While modern ufology has been a component of our cultural zeitgeist for decades and decades now, during much of that time it has generally been seen as a matter for astrophysicists and aviation experts. While ground-breaking researchers such as Jacques Vallee, John Keel and J. Allen Hynek, as early as the 1970s, suggested the anomalous and highly strange nature of the data takes us well beyond that kind of conventional inquiry, even today, the mainstream still tends to think of UFOs (now monikered as UAP) and NHI – the fancy new name for what we use to call “aliens”, as involving interstellar travelers arriving at Earth in sophisticated spacecraft.

For many, especially in still physicalist-centric Western civilization, this kind of enterprise represents, at least in potentia, a new kind of contact, and a new possibility for communication that takes us beyond what we’ve been limited to amongst our own species over the milenia. But, here again, the data – when one actually looks squarely into them – take us well beyond that notion. And that’s because – contact – and specifically contact with apparently non-human and non-conventionally human intelligences – has supposedly already been happening. The varieties of contact technologies or modalities that have meditated this non-ordinary kind of communication include mediumship/channeling, shamanic journeying, CE-5/HICE, dreams, psychedelics, and even fever states.

In other words, the issue seems to be not one of needing to wait for interstellar travelers to arrive to finally give us this opportunity, for it’s been available to us all along, with some cultures and people groups being more privy to this fact than others. Interestingly, these various modalities of contact and communication also seem to be possible regardless of what would seem to be the expected language and even species-specific differences. And that’s because mind-to-mind communication, known in parapsychological circles as telepathy, seems to be the general rule rather than the exception in these endeavors, thus bypassing the need for translation of written and spoken languages altogether.

But of course, these startling revelations raise further questions: if the issue is not one of needing to wait for interstellar travelers to arrive via superliminal (that is, faster than light) travel, then how exactly is this contact and communication happening? Have they been here – in our so-called “physical” space – all along? Or does the nature of this contact suggest space, and for that matter, time, is simply not what we’ve long assumed? How is it that these various contact technologies are able to connect us with alternative forms of sophisticated sentience, and what do they have in common that makes them effective? These are the captivating and consequential matters we’ll seek to engage with in this, the 105th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

2017 was the year that saw a sudden uptick of mainstream interest in the notion of UFOs following revelations arising from a groundbreaking article in the New York Times. This article described so-called “unidentified aerial phenomena” – modern nomenclature for what had traditionally been referred to as “unidentified flying objects” – UFOs. These revelations suggested these objects and/or phenomena had been documented and studied as part of an official Department of Defense program. This tacit acknowledgment of an official UFO program marked a sharp right turn when compared with the historical trend, where the government had traditionally sought to suppress, dismiss and even ridicule the notion of UFOs, as a part of official policy.

Ever since that trailblazing article was first published the interest in this topic has grown by leaps and bounds in the mainstream – even if it still feels painfully slow and incremental to those more familiar with the wealth of data suggesting there really is a there there, and that there has been for a long time. But nevertheless, the presence of these apparent vehicles, that appear to be under intelligence control, has led to inevitable questions around who might be behind them – either at the wheel – so to speak, or piloting them remotely from somewhere else. Industry insiders attest to the beyond next-gen capabilities of these craft, suggesting – startlingly – that they couldn’t possibly belong to any contemporary nation-state player.

And of course, in people’s minds that leaves open one enticing possibility: the notion that these may be the property of an extraterrestrial intelligence; a biological exo-planetary species who’ve come here to study us for reasons thus far largely unclear. For some people in our civilization this notion is most welcome, because the thinking is that these more sophisticated others may be able to help us address some of our most intractable problems. For others, it prompts feelings of fear, forcing a reckoning around the notion that we may not be the apex species on the block after all.

Of course, for those of us much more intimately familiar with the breadth and depth of the historical literature on this topic, these questions – while certainly profound – are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. And that’s because a deep dive into the actual data gathered over the decades suggests the presence of one or more extraterrestrial species in our midst may not be sufficient to explain the bizarreness of what has been observed and encountered by human beings around the world and across time.

In the 1970s trailblazing figures like Jacques Vallee and John Keel emerged, provocatively suggesting that the traditional nuts and bolts ET hypothesis was not the best fit for the events described in the literature. Vallee surprised many by drawing parallels between modern UFO encounters with supposed space aliens and encounters with the so-called faerie folk of deep human lore. By comparing and contrasting the nature of these various entities, Vallee forced a 20th century populace to wrestle with the notion that what we might be seeing is just a modern-day manifestation of a presence that had been with us since the very beginning.

