorable one among most leading thinkers in the community.

It confuses me why ancient aliens are seen as a more plausible explanation than our own prehistoric ancestors, or any other hypothetical advanced indigenous entity.

Studies focused on warp drives and fables of secret space programs are just a couple of examples of the collective fixation on the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The decades-long popularity of the ETH — be it through science fiction, pop culture, or overhyped "official" organizations like SETI — has left the door wide open for skeptics to stigmatize the UFO topic by initiating strawman arguments about travel distances and probability of life.

Personally, I currently have very little interest in "space aliens."

I'm here to talk about UFOs.

Before I get into the weeds and dissect specific threads, let's review the concerns with the ETH that this theory could help alleviate. Although I recognized these solutions as being applicable to the ETH problem throughout my own research and from others, Tonnies does address some of these correlations in his book as well.

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Addressing the Obvious

Starting with the low-hanging fruit, let's take on the skeptics' go-to argument that UFOs can't be non-human in origin due to the vast amount of space they need to travel in order to arrive at our earthly doorstep. Besides the fact that this argument makes more assumptions than should be allowed in any unbiased scientific analysis, the ETH advocates counter with formulas for wormholes and postulations of ancient self-replicating von Neumann probes.

Screenshot of Figure 9 from the AAWSAP paper Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions.

To me, the question of "how did UFOs get here" can be trumped by another, more sensible line of inquiry. In the spirit of Occam's razor, a weapon wielded gleefully by skeptics without remorse, let's address this mystery from a more basic starting point.

What if these anomalous objects originated right here on Earth?

This single theoretical assumption opens up a world of possibilities and, in my opinion, the evidence supporting a non-human origin of these craft becomes much stronger.

It may seem counterintuitive and perhaps even anthropocentric, but there is a lot less conjecture when we analyze our options using a wider array of the knowledge humanity has already gained.

Let's run through a few of the more obvious issues the CTH should could help explain.

1. If UFOs are from this planet, the distance between star systems becomes an irrelevant debate.

   It's not surprising that we see so few skeptics engaging with this idea, as their bias would no longer remain compatible with the argument it fuels. The removal of the extraterrestrial from the conversation complicates their ability to dismiss lines of reasoning outright, which may unfortunately lead to a reactionary doubling-down of derision for even considering the notion of a more advanced species of earthly origin.

2. UFOs seem obsessed with our nuclear capabilities as demonstrated by their known incursions into our most sensitive facilities and airspace.

   Considering the state of our violent, divided society today, it seems much more probable that the intelligence behind the phenomenon is concerned with their own self-interest rather than a bunch of pissed-off monkeys slinging shit at each other. If this non-human intelligence originated on this planet or adopted Earth as their home before human existence, their own biosphere would be at risk from nukes as well.

3. UFOs seem to have a well-established connection with water.

   Numerous reasons for this have been suggested, with a more prominent one suggesting the craft use the planet's life force to fuel their seemingly otherworldly physics. Their love for water may have an even simpler explanation; the ocean may just be their natural habitat. Underwater lava tubes are also known to be a potential cause of magnetic anomalies like those off of Catalina and Guadalupe Island, both locations infamously regarded as hotspots for UFO sightings.

4. The occupants of UFOs seem obsessed or at least fascinated by human genetics.

   A species from another planet having such a commonly reported interest in our genetic makeup is somewhat puzzling -- that is unless we project our own human motivations onto the "alien." Again, thinking of a species acting in self-interest, one must ask if the benefits of such an invasive genetic procedure described by abductees have any relevance to biology not of this Earth. A species much more similar to humans genetically, however, could have a litany of reasons to research and potentially tamper with our genes.

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The Road Ahead

These are just a few of the potential correlations between a possible cryptoterrestrial existence on the planet and the UFO phenomenon.

In the coming weeks, I will be exploring how the work of Tonnies, Forth, Berger, Hancock, and others might correlate with more recent scientific developments and comments by individuals involved with the current push for disclosure.

This is an attempt to connect history, mythology, biology, and technology in a way that helps reframe what is meant by the phrase "non-human origin."

This is the first in a series of articles exploring the possibility of a cryptoterrestrial presence on Earth and its relation to the UFO phenomenon. Click here to read Part II.