A field guide to alleged alien species

Who might be out there?

A small figure with enormous black eyes. A visitor who could pass for human. An intelligence with the face of an insect. UFO lore offers a striking range of answers to what alien life might look like. This guide follows seven recurring traditions through encounter accounts, books, spiritual teachings, and ancient-astronaut speculation. These are alleged beings, not scientifically established species or biological races. NASA reports no credible evidence of extraterrestrial life and no evidence that UAP are extraterrestrial. The possibility of life elsewhere remains open; identifying a particular visitor requires its own evidence.

Sources: UAP frequently asked questions

01 / ABDUCTION ACCOUNTS

Greys

Not a real photo

Also called: Grays; EBEs; Zeta Reticulans; small and tall Grey variants
Claimed origin: Zeta Reticuli in the most famous version, a link that grew out of a 1970s reading of Betty Hill’s star map. Many accounts name no home at all.
Appearance in lore & art: A hairless humanoid three to five feet tall, with a large head, slight body, small mouth, and oversized dark eyes. Witnesses have compared the skin to a mushroom or putty, and the face to a mask. The familiar portrait combines descriptions that are not identical across accounts.

The face everyone knows

No alien is more familiar: the bulbous hairless head, the slit of a mouth, the black eyes that seem to do all the talking. Greys belong above all to missing-time and abduction narratives, in which witnesses describe being floated aboard a craft, examined, and spoken to mind to mind. In Missing Time (1981), the New York artist Budd Hopkins summed up his interviewees’ captors as humanoids “whose skins were whitish-gray in color and disturbingly soft looking, like a mushroom, or a marshmallow, or like putty.” He quoted Air Force Sergeant Charles L. Moody, who said of his reported abduction on August 13, 1975, that there was no hair, no eyelashes, no eyebrows, and that the skin was “almost like a mask.” In another of Hopkins’s cases, the “doctor” stood taller than the rest, about five feet, as did Betty Andreasson’s leader, an early hint of the tall-and-short Grey hierarchy that later accounts would elaborate.

Sources: Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO AbductionsThe Threat: publisher’s description and author excerpt

Two faces of the Hills’ visitors

Betty and Barney Hill’s reported encounter on a New Hampshire highway in September 1961 is the Grey’s origin story, but its beings changed shape in the telling. In Betty’s own written account of her dreams that autumn, later appended to NICAP investigator Walter Webb’s report, the men stood about five feet tall, with grey complexions, bluish lips, dark hair, and noses like Jimmy Durante’s, and wore navy-blue uniforms with caps. Under hypnosis with Boston psychiatrist Benjamin Simon in 1964, Barney fixed on the eyes. “Only the eyes are talking to me,” he said in the session of February 22, and began his sketch with the curve of one side of a face and one elongated eye. The big nose vanished; the eyes grew. Simon himself judged the most tenable explanation to be that Betty’s dreams had taken on the quality of a fantasied experience that Barney absorbed, though he said the case could not be settled absolutely. The University of New Hampshire now keeps the couple’s papers, the star-map correspondence, and a bust of an alien that Betty commissioned.

Sources: A Dramatic UFO Encounter in the White Mountains, New Hampshire: The Hill CaseThe Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer”Using the Betty & Barney Hill CollectionAn Extra(terrestrial) Special CollectionExplore the Betty and Barney Hill case

Twelve days in February 1964

In 1990, the writer Martin Kottmeyer pointed to a curious date. On February 10, 1964, ABC broadcast “The Bellero Shield,” an Outer Limits episode whose luminous alien had eyes that wrapped around the sides of its head. “Wraparound eyes are an extreme rarity in science fiction films,” Kottmeyer wrote. “I know of only one instance.” Barney first described and drew such eyes twelve days later. The episode even gives its alien a line about eyes that speak. The Hills said they had not seen it, so the overlap remains an argument, not a finding. The type had literary ancestors too: a 1933 Swedish novel by Gustav Sandgren gave its aliens short bodies, big bald heads, large dark gleaming eyes, and soft grey clothing, which one scholar has called the template for the popular Grey.

Sources: Entirely Unpredisposed: The Cultural Background of UFO Abduction ReportsThe Bellero ShieldThe Betty and Barney Hill AbductionGrey alien: literary precedents

A portrait painted like a police sketch

Hollywood and the paperback rack made the type move. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), most of the small backlit aliens were played by schoolgirls from Mobile, Alabama, in suits and masks, and the alien who bids farewell was an animatronic puppet by Carlo Rambaldi, who went on to build E.T. A decade later, Whitley Strieber’s Communion became a nonfiction bestseller, and its cover gave the Grey its definitive face. The painter, Ted Seth Jacobs, said Strieber sat with him in his apartment on East 83rd Street while he sketched, correcting “every least detail” in what Jacobs called “the process used by police sketch artists.” Jacobs hung the finished panel at home for about five days while the paint dried and called the result “scary as hell.” Hopkins had already enlisted Jacobs to draw abductees’ memories “in the manner of a police artist”; the visitor’s face was assembled the way a suspect’s is.

Sources: 15 Things You May Not Know About Close Encounters of the Third KindTed Seth Jacobs: an interview with the Communion cover artistCommunion: the author’s account

Hybrids, Zeta Reticuli, and a species with subtypes

By the late 1980s, the Grey had acquired an agenda and an address. Hopkins’s Intruders (1987) argued that the human species was the subject of a breeding experiment. Recalling it without hypnosis, the Indiana woman he called Kathie Davis described being shown a girl of about four: “She looked like an elf, or an… angel. She had really big blue eyes.” Kottmeyer pointed to the 1960 film Village of the Damned, with its mysterious impregnations and hybrid children. The home star came from Ohio schoolteacher Marjorie Fish, whose reading of Betty Hill’s star map put the visitors at Zeta Reticuli, published in Astronomy in December 1974. In December 1987, the pilot John Lear circulated a typology of “Three Types of EBE’s (Greys),” from 3½-foot Grey-1s that “Worship technology” to thinner-lipped, more subservient Grey-3s, and placed their only known home at Zeta Reticuli. Lear also claimed a secret government deal with the Greys around 1969–71 and tied them to cattle mutilations; those are uncorroborated claims. Decades later, David Grusch passed on secondhand descriptions of tall and small Greys in several subtypes.

