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.