What’s Up With Praying Mantis Aliens?

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BY HARV BISHOP

This will be one of my most batshit crazy posts, but work with me for a few paragraphs.

It starts in Crestone Colorado, where longtime friends have a home. Crestone is an idyllic small mountain town nestled against the rugged peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. It is home to multiple spiritual centers from Catholic to Buddhist to Hindu. Its second claim to fame is being on America’s “UFO highway” located near the 37th parallel where UFO sightings have clustered across the country over the years. The UFO watchtower is a popular, quirky tourist destination a few miles away in Hooper.

Close encounters in Crestone

At my friends’ home, a few years back, there was a sighting of a 6- to 7-foot forward leaning being with almond insect eyes lurching forward in the hallway minding its own business, glancing from side to side. It didn’t have a message and didn’t seem to notice anyone. The eyes were reported to be  the most vivid aspect. The being was rail thin and reminiscent of a very tall praying mantis.

I normally don’t flinch when I hear about (and sometimes witness) seeming spiritual or paranormal experiences, but this oversized Jiminy Cricket pushed me up against my limits. I had no explanation and it seemed, as noted, batshit crazy.

Over the years since, I thought briefly back on this puzzle and then refiled it under “who the hell knows?” That changed this last spring.

Another mutual friend, a gifted psychic and novelist, visited Crestone and ended up at a Tibetan stupa across the street from the previously mentioned friend’s house. There she “saw” several 6- 7-foot tall skinny aliens with large almond eyes who talked to her about her future. I was floored given her description of these beings and the proximity to the original sighting. She said she the beings also reminded of images from ancient Egyptian artwork.

This whole enigma called for a second look, but how?

Taking the paranormal seriously, but not literally 

Noted Rice University professor of religious studies Jeffrey Kripal has made a career of taking seriously—but not literally—such seemingly impossible paranormal claims. These claims must be addressed at several levels, says Kripal. It is especially important to look past the physical or literal to the level of meaning. In the context of “aliens” or “ghosts,” this means that we perceive other non-physical realities through the filters of our time and culture and religious beliefs. What are now described as aliens were perhaps once called angels or fairies in other times.

None of those words, concepts or interpretations may come close to the extraphysical reality that is being touched. The paranormal experience can be “read” as text in a rigorous way to explore meaning in the same way sacred scriptures can inspire multiple interpretations of deeper meaning mixed with cultural and historical influences. We may, Kripal suggests, ultimately be in touch with our highest spiritual capacities that we perceive as other or alien because our consciousness is not ready to integrate these realities.

The mass media shapes our interpretations of the paranormal 

My friend, the esoteric scholar David Metcalfe, says that our unexplainable experiences are often mediated by images from the mass media. Hence the only thing I could initially offer on the Crestone experiences was the possibility of it being one of the ubiquitous shadow figures mentioned on reality TV ghost shows. I did an internet dive but it wasn’t helpful. The alien piece didn’t make sense to me. I hadn’t looked deeply into that literature and my media-mediated image was of the peaceful child-sized aliens with big heads that escorted Richard Dreyfuss onto the saucer at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 

I then asked some respected spiritual teachers and psychics about what had been seen in Crestone. The answers ranged from “It’s not literal, it’s a Jungian symbol,” to they were seeing into other extraphysical dimensions, to it was an alien with good/bad intentions (depending on who I asked).

Different views of praying mantis aliens 

I’ve since discovered, with an assist from David Metcalfe, that strange though they may be, praying mantis (sometimes called mantid) aliens are indeed a thing for many paranormal experiencers.

One more possible explanation follows on my lead about this being a meshuga (crazy) post. One explanation obviously could be delusion or hallucination, but that does not explain the multiple people from different walks of life who have seen similar mantid figures. Many of these people had never seen anything like it. Nor had they been primed by reading about events like this or indeed had any expectations of seeing anything like this.

In the Alan Steinfeld edited anthology, Making Contact, mantids are ascribed with different roles and temperaments depending on the contributor’s perspective. In one case they are thought to be the keepers of the universe’s DNA, having genetic material from every species that has ever existed. This is believed to be part of the reason for aliens collecting human eggs and sperm in UFO abduction cases. Yes, this area can get very weird very fast. Mantids are also variously seen as helpful to humans or conversely as impersonal, using people purely for experiments. Some experiencers suggest they can be hybrid beings, human in the physical world and part mantid in out-of-body extraphysical states.

Yes, the latter is strange. But recall Jeffrey Kripal’s view that these beings we perceive as so other and alien may represent our highest spiritual capacities that we are not ready to integrate.

In the book Mutants and Mystics [#CommissionsEarned], Kripal explores the similarities between comic book and science fiction themes and paranormal encounters. Many authors of these works have had paranormal experiences and encode those experiences into their art. Alien-like beings were described by these creators long before popular contemporary UFO lore or even the existence of airplanes. Kripal notes that many aliens (or interdimensional beings) are said to have insectoid features. Take another look at Spiderman’s eyes.

Racism and government secrecy 

Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris’s recent book Trinity [#CommissionsEarned] tells a fascinating story about a pre-Roswell UFO crash on a New Mexico ranch one month after the infamous A Bomb test near Alamogordo, New Mexico. That the case is little known is a consequence of racism and government secrecy. The area’s Latino ranchers, very near the Trinity test site, weren’t warned of the dangers of the July 1945 test and their stories of a UFO sighting and crash in August 1945 were discounted. Inez Padilla heard the sound of the Trinity test blast in July and was blinded in one eye when she peeked through a door to see what was happening. Her son, Jose Padilla, 9, and his friend, Remigo Baca, 7, witnessed the UFO crash one month later. Jose Padilla later became a California state trooper. As adults, both Jose and Remigo described the occupants of the craft as “very strange kids,” and used insectoid images as descriptors, like crickets or fire ants standing upright.

“They were ugly to us at first,” said Baca. “Their heads looked like campamocha.”

“Would you say it in English?,” asks the interviewer.

“The closest translation would be like,” says Baca, “heck, a bug, praying mantis…Big, bulgy eyes… real thin, needle-thin arms.”

Some of the most dramatic and striking contemporary testimony on mantids comes from the respected Buddhist-influenced indie singer/songwriter Stuart Davis, a longtime compatriote of noted spiritual philosopher Ken Wilber. Davis and his friends have had numerous synchronicities with mantid aliens, praying mantis insects and UFO sightings. A psychic told him that these beings are here to work with creatives and to encourage the growth of human consciousness. Davis has written a screenplay dealing with mantids. His in-depth podcast on the topic is highly recommended and linked below.

So mystery and questions remain even with multiple, apparently credible witnesses. What can be said with reasonable certainty is there are multiple sightings that match what the experiencers described in and around my friends’ home in Crestone. Beyond that, as with many experiences like this, the questions that call us to expand and grow in understanding can be as or more important than hard and fast answers.

Resources:

In this article from his Liminal Analytics Blog, David Metcalfe considers the implications of new realities raised by scholarly UFO research and possible UFO imagery in the Bible.

In this Rice University interview, Professor Kripal reflects on ways to think about the UFO phenomenon.

The Stuart Davis Show, Man Meets Mantis can be found on YouTube here. 

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Intrigued by Crestone, Colorado?

Check out this article on our travel blog Slow Stroll Travel: Crestone, Colorado, Tops for Spiritual Centers & UFO Sightings

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