Physical encounters with humanoid Mantis beings don’t only occur in the wilderness, however, but also take place in more urban settings such as the yard, the home, and even the bedroom, and they not only echo the patterns found in the wilderness encounters but build upon them.
While my own, relatively recent experience may constitute such an encounter, the fact of the matter is that I have yet to have a conscious recollection of seeing a Mantis face-to-face. Consequently, that encounter and the earlier ones, though only strongly implied to me, don’t justify more than a mere brief mention here. I do know two people, however – two people, I should add, who do not know one another – who have both explained to me privately that they’ve had direct encounters with them. And for what it’s worth, I don’t for a second doubt the sincerity of either of them.
One was a fascinating, higher classmate from high school who I wish I would have had the courage to get to know better, whom I’ll call Ted, though I only learned of his experience through social media nearly a decade and a half after I had graduated. He told me this in the wake of my September 9, 2011 incident, specifically after I posted on social media something vague regarding it. I don’t recall how much detail Ted provided publically, but I messaged him to glean more detail, and the experience he was gracious enough to describe to me was most interesting. It was a profound experience, he said, and he remembered it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. Evidently, at some point in 1999, he awoke to find a 7-foot-tall Mantis being in a hooded robe holding him down as it made a sound akin to “someone running a finger down the teeth of a comb.” This is a fairly good description of the “clicking” sound described by others.
After some research, he came across similar accounts, which led him to believe it had indeed happened. Ted considered me fortunate for having had so many experiences with the aliens, though I sincerely believed he had lifelong experiences himself but was merely unable to recall them. He added that he believes that one day there will be a “mass awakening.” Though I don’t think I asked for elaboration, I certainly wish now more than ever I would have.
Just another item on an absurdly long list of regrets in my life.
The other individual is a close friend I first met when he was a coworker many years ago, and here I’ll call him Moe, as I have elsewhere. He has been sharing his strange experiences with me over the years. He began having experiences with an extremely tall and slender mantis entity in his house that seemed associated with a sort of “leaf-crunching” or “hissing” noise in July of 2016. Perhaps his most profound encounter, which I documented but to my utter fucking frustration I have been unable to find, dealt with him seeing the Mantis in his house, though it was cloaked in a manner akin, as he described it, to the alien in the movie The Predator. Much like Ted, he then began research and found disturbing associations between his encounters and those of others.
For all I know, they may have both explored many of the very anecdotes I’ve been exploring and will continue to explore now.
After the Hackettstown Mantis encounters he had previously posted (and which I detailed previously), Lon Strickler received some Mantis encounter accounts directly. These were not encounters in the woodlands, but as with the case of my two friends, occurred within the home. One such story was a bedroom encounter that could have either involved invisibility, as we’ve previously heard, or involved the phenomenon of lost or “missing time,” an experience common in UFO and alien encounters, and which seems to imply amnesia, perhaps induced through the aforementioned telepathic hypnosis.
Regardless, in April of 2016, a 65-year-old woman wrote Strickler to share an incident that occurred to her in late October or early November of 1993, when she lived in a two-story house in Seattle, Washington. She and her husband had been asleep beside one another in bed when, at around two in the morning, she had rolled over, bringing the open bedroom doorway, lit by the hallway light, clearly into view – where she saw a tall, robed figure standing. Sitting up in bed and grabbing her husband’s arm, she screamed that there was something in the doorway, and he shot up out of bed, grabbing the baseball bat he kept next to the headboard, ready to defend her, but as soon as she had screamed, she said, the figure was “gone, just gone.”
Afterward, she was understandably hysterical. After calming her down, he checked the house but found it secure and devoid of intruders. While apologetic to her husband for waking him like she had, she knew she had seen something and found it difficult to sleep, fearing the figure might return. Feeling as though she was losing her mind, she phoned her doctor and described the incident to him in tears, and the explanation he offered, at least as she explained it, sounded as if he was suggesting it was stress-induced sleep paralysis. He gave her a prescription and recommended she try and put it out of her mind, but she confessed that she never could.
