The Shapeshifters

In November 1975, forestry worker Travis Walton was driving home with coworkers near the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona when a strange metallic disk appeared, hovering above the road. He jumped out of the truck to get a closer look. "That's when this energy hit me," Walton recalls. "The crew said that it was like I'd stepped on a landmine, like an explosion." He woke up on an elevated table inside a craft, staring into the face of a grey extraterrestrial. He panicked. Then, two human-looking beings entered the room. Former British Ministry of Defence official Nick Pope notes the suspicion: "Actually these weren't different aliens. These were the same aliens, but they were capable of shape-shifting into something else, specifically to calm him down."

Walton's story became one of the most famous alien abduction cases ever reported, and it fits a pattern. According to Michael Salla of the Exopolitics Institute, many abductees report seeing non-human greys who are then replaced by human-looking beings—suggesting extraterrestrials use shape-shifting to appear more familiar. By 2013, public policy polling found that 12 million Americans believed shape-shifting beings live among us. Bruce Fenton, author of Exogenesis Hybrid Humans, describes the theory of "an advance guard, a fifth column" that infiltrates human society, perhaps as a prelude to something larger.