22. A Spiritual Beauty Contest：Beauty and Prejudice in UFO Circles

One of the stranger lessons I learned in UFO circles began with a young man being mocked for claiming the wrong kind of alien ancestry. He said he felt connected to the Greys. Had he chosen the Pleiades, the reaction might have been rather warmer.

The argument itself was trivial. What stayed with me was the instinct beneath it. In communities devoted to awakening and cosmic openness, beauty still carried authority. Human-looking beings invited trust; stranger forms had to overcome suspicion before they were heard. I would later discover, somewhat embarrassingly, that the same reflex lived in me.

The Trouble with Being a Grey

The argument itself began, as so many minor scandals in UFO circles did, with a conversation that was never meant to matter.

It was a lazy weekend afternoon. I was chatting with an acquaintance from the UFO community, letting the conversation drift in the usual way — from recent group gossip to someone’s strange dream, to who had offended whom in which WeChat group. In those circles, information rarely arrived through official channels. It came sideways, half amused and half alarmed, carried by people who began with, “Did you hear what happened?”

My acquaintance suddenly mentioned a young man who had recently returned from the United States.

“Do you remember Shen?” he asked. “The one who studied engineering in America?”

I knew exactly who he meant. Shen was thin, energetic, and talkative in the way some people become after spending several years overseas and returning with a suitcase full of stories. In the groups, he often spoke at length about his life in America, his academic background, the photos he had taken, his observations, and occasionally matters no one had asked about. He could be long-winded, but he seemed harmless enough.

“I remember him,” I said. “Nice guy. Talks a little too much.”

My acquaintance laughed. “Well, he’s been arguing with people in another group.”

That sentence, in the UFO world, was almost never the end of anything.

“About what?”

“He said he was a starseed from the Greys.”

I paused.

There are many ways to become unpopular in a UFO group. You may challenge the wrong teacher, doubt the wrong channelled message, question someone’s galactic lineage, or fail to look suitably enlightened while a retired man explains the hierarchy of the Andromedan Council from a blurry chart. But claiming a connection to the Greys was an especially efficient way to invite trouble.

In much of the UFO community, the word “Grey” carried a heavy charge. For many people, it immediately summoned images of abduction, cold examination rooms, missing time, reproductive experiments, and small beings with large black eyes standing beside the bed at three in the morning. To say one felt spiritually connected to them was, for some UFO enthusiasts, almost like announcing affection for the very figure everyone else had spent years trying to keep out of their nightmares.

“So he said he was a Grey starseed,” I asked, “and people attacked him?”

“More or less,” my acquaintance replied. “He also brought up something you once said in your sharing. You had mentioned that the Greys were not all evil. He seemed to interpret that as a defence of his race. Then several people pushed back, and the whole thing became ugly — insults, curses, and all the ordinary human mess that spiritual language never quite prevents.”

“What?” I said. “But that’s not what I said.”

I felt the familiar sinking irritation of watching my words being pulled out of shape again. What I had offered as a careful distinction had somehow returned to me as someone else’s cosmic evidence.

I did remember what I had said. In an earlier public sharing, I had referred to Mary Rodwell’s research and interviews, where she had repeatedly stressed that “the Greys” was an oversimplified human label. Under that single name, there were many branches, lineages, and subgroups, each with different histories, intentions, and evolutionary paths. Some were described as hostile or exploitative. Others appeared more neutral, observant, or even helpful. My point had been simple: it was careless to reduce a vast range of non-human intelligences to one flat moral category. Yet that was often how people spoke about the Greys — as if one frightening encounter could define an entire spectrum of beings.

Shen, however, seemed to have taken that nuance and turned it into personal endorsement. I could understand, at least partly, why he had done so. In a world where people were constantly searching for signs of origin, belonging, and hidden identity, a single sentence could become more than information. It could become a mirror in which someone finally saw a shape for himself.

Still, there was something uneasy about it. My words had not been meant as proof of anyone’s lineage. They had been a caution against overgeneralisation. Now they had been drawn into someone else’s personal mythology.

I could almost picture the scene: Shen typing quickly, convinced he had finally found language for a private sense of identity; others reading his words with discomfort, suspicion, or outright hostility; the conversation heating up as each side dragged in half-remembered theories, personal fears, borrowed authority, and wounded pride. By the end, what might have been a strange but interesting discussion had become another online quarrel in a community that often spoke of awakening while struggling with ordinary human reactions.

