Humanoid mantis beings – also variously referred to as Insectoids, Insectalins, Mantis aliens, Mantis entities, Mantids, and I feel confident other names I have yet to come across – have been described in a variety of physical and non-physical contexts. In general, these creatures have been described as looking remarkably akin to our earthly praying mantises in various respects, though also occasionally described as giant grasshoppers or ants as well, or as merely insect-like. If you look online or scour the available alien abduction or cryptid literature, you’ll see a great many individuals providing their summary of the appearance and abilities of Mantis entities. While some of it is interesting, particularly when it comes to researchers who have amassed a large number of first-hand encounters, I can’t help but consider such things suspect.
I want to see the source material for myself. I want to see the bulk of actual, first-hand eyewitnesses, where they describe the appearance and capabilities of these entities. So I went on a deep dive far down the rabbit hole and tried to put the puzzle pieces together for myself. And here is where I share what I’ve found so far to anyone who happens to give a ragged rat’s ass.
Of course, in so doing I feel it’s only fair that I provide just why I happen to give a ragged rat’s ass.
Since as far back as I can recall I’ve had strange experiences that would fall within the categories of what others have referred to as synchronicity, telepathy, astral projection, past live memories, and encounters with the dead but not gone. Central to all of this, however, has been a life replete with experiences that others have referred to as UFO sightings and encounters, and encounters and abductions by the occupants of UFOs.
The fact that any one of these experiences alone and by themselves would likely exceed the boggle threshold of the typical human being (whatever that constitutes) hasn’t escaped me; that all of these things would have happened to a single, hopelessly lost and irreversibly weird soul such as myself would certainly lead them to the conclusion that I’m bat-shit crazy, I assure you, has certainly not escaped me, either. In any case, for whatever reason, these things have indeed occurred to me, and continue to occur to me. I’m left with only what I am, to go with what I’ve got, and to continue to seek the ever-elusive truth in any way that I can.
Aside from telepathy, which seems to bridge both, the two recurring experiences I’ve had throughout my life, which have been largely compartmentalized in any clearly-defined sense but which I have always intuitively felt had to have something to do with one another despite a total lack of evidence (if only because they were both so weird and happening to the same person, being me) were my astral projection experiences and my alien encounters.
While these two categories of weird experiences often seemed to occur around the same time as one another, there was no other apparent relation between them. My UFO sightings or encounters and my alien encounters and apparent abductions had no apparent direct relation to my astral projections, in other words. During my astral projections, I had never encountered an alien being, though at one point, even during my initial astral projections, I even attempted to summon them into that space, nor did I consciously recall any instance where an alien triggered an out-of-body experience of any sort. In short, there was no clear connection between these two weird categories of experience.
Until September of 2001.
As I’ve written of elsewhere, I went to bed around ten in the morning on the 29th, and at some point afterward, I felt those familiar out-of-body sensations:
“As I rested on my bed, the familiar paralysis crept up on me, the volume knob on my senses seemed to turn down to zero, and I felt my subtle body drifting from the confines of my skin and sinking down into the otherworldly black void. Struggling to reattach to my body, I focused on a “whirring” noise I could hear as if from underwater, using it as the auditory equivalent as a rope by means of which I could pull myself back together, quite literally as it seemed. Once I met with success, I lifted my head, looked around, listened and discovered that the whirring had been coming from my computer, which I had left on in the midst of writing an article. I then went to sleep.
Around quarter to eight that evening is when I next awoke. I found that my computer was reading an error on the screen and my keyboard wasn’t responding. I rebooted it but had to unplug the keyboard and plug it back in to get it working again.
Heading downstairs, the quiet house suggested my mother and sisters were still out. I found my father asleep on the sofa chair, out cold, a strange movie on television. When he woke up as I came down the steps, I asked him if for any reason him or my mother had come in my room and fiddled with my computer as I was sleeping. It was a dumb question, and it didn’t surprise me when he told me they had not. The electricity had clearly not gone off, either.
