Last week I received a lengthy, rambling series of messages from a guy in Salt Lake City, Utah that – when I finally got around to copy-pasting and formatting it all – amounted to eleven pages in single-spaced Word. I won’t detail the whole story, since it would take an entire batch of articles to do that. Sam (which is his real name) is a twenty-something who has never seen a UFO, has never been abducted by ETs, and has never had a particular interest in the subjects of UFOs and alien life. For a while, however, he did dabble in the occult, which may very well have led to what occurred just a few months back. Here’s the story: Sam found himself in a very weird situation that began in late August of this year, and that he claims is still going on. On the first night of weirdness, he woke up, around 5:00 a.m. in a state of complete confusion on his bed, rather than in it. Sam had had an extremely strange “nightmare” of having been placed into a state of what he called “mind control” a couple of hours earlier, which would have put the time it all began around 3:00 a.m. In that same nightmare, Sam got out of bed, dressed, and exited his apartment. But that’s not all: when he dressed, it was not in his regular, casual clothes. Rather, it was in a black suit, which he put on without giving it a thought. I should stress he doesn’t own a black suit.

Sam cannot remember what happened after he left the apartment, that is until he arrived at the doorstep of an apartment only two blocks down from his. He recalled knocking on the door, which was opened by a woman with a blank look on her face – and who seemed to have no problems about letting a complete stranger into her home at what, by now, was around 4:00 a.m. Sam recalls entering the living-room, with the woman in front of him. He then warned her never to talk about a UFO encounter that she had just a few days earlier – a case that involved “missing time” but not an “abduction.” In his strange state, Sam could hear himself saying the threatening words, but it was as if “it wasn’t me saying it. It was coming from my mouth, but it wasn’t me.” Sam then left, walked back to his home, and went to bed. He fell asleep – and then woke up around 5:00 a.m., as described earlier. In the morning, the suit was nowhere in sight. All that was left were the vivid  memories of that odd night of what Sam fully believes was a case of possession, rather than just a bad dream.

Sam claims that roughly the same scenario has now occurred on three occasions: he wakes in the early hours, dresses in a black suit (which is never still there when he wakes at his usual wake-up time of 7:00 a.m.), and then heads off to the home of the targeted individual, which, so far, is always the same woman. As with the first occasion, he cannot recall how he gets to the home of the person, although he recalls walking back. Oddly, even though he knows the woman lives nearby, he is never able to find her apartment when he is in a normal state during the day. It’s as if (he believes) that he’s being prevented from finding the location – that is, until he is required to make another late night threat. Then, he has no problem at all finding the site. It’s a result of all this undeniable weirdness that Sam chose to contact me, having done some online research and seen that I have written several books on the MIB and one on the Women in Black phenomenon. Sam believes that demons have control of him and that those same demons are behind the MIB phenomenon. In Sam’s world, those same demons use us – in a hypnotized state – to prevent people from getting too close to the truth of the UFO enigma – which is, in Sam’s view, demonic, too. And they do that by literally turning random people into MIBs, via temporary possession of people like Sam. He believes.

When I began to dig into the story deeply, I realized that it was very similar to one that Timothy Green Beckley had shared with me back in September 2010 (specifically on the 21st of the month). The story, in Tim’s own words, went as follows: “There was one case where I might have been threatened by a Man in Black. There was a publication I wrote for in the 1970s called Official UFO. They published their address in the magazine, so they did get a few crank  visitors to the offices. One of these was a gentleman who claimed he was being stalked by the Men in Black.” As Tim also told me, he eventually got to meet a guy who would later turn out to be an alleged Man in Black. They had a degree of correspondence for a while, as well as a few face-to-face encounters. By the end of the 1970s, however, things started to get very menacing, as Tim told me.

The man in question made a number of disturbing calls to Tim’s home phone number. It was something that led Tim to contact the police. When the police tracked the strange character down, Tim finally got the lowdown on who, exactly, the man really was. It transpired he was a homeless character, spending his nights and days on Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, New York City. There was a very good reason – beyond just the threats the guy made – why Tim was concerned. Tim explained to me that the man “…must have called fifty times and left crazy, threatening messages that would go on and on. I spoke with his parents, who were in Florida, and they said that although he wasn’t always like this, something came over him now and again.”

Tim had an intriguing theory, one that echoes the story told to me last week by Sam. Tim said: “With cases like this guy, where something came over him, and with the MIB, it’s like a possession, where a paranormal force takes possession of the person and they become the Man in Black, doing what the force wants them to do, but without their knowledge. Afterward, they might not even remember any of it. These people are living on the fringe of society; they are simple-minded people who can easily be controlled and influenced. Someone, say, who might be living in some rundown apartment, is taken over in a kind of trance, and then he becomes one of the Men in Black. He threatens someone, and then he goes back to his normal life after the possession ends, and he doesn’t remember it. But, while he is under the control of whatever is doing this, he’s not quite right. And, like a zombie, is the best way I can describe it.”

