The genuine anomaly: recurrent, and with no folkloric ancestor.
Tall, thin, insect-like, with large angled eyes, reported as calm and authoritative rather than clinical. This one recurs across experiencers with no obvious route to each other, and it did so before it had much cultural presence, the opposite of the usual pattern. No origin is claimed in most accounts, so it is filed as uncertain rather than extraterrestrial.
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: 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.
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.
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.