Sources: Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley WoodsEntirely Unpredisposed: The Cultural Background of UFO Abduction ReportsThe Zeta Reticuli IncidentJohn Lear letter, December 13, 1987Read David Grusch’s profile

Older shadows: fairies and changelings

Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia (1969) argued that the abduction story was older than the space age. He set the long needle reportedly inserted into Betty Hill’s navel beside a fifteenth-century French almanac, the Kalendrier des Bergiers, which depicts demons piercing their captives’ abdomens with long needles. Fairies, he noted, were said to take pregnant women and young mothers, steal children, and leave changelings behind. Visitors in both traditions deny their guests proof: Betty was refused the book she asked to keep, much as fairy-tale travelers lose the treasures they try to carry home. In 1957 the Brazilian farmer Antônio Villas Boas reported a woman aboard a craft who afterward pointed at her belly and then at the sky. Her eyes were blue and slanted, not black.

Sources: Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds

What the record supports

The archives establish that these accounts, drawings, and portraits exist; they do not establish the beings’ biology or home world. Many abduction narratives were recovered under hypnosis, and a 2002 study found greater false recall in people reporting recovered or repressed abduction memories than in controls. Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy, who with Richard McNally recruited subjects with a newspaper ad asking “Have you been abducted by aliens?”, was surprised how many seemed “quite normal, intelligent and articulate,” and linked many reports to sleep paralysis: waking unable to move, with buzzing, lights, and a presence in the room. Her book Abducted traces such memories to nightmares, culturally available images, and a powerful drive for meaning. That research may explain some accounts; it cannot diagnose every witness or settle every reported encounter.

Sources: Memory distortion in people reporting abduction by aliensAbducted by her researchAlien abduction claims explainedAbducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by AliensSleep paralysis, sexual abuse, and space alien abduction

Back to the guide

02 / CONTACTEES & CHANNELING

Nordics & Pleiadians

Not a real photo

Also called: Human-looking visitors; Space Brothers; Venusians; Plejaren; overlapping Pleiadian traditions
Claimed origin: Venus, Mars, and Saturn in Adamski’s accounts; a hidden planet called Clarion in Bethurum’s; the Pleiades, or a world called Erra, in later traditions. These are different claims.
Appearance in lore & art: Human-looking visitors, often beautiful, frequently portrayed with long fair hair and an air of serene youth. “Nordic” describes an appearance in UFO lore; “Pleiadian” describes an alleged origin, not necessarily the same being.

The man in the desert

On November 20, 1952, about 10.2 miles from Desert Center, California, on the road toward Parker, Arizona, George Adamski said he walked alone into the desert and met a man from Venus. In his chapter of Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), the visitor was about five feet six, perhaps 28 years old, with sandy hair that hung in waves to his shoulders, a chocolate-brown one-piece garment, and the hands of an artistic woman. They spoke by gestures and telepathy. When Adamski asked whether he came from Venus, the visitor nodded; then he mimed explosions to warn that too many atomic “Booms!” would destroy Earth. He insisted his shoe prints were important, and a companion made plaster casts of their strange symbols. On December 13, Adamski said, a craft returned, a hand dropped a film holder from a porthole, and the developed plate bore an undeciphered message. Adamski named the visitor Orthon only in a later book, explaining that it was not his real name.

Sources: Flying Saucers Have Landed: Adamski’s accountFlying Saucers Have Landed: the return visit of December 13Inside the Space Ships

Firkon, Kalna, and a furry animal on the Moon

In Inside the Space Ships (1955), the Space Brothers came to town. On February 18, 1953, Adamski wrote, two average-looking young businessmen approached him in a Los Angeles hotel lobby, gave the desert visitor’s palm signal, and drove him off in a black Pontiac: a Martian he called Firkon and a Saturnian he called Ramu. Aboard the mothership he met two women, the little blonde Venusian Kalna and the dark-haired Martian Ilmuth. From space, he reported, the void was full of what looked like billions upon billions of fireflies. Near the Moon, a pilot told him “The Moon has air,” and Adamski said he watched a small, four-legged, furry animal run across a lunar viewing screen. The psychologist C. G. Jung wryly cited “eyewitnesses” like Mr. Adamski, who relates that he flew in a UFO and made a round trip of the Moon in a few hours.

Sources: Inside the Space ShipsFlying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies

The cracks in the story

Adamski’s desert witnesses signed affidavits, but critics later collected a less tidy history. The skeptical biographer Marc Hallet reports that plaster of Paris had been bought shortly before the meeting, and that one witness, George Hunt Williamson, later said he had seen no one but Adamski. Historian Greg Eghigian notes that one witness even denied seeing the spaceship. Arthur C. Clarke remarked in 1954 that the saucer photographs bore an uncanny resemblance to electric-light fittings with table-tennis balls underneath; Hallet’s sources identified the craft as a model built around a lantern part. Adamski had also published a 1949 novel about trips to the Moon, Mars, and Venus. None of this slowed him: in 1959 he toured the world and was received at the palace by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, and he later claimed a 1963 private audience with Pope John XXIII; Hallet traced the papal medal Adamski displayed to a commercial Roman mint.

Sources: A Critical Appraisal of George AdamskiAfter the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFOGeorge Adamski’s UFO photos

Captain Aura Rhanes and the Space Brothers

Adamski was not alone. In July 1952, Truman Bethurum, a night-shift mechanic on a Nevada highway job, said he woke to small men who took him to their captain, Aura Rhanes of the planet Clarion, hidden on the other side of the Moon. She was “a gorgeous woman” with coal-black hair and an olive complexion, wearing a black and red beret, a black velvety blouse, and a pleated red skirt; Earth men, Bethurum wrote, would rate her tops in shapeliness and beauty. His marriage suffered, and an FBI memo records a 1954 tip about his ticketed saucer show in Cincinnati. Howard Menger said a woman with long golden hair met him by a New Jersey brook when he was ten and returned years later claiming to be more than 500 years old; he described cutting the long hair of newly arrived space people so they could pass as Earthlings. George Van Tassel channeled “Ashtar” at Giant Rock in the Mojave and said a Venusian woke him one night in 1953 with the formula for his domed Integratron.

