Reported as solid, but arriving with lights and premonition.
Creatures reported as physical but attended by lights, electrical interference, strange visitors and foreknowledge: the combination that made John Keel abandon the extraterrestrial framework entirely. Point Pleasant in 1966–67 is the type case, and Mothman the type specimen.
If you go looking
Reports cluster around places and periods, and the people most affected at Point Pleasant were the ones who stayed closest to it longest, which is a pattern worth noticing on its own.
Reported with some consistency but carrying no origin claim in the encounters themselves. Filing these as alien is an assumption the listener adds.
Degree of embodiment: 4, physical but manifests oddly
Scale, 1 to 5
5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.
E: recurring reports
Source code
Described by many apparently unconnected witnesses. The strongest category in the guide, and the smallest.
John Keel
1966–1975
Point Pleasant convinced him the phenomenon was neither extraterrestrial nor consistent. He proposed ultraterrestrials: intelligences that are local, deceptive about their own nature, and not reliably material.
Point Pleasant
1966–67
A West Virginia flap combining a winged creature, lights, electrical interference, strange visitors and premonition. The combination is what made Keel abandon the extraterrestrial framework.
Mothman
1966–67
The winged figure reported at Point Pleasant. Filed here as cryptid-adjacent rather than cryptid because the reports arrive bundled with lights, interference and premonition.
Deliberate contact work
Read this first
The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.
Who should be careful
Practice-side
Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.