I have to say that all of this paints a very strange, even sinister, picture. Of course, the most likely scenario is that Sam was already aware that I had previously addressed this very same theory (in my 2011 book, The Real Men in Black) that the MIB might actually be regular people in the throes of possession and used by…well…something. The least likely scenario is that supernatural, demonic entities are using us as vessels, as a means to threaten witnesses to UFOs (and to paranormal phenomena, too). I personally go with the “most likely” angle. The fact is, though, that in most MIB encounters, the witnesses describe the Men in Black as acting very strange, as if they aren’t fully self-aware, and as if they are performing a role, but they don’t completely understand what that role is – beyond making that veiled threat to keep people quiet about their particular encounter of the UFO- or paranormal-based type.

“You can’t keep a good three-fingered mummy down.”

If that’s not a saying in Peru, it should be. Despite efforts by government officials, mummy organizations and skeptics around the world, the scientists and investigators trying to study the mysterious 3-Finger Nazca-Palpa Mummies continue to fight for the right of the world to see what these preserved beings are. On November 6, 2019, four of them gave presentations at the VI Congreso Internacional de Investigación (VI International Research Congress) hosted by the Universidad Nacional San Luis Gonzaga – the university which is now in possession of the 3-fingered mummies. Fortunately for those not invited (that’s us), Giorgio Piacenza of ExoNews (The Exopolitics Institute News Service) attended the conference and was able to interview some of the presenters, attendees and university officials.

Biologist José de la Cruz Ríos López, who has participated in both historical and DNA tests on the mummies, confirmed to Piacenza that the research is following objective scientific principles and he’s not involved for any monetary gain. He reiterated that it would be impossible to create these three-fingered mummies from human and/or animal parts. (Watch his bi-lingual interview here.)

In his interview with Piacenza, University Vice-Rector of Research, Dr. Martin Alarcón Quispe talks about protecting the 3-finger mummies from skeptics, including Peru’s Ministry of Culture, while still providing access to both serious scientific researchers and members of the public. The Vice-Rector said that the mummies have a reptile-like skin which could have helped them survive in the desert, and their DNA does not match any known species. However, he wants the process to be scientific, regardless of what the final results and determinations are. (Watch his bi-lingual interview here.)

Next up was Dr. Galeckii Dimitri from Russia, who also confirmed that his research found that the mummies could not have been assembled and in his mind were not fakes. Although they have some human traits, he doesn’t believe they’re human. The skin on the mummies is continuous, not pieced together. He found no evidence of alterations, either physical or chemical, to the mummies, and confirmed that not only were egg-like things seen by X-ray inside the bodies, they were surrounded by a membrane. (Watch his tri-lingual interview here.)

Piacenza talked to Dr. Robert E. Farrell, an engineering professor and researcher with an interest in ufology as well as the 3-fingered mummies. To him, the CAT scans prove these are non-human beings, possibly from another planet. He also explains how carbon-dating can determine the age of Maria, the largest of the mummies, even if she had come from another planet. (Watch his English interview here.)

Finally, Piacenza includes an interview with someone who has been involved with the 3-fingered mummies since their discover was announced – investigative reporter Jaime Maussan. He summarizes many of the unusual findings about the mummies and the resistance to this research that could change human history. (Watch his English interview here.)

If you’re looking for definitive proof that these 3-fingered mummies were once aliens, the interviews won’t provide them. However, the data keeps piling up that they’re something other than human and not fakes.

You definitely can’t keep a good three-fingered mummy down.

Strange experiences with UFOs and their occupants have been reported from all over the world for decades, from myriad witnesses ranging across a variety of all age groups and all walks of life. Yet, the ones who really make us listen are those who are in positions of power or authority, ones whom we trust to be what we’d like to think of as “reliable witnesses” or those who are “in the know.” This is especially profound when we get people from the government itself talking about these things, and when an official of this nature talks about UFOs and aliens, people tend to take notice. One such person is a Canadian top-ranking politician from the upper echelons of government, who has become rather famous in recent years for his candid and very open willingness to talk about these matters, and who has some very bizarre stories to tell.

The official in question is one Paul Hellyer, a former gunner with the Royal Canadian Artillery during World War II, an aeronautical engineer, and who served as Canada’s Defense Minister from 1964 to 1967 under prime minister Lester B. Pearson, and who remained connected to politics in later years and is the longest serving current member of the country’s Privy Council. He is notable for being largely responsible and instrumental in unifying the Canadian Navy, Air Force and Army into one organization now known as the Canadian Forces, but in recent years he has become perhaps most famous for his amazing claims and activities involving purported aliens and UFOs, gaining a reputation as one of the highest ranking UFO witnesses and supporters of disclosure on record. His path down this bizarre path can perhaps be best traced back to 1967, when Hellyer inaugurated a landing pad that had been constructed in St. Paul, Alberta, specifically for use by any alien visitors that might arrive. It was mostly considered a symbolic gesture and tourist attraction at the time, but there was still quite a lot of fanfare over it, and it bears a sensational plaque that reads:

The area under the World’s First UFO Landing Pad was designated international by the Town of St. Paul as a symbol of our faith that mankind will maintain the outer universe free from national wars and strife. That future travel in space will be safe for all intergalactic beings, all visitors from earth or otherwise are welcome to this territory and to the Town of St. Paul.