Sources: Aboard a Flying SaucerAfter the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFOFBI memo: Truman Bethurum; Flying Discs, July 22, 1954From Outer Space to YouI Rode a Flying Saucer!Good Vibrations

Why they are called Nordics

Historian Robert Pearson Flaherty places the Space Brothers within the Cold War contactee movement and its spiritual background; their faces carried another history. Menger wrote of “The blond, Aryan-type man.” The anthropologist Christopher Roth observes that since the 1980s ufologists have called these beings Nordics, and that in the classic nineteenth-century ethnologist’s sense, Orthon was a true Aryan; ufology, he argues, is in one sense all about race. Eghigian notes that Adamski blamed his critics on a “Silence Group” and later tied it to antisemitic tropes. Not every fair-haired alien fits the contactee mold: in 1957, Brazilian farmer Antônio Villas Boas described a woman aboard a craft whose hair was “fair, almost white (like hair bleached with peroxide),” with slanted blue eyes and a pointed chin, who afterward pointed toward the sky. In 1987, John Lear listed “Blonds, Swedes, Nordics” among his visitor types.

Sources: Extraterrestrial/UFO ReligionFrom Outer Space to YouUfology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials, and the OccultAfter the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFOThe Humanoids: the Antônio Villas Boas depositionJohn Lear letter, December 13, 1987

Semjase and the Pleiades

In the 1970s the human-looking visitors moved to the Pleiades. The Swiss contactee Eduard “Billy” Meier, who had lost an arm in an accident, said that on January 28, 1975, near Hinwil, a woman named Semjase stepped from a beamship: amber hair falling to her waist, pale blue eyes, a grey suit almost like the hide of an elephant. She said she was 330 years old and came from a planet called Erra. Meier’s photographs became famous, and contested. In Gary Kinder’s investigation, a former associate recalled Meier showing slides of a carved model, and Meier’s wife was quoted saying, “Yes, he is working with models.” Critics later identified two of his alien women as Michelle DellaFave and Susan Lund of the Golddiggers, a dance troupe spun off from The Dean Martin Show; Meier said Men in Black had inserted them. Separately, Barbara Marciniak began channeling a Pleiadian collective in May 1988; her book Bringers of the Dawn presents them as multidimensional spirit beings rather than visitors in ships.

Sources: Light Years: An Investigation into the Extraterrestrial Experiences of Eduard MeierUFO FAQBarbara Marciniak and the PleiadiansBringers of the Dawn

What the record supports

The books document what their authors claimed, and the critiques document how those claims held up. They do not establish a population of human-looking extraterrestrials. Modern measurements show that Venus’s surface has crushing pressure and heat hot enough to melt lead, a serious problem for a literal picture of Adamski’s Venusians. That finding concerns the Venusian setting; it does not test later spiritual interpretations or establish anything about inhabitants of the Pleiades.

Sources: Venus factsA Critical Appraisal of George Adamski

Back to the guide

03 / ENCOUNTER LORE & CONSPIRACY

Reptilians

Not a real photo

Also called: Reptoids; lizard-like humanoids; Draconians in some versions
Claimed origin: Draco, the dragon constellation, in some narratives; Earth itself, deep underground, in others; and later, other dimensions.
Appearance in lore & art: A humanoid interpreted as reptile-like, from the slit-pupiled, flat-nosed figures of a 1967 Nebraska account to seven-foot scaly beings in recent retellings. Scales and amber eyes in this portrait are imaginative design choices, not anatomical observations verified by researchers.

A winged serpent in Nebraska

In the early hours of December 3, 1967, a young police officer in Ashland, Nebraska, Herbert Schirmer, reported a saucer-shaped object hovering six to eight feet above the highway, with a row of portholes and a surface like polished aluminum, which rose with a siren-like sound. He got back to the station at 3:00 a.m. believing only about ten minutes had passed; roughly twenty were unaccounted for. The Condon Committee investigated, anonymized him as a state trooper, and concluded it had “no confidence” the experience was physically real, though a hypnosis session added new information and the psychologist believed Schirmer believed it. Later sessions went further. Watched by writers Brad Steiger and Warren Smith, Schirmer hesitated over a being’s chest and drew an emblem on its uniform: “It was a serpent with wings!” He described beings whose pupils “went up and down, like slits,” with flat noses and slit-like mouths.

Sources: Case 42: a state trooper’s sightingUFO TrekGods and Devils from Outer Space

How a badge became a species

Schirmer never called his visitors reptiles; Smith remembered them as “short, pasty faced UFOnauts.” But the serpent badge and the slit pupils were enough. The book that printed his description, credited to “Eric Norman,” was itself a joint pseudonym of Steiger and Smith, so the two tellings are not independent. The same book opens with Brinsley Le Poer Trench’s theory of serpent kings from the sky, and it set Schirmer’s badge beside Quetzalcoatl and other winged-serpent legends, an early fusion of abduction testimony and serpent-god speculation. Other cases followed with similar emblems. In 1979, according to investigator Virgilio Sánchez-Ocejo, Filiberto Cardenas was taken from a roadside near Hialeah, Florida; he and his wife later described beings with elongated eyes, flattened noses, and light beards, wearing an emblem of a serpent on a lazy X. By the 1990s, abduction accounts gathered by historians like David Jacobs included reptile-like beings working alongside Greys, though Jacobs allowed that “reptilians” might simply be a matter of word choice.