Yet the reaction against him revealed something more serious. People were doing more than disagreeing with his claim. They were recoiling from the image itself. The question was no longer simply whether Shen was right or wrong about his origin. He had chosen the “wrong kind of alien.”

Had he claimed a connection to the Pleiades, the room might have softened. People might have asked more curious questions. They might have recognised the language of light, beauty, and spiritual belonging more easily. But the Greys belonged to another emotional category. They were too strange, too cold, too deeply associated with fear. To identify with them was to step outside the accepted imagery of spiritual identity.

That was what stayed with me after the conversation ended.

In the UFO community, people often spoke of open-mindedness as though it were something they had already achieved. They liked to imagine themselves as brave seekers of truth, willing to look beyond the limits of ordinary society. Yet even there, in a world filled with star nations, galactic councils, higher dimensions, and cosmic awakening, the old human reflex remained remarkably intact: we trusted what resembled us, idealised what flattered us, and recoiled from whatever disturbed the shape of our own reflection.

The hostility toward Shen’s claimed Grey lineage carried a faint echo of racial prejudice, though the “race” in question belonged to the stars. What unsettled me was how quickly appearance itself had become moral evidence.

Human beings are used to dividing the world into simple moral shapes: good and evil, safe and dangerous, familiar and foreign. In ordinary life, those instincts may help us move through danger. In the vastness of the cosmos, they can become a quieter violence — the assumption that our limited categories are large enough to contain what we barely understand.

Perhaps the deeper question was whether we were still judging non-human life through a lens too narrow to recognise it. We were willing to believe in the universe, it seemed, as long as the universe appeared in a form we found beautiful.

This did not happen only with the Greys.

The longer I spent in UFO circles, the more I noticed a quiet hierarchy of forms. Human-looking beings were easier to trust. Beautiful beings were easier to idealise. Those with luminous skin, fine features, long hair, or a faintly Nordic serenity entered people’s imagination already carrying a halo. They did not have to work quite so hard to be believed as benevolent.

Other beings arrived under suspicion.

Animal-like intelligences, insectoid presences, beings with geometric features, or entities whose faces and bodies seemed to fall outside ordinary human comprehension — all of them could be treated as unsettling, even threatening, before any real encounter had taken place. Even when people described pleasant exchanges with them, speaking of patience, intelligence, humour, or gentleness, appearance still seemed to speak first. The form became louder than the message.

The issue was larger than Shen. Even in a community trying sincerely to move beyond ordinary human limits, our oldest instincts travelled with us into the sky. We trusted resemblance. We confused beauty with goodness. We mistook familiarity for safety.

The universe, however, had never promised to comfort our aesthetic instincts.

If consciousness existed across different worlds, dimensions, histories, and evolutionary paths, then intelligence would not always arrive in a shape we found elegant. Wisdom might appear through a body that unsettled us. Compassion might come from a face we struggled to look at. A civilisation far older than ours might carry no trace of human symmetry at all.

Humility, I began to understand, might matter more than cosmic curiosity.

It is easy to speak of cosmic openness when the beings we imagine arrive in forms that flatter the highest ideals of human beauty — radiant, graceful, and reassuring. It is harder when an encounter reaches the animal body before the mind can compose a noble response. Our ideas may say yes while the nervous system is already searching for the nearest exit.

I knew this because I was no exception.

Encountering a Mantis-Like Being

For all my contact with non-human intelligence, and for all my belief that life in the universe must be far stranger than human imagination allows, I still carried the same reflexes in my own body. I could analyse prejudice in others and still feel my stomach tighten before an unfamiliar presence. I could speak about cosmic diversity and still hope, privately, that whatever appeared before me would look gentle enough for my human mind to bear.

That was why I could not stand above the people who recoiled from Shen’s claim. Their reaction may have been harsh, yet beneath the whole scene was a contradiction that belonged to all of us: we wanted the universe to be vast, mysterious, and liberating, while also wanting it to arrive in a form we could bear to look at.

I learned the difficulty of that lesson in the least dignified way possible.

One day, while speaking with an acquaintance in the UFO community, I mentioned an encounter I had once had with a mantis being. The memory still made me laugh, though not because it was trivial. It made me laugh because I had behaved exactly like the kind of human being I had spent so much time trying to transcend.

The being had approached me gently. From the beginning, I sensed no hostility from him. In fact, there was a carefulness in the way he came forward, as though he understood that his true appearance might frighten me before any exchange could properly begin. To make the contact easier, he first projected the image of a handsome European man.