Months later, she sat down and tried to let herself remember what she’d seen in clarity that night and draw it as best as she could. While some details jumped out at her, others were strangely vague, but the resulting drawing was disturbing enough that she immediately delivered it to the trash can. What she described having seen, and having subsequently drawn, however, was a robed humanoid with an insect-like head, enormous eyes, and only the vaguest impression of two slits where a nose would be. She had no recollection of a mouth.
“I remember in detail two nub-like things on its head,” she wrote, but only the vaguest sense of antennae sprouting out of them. It had similarly insect-like arms coming out of the slits on the side of the robe, which she recalled clearly enough, and while she recalled it having hands, she was unable to recall what they looked like or what they were doing. Given the vague nature of some aspects of what she recalled, she tried to convince herself that it wasn’t real, but it nonetheless continued to plague her, and she remains convinced she did indeed see something in the doorway that night.
In 2016 she read Strickler’s book, Cryptid Encounters, and found that others have described such Mantis beings, a creature she had never heard of. Reading these accounts, she confessed, “sent a volt of electricity through my body like an adrenaline rush and I got butterflies in my stomach. Everyone knows about Greys thanks to the movies – never seen one – never want to — but if other people had seen the big insect thing, maybe there really was something in my doorway that night. If other people have seen this thing, maybe they will feel better if they know I saw it too, even if only for a few seconds.”
There was a somewhat similar case provided to MUFON on August 15, 2014, which occurred on May 31, 2012, where an individual from Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada, also had a disturbing bedroom experience. The individual awoke amid sleep and felt an intense, painful tingling sensation that traveled down and back up his body, from his head down to his feet, though he was ultimately capable of screaming and sitting up in bed. Upon doing so, he saw an eight to nine-foot-tall entity resembling a Gray alien that had backward “legs like a grasshopper” in his bedroom, who was “walking towards my bedroom patio door but stopped and looked at me” as if he was in a hurry, “like I did something wrong“ and “almost like he was angry” or frustrated that he had been seen. He was able to calculate its height because he knew the height of the television above his fireplace. Then, as he explained it, the creature was “just gone and I snapped up again in bed sweating and heart raising.” He adds “I’m positive it was not a dream.”
In this last encounter, we again sense that the Mantis being wasn’t the least bit happy it had been seen, a familiar feature also present in many Wilderness cases. In these last two stories, however, the same issue is raised. Thanks to a variety of cases, it’s clear that these Mantis beings can both cloak themselves as well as induce a sort of amnesia, the last of which is a consistent element in abduction cases. In the two cases above, it’s difficult to determine whether the Mantis beings in question utilized their cloaking abilities or whether they induced amnesia, resulting in the experience of missing time. Other reported experiences aren’t at all ambiguous, however, as factors are present that allow them to note the temporal gap.
One such case was a bedroom encounter provided on the Phantoms and Monsters website and entitled, “Tall ‘Mantis’ Guardian Angels?” It derived from a comment on one of the videos posted my one of my favorite YouTube channels, the aforementioned Beyond Creepy, and while the specific video is not referenced, the comment came from one Win Nys.
The experience occurred in July of 2013 in central Pennsylvania, where Nys, who had been injured, emphasized that she was neither drinking nor on any medication but merely “resting, trying to heal” in her bedroom. While she doesn’t describe how the experience came about save for that “they came through the air and walls”, she reportedly found four beings in her room that she described in a general way as “tall white angels that look like bugs.” More specifically, she described them as being roughly “8 to 9.5 feet tall,” though she didn’t know their “exact height because they had to duck” to avoid hitting the ceiling. They were “extremely skinny but muscular” with off-white skin and “extremely large, protruding black eyes which wrapped around the head.” She felt an overwhelming sense of “love and compassion” from them, she wrote, akin to how a parent might feel toward their child. One of them telepathically communicated to her, as she conveyed it, in this way:
“Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared. She can see us. She can see us. Don’t be scared.”