Sources: Gods and Devils from Outer SpaceNorman, EricAlien IdentitiesThe Threat: descriptions of insectlike beings (PDF, p. 59)

Serpent men before the saucers

The shape-shifting reptile is older than the flying saucer. In Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” (Weird Tales, 1929), King Kull of Valusia discovers serpent men wearing human faces: “No man knew who was true man and who false.” Only a true human jaw could pronounce the test phrase “Ka nama kaa lajerama.” Political scientist Michael Barkun traced how Maurice Doreal, a Colorado occult teacher who died in 1963, borrowed the idea for a shape-changing “Serpent Race,” later arguing that they were extraterrestrials. Then in 1983, NBC’s miniseries V gave a huge prime-time audience alien Visitors whose synthetic human skin hid green scales, and its second-in-command, Diana, swallowed a guinea pig whole. Kenneth Johnson had adapted his script from an anti-fascist story; the Visitors’ uniforms carried a swastika-like emblem.

Sources: The Shadow KingdomA Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary AmericaV (1983 miniseries)

Under the mesa at Dulce

Northern New Mexico gave the reptilians a lair. Beginning in 1979, the Albuquerque businessman and physicist Paul Bennewitz became convinced he was intercepting electronic communications from alien spacecraft. Air Force agents, with the researcher Bill Moore reporting on him, fed him tales of underground labs and an alien alliance; Moore admitted his role at a 1989 conference, and our Men in Black notes tell that story. The legend that grew from it placed a vast base beneath the mesa outside Dulce, an area already known for cattle mutilations and paranormal interest. In those early versions, the aliens are Greys. The reptilians arrived through a later folklore figure, “Thomas Castello,” said to be a security officer who deserted the base in 1979 with photographs and a videotape. His story, compiled in The Dulce Book, describes thousands of Greys and tall reptilian humanoids on underground levels, one nicknamed Nightmare Hall. No documentary trace of Castello has ever been produced.

Sources: A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary AmericaRead the Men in Black field notesThe Dulce Book

Icke and the lizard rulers

The reptilian’s most famous modern evangelist began as a British sports presenter. In April 1991, David Icke appeared on Terry Wogan’s chat show to explain his spiritual revelations, to a famously derisive audience. In The Biggest Secret (1999), he argued that reptilians had crossbred with humans to create hybrids who look human but are inwardly reptilian, possessed by full-blood masters; some came from the constellation Draco, which conveniently resembles a dragon. Barkun notes that Icke drew on the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that this is where Icke moves into the dangerous terrain of antisemitism. Historian Ronald H. Fritze traces a later shift toward interdimensional explanations. The idea’s reach has been measured: in 2013, Public Policy Polling found that 4 percent of American voters said shape-shifting reptilian people control the world, with another 7 percent unsure. The blogger Scott Alexander later dubbed that stubborn 4 percent of absurd poll answers “Lizardman’s Constant.”

Sources: The crazy world of David Icke and his shape-shifting reptilesA Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary AmericaHope and Fear: Modern Myths, Conspiracy Theories and Pseudo HistoryDemocrats and Republicans differ on conspiracy theory beliefsNoisy poll results and reptilian Muslim climatologists from Mars

Lacerta and the newest tellings

The legend keeps growing. In 1999 and 2000, a Swede known only as Ole K. claimed to have interviewed a reptilian woman called Lacerta, whose species supposedly descended from dinosaurs and had existed in its current form for 30 million years. No photographs were taken and no audio has surfaced, and the German webzine editor who translated it called it a really good science-fiction story but never the truth. Writers have also traced the reptoid theory from John Rhodes’s 1990s website, which predates Icke’s book, back through Doreal to Howard. In 2026, David Grusch relayed secondhand stories of reptilians seven feet tall or more, with scaly skin, found alive alongside dead Greys in a recovered craft. No specimen, transformation, or verified record supports any of these accounts. Claims that real people are secretly reptilian are unfounded, and they have a documented history of carrying older bigotries.

Sources: The Lacerta Files and its reptilian hybrids show the persistence of appealing mythsReptoids and lizard-like rulers: who truly owns a conspiracy theory?Read David Grusch’s profileA Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America

Back to the guide

04 / ABDUCTION ACCOUNTS

Mantids

Not a real photo

Also called: Mantis beings; insectoids; insectlike beings; ‘the tall ones’
Claimed origin: No consistent home world, even within a single author’s accounts. Their reported role, as supervisors, is more consistent than their address.
Appearance in lore & art: A very tall, thin figure compared with a praying mantis or a giant ant, often with large dark eyes and stiff, jerky movements, sometimes wearing a cape or high-collared robe. The segmented body, compound eyes, and fine textures shown here are an artist’s interpretation.

The tall one in the robe

Abduction accounts often feature a figure who stands apart from the small workers, taller than the rest, watching and directing. In The Threat (1998), historian David Jacobs described him this way: “He is very tall and is usually wearing a cape or long robe with a high collar. He often is described as an insectlike being who looks somewhat like a praying mantis or a giant ant.” He most often performs the staring procedure, gazing into an abductee’s eyes at close range. From his interviewees’ reports, Jacobs inferred a chain of command running down from the insectlike beings to the shorter Greys, and a hive-like quality to the group. He also allowed that labels such as “reptilians” or “insectoids” may simply reflect witnesses’ word choice.

Sources: The Threat: descriptions of insectlike beings (PDF, p. 59)

Strieber’s praying mantis

Whitley Strieber’s Communion (1987) put the mantis on the bestseller list. Recalling the night of December 26, 1985, he wrote that he felt as if he were being passed along by rows of insects, though on reflection the beings had no feelers or wings; it was the stiff way they moved. In a hypnosis session on March 14, 1986, he relived a childhood memory from a vacant lot, at about age twelve: “It looks just exactly like a bug. A praying mantis is what it looks like. Only it’s so big.” He at first took it for a man on a motorcycle wearing dark glasses. Later in the same session he described a praying mantis standing in his New York living room while his son screamed. Strieber later connected this to a 1983 letter in which physicist Robert Sarbacher recalled hearing that recovered beings were constructed like certain insects; Strieber said he did not see the letter until August 1986.