Paul Hellyer

While this might just seem like a politician’s plug to help a town out with its gesture and publicity stunt, this would not be the end of Hellyer’s involvement with UFOs by a long shot, and in later years he would make waves with a series of increasingly bizarre statements concerning aliens, their technology, and their plans for us. It all really started rolling with a very public and well-covered statement in 2005 that he believed that UFOs were real alien craft, and that he had in fact seen one with his wife and friends. He has said of his own sighting:

I have seen a UFO, about a 120 miles north of Toronto. Two years ago, last Canadian Thanksgiving, my wife decided she wanted to go look at the stars, so I went with her, and she looked into the eastern sky and said, ‘There’s a star.’ And I turned around the other way and said, ‘Oh, there’s a much brighter one here!’ And she looked at it, and we watched it until our necks almost broke for 20 minutes. And it was definitely a UFO, because it could change position in the sky by 3 or 4 degrees in 3 or 4 seconds. I checked out and there were no satellites that could do that, the space station wasn’t going by and it isn’t able to move that fast anyway. There was no other explanation except it was the real thing. Two days later, I went down to the dock and got a comfortable chair, it came back in almost to the same spot and entertained me for as long as I could take it. It would drop down in the sky and then roar back up and then shift a few degrees and do a circle and come back at a speed, at just astronomical speeds.

To have such an official figure make these public statements was eye brow raising enough, but Hellyer would increasingly go off the rails into the odd, making ever more spectacular and bizarre claims over the following years. Hellyer went on to very publicly claim that not only were aliens real, but that they had been coming to visit Earth for millennia. He also claims that there are more than one type of entity visiting us, the number of which over the years has fluctuated between 4 and 12 different, separate species of alien beings, in more recent years stating that there could be as many as 80 (!), all with different aims and agendas, some in cahoots with the United States government, most of them benevolent, but at least two of which are not. One example of these alleged creatures is an entity Hellyer has often mentioned, which are called the “Tall Whites,” which are described as being up to 10 feet tall, looking like blonde humans of Scandinavian descent, with disproportionately large blue eyes, blonde hair, and life spans of 800 years.

According to Hellyer, these different alien species have a sort of federation, and maintain a presence on Earth, and also at bases on Venus, Mars and Saturn’s moon in order to keep an eye on us, worried that our nuclear capabilities and destructive nature pose an imminent threat to the cosmos. He is also convinced that these aliens have advanced technology available that they have shared with world governments that would eliminate climate change, but that this is all covered up. A staunch supporter of full government disclosure of aliens and UFOs, Hellyer has made repeated appeals for the nations of the world to release the alien technology he is sure they are hiding, and he has said:

I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation…that could be a way to save our planet…We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know. Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough.

Why don’t the aliens just directly share this world changing green energy with us, you ask? If this is such groundbreaking technology and they are so worried about us, then why not just gift it to us now? Well, he says that this is because they wish for us to change our ways and stop wars and pollution on our own first. He has explained of their general attitude towards our race:

They don’t think we are good stewards of our planet, we’re clear cutting our forests, we’re polluting our rivers and our lakes, and we’re dumping sewage in the oceans, and we’re doing all sorts of things which are not what good stewards of their homes should be doing.

A bit ominously, Hellyer has also gone on record as accusing the U.S. government of being in possession of hidden recovered alien technology and metal alloys, and of using this technology for preparing weapons of war and also for the expressed purpose of fighting unfriendly alien species. He has in the past famously pointed such accusations directly at the administration of then-president George W. Bush, insisting that they not only were creating weapons and aircraft from alien tech, but that they were also prepared to shoot UFOs down and were even creating a moon base to act as a forward operating station in the event of an extraterrestrial attack. Wait, what? Let Hellyer explain:

They’ve been working on technology that they got from the aliens and not only that but the particle guns based on the work of Tesla and others. That is the primary purpose of the anti-ballistic missile shield, the weapons are ones that can be aimed in either direction to control the situation on earth but equally, if not more important, to shoot down UFOs. I do believe they have developed two or three kinds of weapons that are capable of disabling and bringing down UFOs.

The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. The Bush Administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide.

