Paul Froggatt was cycling home from a 12-hour night shift at a dog food warehouse when he saw something in the sky that made him stop his bike.
It was just before 5am on Thursday, July 16, 2020. Froggatt, 26, was making his usual route home through Oakwood and Blacklow Spinney, a quiet Warwickshire Wildlife Trust woodland on the edge of Warwick, England. The sky was just beginning to lighten. Then, hovering low on the horizon, he spotted a glowing orange sphere.
He stopped and pulled out his phone.
Photo: Paul Froggatt
A Light That Didn’t Behave
Froggatt told the Daily Star he initially tried to talk himself out of what he was seeing. He thought it might be Venus, or a satellite. But it was closer than either of those things should be, and it was moving.
“I stopped on my way to take some photos,” he said. “The object looked a fair bit bigger in person than visible in the photos.”
Then the object began to rotate and change shape. He could see it was circular, with something protruding from the main body. A chill went through him. He got back on his bike.
As he continued riding, he had the unsettling sense that the object was tracking his course. He told himself it had to be an optical illusion. He turned into the woodland path and lost sight of it through the trees.
That’s when things got quiet. Too quiet.
“Usually there is a chorus of bird song and insects at this time of the morning,” he said. “But the forest was absolutely silent.”
What Are Mantis Aliens? Mantis beings, sometimes called Mantids or insectoid aliens, are one of the recurring non-human entity types reported in close encounter and abduction cases. Witnesses consistently describe them as tall, bipedal, and praying-mantis-like in appearance, with triangular heads, large dark eyes, and long, jointed limbs. Unlike the more familiar grey-type beings, Mantids are often reported as dominant figures in encounter scenarios, described as cold, highly intelligent, and communicating through telepathy rather than speech.
The Thing Around the Bend
Froggatt kept riding. Around a curve in the path, he came to a stop.
Standing a few meters ahead of him was something he said he could only describe as a humanoid praying mantis. It was at least 7 feet tall. Light green. A triangular head. Large, oval black eyes. The body had all the structural features of a mantis, but it stood upright on two legs, with a shape that was somehow unsettlingly human.
He froze.
“For what felt like an age, but was probably only seconds, I stared into this creature’s eyes and it stared back,” he said. “I felt like it could read my mind and I could read its.”
What he claims to have sensed in that moment wasn’t curiosity. It wasn’t confusion. He described it as pure, projected hatred, the kind of cold predatory indifference you might feel watching a spider consume a fly. “My fear was replaced with completely alien thoughts of utter hatred and evil I felt projected from this thing,” he said.
Then the creature took a step back, as if preparing to lunge.
Froggatt fled.
Photo: Paul Froggatt
What He Left Behind
He reported the encounter to the Daily Star in January 2021, roughly six months after it happened. He brought photographs of the orange sphere from earlier that morning, a hand-drawn sketch of the creature, and a willingness to go on record with his full name.
The alien encounter, as Froggatt described it, wasn’t just visually strange. The telepathic component, the sense of a hostile intelligence projecting emotion rather than communicating in any recognizable way, is something that appears in a surprisingly consistent thread of close encounter reports. Insectoid or “mantid” beings represent one of the lesser-discussed categories in contact case literature, but accounts of tall, praying-mantis-like entities have surfaced in abduction testimony and close encounter reports going back decades, often described as cold, calculating, and operating alongside or above the more commonly reported grey-type beings.
Whether that context lends Froggatt’s account credibility or simply places it within a familiar cultural template is an open question.
The Cost of Going Public
The professional fallout was immediate. Colleagues at the warehouse dubbed him the “Mantis Man of Warwick,” and the ridicule became untenable. Froggatt said he was forced to quit his job. He was also left with what he described as genuine trauma. Sleep had become difficult. The memory of the encounter, and whatever he felt in that moment of eye contact, stayed with him.
He appealed publicly for anyone else who had seen something unusual in the Oakwood and Blacklow Spinney area that morning to come forward. As of the original reporting, no corroborating witnesses had surfaced.
Photo: Paul Froggatt
What Else Could It Have Been?
The skeptical explanations here aren’t hard to find. Froggatt had just finished a 12-hour overnight shift, a level of sleep deprivation known to produce hypnagogic states, hallucinations, and distorted sensory processing. The pre-dawn forest setting, the physical fatigue, the already-heightened state of mind from the strange object in the sky, all of these are conditions that can generate vivid and convincing perceptual experiences that bear no relationship to external reality.
The orange sphere itself, while unidentified, is consistent with a range of mundane phenomena: Chinese lanterns, drones, atmospheric light anomalies, even certain configurations of Venus under specific conditions. The photos he captured show a small, ambiguous point of light, consistent with his own description that the object appeared larger in person.
What’s harder to explain away is the consistency of his account across multiple tellings and the fact that he willingly attached his full name, his workplace, and his likeness to a story that had clear and immediate professional consequences for him. People who fabricate paranormal encounters for attention rarely follow up by losing their jobs over it.
A Stranger Category of Contact
The Warwick mantis account sits at the intersection of two distinct phenomena: the unexplained aerial object and the close encounter with a non-human intelligence. These two threads appearing together in the same incident, and on the same morning, is either a remarkable coincidence or something more deliberate.
If Froggatt encountered only one strange thing that July morning, it would be easy to file away. Two separate anomalies in the same pre-dawn window, each witnessed by the same person, in the same location, on the same commute home, makes the full picture a little harder to set aside.
Whatever was in those woods, Paul Froggatt hasn’t forgotten it. And five years later, the Mantis Man of Warwick still doesn’t have an explanation that satisfies him.
Seen encountered a mantis type alien? Email Reports@ParaRational.com