Given that I was living in Australia, it was an almost embarrassingly considerate choice. The projected human image was calm, refined, and reassuringly human — a Nordic-looking man of the sort one might pass on the street without a second thought. There was nothing in his appearance to send the primitive little animal inside me scrambling for the nearest tree. For a short while, we communicated through that form.

Yet I sensed that it was only a projection. A diplomatic costume, perhaps. A bridge.

Curiosity, that dangerous little engine of spiritual development, began to stir in me. I wanted to know what he truly looked like. Part of me was simply curious; another part wanted to test whether I could meet his real form without fear. So I asked him to show himself as he was.

He seemed amused.

“You will be afraid,” he warned me telepathically. “We are friendly. It is all right to communicate this way.”

That should have been enough. It was a gracious warning, offered without pressure. A wiser person might have said, “Thank you, this is perfectly adequate for today,” and continued the conversation with dignity.

I was not that person.

I insisted.

So he withdrew the projection.

What stood before me was a tall mantis being.

For a fraction of a second, my mind tried to keep up. It reached for everything I believed: openness, respect, interstellar ethics, the dignity of all sentient life. Then my body made its own decision. The ancient machinery came alive. Fear moved through me before thought could place a hand on its shoulder.

I panicked.

There is no elegant way to describe it. I did not bow reverently before the mystery of cosmic life. I did not gaze into his presence with serene spiritual maturity. I fled with the full sincerity of a small mammal encountering something much larger than expected.

Later, half laughing and half ashamed, I told a friend that I had been so frightened I nearly peed myself. Fortunately, human–extraterrestrial relations did not require adult diapers that day. It was not my finest diplomatic contribution.

The mantis being did not chase me, reproach me, or try to prove his kindness. He simply remained where he was, quietly watching me retreat from the truth I had requested.

That image has stayed with me more than the fear itself: his stillness, his restraint, the way he allowed my terror to pass without making it worse. He seemed neither offended nor impatient. He simply let me be human, even when my humanity arrived in a rather undignified form.

Looking back now, I still laugh at myself. I can see the absurdity of it: one moment, asking for the truth; the next, running from it with all the spiritual composure of a startled chicken. But beneath the comedy was something far more tender. He had shown me a kind of courtesy I did not yet know how to name.

He had protected me from my own fear before I understood that I needed protection.

The handsome human image had not been deception in the crude sense. It had been consideration. Contact, I came to understand, is not only an exchange of information; it is also an encounter between nervous systems. Our histories, instincts, and thresholds travel with us. He seemed to understand that the first shock of difference could close me before any deeper recognition had a chance to begin.

Years later, I came to see that the encounter had opened a small but important door in me. It showed me how quickly the image I carried of myself could collapse under pressure. I wanted to believe I was open, discerning, spiritually serious. Yet in that moment, the truth was simpler: I was frightened by a body that did not resemble mine.

That realisation humbled me.

After that, as my contact experiences accumulated, I began to practise a different kind of attention. When fear arose, I tried not to obey it immediately. I learned to pause and attend to the quality of the presence before judging the form — whether I sensed pressure or hostility, or instead patience, intelligence, and restraint.

The practice was modest, often only a few seconds long. But those seconds created a small space between instinct and judgment. In that space, I began to understand that respect in interstellar contact was not always visible. Sometimes it appeared as restraint or distance; sometimes as a being choosing a face you could bear to look at until you were ready for something more real.

That encounter with the mantis being became, in retrospect, one of the most important lessons I never meant to receive.

It came suddenly, without ceremony, and left me with an uncomfortable truth: before human beings can claim to welcome the universe, we may first have to admit how much of it we are still afraid to see.

What the Pleiadian Craze Revealed

Around the same period, I began to notice another pattern.

After my public sharing, listeners sometimes wrote to me privately. Some came with questions about dreams, strange childhood memories, recurring lights in the sky, or the feeling that their lives had been quietly watched by an intelligence they could not name. Others sent photographs of themselves, usually carefully chosen: a flattering angle, soft lighting, a composed expression. Then came the question, sometimes shy, sometimes eager, sometimes already carrying its own answer.

“Do you think my soul family is from the Pleiades?”

The question was rarely neutral. I could feel the hope inside it. People were asking about origin, yet they were also asking whether the secret architecture of their soul might be beautiful, noble, luminous, and safely distant from the darker corners of the UFO world. The Pleiades had become more than a star cluster. In many people’s imagination, it was a spiritual homeland with better lighting.