While Vallee’s postulation is certainly a compelling one – after all, these striking parallels do exist – it’s also important not to prematurely leap to that conclusion based solely on fairly superficial similarities. And of course, this begs the question: how much overlap really exists between ancient faerie and even religious tradition, and the modern-day UFO Phenomenon? And how might we distinguish between a single intelligence with multiple manifestations, and the presence of multiple intelligences perhaps arising from very different source points? These are the very matters we’ll seek to engage with in this, the 63rd episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

When it comes to the history of the UFO Phenomenon, there are a few key players who have shaped the nature of the conversation. Of those individuals, those considered – at least initially, anyway – the most controversial, are the ones who suggested an alternative to the popular, and in many ways ubiquitous, extraterrestrial hypothesis: the notion that alien species had traveled to us by traversing vast distances of interstellar space.

That initial controversy fell by the wayside, in many ways, as evidence mounted over the decades suggesting the ETH really was either, if not wrong, then woefully incomplete, in terms of explaining the depth and breadth of the UFO Phenomenon; a phenomenon that seemed, upon closer inspection, to have much in common with tales of encounters with otherworldly entities from distant human lore.

Of course, Jacques Vallee stands out as perhaps the most influential in this regard. But standing right alongside him, in terms of positing an alternate origin hypothesis to explain the apparently non-human entities visiting and interacting with us throughout recorded history, is the figure of John Keel. Keel, ever a trailblazer, sought from the outset to study this subject in an objective way, unprejudiced by the prominent theories of his day.

And as he studied this subject in depth, Keel began to notice peculiar – though, to him, unmistakable – commonalities behind the appearance and behavior of phenomena such as UFOs and alien beings, and tales from occult literature going back deep into the depth of recorded human history. The crossover elements were so overwhelming in scope, in fact, that this recognition ultimately led Keel to conclude that a common origin was responsible for all interactions with supposedly otherworldly entities – whether they be supposed aliens from distant planets, or goblins arising from the underworld.

Keel suggested that these beings were not so much distant travelers from elsewhere in the fabric of our own spacetime, as interdimensional sojourners, emerging from some alternate plane that exists right alongside our own. He termed this vast “otherplace”, the superspectrum. And he termed the visitors coming from this parallel plane the “ultraterrestrials”.

Keel believed – even though that term “belief” was loathsome to him in many ways – that the vastly different entities we’ve experienced over time, including the craft supposedly traversing our skies, were all manifestations arising from this alternate plane of existence. Indeed he even wondered if perhaps one central and decidedly superior intelligence was responsible for all of these manifestations; manifestations that influenced the origins of our ancient religions as well as much more recent fields of interest and inquiry, such as the UFO Phenomenon.

What was the historical evidence, and direct personal experience, that led Keel in this peculiar – and, at first glance, perhaps counterintuitive – direction? These are the very matters we’ll seek to engage with, in this, the 37th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

Since early in the 20th century people’s imaginations have been captured by the notion of visitors from the Great Beyond visiting our blue pearl of a planet. And of course, for the vast majority of people, and for decades and decades, this “Great Beyond” was assumed to be outer space: the vast array of galaxies, star systems and planets populating the immense expanse of the Cosmos.

When sightings of soon-to-be-branded “flying saucers” were first reported in the 1940s, it was taken as a given that these fast-moving flying vehicles, which were apparently unlikely to be the technology of terrestrial civilization, were examples of these visitors from outer-space finally arrived to make our acquaintance. Immediately the media was saturated with images of “little green men” from nearby planets like Mars, as our imaginations filled in the gaps as to who was piloting these advanced craft.

This view which suggested that these visitors were from outer-space held sway for decades more — even though the potential originating planet for these extra-terrestrials was pushed farther and farther away, as we began to understand more and more about the apparent lifelessness of the neighboring planets within our own solar system.

However, by the time the 1960s rolled around, and gaining steam ever since then, competing hypotheses emerged to explain the source of these apparent Others. And some of these hypotheses even began to question the assumption that these Others were actually really “Visitors” at all.