Sources: Communion: hypnosis sessions and insect comparisonsCommunion: the author’s account

Bugs in the Maine woods, and in Mack’s files

In August 1976, four young men canoeing Maine’s Allagash Waterway reported a glowing object over their campfire. Years later, under hypnosis for investigator Raymond Fowler, Jim Weiner said of their captors: “They’re like bugs! They’ve got, ah, bug eyes.” Fowler titled the chapter “They’re like Bugs!” The story has a sharp twist. In 2016, one of the four, Chuck Rak, told a local newspaper that the abduction was “brilliant storytelling. It’s not the truth,” and that he had supported it at first to make money, though he still said they saw a UFO. Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack’s experiencers also spoke of insects. One described figures on a ship’s ramps like “a cross between a skeleton and a walking insect.” Another, whom Mack calls Carlos, was most frightened by what Mack summarized as reptile-faced, insect-bodied robots: “It has an insectian quality in its body with reptilian facial features.”

Sources: The Allagash AbductionsHow much of a famed 1976 UFO abduction is true?Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

Rulers of the coming order

In Jacobs’s account, the mantis figures are not only supervisors but architects. An abductee he called Reshma Kamal said the insectlike aliens told her that the Greys were products of early attempts at hybridization and could not reproduce, so the insect beings had begun a new program. During what Jacobs calls a Mindscan procedure, she said, an insectlike being told her she was “one of them,” and she was shown herself directing panicked crowds during a coming transition called “The Change.” Jacobs summarized the hierarchy that would follow: “The new order will be insectlike aliens in control, followed by other aliens, hybrids, abductees, and, finally, nonabductees.” The publisher describes the book as drawing on more than 700 hypnotic-regression sessions, which are claims gathered through a method that its own author acknowledged could mix recollection and confabulation.

Sources: The Threat: Reshma Kamal and the insectlike aliens (PDF pp. 84, 160, 170)The Threat: publisher’s description and author excerpt

Where the giant bug came from

In a 2001 encyclopedia entry, Martin Kottmeyer traced the insect alien through fiction long before abductions: Martian ants, brainy Venusian bugs, H. G. Wells’s insect-like Selenites in The First Men in the Moon (1901), the pulps, and the giant ants of Them! (1954). He identified Strieber’s 1986 regression as the first explicit report of a large praying mantis and argued that John Lear’s widely circulated 1987 statement probably shaped later reports. Lear claimed that officials had learned the “horrible truth” that the visitors “were indeed ugly little creatures, shaped like praying mantises.” Kottmeyer added a physics objection: limbs that cannot bear the weight, and oxygen diffusion that fails beyond a couple of inches, make human-sized insects hard to build.

Sources: InsectoidsStatement released by John Lear, December 29, 1987

Mantises on the molecule

The mantis also turns up in an unexpected laboratory. Between 1990 and 1995, psychiatrist Rick Strassman gave about 400 doses of the psychedelic DMT to 60 volunteers at the University of New Mexico. In DMT: The Spirit Molecule, he lists life-forms his volunteers met, including “clowns, reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cacti, and stick figures.” One volunteer said an insectlike thing got right into his face and sucked him out of his head into outer space. Strassman noticed the overlap with Mack’s praying-mantis-like beings. A 2022 analysis of 3,778 online DMT trip reports found entities in 1,719 of them; insectoid, mantis, or arachnoid beings appeared in 40 of those encounters, about 2.3 percent. A shared image does not identify a shared visitor, but it shows how readily the human mind reaches for the mantis.

Sources: DMT: The Spirit MoleculePhenomenology and content of the inhaled N,N-DMT experience

Insectoids in the disclosure era

The mantis has followed UFO lore into the 2020s. In 2026 the physicist Eric Davis told NewsNation that the government knows of at least four species; the outlet’s summary of his list included insectoids resembling a mantis, and he has produced no records to support it. The author Kent Heckenlively told Fox News that insectoids are rarely seen but are often described as the beings in charge, an echo of Jacobs’s robed supervisors. David Grusch, asked on Joe Rogan’s podcast, said he had heard only water-cooler talk about insectoid beings. No specimen, record, or independently verified observation supports a Mantid anatomy or origin; research has linked some abduction experiences to sleep paralysis, which may explain some accounts but not necessarily all.

Sources: Feds sitting on 4 types of dead aliens, UFO whistleblower saysUFO insider claims US has bodies of 4 different alien speciesRead David Grusch’s profileSleep paralysis, sexual abuse, and space alien abduction

Back to the guide

05 / SPIRITUAL CHANNELING

Arcturians

Not a real photo

Also called: Arcturian guides; the crew of the Starship Athena; Arcturian collectives in channeling literature
Claimed origin: Arcturus, the bright orange star in Boötes: a gateway for souls in Edgar Cayce’s readings, a starship crew’s home in later channeling. The star has no confirmed planets.
Appearance in lore & art: In We, the Arcturians, about one meter tall, very wispy and slender, hairless, with two very large almond-shaped eyes and three fingers on each hand. The skin is grey with much white in it, or greenish, though the beings say their true color does not register on Earth. Our blue-toned portrait is a stylized interpretation.

A star that was a doorway

Before anyone channeled an Arcturian, Arcturus was a destination for souls. Edgar Cayce, the Virginia Beach psychic known for his trance readings, spoke of the star as a kind of cosmic crossroads. Asked whether Cayce himself had gone to the system of Arcturus and returned to Earth, reading 5749-14 called Arcturus “that which may be called the center of this universe,” through which individuals pass and choose whether to return. Another reading called it “the door out of this system.” A third gave Arcturus a single admiring line: “Arcturus the wonderful, the beautiful.” Popular retellings often credit Cayce with calling Arcturus home to the galaxy’s most advanced civilization, but that phrase does not appear in the compiled reading extracts we checked. Cayce’s Arcturus was a waystation for souls, not a race of beings. The beings came later.

Sources: The Edgar Cayce Companion: Arcturus and the Journey of the Soul

A message on the screen, Albuquerque, 1987

Norma J. Milanovich was a former University of New Mexico education professor who had left academia to start a training company. She dedicated her book to her niece Tracy, who died at fourteen in 1986 and who, she wrote, became her spiritual guide. In the fall of 1987, she sat at her computer and asked to communicate with the being most qualified to answer. The reply, she said, came from beings from Arcturus “riding on a Starship that was situated to the southeast of Albuquerque.” She thought it was a joke and stayed away from the computer for weeks. When she tried again with a friend, a crystal under her right hand began to turn. From then on she typed in a semi-trance, at 60 to 80 words a minute for an hour or more, in a word processor called PFS: Professional Write.