Shooting down aliens? Intergalactic war? What the what? It is all rather colorful and bonkers to say the least, but people listen because of his position, and in recent years it has only ramped up in intensity, with Hellyer claiming that some species of aliens are cooperating with the Illuminati secret shadow government, and that these entities will not release technology to stop global warming because they are tight with petroleum companies. It is a weird claim, especially as it doesn’t make any sense, because it is the oil causing the global warming, so how would stopping climate change with alien tech hurt the oil industry? If they could produce oil without worrying about causing any damage, that seems it would be a good thing for them, but what do I know, I’m not the ex-defense minister with the inside dirt of UFOs. So, is Hellyer delusional? Has he gone off the deep end into some pure science fiction territory? With his high standing and connections why should he want to do this? Or is this all his true intentions at disclosure that just aren’t making any headway due to those who won’t believe? Whatever the case may be, it is all a wild tale, and it all comes from one of the very highest ranking officials to ever step forward on the matter.

It seems that in the world of the paranormal and of UFOs there are certain years that for whatever reason seem to harbor waves of utterly strange accounts. I have covered this sort of phenomenon here with the year 1965 and its spate of very bizarre sightings, but all over the world there have been those years that just seem to be magnets for the odd. In 1968 there were various spikes of UFO activity all over the world, and one place where this was definitely felt was the nation of Canada. In this year there was a nearly unprecedented spike and intense increase in reports of strange things in the sky and what seems to have been their humanoid occupants. Here are some of the strangest of a very strange year.

Much of the year of weirdness emerged in spring of 1968, and in April of that year we have a report from UFO BC that originates from West Vancouver, British Columbia, where two witnesses were sitting in a car at Whytecliff Park waiting for a friend. They allegedly were snapped out of their lazy daydreaming by a bright white light that slowly moved towards the edge of the nearby wood, where it disappeared behind some trees. Immediately after this, the forest disgorged a “small glowing humanoid,” which moved about with very quick, precise movements, and was so bright that it was impossible to make out any clothing or facial features. The strange little being then looked at them and went back into the woods, after which the bright light they had originally seen lifted up into the air over the tree line and sped off.

That same month, a report from the CASUFO files tells of a witness in Chicoutimi, Quebec by the name of Mrs. Tremblay. She claims that she had been walking on her way to a restaurant when she saw hovering in the sky a strange object with a beam shooting down to the ground beneath it. According to the witness, the beam of light then trained on her, and she squeezed her eyes closed in the sudden, blinding brightness, only to open them and find that the object was gone and nowhere to be seen. The dazed woman then decided to head home, where she says she saw a small humanoid being with dark blue eyes and dressed in an odd-looking seamless white overall loitering around her home. According to the witness, as soon as the tiny man realized he had been seen he vanished into thin air right before her eyes. Apparently other humanoids dressed in similar clothing would be seen in the area over the next few months.

In summer of that year we have quite a few otherworldly encounters. In Sarnia, Ontario, there was a 10-year-old girl who looked outside her house one June evening to see a glowing humanoid with a bald head and no facial features sitting at the bench near their garage. She would claim that when it stood up it was around 6 feet tall, and that when the frightened girl called for her father it disappeared. That same month, two witnesses referred to as Mrs. B. L. and Mrs. A. B. were walking along near a parking lot in Laval-des-Rapides, Quebec, when they saw some strange object eclipse the full moon in the sky. As they peered at this strange anomaly they could make out two smallish humanoid beings floating through the air towards them, and as they got closer it could be seen that they had black skin and were dressed in tight fitting one-piece outfits. The two odd creatures descended to just a few feet over the ground, upon which one of them allegedly produced “a pitchfork” and began poking the ground with it before the two women fled the scene in fear.

In July of 1968 the oddness continued, starting with an odd report from July 2, when a woman in Alexis de Montcalm, Quebec, saw a procession of 20 tiny green men with pointed noses and mushroom-shaped hats file by her home at night. That very same day, two constables in St. Thomas, Quebec, spotted two little weird humanoids with bulbous, over-sized heads that stood only 2 feet tall each. The beings apparently ran through a drainage ditch and the officers gave chase, only to vanish into thin air as the police closed in. Quebec seems to have actually been a hotspot of such encounters at the time, because on July 26 two boys riding their bicycles near the airport at Riviere Du Loup claimed they had seen two short, three-foot tall gray skinned humanoids run out from out behind a hangar to disappear into the brush. Just 2 days later, on July 28, five young witnesses in St. Stanislas De Kostka, Quebec, saw two UFOs with red halos land not far away, and when they went to investigate they say they encountered a humanoid that stood 4-feet tall and had a large head, no discernible neck, large round eyes, a flat nose, and brown skin that was “wrinkled, scabby, with bumps.” They claimed that when they shone their flashlight on it the weird creature reeled and backed away to a barn, but would later knock on the window of the house while making “a mooing sound like a cow” before disappearing into the night and flying off in one of the UFOs.