“It was telling me this in my brain,” she wrote. “I was looking (and listening) at them around my room. The whole experience only lasted a few minutes before I blacked out.”
Upon telling her mother of the experience the following morning, her mother said that she had prayed for guardian angels to be around her, and this apparently served as confirmation to her that these Mantis beings were indeed angels. When she told her husband, he warned her not to speak of it again, lest they commit her to an asylum. When she eventually told a friend of hers in confidence she learned of a girl in her town who had been committed to a hospital because she had seen aliens, and so in fear had stopped speaking about the experience for years.
She recently began searching for similar stories online, however, but it had been difficult for her to find “stories about tall bug-like entities,” she said. “And, yeah, they are telepathic. They were as real as the glass of water I was holding. Never seen a UFO and I have never been abducted. Never a believer until that night.”
While she insists she’s never been abducted, I suspect her experience of having “blacked out” strongly indicates otherwise.
Another missing time episode involving a Mantis was posted on Reddit on January 3, 2021, by a woman who only identified herself as HC, and her account was entitled “6 Ft Tall ‘Mantis’ Entity Encountered Outside of Fillmore, NY Home”. The experience described had occurred in Fillmore, New York, just before midnight on June 22, 2018, while she was in the shed to find some privacy, to escape from the children and dogs in the house and to use the WiFI through her phone. As she describes it:
“While I was watching from inside the shed I noticed something an hour after I was in there. I heard [the sound of] movement[,] of something shuffling in the tall grass. I thought it was a deer until my cat started growling and staring at the shed door. When I scanned the tree line and bushes with my big LED light I thought I saw a head pop up into the dark. I pretended I didn’t see it and spotted my light to the left and heard it quickly get closer. I flashed the light back fast and it was very close, now about 30 feet in front of me. We stared at each other for what seemed like forever but I know it was probably only 20 seconds or so. I was so scared I couldn’t move. Also[,] it didn’t move as I watched it.
I noticed its limbs and features while we stared at each other. It was greenish-grey with very big mantis eyes. The skin was smooth and had broad shoulders, but as you followed down it got skinny. The eyebrow ridge stuck out with a wide head with an upward slant. Its eyes reflected green. There were light green flecks that shown yellow and orange from my light. It was over 6 [feet] tall.
I suddenly got the feeling that it was going to grab me, so I slammed the shed door and turned and ran to my house. When I got in I told my husband about what I had seen, I noticed that a whole hour [passed] by it was now a few minutes after 1 AM. I know I didn’t look at this thing for an hour. My husband came out with me with his gun but it was gone.
I was really scared after that. I will not be out at night anymore. I always feel like I’m being watched. I started to look into UFOs and abductions. I had never read up on this before my experience and now believe I was abducted, but have no memory of it.”
Another tale of missing time is provided by Strickler and comes from “CMB,” a 42-year-old woman who described an incident that occurred in either 1976 or the following year, when she was three or four and lived in Mr. Hicums Trailer Park in Greenville, South Carolina. And the incident, she emphasizes, has been confirmed by her mother.
And for the record, this might be the most disturbing physical encounter I have yet to document here.
She was the youngest of her parent’s three children, and when she was three or four years of age, she had been playing either tag or hide-and-seek outside one warm, sunny day with her two older brothers. As she bolted around the back of the trailer to hide, she almost ran into a creature standing next to their propane tank that she simply could not, at the time, comprehend. She stood there frozen, feeling as if the breath had been taken out of her. At the time, she said, she thought it was a giant insect – more specifically, perhaps in retrospect, she described it as resembling a humanoid praying mantis that was taller than her father. In any case, she stood there staring at this creature as it stared back at her until suddenly, all was a blank.
The next thing she remembered, she came running into their trailer screaming about a burning pain between her legs, and her mother was so concerned that she pulled down her underwear and shorts, but upon inspection found that nothing seemed to be wrong. She then cried herself to sleep.
