Wing 01 · Alien Species · The Uncanny Bestiary

The Mantis and the Scarab

Insect-formed beings crawl through humanity's oldest sacred art and its strangest modern testimony alike — the scarab that rolled the sun, the bee that spoke prophecy, the towering mantis witnesses sketch from the abduction table and the DMT trance. A field guide to a very old uncanny, with the tiers kept honest.

CASE B_5_13Reliability: Source confidence 2/5 · primary tier 3 (speculative)12 sources

Tier 1 · verifiedTier 2 · credibleTier 3 · speculativeTier 4 · dubious

01Two Worlds, One Silhouette

Set an Egyptian scarab amulet beside a witness's sketch of a towering, triangle-headed mantis from an abduction interview, and something uncomfortable happens: the silhouette rhymes. Insect-formed beings — entities with arthropod morphology, whether mantis-like, ant-like, or beetle-like — turn up in two places that supposedly have nothing to do with each other.

The first is ancient mythology, where insects were not monsters but sacred machinery: engines of rebirth, fertility, and prophecy. The second is the modern encounter report — the clinical psychedelic study and the UAP-abduction interview, where the insect returns as a watching, intelligent other. This piece walks both halves, keeps the source-tiers labelled, and resists the temptation to weld them into a single story.

02The Sacred Swarm: Insects of the Ancient World

03The Mantis in the Machine: Modern Encounters

Fast-forward to the late twentieth century and the insect changes register — from icon carved in gold to an entity people report meeting. Two literatures, one shape.

Documented · Strassman 2001

Between 1990 and 1995, psychiatrist Rick Strassman administered 400 doses of intravenous DMT to 60 volunteers at the University of New Mexico under DEA-approved clinical protocols. In DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001) he reported that multiple subjects, independently, described encounters with insectoid and mantis-like beings during the drug state.

Read that carefully. What is documented is the testimony — that subjects said this — not that any being was in the room. AEON reports the study; it does not offer DMT as medicine, method, or advice. The interpretive question is the whole fight, and it comes in Section 05.

Credible · Mack 1994 / Jacobs 1998

In UAP-abduction literature, insectoid entities — typically tall, mantis-like, with large dark eyes, angular limbs, and an apparent supervisory role over smaller "grey" beings — are a recurring report type recorded by Harvard's John Mack (1994) and David Jacobs (1998), turning up across cultures and demographics. The field, however, lacks standardized methodology, and that caveat matters.

Credible · Shanon 2002

Cognitive scientist Benny Shanon, in The Antipodes of the Mind (2002), catalogued entity encounters during ayahuasca experiences — insectoid figures among them — and proposed that the cross-cultural, cross-substance consistency points to either neurological universals or pharmacologically triggered activation of shared cognitive templates. A proposal, he stressed, not a proof.

A supervisor with a mantis's face, standing over the greys. It recurs — and it recurs in people who lived on different continents and never met.

04Kindred Forms Across Cultures

The mantis-and-scarab pairing is only the loud end of a much wider bestiary. Around the world, cultures independently reached for the arthropod when they needed to picture a trickster, a guardian, or a soul.

A word of care here. The San mantis-trickster |Kaggen and the Puebloan Spider Woman are not fossils — they belong to living Indigenous cosmologies, and they deserve to be met on their own terms rather than mined for a UFO thesis. The comparison below is offered as resonance, not as evidence that these traditions were "really" describing the same thing.

05Archetype, Contact, or Contamination?

So why the recurrence? Why does the insect keep surfacing in DMT sessions, in meditation, in near-death accounts, in abduction interviews — and rhyme, faintly, with what the ancients carved? Researchers have floated three families of explanation, and it is essential to say plainly: none has been validated.

And the skeptics have the sharper knife. Two counter-arguments cut hardest. First, priming: media images of insectoid aliens — from H.G. Wells's Selenites onward — preceded most of the encounter literature, so the "consistency" may be learned expectation, not a hard-wired template. Second, neurology: mainstream science reads DMT-induced entities as complex hallucinations from disrupted thalamocortical feedback, not perception of anything external. The subjective certainty that the being was real is not, by itself, evidence that it was.

The most defensible position is also the least dramatic: three genuinely different worlds — Bronze-Age symbolism, a living San trickster-myth, and a modern pharmacological experience — sharing a shape, for reasons we have not settled. Treat them as one phenomenon and you risk an anachronistic conflation the evidence does not license.