The secret alliance between humans and the Outer Ones

The secret alliance between humans and the Outer Ones is a recurring but uncertain thread linking Vermont folklore to claims of organized human cooperation with nonhuman visitors. First imagined as clandestine collaboration with dangerous beings, the relationship is later presented by Henry Wentworth Akeley as a possible intellectual partnership. A recorded ritual, reports of human intermediaries, and a mechanical speaker’s account give the alliance concrete traces, but each arrives through incomplete and interested testimony.

Folklore and Hidden Contacts

Local accounts place the beginnings of the alliance in a landscape of secrecy and avoidance. Stories describe the beings establishing hidden outposts in the human world, leaving claw marks around farmhouse windows, and speaking to solitary travelers in buzzing imitations of human speech. Other tales associate them with disappearances beyond the regions already considered haunted. In the latest layer of legend, remote farmers and hermits are said to have undergone disturbing mental changes and were suspected of serving as allies or representatives. Around 1800, eccentric recluses in one northeastern county could be accused of such affiliation simply because they were unpopular and isolated.

These stories did not agree on what the beings were, but some Indigenous accounts gave the secrecy a more specific structure. Pennacook tradition held that the Winged Ones were not native to Earth: they maintained earthly outposts, mined stone, and carried it back to stars in the north. The beings could understand human languages without apparently needing a language of their own; they communicated through their heads, whose changing colors conveyed different meanings. The legends also warned that listening to their forest voices or approaching their hills could bring danger. In this framework, contact was real but limited, and the relationship was shaped by distance, observation, and the beings’ own purposes.

Akeley’s Evidence and the Recorded Ritual

Henry Wentworth Akeley’s private investigations turn inherited rumor into a claim of present-day surveillance and contact. He tells Albert N. Wilmarth that nonhuman creatures watch humanity and gather information through spies among people. Akeley believes that a man he regarded as one such spy supplied many of his clues before killing himself, and he suspects that other intermediaries remain. He also warns that the beings may remove learned men to learn about human society. These claims make human collaboration seem both covert and perilous: an intermediary can provide knowledge, but the person’s identity and allegiance are difficult to establish.

Akeley’s phonograph record adds an audible, though fragmentary, trace. Made near a cave on the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain on May-Eve in 1915, it captured what Akeley understood as a ritual involving a cultivated human voice and a second voice that spoke grammatical English with a scholarly accent but sounded unmistakably nonhuman to him. The recorded words invoke Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, and Shub-Niggurath. The combination of human participation, an alien-sounding speaker, and religious language makes the scene suggest a contact network older than Akeley’s own investigation. It does not, however, establish who the human speaker is or how extensive the network may be.

After repeatedly listening to the record and comparing interpretations with Akeley, Wilmarth understands it as a possible clue to repellent customs within ancient human religions and to elaborate alliances between hidden outer creatures and some people. Their speculation places the beings’ earthly manifestations in relation to Yuggoth, itself described as an outpost of a race with a more remote cosmic origin. The record therefore widens the alliance from a local secret to a possible link between human institutions and an immense nonhuman history, while leaving its scale and present condition unresolved.

Akeley’s Reversal and the Proposed Accord

In a letter dated September 6, 1928, Akeley announces that a messenger from the beings has spoken with him. The messenger is human, and his account causes Akeley to revise his earlier interpretation: the frightening offers and intentions attributed to the Outer Ones, he now believes, arose from misunderstanding allegorical speech shaped by radically different cultures and habits of thought. Akeley describes his former conclusions as mistaken and says that he regrets the harm he inflicted during the nightly skirmishes. He also names the late Walter Brown as a human agent whose conduct had prejudiced him against the beings.

Akeley’s new account identifies a competing human network as the source of at least some of the apparent hostility. He says a secret cult of malign men seeks to track and injure the Outer Ones, and that emissaries of this cult—not the beings—stole many of the lost letters. Akeley links the cult to Hastur and the Yellow Sign. In this revised explanation, the beings’ precautions are directed against human aggressors rather than humanity as a whole. It directly reverses the earlier fear that the Outer Ones were secretly targeting people, but it remains Akeley’s report of what he was told, not an independently verified account.

The relationship Akeley now describes is an accord built on peace, non-molestation, and intellectual exchange. He argues that the beings want to understand humanity more fully and want a small number of philosophical and scientific leaders to understand them in return. New human inventions, he says, make it increasingly difficult for their outposts to remain secret, so mutual knowledge is necessary to establish a workable coexistence. Akeley presents himself as their chosen interpreter on Earth because of his existing knowledge, and anticipates receiving further information orally and in writing. What he had treated as a threat thus becomes, in his revised account, a chance for intellectual adventure and future contact beyond Earth.

Human Intermediaries and the Alliance’s Limits

A later mechanical message gives the claim of human collaboration a distinct voice. The machine speaks with a loud, metallic, deliberately measured sound; its speaker says that he is human, while his brain rests in a cylinder at Round Hill and communicates through electronic devices. He claims to be allied with the visiting beings, to have met them in the Himalayas, and to have traveled with their help. His account of journeys to thirty-seven celestial bodies, including places beyond the galaxy and the known space-time cosmos, casts alliance as a route to experiences otherwise inaccessible to human beings. He invites Wilmarth to join him and Akeley, describing the visitors as interested in people of knowledge.

The speaker also identifies Noyes as a longtime member of the same human circle and says that Wilmarth may recognize Noyes’s voice on the record sent by Akeley. This connection retrospectively joins a recorded human voice, an established local intermediary, and the beings’ wider network. The alliance is therefore not presented as a single encounter: it includes interpreters, agents, hidden antagonists, and people who claim to travel with nonhuman assistance. Yet the invitation and testimony do not erase the uncertainty surrounding the record, the stolen letters, or Akeley’s changed account. The relationship remains significant precisely because its signs can be read as evidence of either danger or cooperation, and because human speech repeatedly mediates what the beings are believed to want.