Since then, the incident has always hung with her, haunting her from the back of her mind. After the incident, she mentions having developed a fear of monsters and suffering from a great deal of nightmares, though none of it seemed directly related to what she recalled having seen. Eerily, in this context she also references the fact that she had never been able to give birth naturally, and has always had to have C-sections, strongly implying that she feels at some level that this fact may be related to her experience.
As she grew older she had always reasoned that perhaps there had been a gas leak in the trailer, which makes little sense to me, as she had had this experience outside. A few years before her letter, however, she had caught wind of a UFO sighting reported by the Highland, Illinois police department – an area to which her family had moved when she was seven, before moving back to South Carolina when she was ten. This inspired her to tell her husband about her Mantis experience, and though they both laughed about it, she nonetheless insisted to him that it did indeed happen. The conversation suddenly inspired her curiosity to such a degree that she did a Google search for “praying mantis aliens,” and the results, she explained – and in particular, the images – felt like a punch to the fucking gut. It was exactly what she remembered having seen as a child. Her husband was shocked as well. In retrospect, she seems understandably concerned about the gap in memory she had between her eye contact with the mantis creature and her subsequent sprint into the trailer.
As in previous accounts, here we find that CMB’s experience involves a sudden experiential shift upon meeting the eyes of the Mantis being, though in this case, it wasn’t invisibility, but clearly involved amnesia, producing the experience of missing time.
To reinforce the notion that these Mantis beings display both the ability to cloak themselves as well as induce amnesia, there are incidents in which both abilities are blatantly displayed within the context of the same narrative.
One such tale comes from Dan, who grew up in the Medford area of New Jersey but lived in Missouri at the time of the letter. At the time of the experience he wrote Strickler to provide, however, it was around 1971 or the following year, when he was two years old and his family had moved into the third-story of the Top of the Hill apartments in Feasterville, Pennsylvania. He recalls having been on the sidewalk outside of the building one night, uncertain as to how he had gotten there, though certainly not of his own volition. Three Manits beings stood beside him, though he wasn’t afraid at all, but rather felt comfort that he was among friends. He recalls having been asked a question, though cannot for the life of him recall what it was. While he knows more took place, as the memories he recalled were segmented, all he remembers is watching them disappear as he “felt a warm assurance of friendship.”
The next thing he remembered, his mother rushed out of the door of the apartment building in a panic and picked him up. This memory, he said, always stood out, and it always puzzled him why. When he recently read the encounter Strickler published in the post, “The Musconetcong River ‘Mantis Man’,” he said, he “was shocked to find accounts of an exact description of what I saw as a small child.”
Dan’s encounter was distinct from the first two encounters I described of the Muscenetcong Mantis Man, as he was neither bearing the “whatever” attitude nor traumatized by the experience, but the extreme opposite trauma – he felt comfort, friendship, and warmth. While Dan’s experience described the “cloaking” ability described in the first encounter with the Muscenetcong Mantis Man, his tale also includes the element of lost or “missing time” described by Nys, HC, and CMB.
While all previous individual accounts that I’ve stumbled across who’ve had encounters with these Mantis beings report a single encounter, this is not always the case. Between August and September 2003, the website UFO*BC began communicating with one Jim G, a self-employed professional sound engineer who lived in a small town on the outskirts of London. While he claimed to have had strange experiences throughout his life, such as UFO encounters and OBEs, it was his most recent experiences, which began in April of 2001, that finally inspired him to reach out – and which have the most relevance here. Some of these encounters involved other types of entities, but it is the Mantis encounters that will be focused on here.
