Terms used on this page
XT: extraterrestrial, biological
Origin code
Claimed to have travelled here from another star system in an ordinary physical body.
Degree of embodiment: 5, an ordinary biological body
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.
Communion
Book, 1987
Whitley Strieber's account. Its cover portrait did more to standardise the Grey's face than any body of testimony, and reports afterwards increasingly resemble it.
Zeta Reticuli
Claim
The Greys' supposed home system. It does not come from any witness. Betty Hill drew a star map from memory; in the late 1960s Marjorie Fish built a physical model of nearby stars and found a viewing angle that resembled it. Later star data weakened the match considerably.
Hypnotic recall
Term
Used throughout the abduction literature to recover memory. It is now well established that hypnosis can generate detailed, confidently held memories of things that did not happen, which does not settle any individual case but does complicate all of them.
The abduction template
Term
Missing time, an examination, and recall recovered under hypnosis. Fixed by the Hill case in 1961 and remarkably stable since, which is either corroboration or a very effective script, and the two are hard to tell apart from inside.
Material generated under hypnosis
Practice-side
Much of the detail in this tradition was recovered through hypnotic regression, which reliably produces vivid, confidently held and sometimes deeply distressing memories of events that did not occur. That does not settle any individual case, but it means the accounts cannot be treated as straightforward recall, and undergoing it is itself the risky part.
Commercial ecosystem
Documented harm
A paid economy has grown around this tradition, whether readings, courses, retreats and private sessions, or books, tours and media that keep promising more. Not automatically predatory, but it does mean some of what you will read was written to sell something, and that people in distress are a market.
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.