Most aliens are embarrassingly mundane - like actors in suits or just fancy make-up. The worrying suspicion is that this reflects the state of special effects in the middle of the 20th Century. This meant, for example, that to do justice to John W. Campbell's 1938 novella Who Goes There? we had to wait for John Carpenter's The Thing in the early eighties, the 1951 adaptation not only featured a man dressed like a carrot but couldn't really capture the themes of the story. Star Trek got around the fact that their aliens were usually guys with bits of rubber stuck to them and hot babes painted funny colours (who were there for Kirk to get a bit of interplanetary "diplomacy" with) by invoking earlier aliens who seeded the universe with humanoid species, as seen in "The Chase". However, even looking around the Earth the bipeds are the exception, not the rule, and nature even throws out body shapes that shows the bilaterally symmetrical bauplan is only one of many plausible designs (just think of those starfish). With this in mind I am always happy to see entity encounters which throw the rulebook out of the window and get weird without the witness being concerned about people's estimation of their sanity:

On 8-15-2009 at 2:45am I was buzzed for about 5 seconds by a 4 foot round luminescent orb on the roof of the building that I work in, in Philadelphia . It materialized about a foot away from me, blocking my way and making a buzzing sound, it then took off and dematerialized in approximately a 6 feet distance. At this time I decided to turn around and leave the roof. I found a photo of the object here.

About an hour later at 3:45am I was walking through a machine room on the roof, near the same location of the orb, when I encountered a 3 foot tall triped creature. It was standing by an electrical transformer looking up at the conduits. I observed it for about 30 seconds from a distance of four feet before it turned around and noticed me. I was looking down at it! It had a beautiful baby blue eye which was moving rapidly, just one, a long eye lid and rubbery looking legs with bulbous feet.

I could see it was starting to panic because it started stomping his feet like a mad skunk or jumping up and down and making a high pitch squeaking sound almost like a cats toy. I was blocking it's way to the open roll up door leading to the roof behind me. I put up an open hand in a gesture to let it know that I wouldn't hurt it and backed up towards a different part of the machine room, away from it's path to the door, but kept my eye on the creature. I watched it walking down the isle slowly when it started to move. It stopped where I had turned to get out of its way, it then turned and looked me over for a couple of seconds. I couldn't help myself and started to laugh at it. I felt like a child who saw a monkey for the first time or something! I got the impression that it was thanking me but I think I also offended it because it started to leer at me and it's eye changed to a lighter color. I could be wrong, it may have took a bow! The triped then took off running in the direction of the door disappearing behind machinery in the area. I didn't feel threatened in any way by this creature but I was quite sure that cornering it was a bad idea! In hindsight of this encounter I'm left with a feeling a of wonder. The buildings electrical generator was permanently shut down about a year ago.

On this same morning I'm doing my paper work in the control booth, and a larger than man sized Praying Mantis comes up to the window and just stairs at me for about a minute. I did not feel comfortable with this encounter considering the nature of this kind of insect. I sat there and didn't move a muscle until it left. I have also heard screeching sounds in the roof machine room, in the direction of the roll up door which made my hair stand up on the back of my neck around the same time for 2 nights.

...

On 8-18-09 at around 3:00am I was witness to a giant bird above Eakins Oval with a 40 foot wing span or better, it had rectangle shaped wings and no tail feathers, I didn't see any feet or head either. All I could make out was the huge wings with all of the feathers moving in the breeze and there were hundreds of them, there were no primary feathers that I could see. It looked like a enormous kite. I'm a bird watcher and never seen a bird like this before. I was really quite fed up with all the paranormal stuff happening to me at this time so I watched it for about 4 minuets and decided to just ignored it and go on about my business before it did something really weird and unexplainable. "Wow " A Sumerian god come to earth! An angle maybe? I can take see an alien off my bucket list! Nothing else has happened since.

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Does the strangeness itself make such accounts valid? It is a tricky one - you'd imagine anyone deciding to lie would come up with something that follows a well known pattern, so people have precedents to judge it by. However, this may not always be the case and we shouldn't rule it out automatically

So what is going on?

• Well reality could have gone very wrong in their locality, or reality is always weird and the veil of normality was whipped aside for a second.
• They could be lying, delusional or mistake but it is difficult to tell without having the witness to question. However, a couple of other interesting possibilities present themselves:
• The mention of the buzzing sphere in proximity to electrical equipment, reminds me of the numerous cases we have looked at involving electrical UFOs or plasma spheres. The appearance of the triped could be the result of the sphere's impact on the brain (although if this is inducing hallucinations or opening the doors of perception is a difficult one to judge, although you'd have to default to the former without evidence for the latter). Of course, this doesn't necessarily explain the other two sightings but they were shorter and less detailed. It may be there was some kind of residual effect knocking around their headbox or having one odd experience makes you keep a look out for other oddities. The mantis though got me thinking:
• While there have been reports of mantis-like entities before, like the Mantis Man of London, the mention of the mantis rang a bell, as encounters with praying mantis-like insects are common in DMT trips, as described by Clifford Pickover. Endogenous DMT has been suggested as a cause for a range of strange experiences and it may be the mantis is pointing this out to us.

Of course, it could be a mix of a few of them. The only thing I feel I can say is that this whole business makes very little sense as an encounter with an alien, even though it is a very "alien" entity.