He awoke at roughly 2:30 one morning that April to find himself paralyzed with two strange beings beside his bed. One was a seven-foot-tall mantis being with a pointed head, large eyes, and long forearms that moved in a jerking fashion, and who had to bend its neck to avoid hitting the ceiling (much as reported by Nys). The other, shorter being was closer, crouching by his bed, and had black, leathery, reflective skin. It wore a hooded cloak, and beneath that armor that included a metallic breastplate. In retrospect, he seemed to remember that they had been doing something with his legs but could remember little detail concerning that. Thinking that he must still be in the grips of some strange and vivid dream, he closed his eyes, but upon opening them again, the figures remained.
Jim deduced that the Mantis was the one in charge as the smaller one turned to the mantis as if seeking instruction. In response, the Mantis turned back to him and made – you guessed it – “a series of high-pitched clicking sounds.” The Mantis then bent its upper body so that it was positioned over where Jim lay on his bed and, from a long, needle-like object held in his hand, shot a green, laser-like light directly into his right eye, which allowed him to see the veins in his eye. It was painful and, though he attempted to scream, nothing came out. Closing his eyes, he then felt something being jabbed into his skull. In a panic, his mind racing, he heard a “whooshing sound.”
The next time he opened his eyes, they were gone, but he remained shaken and was unable to sleep. He spent the next day in bed feeling, as he put it as if he had just undergone a major operation. That day he did manage to do an internet search on “mantis-type aliens,” though nothing came up, which in turn helped him convince himself that it was indeed just a fucked up dream. Far later he came across a drawing on alley.com by artist J. Westwood which depicted a mantis being holding a needle-like object. He panicked, as this was exactly what he had seen. On the same site, he also found a drawing by Sylvia Rayner which she dubbed the dark entity, and it was the spitting image of the shorter, cloaked being.
Ever since that incident, he outlined what had become a typical scenario for him which tended to happen roughly twice a week, though there were often troughs of inactivity that might last for perhaps a month. At night, just as he was about to slip into sleep, he would begin hearing that Mantis clicking inside of his head. Within a few minutes, he would again hear the clicking, but now it was coming from inside his bedroom, and he came to recognize this as a sign that within about ten minutes he would be fast asleep. Through his heavy eyelids, he would see a red glow on his far wall and tall, shadowy figures moving out of the light and approaching him. Despite his best efforts, he would soon be out like a light. The following morning he would wake up feeling just as he did following the original incident, and in addition would often find himself covered in bruises, on at least one occasion in the shape of a large hand.
His next encounter with a Mantis being, which he believed to be the same one he encountered in his initial encounter, occurred on December 18, as he was spending the night in the spare bedroom of his brother’s house. He suddenly found himself immobilized and acutely awake with the clicking sound in his head, and in response, he screamed and cussed, though none of it was expressed verbally. Managing to look towards the bottom of the bed, he saw the Mantis, and at the sight of it felt “waves of fear” washing over him, the terror “completely overwhelming.”
Unlike the previous occasion, he was able to study it in detail. Wearing what he described as a long and dark robe, the Mantis was over seven feet tall, bony, and vaguely humanoid in appearance with skin that “was liquidly looking, like oil shimmering in the sun.” It had a triangular-shaped, gray-black head reminiscent of a skull with round, bulbous, black eyes. The head was attached to the body by a long, black, snake-like neck.
“The arms were extremely long with multiple joints extending out in a messiah pose,” he wrote, with its “forearms … bent forward longer than the rest of the arm.”
It then ran in a “jerky and fast” manner, making “a clunking sound” as it did so, and exited directly through the wall of the bedroom, leaving “a strange red glow” on the wall in the wake, and a door on the same wall rattled at high volume, apparently prompting the neighbor – adjacent to the wall – to call out in annoyance.”
While Jim G had a vast array of subsequent experiences, they fall into a category that exceeds the limitations of the wilderness and urban encounters we’ve thus far explored, though such experiences are certainly implied in many of the “blackouts,” “amnesia,” or “missing time” aspects of the formerly described urban experiences.
In other words, this involves experiences that fall into the category popularly referred to as alien abduction, which is our final category of Mantis encounters in the realm of the physical.
Transmissions to Earth 