Sources: We, the Arcturians: dedication, method, first contact, and self-portrait (PDF pp. 2–52)We, the Arcturians: publication record and synopsis

A self-portrait by dictation

The Arcturians, according to the book, dictated their own portrait: over a two-hour session, a friend drew a face by following typed instructions. They had no hair, no eyebrows or eyelashes, no external ears, and skin “a grey color, with much white in the tone.” Then came a postscript: “By the way, we are about 3'-4' tall, in comparison to you Earth people.” When co-author Cynthia Ploski first sat in, Milanovich wrote, the computer and printer went out of control: a message scrolled onto the screen without her hands touching the keyboard, and the printer then printed the part that had failed to appear. Formal sessions began on July 5, 1988. The first answer opened, “We would not win any beauty contests on your planet.” The spokesman gave his name as Juluionno, commander of the Starship Athena; questions of language went to the ship’s elder, Herdonitic.

Sources: We, the Arcturians: dedication, method, first contact, and self-portrait (PDF pp. 2–52)

Life aboard the Starship Athena

The book’s Arcturians live 350 to 400 Earth years and die by a kind of prearranged contract: “On Arcturus, we have no sickness.” They concede that plans sometimes go wrong, “such as the times when some of our spacecraft have crashed on other planets.” Children’s caretakers are selected at birth for a violet-equivalent aura, then tested in a chamber of conflicting energy fields and a flag test, in which the one who collects the most flags is not automatically the winner. The beings say they serve the Ascended Masters, under Jesus, also known as Sananda, and that they have worked among humans for longer than we could comprehend, under a plan two thousand years old. Long ago, they add, Arcturian elders founded a colony here that a more warlike life form destroyed, and some of the Greek gods were partly space brothers and sisters. The book itself explains “planet Arcturus” as a home or state of consciousness rather than an astronomical world.

Sources: We, the Arcturians: lifespan, society, and Earth history (PDF pp. 12–40)We, the Arcturians: appearance and home-world claims (PDF)

The message spreads

Arcturians soon had other mouthpieces. According to his group’s own history, David K. Miller began channeling “Juliano and the Arcturians” in 1995 while camping on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and was told to found a planetary-healing group; Juliano later recommended expanding it to forty groups of forty. In a lecture dated January 6, 2018, Miller’s Arcturians say they have been described very kindly as looking like ballet dancers, that their planet has transitioned into the fifth dimension, and that they live six or seven hundred years. That is nearly double the lifespan the beings gave in 1990. The story changed as it traveled, as channeled traditions often do.

Sources: History of the Group of FortyLife on Arcturus: Juliano lecture, January 6, 2018

The real Arcturus

The star itself is stranger than many inventions. Arcturus is an orange giant about 37 light-years away, roughly 25 times the Sun’s width, and the brightest star in the northern sky. At about seven billion years old, it is far older than the Sun, and it belongs to a moving stream of stars whose origin astronomers still debate. A possible companion detected in 1993 has never been confirmed, so no planet is known there. On May 27, 1933, astronomers caught its light with telescopes and photocells and used the current to switch on the lights at Chicago’s Century of Progress fair, on the theory that the light had left the star during the city’s 1893 fair. In the King James Bible, Job is asked whether he can guide “Arcturus with his sons,” though the Hebrew word probably means a bear constellation. The star has even been suspected as a UFO; see our Deception Island entry.

Sources: Bright orange Arcturus: use the Big Dipper to find itFundamental parameters and chemical composition of ArcturusArcturus: search for planetsThe curious and confounding story of how Arcturus electrified Chicagoʿayish (H5906)Explore the Deception Island sighting

What the record supports

These sources document a rich Arcturian spiritual tradition, from Cayce’s gateway of souls to a starship crew with names and ranks. They do not independently verify the speakers or their biology. A channeled description remains a claim even when it includes precise physical details, and the details themselves change between channelers. The portrait’s color and facial structure are artistic choices.

Sources: We, the Arcturians: publication record and synopsisWe, the Arcturians: appearance and home-world claims (PDF)

Back to the guide

06 / ANCIENT-ASTRONAUT INTERPRETATION

Anunnaki

Not a real photo

Also called: Anunna; Anunnaku — names with an ancient religious history
Claimed origin: Nibiru, a planet on a 3,600-year orbit, in Zecharia Sitchin’s modern interpretation. In cuneiform sources, Nibiru is a celestial crossing point usually tied to Marduk and Jupiter.
Appearance in lore & art: Ancient sources refer to a group of deities, not one alien body type. Sitchin described his Nibiruans as about nine feet tall. This imagined figure borrows a beard, robe, and headdress from a broad Mesopotamian visual vocabulary.

Those of princely seed

Long before they were cast as astronauts, the Anunna were gods. Assyriologist Nicole Brisch notes that the most likely translations render the name as something like “those of princely seed.” In Sumerian texts they are the highest gods, or the pantheon of a single city, and one of their chief tasks was deciding fates. After the Old Babylonian period, the name came to mean gods of the netherworld, set against the heavenly Igigi; the Babylonian creation epic has Marduk station 300 in heaven and 300 below. Brisch notes some confusion surrounding these terms already in antiquity, and that no depiction of the Anunna as a group is known. In Inana’s Descent to the Netherworld, they are judges: “The Anuna, the seven judges, rendered their decision against her. They looked at her -- it was the look of death.” The goddess becomes a corpse hung on a hook.

