Occupant

"Occupant" is the case-file term investigators use for any being observed in, on, or near a UFO — deliberately chosen over "alien" because it describes only what was seen (a figure associated with a craft) without asserting anything about where that figure came from. The neutral vocabulary matters to serious casework: a witness can accurately report an occupant without the report itself smuggling in a conclusion about extraterrestrial origin, interdimensional origin, or misperception of something mundane. Occupant reports define Hynek's CE3 category and form the raw material for the entire "beings" side of ufology, from the small silver figures of the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville siege to the tall, grey-skinned figures central to the modern abduction literature. Socorro, 1964, includes one of the better-known American occupant reports — officer Lonnie Zamora described two small figures near the landed object before it departed. Occupant sightings are rarer and more contested than light or craft sightings alone, since they demand the witness be close enough, and the encounter long enough, for facial or bodily detail to register; skeptics attribute most occupant reports to a mix of sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucination, and pattern-matching under stress, while investigators who take the reports at face value use them to build being-type taxonomies like "greys" and "small humanoids."