That same month found other similarly baffling reports from other areas of Canada as well, and in some instances the witnesses even claimed to have been abducted. One such account comes from a woman who says she was teleported from her Ontario home to the yard, where she saw a large glowing disc descend to produce three humanoid “aliens” that allegedly dragged her into their ship. She says that she was put on a floating bed and operated on, with them cutting open her brain in an attempt to put a “tracking device” in her head and then healing the wound with the wave of an inscrutable device. It is unclear what the creatures looked like as the report, first published in Michael D. Swords’ Grassroots UFOs, doesn’t provide a proper description.

That summer brought more weirdness on into August, with one quite bizarre report on UFO BC and coming from Vancouver, British Columbia. The witnesses are described as being a group of young boys who were out playing with BB guns at the Shaugnessy Golf course when they spied a metallic object about the size of a small car that looked like a “flying saucer” sitting there upon the grass. The curious kids approached it to and rapped on its surface, then one of them began to walk around it, and as he did he saw standing there a pale blue humanoid with a white jumpsuit and red sash tied around its waist. The strange report reads as follows:

The witness said, “My name is Kim” and put his right hand on his heart. The creature responded by holding his palms upward and made a sound, but he didn’t seem to “have a tongue”. At one point he put out his right arm and nodded for the witness to do the same thing with his left, and he was allowed to compare his hand with the alien’s and except for the pallor they were very similar. At this point he heard a voice in his head that spoke the words, “Would you like to pray”? And he bowed and put his arms pointing down with palms towards the witness. He was a bit embarrassed and to get a laugh from his friends who were literally “stunned” he made a gesture towards this BB gun in his right pocket. The alien seemed to sense this and the witness had to apologize for this and explained that it was only a bb-gun and was not real, the alien seemed to understand. The witness said a few more things and then waved at the alien and the alien waved back. The witness then rejoined his friends and they left the area.

Also in August we get back to Quebec and its high strangeness, where in Montreal three men named Guy Gagne, Jean-Guy Girouard, and Carol Marquis were on their way back home from a fair when they saw a 3-foot tall creature that looked similar to a monkey but with a disproportionately large head walking along with what appeared to be great difficulty. The otherworldly being made its way to a streetlamp and then purportedly suddenly nimbly leapt a full 30 feet to the other side of the street before disappearing. Later on that month, on August 28, a group of schoolchildren in Coleraine, also in Quebec, saw a strange being lurking about a cemetery over the course of 4 days. The strange looking creature was described as looking like a 4-foot tall man with a bald head, a bushy black beard, and rough, scaly skin like a lizard’s that was red in color. On the fourth day the bizarre being then apparently boarded a blue, white and red “flying saucer,” that shot up into the sky trailing a plume of thick smoke, which was seen by several adults who the children had called to investigate.

More Quebec humanoid madness would follow in September, where we have a string of such reports from the region. On September 14, three young girls in Drummondville saw a tiny, dwarf-like man in an overcoat and hat walking about with movements like those of a robot, who apparently had a look of terror on his face when he realized the kids had seen him. The curious little man then supposedly vanished into thin air. The next day, the same witnesses saw the same humanoid being step out of a circle of red light, this time wearing a dark blue jumpsuit, after which it did its strange robot walk behind a tree and disappeared, apparently leaving odd footprints behind. On September 21, two different girls saw what they called “a Martian” on the roof of their school in Coaticook , Quebec, which they said had “a green face with no nose, mouth or hair” and which emitted sparks when it moved. Later that week, on the 28th, a family in Asbestos, Quebec, saw a green rectangle in the sky that discharged a yellow orange disc from which several humanoid occupants were said to exit and float around before getting back into the craft and speeding off. A similar object was seen by several other witnesses in the area as well.

These are just a sampling of some of the dozens of reports of bizarre humanoid and UFO encounters that came pouring in during the year of 1968 all over Canada, and in particular Quebec. Why should there be such a high concentration of sightings during this one year? Were any of these cases related to each other, and what were these entities? Were they aliens or interdimensional interlopers, and if so, what did they want and why in 1968? It is all rather baffling to say the least, and leaves one wondering just what was going on here in this weird year of utter strangeness.

Going back to just about as long as encounters with strange alien entities have been around there have been many types of beings that are most commonly described by witnesses who have seen them and people who claim to have been abducted. There are the “Greys” perhaps most well-known in popular culture and which are probably the first image that springs to mind for most in the mainstream, but there are also commonly reported encounters with reptilian beings, and even odder still are those describing something insectoid in nature. Here we will look at a selection of such encounters in recent years, but these are really just the tip of the iceberg, and it seems to be a phenomenon that is firmly entrenched in the world of the paranormal and UFOlogy. These reports are the strange of the strange, so get on your tin foil hats, because we are going for a ride into the furthest reaches of the utterly bizarre.