When my reading or intuition pointed elsewhere, especially toward a non-human or less aesthetically pleasing form of intelligence, the change in tone was often immediate. The reply might remain polite, yet something in it dimmed. A small silence opened. Sometimes the person would thank me, then quietly steer the conversation back toward the Pleiades, as though I had misunderstood the assignment.

I did not find this ridiculous. I found it human.

There was real longing beneath it. Many people who entered UFO and spiritual circles were searching for a story large enough to hold their loneliness, sensitivity, childhood wounds, and lifelong sense of not belonging. To be told that one was connected to the Pleiades could feel like receiving a secret dignity. Ordinary awkwardness became cosmic displacement; pain became evidence of origin. One was no longer merely fragile or misunderstood. One was from somewhere higher.

In New Age and UFO circles, the Pleiadians were often imagined as beautiful, gentle, compassionate beings of light — human enough to feel familiar, radiant enough to feel elevated, and distant enough to remain safely idealised. They carried the emotional texture of angels, advanced cousins, benevolent guardians, and a higher evolutionary path all at once. The image reassured people that the universe was vast and strange, yet also kind, orderly, and watching over us with excellent bone structure.

Perhaps that last detail mattered more than people wanted to admit.

The popular Pleiadian image, especially in its Nordic-looking form, fit easily into old human associations between beauty and virtue. Fine features, luminous skin, graceful bodies, calm eyes — these details did more than decorate the mythology. They helped people believe in goodness. Beneath the language of vibration and star families, an earthly assumption was still at work: beauty meant purity; radiance meant wisdom; the face we desired belonged to the being we could trust.

This pattern was not confined to Chinese UFO circles. I saw the same pattern in Western New Age material and global UFO subcultures. It was not uniquely Chinese. The language changed; the emotional structure remained familiar: the Pleiadians offered comfort, identity, and rescue.

To say, “I am a Pleiadian starseed,” could become more than a spiritual claim. In some circles, it functioned almost like admission to a symbolic class — closer to beauty, refinement, and cosmic purpose, with a faint shimmer of superiority even when spoken humbly.

The affection itself did not trouble me. The narrowing did.

When one image becomes too desirable, other forms of intelligence begin to look like lesser options. Messages attributed to beautiful, human-looking beings enter with an advantage: they feel safe before they are examined. A stranger form, even if wise or compassionate, must first survive suspicion.

This was how an information bubble could form without anyone deliberately building one.

People believed they were opening themselves to the universe. Often, they were opening themselves to a version of it filtered through human aesthetics and the desire for reassurance. The door to the cosmos appeared wide open, yet only one kind of light was being allowed through.

That was the dangerous innocence.

I do not mean that all Pleiadian contact is false. Some people may have had sincere and meaningful experiences connected to that star system. My concern was the imbalance. Without an open and accountable framework for extraterrestrial contact, people were left with fragments — dreams, rumours, channelled messages, private experiences, online claims, and the emotional weather of the group. In that space, beauty could begin to function like evidence and comfort like truth.

The beings who do not fit our preferred image may carry wisdom, compassion, and gifts of their own. Yet if they arrive in forms that unsettle the human eye, their message may be weakened before it is heard. This is how prejudice narrows the future: not always through hatred, but through preference — the subtle habit of choosing only the most beautiful guide in the room.

At times, I imagined that after some greater disclosure or long-promised liberation, humanity might look back on the Pleiadian craze with embarrassment and affection. Before stepping into a larger universe, we may realise, we first tried to turn it into a spiritual beauty contest.

The thought makes me smile, though not cruelly.

There is something deeply human in it. We want the unknown to be kind, and preferably attractive. We want the beings above us to look like improved versions of ourselves. Yet maturity asks for a harder form of seeing: to recognise wisdom without being seduced by beauty, and danger even when it arrives clothed in light.

The Unfinished Awakening

Looking back, those scenes seem now like fragments of the same lesson.

Li’s claimed Grey lineage, my panic before the mantis being, and the disappointment of those who hoped for Pleiadian ancestry now seem like versions of the same lesson. Each moment was small; together they revealed how easily appearance becomes a moral shortcut.

If humanity ever enters a wider field of cosmic contact, the encounter may expose more than our technology or politics. It may reveal whether our idea of consciousness is large enough to include forms that unsettle us — and whether our longing for liberation has matured into discernment.

The unfinished awakening was never only in the UFO community. It was in me as well. Perhaps the real work begins here: learning to stand before the unfamiliar without turning fear into truth.

The universe may be far more generous than we imagine.

It may also be far less interested in being beautiful for our sake.