Just finished reading the book The Cryptoterrestrials, by the late Mac Tonnies. I had been inspired by his blog before, and I just had to see if his first (and, sadly, last) book lived up to his sharp intellect and wild ideas.
Well, I was not disappointed. Not at all. It was refreshing to find such an indipendent spirit, the likes of which the Paranormal world has not seen since John Keel.
Don’t get the wrong idea: the book is far from perfect. It is very small (some 100 pages), and most of the chapters go round and round the very same themes and ideas. The language is a bit too literary, most of the time removing power from the ideas expressed by overstating them through convoluted sentences.
But the ideas.. Oh yes, that’s where the gold is at. In a previous post I had described my preoccupation with what could be hiding in plain view. That’s where Tonnies places his Cryptoterrestrials most of the time. In UFOs, underground, in hiding, but also in plain view.
The main idea proposed in the book is that we are being played, our preconceptions used against us in a strange play that has lasted for aeons, and whose purpose is unfathomable. The beings responsible use us as a means to an end, one that has never been revealed.
There is little proof in the whole book. Just well-constructed, probing, ultimately disturbing thought. Thought on facts, research, our ideas and our faults as the collective entity we are.
A word of caution : This is not a book for believers. Quite the opposite.
It’s ideas in their purest form, not chewed-over food.
I will end this post here, as I consider this topic an ongoing research, but I will be coming back to the book ever so often.
I can think of no better epilogue than the last lines of the book:
I’m willing to embrace transcendence or endure extinction. I must perpetually concede either possibility, no matter how dramatically different, regardless of how exciting or dismal. I walk a fine existential edge, fearing and cherishing, enlivened by a vertiginous sense of astonishment and horror.You and me both brother.. You and me both.
