Do aliens smoke cigarettes?

In a follow-up to her post about an unusual cigarette-purchasing "woman" (briefly discussed here), "Kartott" has offered further description that underscores the unconventional nature of her brief encounter:

Though I could not see her eyes due to the large Jackie-O style sunglasses she wore, other aspects were evident: an unusually long pointy chin. Exaggerated cheekbones out of proportion to the rest of the face. Practically no lips, only enough to discern that there was any mouth. A nose that was almost not there: there was very little structure to it, a small bridge area, and some structure around the nostrils, but not much.

Consciously or not, Kartott is describing a being strikingly similar to the woman supposedly encountered by abductee Antonio Villas Boas, whose experience is described here. Indeed, the pointed chin, exaggerated cheekbones and vestigial nose and mouth are commonly reported characteristics of ostensibly "alien" entities, and crop up with compelling frequency in the UFO literature. The visage has become synonymous with that of the "Gray," a commonly portrayed UFO occupant type with massive black eyes and fetal characteristics. (The Grays are often described as sexless or even robotic, stirring discussion that they're in fact biological robots or even genetically atrophied human time-travelers from our own ecologically impoverished future.)





Although the being described by Villas Boas is perhaps the most obvious example of an apparently alien woman, one has to look no further than the cover of Whitley Strieber's iconic 1987 best-seller "Communion" for another. (Often assumed to depict a male extraterrestial, the text of "Communion" and subsequent books by Strieber emphasizes that the being on the book's cover is female.)





In a disquieting twist, researchers have noted a conspicuous resemblance between the "Communion" alien and "Lam," the "magickal" entity allegedly summoned by controversial occultist Aleister Crowley. Like Strieber's female contact and Villas Boas' seductress, Lam's portrait emphasizes a memorably tapered face with dramatically pointed chin and minimal nose and mouth, suggesting a common origin. (At least some of the infamous "Men In Black" would also seem to fit the mold.)

Kartott's "cigarette lady" seems to fit the pattern. Even the purchase of cigarettes -- however seemingly preposterous -- is in keeping with reports by self-proclaimed abductees, who have described the smell of cigarette smoke in the context of their encounters. (The distinctively repellent odor of sulfur is a more common variant, with both mythological and folkloric antecedents.)

I propose -- tentatively -- that the beings featured above are "alien" only in the sense that they seem exceedingly strange to us. Their predominantly humanoid manner and ability to function in "normal" human reality -- if fleetingly -- argue that they're denizens of our own planet. Perhaps they're materializations of the sort postulated by John Keel in such books as "The Mothman Prophecies" and "The Eighth Tower."

Of course, the unmistakably elfin qualities described by UFO witnesses suggest Jacques Vallee's heretical notion of a "multiverse" inhabited by all manner of humanoid intelligences: a hypothesis that begs a scientific analysis of unlikely "contact" reports attributed to indigenous beings such as fairies.

Alternatively, liminal beings like Kartott's cigarette woman might represent a race of human-alien "hybrids," as argued by Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs. Apparently unable to pass among us for great lengths of time, the hybrids' overseers might be content to allow their creations to practice certain basic social skills in a relatively unbounded setting.

Of course, the answer could be a fusion of any of the above possibilities . . . or we could be dealing with a phenomenon generated at least partly by the psyche. The supposed aliens that witnesses see within and outside of UFOs might be examples of what Dr. John Mack termed "reified metaphor": a physical intrusion of repressed archetypal forces. If so, it's all-too-tempting to speculate that the daimonic reality traditionally accessed by shamanic cultures has begun to spill over into waking consciousness, manifesting as a veritable onslaught of beings quietly seeking to reassert their influence.

In a mechanistic society, the "Other" might find itself faced with extinction; violations of restricted airspace and face-to-face encounters with unsuspecting observers could amount to a kind of existential assertion, begging the possibility that our capacity for belief is somehow integral to our visitors' reality . . . if, indeed, "visitors" is the proper term.

Note: This is the latest in a series of speculative essays that I'm using as "source-code" for a book titled "The Cryptoterrestrials." If interested, you can find related musings here, here, here, and here.