Sources: Anunna (Anunnaku, Anunnaki): a group of godsInana’s descent to the nether world

A strike in heaven and the first workers

Sitchin’s most famous claim grew from a real and remarkable myth. The Babylonian epic of Atrahasis opens in a world where the gods themselves do the labor. The great Anunnaki make the lesser Igigi suffer the work, until the Igigi revolt: they burn their tools and surround the god Enlil’s house at night. The solution is a new creature to bear the yoke. A god is slain in the divine assembly, the birth goddess mixes his flesh and blood with clay, and the Igigi spit upon it. Seven men and seven women are formed. Later, the noise of the multiplying humans disturbs Enlil, who sends plague, drought, and finally the flood. The Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish offers a parallel: Marduk makes humankind from the blood of the slain rebel Qingu and imposes the gods’ toil on them.

Sources: Atra-ḫasīs: The Babylonian Story of the FloodMyths from Mesopotamia

Sitchin’s gold-miners from Nibiru

In The 12th Planet (1976), Zecharia Sitchin turned that myth into a space saga. Born in the Soviet Union in 1920 and raised in Palestine, he studied economics in London and worked as a journalist before moving to New York in 1952. In his telling, the Nefilim landed about 450,000 years ago and came to Earth for gold, mining it in southeast Africa under Enki. When the Anunnaki in the mines mutinied, they engineered a “Primitive Worker” by genetic manipulation: Atrahasis’s clay and divine blood became cloning. The 300 heavenly Anunnaki became astronauts who stayed in orbit. The motive grew over time; by Genesis Revisited (1990), the gold was needed to shield Nibiru’s dwindling atmosphere. Sitchin also read the creation epic as cosmology, with Nibiru smashing a planet called Tiamat to form Earth and the asteroid belt, and the Sumerian King List’s reigns of 28,800 and 36,000 years as counts of Nibiru’s 3,600-year orbits.

Sources: The 12th Planet: the 1976 textGenesis RevisitedUp close with Zecharia SitchinLooking for alien DNAThe Sumerian king listThe 12th Planet: 1976 first-edition recordThe 12th Planet: the publisher’s presentation of Sitchin’s claims

The seal, the crossing, and the rocket

Specialists found the translations strained. Sitchin’s favorite exhibit was a cylinder seal in Berlin’s Vorderasiatisches Museum, VA 243, in which he saw the Sun surrounded by eleven globes, a solar system with Nibiru included. The scholar Michael S. Heiser, trained in ancient Semitic languages, countered that the central symbol is a star, not the Mesopotamian sun sign, and that the seal’s inscription names a man and his servant: “Nothing in the inscription suggests anything remotely to do with astronomy or planets.” In cuneiform texts, Heiser showed, Nibiru means a crossing or crossing point, and an astronomical compendium identifies it as “the star of Marduk, Nibiru, Jupiter.” He argued that Sitchin also misread the Hebrew word shem, which means name or renown, as a kind of rocket.

Sources: The Myth of a 12th Planet in Sumerian Texts: VA 243The Myth of a Sumerian 12th Planet: ‘Nibiru’ According to the Cuneiform SourcesZecharia Sitchin’s errors

Nibiru’s doomsday afterlife

Sitchin’s planet escaped his books. Nancy Lieder, a self-declared psychic who said she channeled beings from a planet around Zeta Reticuli, warned on her website that Planet X, linked to Nibiru, would strike in May 2003; when nothing happened, the date moved to December 2012. In 2017, David Meade tied an arrival to a September 23 alignment in Virgo and Leo, and news reports answered with NASA’s statement from the 2012 scare: Nibiru “simply put - does not exist.” David Morrison of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, who called the idea “a myth, with no basis in fact,” became its reluctant public answerer. By 2008, he wrote, he was receiving “at least one question per day,” ranging from anguished to abusive, and in a 2011 video he recalled a note from a 12-year-old girl who said she and her classmates were scared. Sitchin himself had distanced his work from the 2012 panic: “Don’t link me to 2012. Nothing will happen in 2012.”

Sources: Doomsday 2012, the Planet Nibiru, and CosmophobiaWill the world end on Sept. 23? Conspiracy theorists say yesPlease stop annoying this NASA scientist with Planet X theoriesLooking for alien DNA

The last experiment

At almost ninety, Sitchin wanted a test. In 2010 he asked London’s Natural History Museum to sequence the DNA of Queen Puabi of Ur, buried about 4,500 years ago, whom he believed to be a demigoddess. “Maybe by comparing her genome with ours, we would find out what are those missing genes,” he told NBC News, adding, “I’m really risking my life’s work on this outcome.” The museum replied that such a request had to come from a researcher with recognized experience in the field. He died on October 9, 2010, with the test still undone. The ancient texts support Mesopotamian beliefs about gods; through the shared name alone, they do not establish Sitchin’s visitors or genetic engineering. Our portrait illustrates his modern speculation, not an authenticated artifact.

Sources: Looking for alien DNAR.I.P. Zecharia Sitchin, 1920–2010Anunna (Anunnaku, Anunnaki): a group of gods

Back to the guide

07 / ETHERIANS, LIGHT BEINGS & LIVING-UFO LORE

Energy beings & living light

Not a real photo

Also called: Light beings; etheric beings; sky ‘critters’; intelligent plasmoids — related ideas, not interchangeable names
Claimed origin: An overlapping etheric realm in Layne’s account; Earth’s atmosphere in Constable’s; no agreed home world.
Appearance in lore & art: Luminous presences, shifting forms, or invisible organisms supposedly revealed by special photography. This portrait imagines a body of light; no source establishes a shared anatomy.

When the light itself is the visitor

What if the glow has no pilot inside it? This branch of UFO lore imagines intelligence without an ordinary flesh-and-blood body: a presence that becomes visible, changes form, or seems to answer an observer. ‘Energy beings’ is our umbrella for several distinct traditions. The closest named early example is Meade Layne’s Etherians; Constable’s atmospheric animals and Dorothy Izatt’s light beings give the idea very different personalities. Some are described as neighbors sharing our world, rather than travelers from another star.

