The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

The “crypoterrestrial” hypothesis recently proposed by the late skeptic blogger Mac Tonnies has a lot going for it over the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) that most UFO believers still adhere to. For one thing, there is the historical span of reported encounters with strange humanoid beings. Encounters with “UFOs” and their purported otherworldly inhabitants are a post-WWII phenomenon, yet reports matching the modern UFO encounter or abduction report go back through recorded history, and are a common feature in folklore from all over the world. Astronomer Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia shows that there is no difference between modern reports of alien visitation and reports of interactions with fairies, demons, and other cryptic humanoids found in all cultures present and past, which is the main reason he very early abandoned the ETH as a not-very-likely explanation for such experiences.

Vallee’s work places the UFO problem squarely in the realm of cultural beliefs, in other words, and any good anthropologist would therefore smile and close the book on the whole “alien” question then and there. Abductions by aliens are just like abductions by little people, witches, or demons: They are psychological phenomena given culture-specific construction—hallucinated or fantasized experiences couched in the symbolic or cosmological idiom of that society. Local craziness.

As an anthropologist, that’s the reaction I ought to have too. But more and more, that response feels too easy, like another arrogant dismissal of experiences countless humans have and have always had but have not been able to corroborate because they have been generally been alone at the time. It’s the “n of 1” problem: Personal experience (see previous post) is necessarily excluded from the domain of science because the latter is founded on replicability. Yet just because a phenomenon cannot be replicated does not mean it is not real. Hence my recent openmindedness about the question of abduction—which I admit I used to scoff at.

With that, I’m open to speculation about the theme of “hybrids” as it relates to supposed alien intervention in human affairs.

A common motif not only in alien abduction reports but also in stories of abductions by demons, succubi, fairies, deities, etc. is that of some kind of forced sexual intercourse (or surgical insemination or implantation in the extraterrestrial variant), resulting occasionally in, or with the aim of producing, some sort of intermediary cross-breed. Even the Bible includes several examples of potential mating between humans and angels, and what is Jesus but a deity-human hybrid? What if “aliens,” if they exist (a huge “if,” obviously) could actually be a cryptoterrestrial human offshoot attempting to cross-breed with our species?

As it happens, recent research reported a couple weeks ago in The New York Times has some fascinating things to say about real, naturally occurring hybrids. Close animal cousins can and do reproduce to produce cross-breeds, such as “ligers”—yes, ligers do exist. (See some cool pictures of such hybrids in this Huffington Post article.) Many hybrids are reproductively unviable (mules for instance), but many can produce offspring. It appears, for example, that Neanderthals interbred with humans back in the day, lending us a portion of their genes (and vice versa). So, to a degree, modern humans are hybrids of Paleolithic Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

But here’s the really fascinating point: Such cross-breeds , when they are reproductively viable, are actually hardier and able to thrive in environments that neither parent species can quite abide. It is distinctly possible that the mixing of (proto-)human and Neanderthal genes is what enabled modern humans to thrive in pretty much every climate on earth’s dry land.

The notion of a human-alien hybrid as the agenda of an extraterrestrial species having a totally unrelated genetic code is absurd from a biological standpoint. Yet hybridization makes considerably more sense if “aliens” are secretive hominid relatives—perhaps a separate, brainier species from which our lineage diverged relatively recently. It’s thus also interesting to speculate whether a technologically advanced and secretive close human relative might attempt to create a viable hybrid capable of living and thriving in more extreme conditions than either parent species. Conditions such as space.

It would reverse the usual abduction assumption: Instead of extraterrestrials cross breeding with humans to create, effectively, a terrestrial half-breed, cryptoterrestrials could be cross-breeding with humans to produce, wait for it, extraterrestrials.

By “thriving in space” I obviously I don’t mean living unprotected in an actual vacuum; I mean able to easily tolerate the stresses that still put the major limit on human space exploration: ability to live long periods of time in cramped, close quarters; needing relatively little food and water and sunlight; resistant to radiation; able to withstand high g-forces and also not suffer muscle atrophy and bone loss over periods in zero-g; able to withstand or even enjoy long solitude and sexual deprivation; ability to see in relative darkness, and so on.

At least some of these attributes fit the physical description of alien “grays”: Coldly emotionless beings of small stature, with gracile frames, atrophied noses and mouths, and enlarged dark (i.e., light-gathering) eyes. Beings adapted to travel in spaceships, in other words.

So it raises the question: What if grays (if they are not simply the children of the space-age imagination) are themselves the hybrids—purpose-bred space explorers, Homo astronauticus, the product of successive generations (even millennia) in a breeding program by cryptoterrestrials who look much more like us–such as the “Nordics” also frequently described in the abduction literature, and sometimes even in the company of grays? Are the grays our bastard children?

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