What 152,000 UFO Reports Reveal About Entity Encounters

Sixty-eight percent said frightened. Thirty percent said paralyzed. And virtually none said there was an attempt to communicate.

That's the profile of "shadow" entity encounters in the NUFORC database. I didn't expect that. I was looking for patterns in how witnesses describe seeing beings alongside UFOs. What I did find was a spectrum, with "shadowy figures" at one end and "light beings" at the other.

In my previous analysis, I discovered that disk-shaped craft were five to six times more likely to involve entity encounters than spheres. That was odd to me, so I decided to take a deeper dive.

Quick background: I used an AI model to extract 35 features from each of the 152,000 sighting narratives in the NUFORC database. Things like shape, sound, movement pattern, entity type, witness reaction, physical effects. This lets me query patterns across the full dataset. For more on the methodology, see my earlier post.

Thank you NUFORC: Before diving in, I want to again thank the team at theNational UFO Reporting Center for providing access to their dataset. Their decades of work collecting and preserving these firsthand accounts makes research like this possible. If you haven't explored their searchable database, it's worth your time.

The 1.68 Percent

Out of 152,691 sightings in the database, only 2,569 involve reported entities. That's just 1.68 percent.

When you think about it, that's not too surprising. Most UFO sightings are observed at a distance: a light crossing the sky, an object near the horizon, a blip seen for a few seconds before it disappears. You can't see occupants from a mile away.

But still that 1.68 percent is very different from the reports in the rest of the database. They tend not to be passive observations. When entities appear, things get real.

When Entities Appear, Things Tend to Escalate

I looked at the interaction levels for entity encounters versus all sightings. There's a noticeable difference.

Only 23 percent of entity encounters are passive observations. Over three-quarters involve some form of interaction beyond passive observation.

This makes sense when you think about it. Seeing an entity requires proximity. And proximity, at least in these reports, tends to mean interaction.

Disks Are Associated with Entities

I wrote about this in my earlier article. Surprisingly, not all shapes are equally likely to involve entities. Here's the pattern:

Disks have an entity association rate of 3.39 percent, roughly double the baseline. The classic flying saucer with occupants is more than a cultural trope. It's backed by the data.

Contrast this with triangles. Despite being the third most common shape, triangles are below the baseline rate. Black triangles tend to fly overhead silently and leave. They don't land. And they rarely deposit occupants.

The Entity Hierarchy

What kinds of entities do witnesses report? Here's the breakdown:

"Humanoid" is the generic category: a human-like figure without more specific features. "Grey" is the classic grey alien of abduction lore that we all know and love. "Tall" captures what some researchers call "Nordics" or "tall whites". "Shadow" and "light being" sit at opposite ends of an interesting spectrum that I'll get back to in a bit.

The Emotional Spectrum

Here's where things get interesting. I looked at witness emotional responses by entity type:

Shadowy figures produce the most fear: 68 percent of witnesses report being afraid. Greys aren't far behind at 62 percent. But light beings? Only 19 percent fear. In fact, light beings are the only entity type where witnesses report more awe than fear.

Two poles emerge from the data. On one end: shadow entities and greys, associated with paralysis, fear, and abduction. On the other: light beings, associated with awe and calm.

Physical Effects: The Paralysis Pattern

Physical effects correlate strongly with entity type:

Greys and shadows have nearly identical paralysis rates, around 30 percent. One in three witnesses reports being unable to move. Light beings and generic humanoids rarely paralyze.

Greys and Abduction

The grey-abduction connection is one of the strongest patterns in the entity data:

Thirty-eight percent of grey encounters involve claimed abduction. That's nearly three times the rate for generic humanoids and eight times the rate for light beings.

Light beings almost never abduct. They appear, they communicate, they leave.

How They Communicate

When entities communicate with witnesses, how do they do it? The table below shows cases where communication was reported (roughly 30-45% of encounters, depending on entity type):

Greys communicate telepathically at 4.6 times the rate of audible speech. Light beings show a similar pattern. The "voice in your head" phenomenon is concentrated in these entity types.

Shadow encounters rarely involve any reported communication. Only 17% of shadow cases include communication data, compared to 44% for greys. When shadow communication is reported, it's evenly split between telepathic, audible, and visual, with no dominant mode. They paralyze, they terrify, but they rarely engage.

Humanoids are the most "normal" communicators, using audible speech at nearly the same rate as telepathy.

The Shadow Phenomenon

Shadow entities were an unexpected finding. I hadn't encountered this category much in the popular UFO narratives, but they show up in the data with a distinct profile:

• Highest fear rate of any entity type (68%)
• High paralysis rate (30%)
• Minimal communication or engagement
• Often bedroom encounters

The obvious question here: are these sleep paralysis experiences? The paralysis rate and bedroom setting would support that hypothesis.

But then explain how 11 percent of shadow encounters happen during daylight. And the actual sightings narratives don't all fit the sleep paralysis pattern.

Here's one witness account (Sighting #56269):

I awoke to what must have been an hour or so after midnight in a bedroom adjoining my grandfather's room. I woke up suddenly and shot up straight up in my bed sweating and breathing hard. A amazing bright light flooded the room suddenly... I was gripped, frozen by fear and hardly able to breathe. I wanted to call for my grandfather, but nothing came out.