Pouring myself a mug of coffee, I then put on my shoes in the mud room to go outside for a cigarette. As I began to open the front door of the house, I saw the red globe of light shimmering as it hovered just slightly above the front lawn and began to silently rise. Shaking myself free of shock, I aggressively yelled for my father, urging him to book it the short distance to the door.
The globe rose, crossed the driveway onto the other side of the yard and then ascended above the power lines and trees to the far right side of the property close to the horse barn. As my father arrived at the door frame, it had dimmed and was ducking behind some trees before it seemed to shrink or move out into the distance, glow turning an opaque milky red that then dissipated until it was entirely gone. He seemed perplexed by it, at first wondering aloud if it had been a flare, then asking if I wanted to check it out.
We hopped in his truck and drove to a nearby dirt road where it seemed to have been headed, but I was not even looking towards the sky. I knew it was gone. Soon we turned back around, and on the way back he tells me how strange it was that I had stepped out the front door at just the right moment to see it. He adds that it reminded him of the fireball my mother had talked about seeing in the sky while she was on the highway a few years back.
My mind was elsewhere. The important part of the red light sighting for me was that it established a connection I had for long suspected but had never had any real reason to believe: that the alien stuff was somehow related to the OBE stuff.”
That was the last suggestion of any connection between my astral projections and my alien encounters and abductions for almost 22 years.
Until September of 2023.
On the 14th, I had a particular form of out-of-body experience that I began having on March 2, 2021, and came to refer to as “serial OBEs.” I would awaken in an immobilized physical body, feel my subtle body drift upward, and then violently snap back into my physical body. This would happen again and again, over and over, and all the while I would have the distinct sense that someone was watching, intensely observing this as it all played out. This had never happened, not since these experiences began spontaneously happening back in May of 1995. More disturbing was the pattern that played out after the experience:
“For one thing, after I’d finally awakened into my physical body, I didn’t write the experience down. This was something that I noted at the time as being unusual, as this has been standard practice of mine for three decades. It was also strange that, despite my lack of immediate documentation, I remembered it at all. It was even stranger that once I awoke in the physical reality, I didn’t immediately roll over and go to sleep. To the contrary, I remembered remaining awake and in bed, eyes open, which is something I haven’t done since I was a kid. […] Yet that evening, after the first set of serial OBEs, I distinctly recalled having remained awake in bed, eyes open, staring high up on the wall to my left – in the area between the window beside my bed and the wall separating my bedroom from my living room. I watched as the rising sun bled through the curtains, casting shadows across my bedroom, all as I just stared and marinated in terror.
This profound terror, I felt certain, had not stemmed from the serial OBEs. Instead, it seemed somehow associated with the physical plane — specifically someone, I later felt, who had been in my room, and was likely the source of the presence I’d also felt when out of body. I’d just remained staring at the area where he’d been after his departure. Whatever had happened, whoever it had been, it brought back fears of living alone – I remember that specifically – which in turn frustrated me, as I was determined not to live with anyone ever again. I also felt what I later described as a ‘fear of fear’ – a fear of remembering something that would inspire intense terror, no matter how much I desired to recollect it.”
On September 14, 2023, specifically, there was an additional element. Rather than seeing a nocturnal red light hovering above my parent’s lawn, however, it was something that implied a more direct link between aliens and these astral projections:
“After laying back down in bed, it happened several times in succession. I’d blast into awareness, feel a head rush, hear the sound of blood rushing into my ears, making that muffled sound like I had been submerged underwater, and I would realize my body was paralyzed and I could move my subtle body to some degree. I couldn’t see, all was black, but merely felt the sense of touch and movement. I kept fearing that I was dying and didn’t want this to be permanent, and that fear drove me out of it a few times. Each time I was out of it, the process would happen all over again.
Four distinct episodes happened during this experience, though I’m not sure of the sequence. One of the first two I’ve written below came first, however.
At one point, after my focus came to the immobilization of my body, I sensed a presence nearby, so called out with my mind telepathically, ‘Who’s there?’ While there was no verbal response, I immediately received a tinted visual still image that slowly faded out of the black background of my mental space, and it certainly felt as if it had come from outside me. It was a Mantis-type Gray alien. Shortly thereafter, I snapped out of it and the process started over.”