What have often been called “Mantis Men” or “Mantis aliens” typically are said to look very much as their name would suggest. They are usually described as standing 6-7 feet tall, with long, thin torsos, skinny, multi-jointed limbs, triangular, insect-like heads with large, slanted eyes and small or non-existent mouths, and the whole of the creatures covered with what appears to be some sort of segmented exoskeleton. One good description is given by UFO BC, and reads:

These Beings have long, narrow faces, with long, narrow, large eyes, sharply slanted upward and outward in an almost narrow-V position, giving an almost insect-like appearance. This comparison is heightened by the Praying-Mantis types’ extremely thin, long torsos, long, extremely thin arms which are usually crooked into a sharp bend at the mid-joint, with the hand and fingers sloping almost vertically downward from the wrist, and legs also bent at an almost right-angle at the mid-joint, creating a crouched pose. The overall effect is the characteristic ‘Praying Mantis’ look. It should be noted that experiencers feel that this type is no insect, but rather an intelligent, gentle spirited… and jerky moving, human-like life form. There are both males and females.

It may sound completely absurd, like something out of a bad science fiction movie, but there are actually numerous reports of encounters with such entities, running throughout a range of ages and walks of life. Such encounters can come in conjunction with UFO sightings and abductions, but just as often are reported by witnesses who see these creatures just roaming about, and the reports are so varied and weird that it is hard to know what to make of them at times. While most commonly associated with the UFO phenomenon and lumped together as aliens, Mantis Man sightings often happen out in the wilderness with no mention of UFOs, as if a particularly freakish Bigfoot report, and a few of these occurred as recently as the early 2000s in the state of New Jersey. The first in this series of encounters allegedly happened in 2002 at Stephens State Park, north of Hackettstown, New Jersey, where two men had been fishing at dusk along the Musconetcong River when they saw something very odd indeed. A friend of one of the witnesses would tell Lon Strickler, of Phantoms and Monsters of the surreal events that would transpire:

Apparently about a year ago my friend and his brother were down at Stephen’s State Park fishing right around dusk. During this time, while his brother was roughly 50 yards downstream fishing, he said he felt this strange vibration in his right ear and from that he turned and looked to the right. When he turned and looked to the right he said he saw this 6 to 7 foot praying-mantis-looking-man… just standing there and unable to believe that he could see him. He said the creature was black and gray and to be quite honest, the way my buddy was telling me this story, I was having a tough time. I know he saw this thing… because I could see it in his face.

Strickler would end up digging up another sighting of what seems to be a very similar creature in the same vicinity, which was seen by another fisherman as well. The witness claims that he had been out fishing in at the river with his boss in 2004, and they had both been waist high in the water when he says he just suddenly noticed a very outlandish entity making its way up the opposite bank. He explains:

I just “Caught it”. Movement out of the corner of my eye to my left and there it was—Humanoid. Tall. 6 foot at least –no reference points– but I sense 6’6″ – 7′. Moving away from me back up the bank. (I am chest-high in the river) The first thing I see was the ‘grasshopper’ thigh, but bending forward like a human. Then the whole form. He is looking at me over his shoulder, moving up the bank, astonished, amazed. What, that I am in the water in a strong current, that I can see him? But yes we lock eyes and this creature is astonished– I get the sense that he can’t believe I am in the water, that he can’t believe I have seen him, that I am not perturbed at all– something of all three, I still don’t know– just astonishment and he is actually trying to get away from me and the water! Triangular Head. Huge, slanted black eyes. Just like a Praying Mantis. It’s whole body was gangly, nobby, ((Nobby!) but you could still sense it was powerful, and no– I would not say it was a “Big Bug”– it was definitely humanoid despite the mantis/insect qualities.

Again, I stress the strong impression that The Mantis Man was cloaked and I “caught it” just right; it abruptly found itself against a “new”/blank background and was adjusting quickly. No, I do not believe it “slipped” into another dimension/plane. I detected movement and first saw that strong left thigh, (and strong right calf) then the whole thing and immediately those eyes/face. The whole encounter was only a couple of seconds. I can not tell you with any strong certainty what its feet or hands looked like –I wasn’t looking there– but I can tell you that its arms were “normal”, and not the literal Mantis forelegs I have recently seen in drawings of these “Aliens”.

The detail that it seemed so surprised to be seen is interesting, although it is hard to know what to make of that. Yet another sighting featured on Phantoms and Monsters happened in the same area, this time in July of 2014 by a witness who claims he had been driving along the Musconetcong River and just sort of taking in the scenery when he noticed something very tall standing out in the water. At first he took it to be a fisherman, but it seemed too strange looking and somehow not human, so he slowed down to get a closer look. This is when he would realize that it was definitely no fisherman, and he says of his encounter:

I saw something strange a few weeks ago on the Musconetcong River near my home here in Hackettstown, New Jersey. I was driving home from the drug store on Newburgh Rd. As I drove near the bridge over the river, I noticed to my left something (I thought a fisherman) standing in the river just off the south bank. I slowed the car and looked closer. It wasn’t a person and it was transparent-like with a weird shape. It moved slowly towards the bank and into the trees. I drove further so I could see it coming out of the trees. That’s the last I saw of it. It was tall, 8 ft. or so and had long thin arms hanging off of it. The color was a pale brown, but I could see through it! The head was small compared to the body. It was sunny that day so I thought it may be glare from the water, but after I thought back I realized I wasn’t seeing a mirage or glare.