My ears were filled with what sounded like a thousand people whispering or what I imagine inhumanly large power lines buzzing with electricity would sound like. In what seemed like an eternity to me, but I believe happened in mere moments the shadow of a figure crept across my window with only the impression of his body passing by. But for one brief moment and for what will forever fill my heart with fear and make me cringe to this day, I had the most horrifying realization that it knew I was awake and turned to me to contemplate my intrusion.

I cocooned myself in my covers and held myself for hours before I finally found release in forced slumber.

Sleep paralysis? Perhaps...but the witness describes being mobile (sitting up, pulling covers over). I'm not sure what to make of that one.

The Grey Experience

Grey encounters follow a different pattern. Here's a representative account (Sighting #184114):

One night going downstairs, I thought I heard a train on train tracks a block away or a plane overhead because I heard a train/blowing air type noise and saw a white light out the windows in the house. I got to the other side of kitchen where I could see all the way down my dad's house, about 100 feet and in the porch, I saw a now what I believe was a grey alien. It hovered through the wall of the porch wall and came/floated to me. I was frozen and couldn't move. I was crying uncontrollably with my eyes closed.

It spoke to me telepathically, I don't remember what he said besides being reassuring that he wasn't there to hurt me. He didn't speak until we were floating up to his ship, outside the front of the house.

They did perform a surgery on me by going through my right side about a foot below my right chest on my right upper stomach. I had this scar into my 20's. A scar I didn't have before nor can I explain any other way.

Still to this day, when I hear a noise, I'm scared it's a 4 foot tall grey alien.

The witness was 7 or 8 years old. His sister and father found him frozen and crying in the kitchen. The encounter he described left physical marks and lasting psychological effects.

This is the poster-child classic grey abduction narrative: paralysis, telepathic communication that's oddly "reassuring," medical procedures, missing time, and then trauma that persists for decades.

Light Beings: The Other End of the Spectrum

Light being encounters offer a different experience. Here's an account from 1982 (Sighting #47116):

This happened at an old strip mine we used to camp at back in the 80's. I was there with a guy named [name] and his girlfriend [name]. We had laid out a blanket and were laying side-by-side stargazing when I saw what looked like a normal satellite tracking in a straight line from east to west across the sky. I pointed it out to the others and everyone acknowledged that they saw it too.

When it got directly above us it suddenly did a fast, tight loop, seemingly around a bright star exactly above us. At that moment all three of us received a very strong mental impression that I can only describe as a telepathic message directly from this object. I know this was real because we compared our experiences and all three of us felt the same thing and received the same "information."

This object was a group of beings that were aware of us watching them and they timed their loop maneuver somehow so it would seem to us that they had looped around a star... They did the loop just to amaze us in a playful, humorous way.

We all had the impression that these beings were beneficial and had a sense of humor. At the same time, the beings imparted to us a very strong impression that they were watching over all of us on this planet and not to worry, they weren't going to let anything really bad happen like us destroying ourselves or something. We were hit with a very nice sense of calm and well-being. This feeling was very profound and life-changing for me.

Note: I am not a mental patient nor have I ever had any type of mental or psychological episodes whatsoever. I'm a down-to-earth guy who owns a small farm and is 49 years old at this time.

Three witnesses in an outdoor setting. "Beneficial" and a "sense of humor". A lasting sense of calm rather than trauma...

Contrast that with the shadow and grey encounters.

The Elephant in the Room: Are These Reports Credible?

A few points worth considering:

Multiple witnesses are common. 46% of entity encounters involve more than one witness. That's actually slightly higher than the baseline rate for all sightings. These aren't exclusively solo experiences.

Data quality is mixed. Entity reports do skew toward lower quality. While reasoning through the reports I had the AI also flag the level of detail. 30% are classified as "low" detail compared to 10 percent for non-entity sightings. But 53% are medium quality and 13% are high quality. There's a solid percentage of detailed, coherent accounts from (apparently) credible witnesses.

There's consistency in the data patterns. Greys cluster with abduction, telepathy, and paralysis. Shadows cluster with fear and paralysis. Light beings cluster with awe and calm. These aren't random associations, the patterns were made more evident after using AI to apply structure to the sighting narratives.

What to Make of This

I honestly have no idea what these reports mean.

What I can say with confidence is that 2,569 people reported seeing non-human entities in connection with UFO sightings, and their reports follow patterns. The patterns are consistent with decades of UFO literature, but they also show nuances that are weird. "Shadow beings" don't appear much in popular accounts, but they're in the data. "Light beings" are almost never associated with abduction, and the narratives push back against the assumption that all entity encounters are frightening.

I believe the emotional spectrum alone is worth investigating further. Why would "shadow entities" induce a 68% fear factor while "light beings" only 19%? If these are all hallucinations or hoaxes, why the consistency? If they're real, what does the variation tell us about the larger phenomenon?

Ultimately it's a small data set (only 1.68% of the entire database) so perhaps the patterns could be validated against additional sources (like MUFON).

Ultimately, I don't have answers. But the data is interesting enough to share.

For Insiders

I'll be sharing the Jupyter notebooks used for this analysis with Insiders, including the specific sighting IDs for some of the more interesting cases. You'll be able to look up the full narratives in the NUFORC database and explore the patterns yourself.

Note: The raw extracted feature data will not be included, as the underlying sighting narratives are proprietary to NUFORC. But the notebooks will show the methodology and let you see which specific reports I found most compelling.

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