Insights into Preternatural Species and Their Sense Organs.

[Gray Raven]

Excerpts from the journal articles based on Ariel Jaronofsky's recent field research.

Interstellar alien physiology could be and perhaps should be truly alien to our conceptions of what has evolved on Earth.  Here on our planet, sensing within the visual range of the electromagnetic spectrum has tended to be evolved into creatures with 'eyes'.  The visible light spectrum is the segment of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can view.  More simply, this range of wavelengths is called visible light.  Typically, the human eye can detect wavelengths from 380 to 700 nanometers.  With our sensory organs, we can see things and focus, which has stimulated the creation of varieties of artistic creations as well as the means to communicate with written symbol systems that can be read.

This ability to draw and write and thus to see those creations would be key for any species to create and store their learned knowledge to be transmitted to others of their kind.  Thus, these alien species with scientific technology would have to have sense organs that allow not only the ability to sense their recorded symbol systems but to work with the material needed to build not only their technology but also to create their art forms of illustration and architecture.

Now, for example, snakes have sense organs other than in the form of their eyes, which enable them to experience parts of the infrared spectrum.

The ability to sense infrared thermal radiation evolved independently in two different groups of snakes, one consisting of the families Boidae (boas) and Pythonidae (pythons), the other of the family Crotalinae (pit vipers).  What is commonly called a pit organ allows these animals to essentially "see" radiant heat at wavelengths between 5 and 30 μm.  The more advanced infrared sense of pit vipers allows these animals to strike prey accurately, even in the absence of light, and detect warm objects from several meters away.  It was previously thought that the organs evolved primarily as prey detectors, but recent evidence suggests that it may also be used in thermoregulation and predator detection, making it a more general-purpose sensory organ than was supposed.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_sensing_in_snakes

It would seem that this physiology could evolve in other ecosystems on other planets, whereby the ability to recognize aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum would enable the species to discern the fine details of a symbol system.  Thus, truly alien creatures might not have what to our human perspective and planetary expectation sensor organs resembling eyes as we are familiar with.  Perhaps parts of their dermal surface can sense and gather the needed aspects of that spectrum in a manner similar to how Earth snakes have evolved to sense infrared radiation.  Thus these creatures may not have 'eyes' in the familiar form that we are accustomed to seeing on our planet.

This speculative fact might go a long way to explain a creature such as the so-called Moon Beasts, who do indeed have a written language as evidenced by the text called The Book of Black Stones.

THE BOOK OF BLACK STONES: in Moonbeast, by unknown moonbeast authors.  A series of plates of black stone, laced together with thick wire to form a sort of book.  The book is inscribed in a series of strange hieroglyph-like symbols, which are the language of the moonbeasts.  Attached to the book by a small chain is a disk of curved glass with a rod-like handle, similar to a magnifying glass.  If anyone looks through the glass at the plates, they can read the inscriptions as though they were written in their own native tongue.

The black plates deal with the worship of Nyarlathotep in clinical detail, as well as dealing with methods of torture as applied to some seventeen different alien species, including humankind (interestingly, ghouls and humans are classified as the same species). Dreamlands, Fifth Edition, 2004, pg. 148

Therefore, the entry in the important scholarly work by S. Petersen, his Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors, needs to be amended concerning the Moon Beasts and their pinkish tentacles.  A submission to both The Preternatural Clearing House, Arkham, Massachusetts, which has since 1980 maintained a registry and information exchange of preternatural sightings in North America, and to the Windthrope Institute for Dream Research, in Clauson, Colorado, I have been told have been submitted to those important academic institutions. 

Ms. Jaronofsky, who is currently undergoing treatment at the Felton Institute in San Francisco, will hopefully, upon her full recovery, be able to respond to the success and publication of her important findings.  Our prayers go out to her for a full recovery of her sanity.  The loss of one of her grad students is truly a tragedy.