“Maybe we can safely dispense with notions of interstellar visitors and wormholes. Our apparent visitors may not be “visiting” at all; conceivably, we are the newcomers.” -Mac Tonnies

I loved the quote above, which I’ve excerpted from Mac Tonnie’s recent post over at the SETI blog, titled Intelligence and the Cosmos: Some Barely Restrained Musings. Tonnies is the kind of writer who can effectively take you out of the nutshell for more than a few moments as he indulges in acrobatics of the mind, especially when it involves innovative thinking with regard to UFOs. This time around, Mac is discussing theories regarding non-human entities who he believes may be native to Earth and it’s place in the cosmos, as opposed to being creatures who travel here from elsewhere. In the article, he tells us that he’s “been dissatisfied with the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis since encountering Jacques Vallee. But sometimes musing about a nonhuman ‘psychosocial control system’ just seems too abstract, too vague and obtuse. Vallee himself pointed out that the prevailing materialist interpretation for UFOs is quintessentially American; Americans like to ‘kick the tires.’ ”

Tonnies suggests that the UFO phenomenon might involve elements of both what we deem physical, “nuts-and-bolts reality”, as well as that which humanity would presently classify as supernatural or metaphysical. “Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology would appear indistinguishable from magic’ certainly applies,” Tonnies reminds us, quoting one of my own favorite of Clark’s maxims pertaining to the interrelationship between science, technology, and “magic”. “But even Clarke was postulating arbitrarily advanced forms of known technologies,” Tonnies adds, reminding us that the brilliant mathematician often chose to abstain from the use of elements like telepathy in his fiction (one exception, perhaps, could be the way the obelisk sent to Earth in 2001: A Space Oddysey seemed capable of communicating to man’s early ancestors through a sort of “telepathy”as it instructed them in the ways of survival of the fittest).

Altogether, Tonnies suggests that non-human lifeforms we might consider “alien” to this planet could instead exist alongside us right now, unobserved by us and the majority of our sensory equipment intended to detect such entities (traditional SETI research equipment and methodology, for instance). To read the complete article, you may click the link below to visit the SETI blog:

http://www.aboutseti.com/blog/intelligence-cosmos