However utterly irrational it may seem to others, I have come to sincerely believe that this Mantis entity has been visiting me since at least as early as March 2, 2021, though I now feel strong suggestions that this entity, or those like him, have been involved with me since my early childhood. For that reason, I decided to explore the personal encounters others have had with such Mantis entities. I went on a deep dive. I went as far down the rabbit hole as I could manage, and here is where I begin to share what I’ve amassed.
Encounters with these creatures have been reported in what I will categorize, for convenience – and however potentially arbitrarily – as Physical Encounters With Mantis Aliens and Encounters With Mantis Aliens in Altered States. At present, I will focus on physical encounters, which I will subcategorize into three types: Wilderness Encounters, Urban Encounters, and Abduction Experiences.
First and foremost are Wilderness Encounters which I will define as those random, apparently chance encounters an individual has had with such a being in an area outside the home, typically in a forested area.
I initially came across such stories through Beyond Creepy, a YouTube channel I would highly recommend to anyone interested in UFO and paranormal tales, especially obscure ones bearing a particularly high strangeness. This YouTuber, who prefers to be referred to as Mr. Black, seems to have acquired the bulk of these Mantis tales through Fortean researcher Lon Strickler, who has published countless books and also began a blog in 2005 entitled Phantoms & Monsters. It was only recently that I began taking notes and quotes from Mr. Black’s relevant videos, however, which in turn led me to Strickler’s website to see what other cases he might have collected. What I found there was quite illuminating.
The initial post I came across on Strickler’s site was dated July 26, 2011, though whether this was the date of the report or the date of the incident is still unclear to me. In any case, the unnamed eyewitness described the incident as having occurred five years prior while he was fly fishing with his boss on the east bank of the Musconetcong River in Hackettstown, New Jersey. It was mid-afternoon, the sky was “white and heavy,” and while there had been heavy rains for several days, he described the river that day as smooth, though with an incredibly strong current. Both he and his boss were in the water, with his boss about fifty yards behind him. He was chest high in the river, leaning back, digging his heels into the gravel beneath, when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye to his left.
On this side of the river, he explained, there was a sloping bank perhaps ten feet high with a strip of trees between 10 to 20 yards thick, beyond which there were fields, though there was an occasional, roughly 20-yard gap in the trees that provided unobstructed access to the river. When he looked towards the source of movement, it was in one of these gaps, and what he saw, for what he calculated amounted to “only a couple of seconds,” was a creature some 15 to 20 yards away and several feet above him, its figure cast against the aforementioned “white and heavy” sky.
What he caught first was a strong left thigh and calf that, while reminding him of a grasshopper, was bent forward like a human. He then saw the creature in full, which he described as a tall humanoid, somewhere between six and a half and seven feet tall with a “gangly, nobby” body. While he remains uncertain as to the nature of its hands or feet, he insists its arms were typical and not akin to the literal praying mantis forelegs that earn the earthly insect its name. Its head was triangular with huge, black, slanted eyes that reminded him of a praying mantis, and he spotted it as it was moving away from the river and up the bank, presumably away from him, as it looked over its shoulder at him – and at this moment, they locked eyes.
Upon their mutual gaze, his immediate sense that the creature was astonished, and though he remains uncertain why, he suspects that the fact that he had not only been able to see the creature but had not reacted in fear may have had something to do with it. He emphasizes that he has always had paranormal experiences and has come to shrug them off, and feels that his “whatever” kind of attitude may have played a role in its reaction, and so in the creature’s reaction. At the same time, however, he is swift to insist that this was a physical, biological creature, not some apparition. In any case, he said the Mantis quickly faded into transparency. It “disappeared into thin air,” as he put it, mid-stride. He feels it had a cloaking ability and he “caught it” at just the right moment, as it found itself against a new background and was adjusting.
He also adds that he muttered not a word about this to his boss, and honestly, I can’t blame the guy.
What makes this tale more intriguing to me is that he wasn’t alone in encountering a Mantis entity in this general location. To the contrary, Strickler came across a post on the Hackettstown Life online forum describing yet another sighting of such a creature along the Musconetcong River. Though it was a second-hand story, he began corresponding with the individual who posted it and I feel it bears mentioning.
