Taller versions described as directing the smaller ones.
Taller forms reported in abduction accounts as supervising the others. The caste structure (workers, supervisors, a hierarchy) appears more often in later accounts than early ones, which is a signature of a story settling into a shared template rather than a detail witnesses arrive at independently.
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.
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.
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.