This one almost seems to have been trying to cloak itself somehow, perhaps why the enitiy in the previous encounter was so baffled that it was seen. Another seemingly similar creature, although much smaller than these previous accounts, was also reported, this time in 2011 along the Thames River, in Connecticut. The woman claims she had been driving home from work at around midnight when she saw something she cannot explain. She says:

I saw a small 1 1/2 to 2-foot-tall Praying Mantis humanoid running on the side of Pequot Avenue in New London, CT. The avenue runs alongside the Thames River and I was driving southbound on Pequot when I saw it on the side of the road directly on my left. It was a mahogany brown color and it looked exactly like the CGI version on the show. I stopped my car and watched it and it was looking right at me the whole while as it ran towards a storm drain. It never took its eyes off me then it jumped down the storm drain.

Interestingly, another of these creatures was spotted in 2015 in the vicinity of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, California, which was related to the show Coast to Coast AM and involved the witness seeing an 8-foot-tall “Mantis Man” that apparently had the ability to turn invisible or vanish at will. While these reports are certainly very bizarre, there are other Mantis Man reports that are even more outlandish, and with these we truly take a trip into a realm deeply lodged in high strangeness. One very odd report that has made the rounds was given on UFO BC, by a witness calling himself “Jim G,” who lives in London, England. He claims that one evening in August of 2001 he woke to find two of these entities looming over his bed, apparently watching him as he slept, and they looked very much like some sort of insectoid humanoids. One entity was cloaked in a robe, but had what seemed to be a shiny black exoskeleton like that of a beetle, while the other was more of the classic description of a Mantis Alien, standing 7 feet tall and all segmented limbs and mantis head, with no noticeable clothing. Jim explains the mantis creature and the weird events that would play out thusly:

All I recall was that it was tall. At least 7 foot, it had to bend its neck because of the height of the ceiling. Its head was pointed with large eyes. Its for-arms were extremely long and moved in a jerky fashion. The cloaked figure was closer, crouching by my bed, so I couldn’t tell how tall it was, but I could clearly see that it was wearing some kind of overlapping ridged amour? Including a metallic looking breastplate that had a series of circles on it. Its head was dome-like with emotionless facial features. Its eyes were large and surrounded again by detailed ridges. It acted in a way that reminded me of a robot or insect.

I remember thinking to myself, nobody’s going to believe this! A bloody giant sized mantis and medieval-style dressed alien, what the hell is this? Before this incident, although I hadn’t see one, I was familiar with the gray (alien) types but I had never heard of the praying-mantis types. At this point, the mantis bent its upper body, over my bed and directly above me. In its hand it was holding a long metal object that looked like a needle. A green light shot directly from the needle and into my right eye. Maybe it’s a laser, I am not sure, but I do know it felt very painful. I could see all the veins from my eye, the same effect you get when an Optician checks your eyes. I screamed but no noise came out. I then felt something stick into my skull! I’m not sure what because by that time I had my eyes closed. I pretended to sleep and went into deep panic! My mind was racing at a million miles per hour. I heard a great whooshing sound and when I next reopened my eyes thankfully they had gone.

Another one of the weirder of these reports is an account chronicled by UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe in her book Glimpses of Other Realities, Vol. II: High Strangeness. She tells the tale of a witness named Linda Porter, who claimed to have had an incredibly odd encounter with a telepathic mantis-like humanoid in a hallway in 1961 and that it had whisked her off to another dimension via what she called an “interdimensional tunnel.” The next thing she knew, Porter was with a “Praying mantis being in a light-filled room,” and she said:

I remember the being slowly coming around the corner and facing me. He stood very still and simply waited as if he knew how frightening he appeared to me. Eventually he began to talk to me (telepathically). He seemed to possess a great deal of dignity and gave the impression of being quite old. He walked me to this room (filled with dense light). The memory ends with me about to enter the room and the thought ‘Translated Into the Light’ has to do with what happened.

Adding to the utter strangeness of this case, Porter, who had been born with a heart defect, claimed that she had had her soul transferred by the creature into a cloned body of herself that was healthy, and that the creature had explained to her in depth about other dimensions and travel between them. Very weird stuff, indeed. In another peculiar account from UFO BC, there is a witness who says that her and her friend had been captured by tall, insectoid humanoids and then been subjected to some sort of violent, gruesome medical procedure. She would say:

I stood there helpless for the longest time, not knowing what to do but feeling a real sense of panic. Something had to be done quickly. All of a sudden there were two Beings that appeared next to my friend. They seemed to push me right aside and silently went right to work on her, like skilled surgeons. They stood to her left, standing together and working furiously on my friend. I had no idea who they were, what they were doing, but the first thing I thought of was ‘are they aliens’??? I stood there and watched…I thought they looked like Praying Mantises. Alien Praying Mantises…

Then I focused on my friend and saw her head was split wide open, like these aliens sliced it perfectly open. I saw freshly sliced raw flesh and these Aliens/Praying Mantis were busily removing pieces of bone, rock or whatever from her brain. This did not look anything like what I would imagine the inside of a brain to look but it was just such a clean cut. These two Alien/Praying Mantis worked quickly, without speaking one word. I seemed to black out and don’t remember any more of it.

