An argument that the whole list is the wrong shape.
Keel's proposal is not another species to add. It is a claim that if a single local intelligence can present itself in whatever form the witness's culture makes available, then the form perceived tells you about the perceiver, not the perceived. It is unfalsifiable and explains rather too much, which are serious objections. It is also the only framework that accounts for why the encounter structure stays constant while the costume changes every century.
Keel's own conclusion was cautionary. He documented the deterioration of people who pursued the phenomenon closely, himself included, and did not treat sustained attention to it as harmless.
Not a being to sit alongside the others. A framework that reframes the whole catalogue, a tradition that travelled in the opposite direction from the rest, or an intelligence people say they made rather than met.
Degree of embodiment: varies
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.
S: speculative hypothesis
Source code
Offered explicitly as a proposal rather than a report. Rare in this field, and worth noticing when it happens.
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.
Tradition warns against contact
Tradition-side
The tradition's own practitioners advise against seeking this out deliberately. Worth weighing on its own terms: the people closest to the material are the ones counselling distance.
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.