As the story goes, the poster was far into a conversation he had been having with his friend, a successful businessman, when the guy began tearing up. He confessed to having had an incredibly frightening experience roughly two years prior and explained that he hadn’t been the same since. Around dusk, he and his brother were fishing at Stephen’s State Park, and as his brother was fishing about 50 yards downstream, he suddenly felt a vibration in his right ear, and so naturally turned his head in that direction. As he did, he saw a 6-to-7-foot-tall black-and-gray-colored humanoid resembling a praying mantis. He saw the creature for perhaps three seconds, he claimed, though it frightened him so bad he wet his pants and subsequently sat down in the water so his brother would be none the wiser. After this original confession, however much the poster struggled with accepting the story, he knew his friend wasn’t lying. They then both Googled “Praying Mantis Man on Muscenetcong” only to discover that he was not alone.
Despite the similarity in their activities at the time, their locations, and the general description of the Mantis creature they witnessed, I find it interesting how their reaction to their individual experiences differed in such an extreme manner: the first, utterly fearless; the other, not only so terrified he pissed himself but was traumatized by the sighting for long thereafter.
Another Mantis encounter took place in yet another forested area, though not a river, and not in New Jersey. I believe this was the first Mantis encounter I heard of on Beyond Creepy which I believe he got from Strickler, who in any case posted it on his site, though the story originally derived from the radio show Coast to Coast AM on its September 29, 2016 broadcast. It was delivered by a caller who only identified himself as “Ricky” from San Diego, California.
As the caller explained it, his sister had taken him, a friend, and others deep into the Sequoia National Forest around 2014, and while initially everyone was having a great time, things ultimately took a turn towards the undeniably strange. Around nine in the evening, as the rest retreated to their tents to get some shut-eye, he and his friend decided to stay up and gaze at the bonfire. At some point he decided he wanted to listen to some music, so he went to his sister’s 4Runner and opened up the back door to grab his iPOD, and as he did so he heard a sound that suggested to him that something had fallen out of one of the nearby trees. It hit the ground with a loud thumping sound – and it hit the ground so hard, he said, that he could feel it. “I had a flashlight on me,” he said, and:
“I looked over at the tree I heard the fall from and I swear on my life – and I swear to God; honest to God – I saw a 6-to-7-foot-tall praying mantis. And as I laid eyes on it, I completely lost breath. I was completely taken aback. It took a step back and it became completely invisible. I could not believe what I saw.
I slammed the door and I ran back to the campfire. I alerted my friend. I woke everyone up and no one would believe me. I was really upset because I knew what I’d seen. So that happened and my friend didn’t believe me. He was laughing at me and then all of a sudden I could hear all these things surrounding us. And finally, when I brought it to my friend’s attention, he kinda put his ear to it and he heard it too. Finally, I was patrolling the campground with my flashlight and I could just hear these things surrounding us and I heard, like this clicking sound, it was like… It was really strange. I was so scared.”
All three of the above reports occurred in rural areas, with the first two in the same area, and with the first and the last both describing the apparent abilities of these Mantis beings to cloak themselves. In the first case, this seemed to occur in tandem with eye contact, and it may be the case with the last as well, though it isn’t entirely clear. This last case also added that the creature made a clicking noise, however – but, much as with the “astonishment” of the Mantis in the first case, this is by no means the only case to report this.
Another report, for instance, comes from the newsletter UFO Roundup, Volume 9, Number 32, published on August 11, 2004. It involves an experience reported by an eyewitness, A.T., who explained how he and his girlfriend were lying on the grass in Kay Rodgers Park in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on August 4th of that year, at around ten in the evening when they saw two humanoid beings walk out of the bushes about ten feet away from them. The creatures were roughly seven feet tall, he said, though the one on the left was a few inches shorter than the other.
“They wore grey or off-white tunic-style outfits,” he explained. “They had shiny bronze or gold medallions on the center of their chest or shoulder.” They had “mantis-like heads” that bore eyes that would change from “blood red to neon green” and “made strange clicking noises.” The couple and the two creatures gazed at one another for five to six minutes before “they disappeared into a white light.”