Researchers likes Jacques Vallee and John Keel, who had examined thousands of cases each, and who tended to be much more familiar with the totality of the data as compared with armchair enthusiasts, began to take note of data-points that suggested perhaps these “aliens” weren’t visiting from far-flung star systems after all. The way these Others seemed to blink in and out of existence, for instance, led some of these more nuanced researchers to wonder if perhaps these Others were popping in and out of different dimensions, almost instantaneously. And if that were true then they weren’t necessarily really coming from far away at all. In fact, they may be dropping in from a mirror universe; perhaps even from an alternate Earth, thus giving birth to what’s often referred to as the Interdimensional Hypothesis.

When researchers like the aforementioned Vallee and Keel considered the long history of the so-called UFO Phenomenon, they wondered if perhaps stories buried in the lore of distant history – here we speak of elves, goblins, the fae, etc., may actually be instances of contact with the same beings who are piloting the craft we see buzzing around our skies today, and who are interacting with modern human beings in consistently – and similarly – confoundingly mysterious ways.

There are various forms that new hypotheses take to account for all of the data we’ve described above, but a common term that’s arisen to describe these not necessarily extraterrestrial Others, is “ultraterrestrial”. This term is seen to capture the sense that perhaps these Others are native to the Earth after all, and may indeed have been here longer than us. But it also allows for the sense that they either: don’t seem to be necessarily tied only to the earth, in our experience of it anyway, and/or that they exist in a bandwidth of reality that only sometimes brings them into direct contact with us – or at least, into a kind of direct contact that we can actually perceive. Perhaps they can see us all the time, but we only seem to be able to “see” them when certain, as of now unknown, conditions are met.

The notion of these ultraterrestrial others is the topic of this, the 24th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

Even before H.G. Wells wrote his classic War of the Worlds, depicting an alien invasion on behalf of a technologically superior civilization from Mars, human beings have looked to the skies — meaning, more specifically, outer space — as the obvious source for visitation from a group of “Others”. As we’ve grown in our understanding of just how discombobulatingly vast our Cosmos is, populated by countless galaxies, each containing untold numbers of star systems and planets, that assumption has seemed all the more secure. The “final frontier” was clearly “out there” — and so we turned our attention, as well as our most advanced telescopes and technology — to the stars, in hopes of confirming the existence of these “Others”.

Ever since the dawn of the Atomic Age, the apparent presence of advanced craft buzzing in and around our skies, combined with reported contact between people and various non-human entities, has led many to conclude that the epoch of contact with advanced non-human intelligence is already upon us. And, of course, following the common-sense thinking of the day, these Others have been assumed to be space travelers, who’ve transversed astounding astronomical distances to arrive on and around our planet.

In more recent decades this model, termed the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, has met with some competition from what is most often termed the “Interdimensional Hypothesis”. This competing notion postulates the visitation of beings who are coming, not necessarily from far-flung star systems, but from parallel dimensions or other universes. This hypothesis has been advanced by well respected ufologists such as Jacques Vallee, who argue that the data best fits with this model.

What sometimes flies under the radar in this debate as to the origin of these Others, is a much more close-to-home explanation. It’s an explanation that is so close-to-home, in fact, that some find it downright disturbing. I speak of a model advanced most famously by a researcher named Mac Tonnies, termed “The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis”. This hypothesis posits that these Others are actually terrestrial creatures – flesh and blood beings, just like us, co-occupants of our world, who have operated, in stealth, right alongside us, since time immemorial.

This hypothesis goes further, arguing that many of the bizarre reported sightings and interactions with beings from distant human history – I speak of faeries, elves, and such – which are of course disregarded/explained away today as mythological constructs of pre-scientific societies by modern historians – are actually incidents of contact with these very same Cryptoterrestrials.

Is it possible that the Others we’ve heard so much about, or at least some of them, could actually be terrestrial in origin – perhaps a distant off-shoot of a common human ancestor? And have they, supposed masters of stealth and disinformation, been actively misdirecting us into believing that what we’re solely dealing with are extraterrestrial visitors, simply to throw us off their scent?

This is exactly what’s postulated in Mac Tonnies’ much respected book, THE CRYPTOTERRESTRIALS: A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and the Aliens Among Us. Tonnies’ counter-intuitive and disconcerting Cryptoterrestrial hypothesis is the topic of this, the 13th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.