What are Mantis aliens?
Mantis aliens are a type of alien said to look much like a praying mantis. They are described with a triangular head, large slanted eyes, a long thin neck and body, and slender limbs, and are often said to be about 2 meters tall, larger than humans. Some accounts say they wore long robes of various colors. They are also called “mantis beings” or “insectoid aliens.”
Appearing in abduction accounts
Mantis aliens came to be described in accounts of alien abduction, in which people say they were taken by aliens and examined. In early abduction accounts, most aliens were the small Greys; their large eyes were sometimes called “bug-like,” but mantis-shaped aliens did not clearly appear. An early example of an insect-like being is in Communion (1987), the book in which the American writer Whitley Strieber described his own experiences, and from around the 1990s, reports of seeing mantis-like aliens increased.
Supervisors of the Greys
Some American researchers who collected abduction accounts placed the mantis beings in a high-ranking position, directing and supervising the Greys who actually examine humans. In the accounts, a mantis being is often described standing beside an abductee lying on a table like an operating table, quietly watching. Some say it spoke to them telepathically.
A link to psychedelic research
Mantis beings also came up in an unexpected place. From 1990 to 1995, the psychiatrist Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico conducted approved research in which volunteers were given DMT, a substance with powerful hallucinogenic effects, and their experiences were recorded. Many participants reported meeting intelligent non-human presences, some in the form of mantises, bees or reptiles. Strassman pointed out how closely these experiences resembled abduction accounts. However, any link between abduction experiences and substances in the brain remains an untested hypothesis.
The mantis in world mythology
Aliens are not the only stories in which the mantis is a special creature. In the mythology of the San people, indigenous to southern Africa, a god called /Kaggen who takes the form of a mantis is described as a trickster who created the world and brought fire and language to people. And, as the English name “praying mantis” suggests, its pose with its forelegs folded together has long been likened to a person in prayer.
How to read the Mantis story
Many claims about the appearance and origin of mantis beings circulate online, but there is no evidence that they exist. Most abduction accounts are thought to be explainable by sleep paralysis, in which the body cannot move during sleep, or by memories shaped under hypnosis. The praying mantis, with its large eyes that fix on prey and its forelegs folded as if in prayer, has long been seen as a mysterious creature in many parts of the world. That image may have become linked to the idea of an intelligence utterly unlike our own. See also the human-looking Nordics and the reptile-like Reptilians.
