Cynthia Crawford: the woman who claimed to be an alien
Have you ever heard of the dark forest hypothesis? It’s a fascinating, yet kind of terrifying look at what the universe could be that gets past around alien enthusiast circles like a blunt at an art student’s house party.
The basic concept is that the universe looks empty in the same way that a dark forest does – when the sun has gone down, and we can stand in the middle of a wood and feel like the only thing alive for miles around, but that feeling is completely false, that forest is teeming with life, the issue is that it’s all hiding, and anything that sticks its head above the parapet gets picked off by hungry predators. People use this comparison to explain why aliens aren’t visiting.
However, there are also people who use this hypothesis in a slightly different way. They use it to explain not only why aliens aren’t visible from our Earthly vantage point, not only why aliens aren’t visiting, but to explain why the aliens that are already among us aren’t making themselves known. That’s right. I may have buried the lede somewhat there, but it’s true. There’s a pretty sizable portion of people who believe in aliens that also believe they live in hiding right here on Earth.
If this is true (and it would be precisely as cool as it is terrifying), one could understand exactly why they’d want to keep that a secret. Anyone with an understanding of the world can see how it treats its minorities, and as a literal alien, they’d be the ultimate minority. Perhaps they’d look at someone like Cynthia Crawford as the height of courage, as she was the one person to stand up for herself and truly say who she really was to the world.
That, yes, she was an alien. Or at least, half of one.
Wait, there was an alien on Earth?!
According to her. Crawford did taper our skepticism somewhat by saying that she was half alien at least. The full story, according to her, began with her very birth. She was a fraternal twin and yet was born with a completely different blood type and tissue type from her twin. This was only discovered a few months after the birth, but at the moment, doctors were baffled by the fact that she was born without an amniotic sac
This led to several more tests being done on Crawford as a young child, so the story goes. It was only when she was a little older that she realised that these tests were being done not in doctors’ offices but in top-secret military testing facilities. The kind of places where she’d see things that she could never explain until finally, her father explained the whole truth when she was in her mid-30s. Her father had ties to the OSS and, years before she was born, agents from there had approached him for a top-secret project.
The project was to mix human DNA with alien DNA that the government had been storing for decades in order to try to create a human/alien “hybrid”. Crawford was the first successful version of this, the result of human DNA mixed (literally in a Petri dish) with the DNA of two other alien species. Crawford went public about this and her visits from other alien species shortly afterwards, making sculptures of the other species that visited her until her death in 2017.
It’s a nice story. Y’know, apart from all the government agent stuff at the start. One hopes that this was just a way of making a living on one’s own terms; God knows that’s hard enough at the best of times. The line between a shared fantasy and a con is barely visible, though. Here’s hoping that Cynthia Crawford, who seemed like a woman that a lot of people loved dearly, spent her life on the right side of it.