Again, the clicking. Again, the capacity to seemingly vanish upon eye-gazing – though in this case “into a white light.”
Other wilderness sightings of the Mantis beings come through another YouTube channel, What Lurks Beneath, specifically a video entitled “It Preyed Upon Me – 2 Scary Stories of Insectoids,” which I must confess I initially had profound doubts would provide any useful information. It seemed like one of those YouTube channels that serve only to provide creepy stories for entertainment purposes and remain loose on the facts. While the first story lacks satisfying detail, it bears mentioning, and the final story certainly seems interesting.
The first story was provided by a fifty-year-old fighting cancer who asked that their name and gender not be revealed, but who for the sake of convenience I’ll refer to in the feminine. She had purchased 20 acres in the Ozarks in the early 1990s and came to believe a “small family of Sasquatch” lived on the property. While she permitted close friends and family to hunt whitetail deer on the property, when they did so they were required to leave something such as a basket of fruit and chocolate. The Sasquatch always took the basket, she claimed, sometimes leaving a bundle of sticks or nuts in its place. Then, around August or September of 2018, everything changed. She no longer had wild boar destroying the property, the elk disappeared, successful deer hunts became a rarity, and the baskets were left untouched. The reason, she says, is “something in the woods” that she has seen during the daytime “that I cannot explain. It looked and moved like a six-foot praying mantis and made this clicking screech as it followed me to the woods.” She adds that “it was big, fast, loud, and it was not afraid of me. It was definitely stalking me” but she “didn’t see it or hear it after I got in my truck. I just sat there, paralyzed. I couldn’t move.” Even her pets were petrified. “My dogs were barking, snarling, whining obviously terrified,” she explained, adding, “I’m gonna sell my property. I’m not going back into the woods.”
Despite her frustrating lack of description regarding the actual incident, she writes:
“I see it almost every night of my dreams. I always go back looking for it, like it’s calling me to it, beckoning me closer. Sometimes I stumble on it and it’s consuming a fresh-killed deer or a hunter. Sometimes it is waiting for me and lashes out with its stiletto-laden arms, piercing my body before I even have a chance to defend myself, before I even have a chance to scream. And each time I see it, how do I know what it is? It looks exactly like a praying mantis. There’s just something different about its eyes like they see into my soul like no insect ever could. It knows you
fear it. I think it knows how to follow me into my dreams. I’m wondering now if it can track me here to my home in the city through my dreams. I barely sleep anymore at night and every time the dogs bark at night I jump, adrenaline racing through my heart. I need to add this even though it may cause some doubt to my story even more.”
So again, we have an encounter with a being that looked liked a Mantis and made a clicking sound, though this time described as a “clicking screech.” She also mentioned being “stalked” by the creature. We might also add the element of presumed telepathy here, as she felt that its eyes could see into her soul, and felt that it could follow her into her dreams as well.
The next tale was an account by someone who identified himself as Daniel. He described himself as someone who, though he was no hunter or adept outdoorsman, loved being in nature, taking in the beauty, and enjoyed exploring the forest, particularly the swamps of northern Florida, into which he’d been venturing for years. Then, during the pandemic, he began letting himself “kind of get lost in the swamps, to not just escape but escape reality, escape the world that we live in to find myself in a place of so much beauty.” Unfortunately, that’s when he began having experiences that left him with the feeling that he was being stalked by something that even he admits is more far-fetched than the notion of Bigfoot, which he’s not even sure he believes in.
“It all started when I began hearing this weird clicking noise. Sometimes it would appear as if it was directly behind me, then other times it would sound like it was all around me, top to bottom. Degrees. Like some sort of swarm of insects that I couldn’t swat away. It was very bizarre. The noise would just kind of come and go and sometimes would change in volume and even pitch. Over time, it began to make me more and more uncomfortable. I soon realized I wasn’t just hallucinating or having some sort of vision, I was experiencing a noise that was surrounding me that I couldn’t identify, I couldn’t pinpoint it to any specific animal…”
Then, about thirty to forty feet away and directly in front of him, he saw large, bulbous eyes, very close together, that “kind of emanated a bright yellow glow. And that’s when I was able to see the silhouette” of the “large, insect head” to which the eyes were attached. While he couldn’t see the body, which “was standing in the bog and the brush,” it seemed larger than himself, and “as I looked at it and as it looked into me the clicking sound grew louder and louder” and he was suddenly overcome with the fear that if he remained there any longer, he would perish, so be hightailed it back home.