Sources: The Ether Ship Mystery and Its Solution: EtheriaTrevor James Constable and his atmospheric ‘critters’The Dorothy Izatt Case: Peter Guttilla’s account, June 16, 2003

Etherians: a world threaded through ours

In The Ether Ship Mystery and Its Solution, Layne pictured ordinary matter as a net with enormous openings, with Etheria occupying the apparent emptiness. Its inhabitants supposedly built craft that entered our perception by changing their vibration, like a spinning fan slowing until its blades become visible. His visitors were chiefly observers: studying civilizations near their decline, charting impending earthquakes, and disturbed by atomic weapons. He even suggested they materialized in bodies about 30 inches tall for convenience aboard their discs. These are Layne’s esoteric claims. His Etherians had bodies and machines made of supposed etheric matter, so calling them literally ‘pure energy’ would simplify his story too far.

Sources: The Ether Ship Mystery and Its Solution: Etheria

Constable’s invisible menagerie

Merchant-marine radio officer Trevor James Constable gave the invisible visitor an animal form. His publisher describes huge amoeba-like ‘critters’ inhabiting Earth’s atmosphere, normally too diffuse to see but supposedly detectable with infrared photography. Constable claimed that increasing their density made them visible and that radar disturbed them out of hiding. He drew on Wilhelm Reich’s proposed orgone energy, and his menagerie had a sinister side: he speculated that some creatures preyed on livestock and people. The Cosmic Pulse of Life developed these ideas. The publisher’s enthusiastic account records his beliefs and photographic claims; it supplies no independently established organism. In this version, the UFO could itself be the animal.

Sources: Trevor James Constable and his atmospheric ‘critters’

Dorothy Izatt’s visitors on film

Near Vancouver, Dorothy Izatt gave living-light lore a different centerpiece: reels of home-movie film. On Coast to Coast AM on June 16, 2003, author Peter Guttilla said she had shot 600 reels of 8mm film since 1974, showing what he interpreted as craft, extraterrestrials, and light beings. He described the light beings as angelic and also recounted benevolent elf-like visitors and humanoids over nine feet tall. His book Contact with Beings of Light gathered her story. The extraordinary variety matters: her reported visitors do not define one consistent species. Guttilla’s endorsement and the existence of film do not independently establish the lights’ identity or composition.

Sources: The Dorothy Izatt Case: Peter Guttilla’s account, June 16, 2003

Hessdalen: did a light answer back?

The 1984 Hessdalen field report supplies a particularly intriguing incident. Erling Strand reported aiming a laser toward flashing lights in two encounters, with an apparent response in eight of nine attempts: the flashing changed when the beam was directed at the light. That is an investigator’s reported observation, not a demonstrated conversation. In a speculative excerpt published on his website in 2019, Massimo Teodorani proposed that some plasma structures might support consciousness and discussed searching their light variations for structured signals. The jump from a changing flash to a thinking being remains a hypothesis. Our Hessdalen encounter entry follows the wider observational record and its competing explanations.

Sources: Project Hessdalen 1984: final technical report, sections 3.7 and 4.5The Intelligent Plasma HypothesisExplore the Hessdalen lights

Plasma is matter; ‘pure energy’ is the lore

There is a real research thread behind some plasma-life speculation. A 2007 paper by V. N. Tsytovich and colleagues examined helical structures in complex dusty plasmas, discussing self-organization, memory-like features, and possible reproduction as candidates for inorganic living matter. It did not identify an alien visitor or demonstrate consciousness. Plasma contains charged particles: it is a state of matter, not disembodied energy. A glowing object, an esoteric etheric body, and a hypothetical plasma organism therefore make different claims. Together they give the archive a rich non-humanoid tradition, but the cited material establishes neither a pure-energy species nor an extraterrestrial origin for these lights.

Sources: From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matterWhat is plasma?

Back to the guide

Could real alien life look completely different?

Yes—the search is not limited to beings that resemble us. NASA’s search includes biosignatures, signs that biology might leave behind, and technosignatures, possible signs of technology. Neither requires a Grey face, a humanoid body, or a visitor to Earth. These seven profiles were selected to compare recurring traditions with traceable sources, not to rank which beings are most likely to exist. There is no defensible probability ranking in the material reviewed here.

Sources: UAP frequently asked questions

How to read the sources

An archive can verify when someone recorded a claim. A claimant’s book can explain exactly what was asserted. A publisher’s synopsis can establish how a book presents itself. Scholarly history can trace a story’s development, and scientific research can test particular explanations. Those are different jobs. This guide compares them without treating a famous name, repeated description, or number of interviews as independent confirmation. The dates refer to reported events or publications, not the discovery of a species.

GO TO THE SOURCE

Sources & media

Spotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun.

THE FORUM

Discuss this entry

Compare notes with other readers: witness details, sources, and the parts that still do not add up.

Open the discussion

A field guide to alleged alien species

Who might be out there?

The face everyone knows

Two faces of the Hills’ visitors

Twelve days in February 1964

A portrait painted like a police sketch

Hybrids, Zeta Reticuli, and a species with subtypes

Older shadows: fairies and changelings

What the record supports

The man in the desert

Firkon, Kalna, and a furry animal on the Moon

The cracks in the story

Captain Aura Rhanes and the Space Brothers

Why they are called Nordics

Semjase and the Pleiades

What the record supports

A winged serpent in Nebraska

How a badge became a species

Serpent men before the saucers

Under the mesa at Dulce

Icke and the lizard rulers

Lacerta and the newest tellings

The tall one in the robe

Strieber’s praying mantis

Bugs in the Maine woods, and in Mack’s files

Rulers of the coming order

Where the giant bug came from

Mantises on the molecule

Insectoids in the disclosure era

A star that was a doorway

A message on the screen, Albuquerque, 1987

A self-portrait by dictation

Life aboard the Starship Athena

The message spreads

The real Arcturus

What the record supports

Those of princely seed

A strike in heaven and the first workers

Sitchin’s gold-miners from Nibiru

The seal, the crossing, and the rocket

Nibiru’s doomsday afterlife

The last experiment

When the light itself is the visitor

Etherians: a world threaded through ours

Constable’s invisible menagerie

Dorothy Izatt’s visitors on film

Hessdalen: did a light answer back?

Plasma is matter; ‘pure energy’ is the lore

Could real alien life look completely different?

How to read the sources

Sources & media

Discuss this entry

The Men in Black