The Reported-NHI Field Guide: Every Claimed Non-Human Type, Graded by Provenance

Search “types of aliens” and you will find tidy lists of a dozen races — Greys, Reptilians, Pleiadians, Arcturians, Lyrans — presented as if picking between them were like choosing a Pokémon. That flattening is the problem. A being described by four sober witnesses in an investigated 1961 abduction case is not the same kind of claim as a being a 2010s YouTuber says they channel from the star Arcturus. Both belong in the catalog. They do not belong in the same tier.

So this field guide does something the pop lists don’t: it grades each type by where the claim actually comes from, and — wherever possible — points you to the specific case on this site where you can examine the evidence yourself. Nothing here is us asserting a being is real. It is us logging precisely who described it, in which case, and how much that case can bear.

The house rule, applied to every entry below. We separate three things and never let them collapse: what a witness reported, what an official confirmed (almost always: nothing), and what the physical record contains (almost always: no body, no document, no authenticated image). Every illustration on this page is AI-generated from verbal descriptions. There is no authenticated photograph of any of these beings in the public record.

How the three tiers work

• Tier I — Encounter types. Recur across multiple investigated sighting and abduction cases, often with named witnesses, contemporaneous reports, and decades of follow-up. The strongest provenance available — which still means testimony, not proof.
• Tier II — Recovery / whistleblower types. Named in sworn or on-the-record testimony about recovered bodies and craft. Higher-status sources (intelligence officers, program scientists), but the documents and bodies remain unreleased, and the Pentagon’s UAP office flatly disputes the premise.
• Tier III — Contactee & channeled types. Originate in contactee movements, New Age channeling, and “starseed” lore. Rich as mythology, essentially unfalsifiable, and with no investigated physical case behind them. We log them honestly as what they are.

---

Tier I — Encounter types

Greys

AI illustration based on described characteristics. No authenticated image exists.

Described as: small, thin, hairless humanoids with smooth grey skin, oversized craniums, and large black almond eyes — tiny slits for nose and mouth. The default “alien” of the modern imagination.

Where it actually comes from — cases on this site:

• Betty & Barney Hill, 1961 — the case that built the archetype: short grey beings, a medical exam, and the star map Betty later drew, which enthusiasts tied to Zeta Reticuli.
• Travis Walton, 1975 — Walton described waking aboard a craft surrounded by large-eyed grey beings (Fire in the Sky).
• The Allagash abductions, 1976 — four campers, shared missing time, hypnosis-recovered accounts of grey handlers.
• Whitley Strieber’s Communion, 1985–87 — the “Visitors,” small with huge slanted black eyes, the grey lineage’s most literary witness.

Provenance note: the best-evidenced type precisely because it is the best-evidenced cases — but every one of those cases rests on witness testimony, much of it hypnosis-assisted, with the reliability questions that carries. Worth flagging separately: the Pascagoula 1973 case is often filed under “greys” but the beings there were described as robotic, wrinkled, and claw-handed — a reminder that “grey” papers over real variation.

Nordics

AI illustration based on described characteristics. No authenticated image exists.

Described as: tall (around six feet), athletic, fair-skinned, blond, blue-eyed — so close to human that, in the recovery-testimony version, they would pass for northern Europeans.

Where it comes from: straddles two tiers. As a recovery type it appears in the four-types testimony (Eric Davis’s named taxonomy). As an encounter type it is mostly 1950s contactee material — benevolent “Space Brothers” — which is why skeptics single the Nordics out as the category most easily explained by ordinary human misidentification. The same description recurs, with mystical packaging, as Pleiadians in Tier III.

Reptilians

AI illustration based on described characteristics. No authenticated image exists.

Described as: scaled, lizard-like, upright, roughly human height, with slit-pupil eyes and sometimes a tail.

Where it comes from: the weakest provenance in Tier I, included here only because it appears in Davis’s recovery taxonomy. Its cultural mass comes almost entirely from conspiracy folklore — David Icke’s shapeshifting-overlords thesis, the unverified “Lacerta Files,” the Dulce-base legend — none of which is an investigated physical case. Keep the recovery claim and the folklore strictly apart; they get conflated constantly.

Insectoids (Mantids)

AI illustration based on described characteristics. No authenticated image exists.

Described as: tall, thin, praying-mantis-like, with elongated limbs, a triangular head, and large compound eyes; precise, deliberate movement.

Where it comes from: the rarest of the recovery-taxonomy four, and notable for a recurring detail across otherwise unconnected abduction accounts — the Mantids are usually cast as the supervisors (“priest-scientists”) while Greys do the handling. That consistency is interesting; it is also exactly what you would expect a shared cultural script to produce. No investigated case offers physical support.

Tridactyls (the Nazca mummies)

Described as: three-fingered, three-toed humanoid bodies — the desiccated “Nazca mummies” surfaced in Peru from 2017 on, the best-known nicknamed “Maria.”