He further explained that this had happened just a few weeks before writing his letter, which he was shaking in the process of writing, and he was writing all of it down mostly to process the experience and was uncertain who he could send it to who wouldn’t simply label it as crazy. He had sent it to this YouTube guy and a few others, however, “out of desperation” in the hopes that someone could provide him some information regarding what he saw.
And so we again have the clicking, the eye contact, an the glowing eyes – not “blood red” or “neon green” in this case, however, but yellow. As with the previous case, there is also the fact that the Mantis appeared to be stalking the individual.
While the seven encounters above may leave one assuming these beings are intelligent creatures native to the earth and merely as of yet unacknowledged by the scientific community, they are without question also associated with the UFO phenomenon.
To provide a recent case of such an encounter, we’ll now turn to an incident that occurred on Thursday, July 16, 2020, in Warwickshire, United Kingdom. At about five that morning, Paul Froggatt was riding his bicycle home after working a 12-hour shift when he suddenly saw what he described as “a glowing orange sphere just hovering on the horizon” and wondered if it might be a satellite, or perhaps Venus, though he ultimately concluded that the object seemed too close for either to serve as a suitable explanation. After some time, he stopped to take some photos of the object with his phone, adding in retrospect that it seemed larger than the photos depicted. In any case, as he continued watching, the object began to rotate. As he went on to explain:
“I could see it was circular with a part sticking out from the main body. When this started I got the chills down my back and felt like there was something wrong here, I hurried on my way home. As I kept cycling I could swear the object was moving along my course but I just told myself it must be some kind of optical illusion. I entered a wooded area and lost sight of the object through the trees. Usually at this time of morning there is a chorus of bird song and insects but the woods were dead silent.”
This is a common experience during UFO encounters, it should be mentioned, that is often referred to as The Oz Effect. It is as if time has not just slowed, but entirely stopped. As if the whole of the universe, from inception to expiration, were but a roll of film, and you are suddenly stuck in a single frame – yet paradoxically able to move around as you otherwise would. In such instances you often quickly realize you are not the only free agent in this temporal amber, however, just as Froggatt did:
“As I cycled down the path I came around a bend I saw something I will never forget. Standing a few meters ahead is what I can only describe as a humanoid praying mantis. This thing was at-least 7 foot tall, light green with triangular head and big oval black eyes. It had all the features of a mantis but stood on two legs and had a somehow human like shape about it. I was completely frozen with fear. For what felt like an age, but was probably only seconds, I stared into this creature’s eyes and it stared back. I felt like it could read my mind and I could read its. My fear was replaced with completely alien thoughts of utter hatred and evil I felt projected from this thing. I suddenly snapped out of this hypnotic kind of state and it made a step back as if it was gonna pounce on me.”
As I can find no article that references the conclusion to the encounter, I must assume that he tore ass home, just as I would have. In any case, yet again we have a humanoid Mantis-like entity roughly seven feet tall who engaged in prolonged mutual eye-gazing with the witness that left the witness feeling as if telepathy was occurring.
There are still other UFO encounters associated with such Mantis beings, and while this final account makes mention of a Mantis entity only peripherally, which is to say second hand, I feel that it is important to include nonetheless. As recently reported in “Messengers,” the first episode of the 2023 Netflix docuseries, Encounters, there was a UFO flap over Stephenville and Dublin Texas in January of 2008, one which I had passionately followed in the news at the time. Concerning eyewitnesses of the event, the docuseries focused on Steve Allen and Lee Roy Gaitan, the Constable of Erath County, both of whom witnessed the UFO on January 8, along with over 300 other eyewitnesses.