What was going on here? What were they doing? What happened to the friend? Was this all a hallucination or is there anything more to it? Who knows? From the same site is a bizarre report from a witness who claims the Mantis Men were rather more benevolent towards him, and even gifted him with advanced technology. He explains:

My Praying Mantis figure was very kind to me. He urged me to stay calm and telepathically reassured me everything would be alright. My right eye was removed by a device that came down from the white ceiling. I started to really panic but the Mantis kept me from really freaking out. Then it was replaced. The Mantis also told me telepathically that I was a special person who would really make a difference here on earth. I am now 44 years old and have made no real significant differences to the human race. I think he may have just wanted to reassure a child at the time. I have retained 1 thing from my encounter. I still have the power to see major global disasters before they happen. I only report them to either my fiancé or my close family members because I know anyone else would just call me crazy. But now they believe me for the most part. Because when I see something clearly and tell them, it always happens.

Here we have looked at merely a selection from the files of truly otherworldly encounters with insectiod humanoids, and it is all really quite a lot to take in. What could possibly lie at the root of such reports? Are these things aliens or undiscovered creatures of some sort? With regards to Mantis Men the theory that these are interdimensional travelers is often brought up, so could that possibly be what is going on here, these beings coming across the veil between realities rather than across the sea of stars? Are these just hallucinations, delusions, or lies? As it is we are left pretty baffled by such reports, and it has come to the point where these accounts are largely even shunned by those within cryptozoology, UFOlogy, and the paranormal world in general. Yet, still these sightings and reports come in, and it sure does make one wonder just what is going on here.

Somewhere in the afterlife, the great-and-gone geniuses of Earth might be gathered around a celestial campfire (or burning bush) roasting heavenly marshmallows, swapping tales of how their creations and theories turned out and having a good laugh at how they continue to baffle humanity long after they’ve left the planet. Two who may be sharing a similar story these days are Enrico Fermi, creator of the Fermi Paradox, and John Von Neumann, proposer of the idea of space probes that can replicate themselves as they travel ad infinitum. A still-living astrophysicist recently pulled these two ideas together and shrunk them down to a microscopic size with his new proposal that aliens may already be among us in the nearly invisible form of self-replicating nanoprobes. Are Fermi and Von Neumann laughing … or crying?

John von Neumann

“In this paper we consider efficiency of self-reproducing extraterrestrial Von-Neumann microscale robots and analyse the observational characteristics. By examining the natural scenario of moving in the HII clouds, it has been found that the timescale of replication might be several years and even less – making the process of observation quite promising. We have shown that by encountering the interstellar protons the probes might be visible at least in the infrared energy band and the corresponding luminosities might reach enormous values.”

In a paper published recently in arxiv, Zaza Osmanov, astrophysicist and professor of physics at the Free University of Tbilisi, Georgia, proposes that Fermi’s Paradox (“where are all of the aliens?”) is due to scientists looking in the wrong place for creatures of the wrong size. He suggests that Von Neumann probes are already here but the machines are a microscopic one nanometer long. (For comparison, a strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter.) At that scale, the probes can be powered by hydrogen atoms – abundant in space – and replicate themselves in just a few years. At that rate, Osmanov estimates a mere 100 nanoprobes launched into space would need only four light years to create – they would create  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 10 to the 33rd power (a decillion) offspring. (Take that, Duggar family!)

While one nanoprobe would be nearly impossible to find, a decillion of them might be easier, especially when feeding on hydrogen atoms. That act would result in emissions that could be luminous, especially to someone looking right at them. At that size and with the right density, Osmanov speculates that the cloud of nanoprobes emitting hydrogen farts could look like a comet. And the place with the highest probability of such a mass gathering would be in interstellar clouds containing a lot of hydrogen atoms. Or perhaps in a zeppelin?

Enrico Fermi

“All the aforementioned results indicate that if one detects a strange object with extremely high values of luminosity increment, that might be a good sign to place the object in the list of extraterrestrial Von-Neumann probe candidates.”

So, if you look at an interstellar cloud and see a luminous object about the size of a comet, it just might be a swarm of alien nanoprobes on their way to Earth. And if you see a smaller luminous blob inside of a hydrogen-filled zeppelin, they may already be here.

Osmanov’s theory is certainly possible and plausible. The real question is … what would Fermi and Von Neumann think?

Are they laughing, crying … or scheming up ways to come back and see what’s next?