Where it comes from — case on this site: the Nazca tridactyl mummies. This one is unusual because, unlike every other entry, there are physical objects you can in principle test — which is exactly why it sits closest to falsifiable. The catch: independent analyses are sharply split between “unknown anomalous biology” and “assembled fakes built from real (often looted) human and animal bones,” and the chain of custody is a mess. A rare case where the bottleneck is interpretation of physical evidence, not the absence of any.

---

Tier II — Recovery / whistleblower types

These come not from a witness on a roadside but from people with intelligence and program credentials, testifying about bodies and craft the government allegedly holds. Higher status; same missing receipts.

The “four separate types”

The four-types claim is the Tier-II spine: in 2025–26, physicist Hal Puthoff said recovery personnel described “at least four separate types,” and astrophysicist Eric Davis named them as the Grey/Nordic/Reptilian/Insectoid humanoid taxonomy above. Puthoff explicitly disclaimed direct access (“I have not had direct access to that, but I believe the people who I talked to”). It sits downstream of David Grusch’s 2023 sworn testimony about recovered “non-human biologics.”

Sentient Plasmoid

AI illustration based on the described concept. No authenticated image of a “sentient” plasmoid exists.

The newest entry in the catalog, and the reason this guide exists now. At the June 9, 2026 Capitol presser, a reporter asked David Grusch how many alien species the US government has identified. His verbatim answer (as printed by the Daily Mail; the wire-style outlets covering the same event kept it vaguer):

“It’s a continuum from corporeal bipedal type life to what I would consider sentient plasmoid life, but there are several that the US government is aware of.”

Described as: not a body at all — intelligent, self-organizing plasma; a luminous, bounded entity with no fixed corporeal form. The claim explicitly places it at one end of a continuum, the opposite pole from the bipedal humanoids above.

Where it connects on this site: this is the type that quietly links the “occupant” lore to the instrumented end of ufology. If some fraction of UAP are self-contained luminous spheres, the relevant cases are the orb files, not the abduction files:

• Orb morphology, from foo-fighters to PURSUE
• Why everyone is seeing orbs in 2026
• The Buga sphere, Colombia 2025
• Aguadilla 2013, the thermal-imaging UAP
• Shag Harbour 1967 (a luminous transmedium object)

Provenance note — read this before you share the quote. “Sentient plasmoid” is a real, attributable Grusch quote describing his own characterization of alleged reporting. It is not a government finding, not confirmed by any official, and not elevated by the outlets that covered the presser most directly (NewsNation/ The Hill and The Independent reported only “several… ranging in complexity,” with The Independent noting he “did not provide further details”). It is also worth keeping clean from the genuinely scientific question of whether ordinary atmospheric plasma can mimic UAP behavior — that’s a physics debate, not a claim about sentience. Log it as: vivid quote, single elevated source, zero physical corroboration.

---

Tier III — Contactee & channeled types

Everything below originates in contactee movements and New Age channeling rather than in any investigated physical case. We are not mocking it — channeled contact is a real and fascinating cultural phenomenon, and we treat the mechanism itself seriously in our esoterica pillar. But as evidence for distinct biological species, these carry the least weight in the catalog, and honesty requires saying so plainly.

• Pleiadians — Nordic look-alikes from the Pleiades; the Billy Meier “beamship” contacts (widely disputed as hoaxes) are the foundational source. Cast as spiritual mentors, not abductors.
• Tall Whites — very tall, chalk-white, fragile-looking; almost entirely from Charles Hall’s single-author Nellis AFB memoirs.
• Arcturians — luminous, blue-hued, “partially energy-based” guides from Arcturus; pure channeling lineage (Edgar Cayce onward). Note the energy-based framing echoes the plasmoid idea — minus any whistleblower or instrumented case.
• Sirians — custodians of “ancient knowledge” tied to Sirius and esoteric Egypt; channeled “starseed” material.
• Lyrans — feline-featured “root race”; regression and channeling only.
• Anunnaki — Mesopotamian deities recast by Zecharia Sitchin as Nibiru-based engineers of humanity; rejected by historians as a misreading of Sumerian texts.
• Hybrids — human/non-human crosses central to abduction emotional narratives (hybrid-children accounts); appear in regression therapy, not physical recovery.
• Little Green Men — a media meme more than a witness description. Even the case that spawned the phrase — Kelly–Hopkinsville, 1955 — involved silvery glowing goblins, not green Martians.

---

How to use this guide

The point of tiering is not to rank which beings are “more real” — none are confirmed. It is to keep you honest about what kind of claim you are repeating when you say a word like “Reptilian” or “plasmoid.” Say “Grey” and you are invoking sixty years of investigated, named-witness encounter cases. Say “Arcturian” and you are invoking a channeled message no one can check. Say “sentient plasmoid” and, as of June 2026, you are invoking exactly one on-the-record quote from one whistleblower that the careful press declined to headline.

All three sentences are worth saying. They are not worth saying in the same tone of voice. When a body, a document, or an authenticated image moves any of these from testimony into the physical record, we’ll move it up a tier and say so. Until then, this is a catalog of claims with provenance attached — which is the most any honest field guide can be.

Cross-references: the four-types claim · the June 9 presser · non-human biologics · what AARO has actually published · the whistleblower report card.