Allen first saw the UFO while around a campfire, bullshitting with some friends of his, and he equates what he saw to a religious experience. Two seconds after it disappeared, they all witnessed two F16s come flying by, and shortly thereafter he talked to the press – and subsequently was contacted by the military:
“A military Colonel called me one afternoon at my house and talked to me about an hour and forty-five minutes. Says, ‘We’ve had a lot of discussion about you and what to do with you,’ he said. ‘You’re kind of a high-profile guy. If you was to just happen to come up missing it would kind of look suspicious’…'”
Along with his young son, Gaitan saw lights in the sky outside his house, which then departed at an insane speed. A minute or two later, like Allen, he also saw jets appear, traveling in the same direction as the UFO.
Neither of their accounts or any accounts in the general area of Stephenville, for that matter, struck me as hard and with as much depth as the account of Ricky Sorrells, however – even when I initially began following the story when it broke in the papers and news stations back in 2008. He was one of the first to come forward with his UFO experience, and the sincerity and simplicity inherent in his character made the truthfulness of his account undeniable to me. Sorrells’ encounter took place in December of 2007, however, which is to say a month before the 2008 flap.
He had gone out to hunt deer on his property, dressed in the appropriate camouflage and bearing his gun. At some point, however, he got tangled in some briars, and with his head down, as he made efforts to get untangled, he suddenly realized that everything had gone dark – as if a stormcloud were looming above him. As a consequence, as he freed himself from the briars and was in the process of stepping forward, he instinctively looked up, at which time he saw the object hovering about 300 feet above him. While he raised his gun, he thought it best not to shoot, though he still stood under the object for roughly three minutes, studying it with his naked eye and often studying it through his scope as well.
He explained the object in detail through interviews as well as in William J. Birnes’ book Aliens in America: A UFO Hunter’s Guide to Extraterrestrial Hotspots Across the U.S. While he couldn’t see the edges of the object through the canopy of trees nor see passed it, he explained it as being akin to a smooth, perhaps three-football-fields-wide sheet of iron, barn gray in color with a dull, matte-like finish. There were no bolts, rivets, or seams. There were circular indentations beneath the object – each of which went perhaps four to six feet deep, cone-like in that they were bigger at the bottom and smaller at the top – that were placed about forty feet apart. It made no sound as it hovered, and made no sound and produced no wind as it took off. To his surprise, it didn’t pivot skyward and take off as an airplane would, either, but rather remained flat as it departed at a 45-degree angle – and with such an insane speed that if he had blinked, he said, he would have thought it had simply vanished. After that, he hightailed it back to the house.
Sorrells, it should be noted, was not featured in the Netflix series, however, and there may be damned good reasons for that. On Larry King, he openly confessed that he believed he’d been harassed since his encounter by what he assumed to be the military, who had flown helicopters above his property in a grid pattern. Someone claiming to be a Lieutenant Colonel had called him on the phone, he said, and requested an interview with him, which he refused, after which they had a rather heated discussion. In the midst of it, Sorrells asked him to stop flying helicopters over his airspace, upon which the guy claimed that it wasn’t Sorrells’ airspace, but his. Eventually, he said that if Sorrells quieted down he’d stop his helicopter bullshit, and Sorrells had remained quiet – until the Larry King interview, that is – and the activity above his property had indeed ceased.
Angelia Joiner, a reporter for the Stephenville Empire-Tribune, had also said on Larry King that she thought Sorrells might have been singled out because he had a detailed, daytime sighting.
There may have been another reason, however, as mentioned by both Gaiten and Allen in the Netflix series – something that, despite my interest in the flap, I had never heard before. Gaitan said one day Sorrells came to him in tears, alleging that someone was harassing him.
“Suddenly, Ricky stops talking to everybody,” he says, ominously adding, “I think Ricky saw a lot more than what the rest of us saw.”
Allen also asserts that Sorrells was “being intimidated,” as he put it, and he added details that Gaitan had not.
“Ricky has said he saw some sort of ‘something’ inside the aircraft, and it resembles some sort of insect,” he said, “or maybe even a praying mantis.”
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