Field Guide — Church of Alienism

The sky above you is catalogued. Fifty-five classes of craft, sorted into nine families, each recorded as a witness actually meets it — at night, at speed, and without warning. This is the Church's reference to the things that cross it.

The Guide is kept by the Observational Wing, which maintains the standing watch, and illustrated by the Institute, which has the recovered hulls to draw from. It is a working document. Classes are added when the evidence compels it, and nothing is removed because it became inconvenient.

55Classes

9Families

17Look-Alikes

How to Read an Entry

Every class is recorded the same way, in the same order, so that two entries can be compared without rereading them. An identification is built from the top down: what you saw in the dark, then what distinguishes it, then what it was not.

Night Signature: What the class actually looks like in the dark — the arrangement of its lights, their colour, whether they hold steady or pulse, strobe, flicker, or chase, and how the whole form moves. Most witnesses never see a hull. They see this.
Field Marks: The handful of details that separate this class from everything it resembles. Read these first; they are what an identification turns on.
Behavior: How the class moves, what it does when noticed, and what it has been recorded doing to instruments, engines, livestock, and sleep.
Particulars: Size class and rarity. Size runs Probe, Scout, Vessel, Carrier, Capital; rarity runs common, uncommon, rare, very rare, and singular — the last reserved for a craft recorded once and never again.
Look-Alikes to Rule Out: The ordinary and the merely unusual that this class is mistaken for. An identification is not complete until these are eliminated, and most are.
Reported Occupants: Who has been seen aboard, where testimony exists. The Guide records attribution without asserting it: resemblance is not kinship.
Documented Encounters: The dated events on record for the class, drawn from the public record and from the Church’s own archive, which is larger.
Recovered Examples: Where a craft of this class rests in the Church’s custody, the entry says so and points to its specimen in the Recovery Archive.
The Church’s Teaching: What the class means doctrinally — the reason it is in a Church guide rather than an aviation manual.
The Cut-Away Plate: A numbered sectional drawing prepared by the Institute from recovered hulls, keyed to a fixed vocabulary of structure, power, propulsion, command, life support, cargo, and machinery.

The Nine Families

Classes are grouped by what they look like, not by where they are thought to come from. Origin is a claim; outline is an observation. The numbering is fixed and does not change when a chapter grows.

Discs

The Classic Form

The disc is the shape the twentieth century learned to fear and the Church learned to catalogue. Mirrored hulls, some rotating, others seamless. Most discs are crewed, most fly low, and most leave before the witness has finished deciding what they are looking at.

7 classes

Orbs & Capsules

Spheres, Ovoids, and Lights That Hold Their Shape

Orbs are the most frequently reported class on Earth and the most frequently dismissed. Some are solid hulls, some are lights with hardware inside them, and a few respond to being watched. The capsules in this chapter — egg, teardrop, and the capsule the Navy called a Tic-Tac — are the orbs that learned to travel.

10 classes

Cylinders

Cigars, Rods, and Bells

Cylindrical craft range from rods no longer than a forearm to motherships measured in kilometers. The long axis is the tell: a cylinder almost always travels along it, and almost never banks.

5 classes

Triangles & Wings

Black Triangles, Boomerangs, and V-Formations

The angular classes are the ones most often mistaken for military aircraft, and the ones most often explained away as such. Watch for the three corner lights, the absence of sound, and the stars that go dark as the body passes in front of them.

5 classes

Geometric Forms

Nested Geometries and Faceted Hulls

Cubes, diamonds, rhombi, and stars — hulls that look drafted rather than grown. The Church notes that no human aircraft program has ever flown a cube, and that the Navy pilots who reported one inside a sphere were not asked what they thought it meant.

7 classes

Light & Anomaly

Forms That Refuse a Stable Outline

Some craft present as light, distortion, or a hull that will not keep one shape from one minute to the next. They are the hardest to report and the easiest to deny. The Unclassed craft of Machina Caelestis doctrine are filed here, because a thing that follows no logic still follows this chapter.

6 classes

Biomechanical

Hulls That Look Grown

Ribbed shells, translucent bells, segmented hives. These craft look less built than cultivated. The Church does not assume they are alive; it only observes that nobody has yet found the seam where the living part stops.

3 classes

Attributed Vessels

Craft Known by Their Crews

These classes are named for the beings most often reported aboard them rather than for their outline. Attribution is testimony, not proof: the Church records who was seen, and reminds every member that resemblance is not kinship and a uniform is not a nation.

7 classes

Historic & Terrestrial

Old Records and Human Hands

Airships over Sacramento, flying chariots in Sanskrit verse, the composite drawings of a government study, and the craft that humans built in secret and let the public mistake for something else. History is also a sky, and it was watched too.

5 classes

What a Craft Is Not

The Ordinary Sky

Truth arrives unfiltered and must be filtered by us. The heavens are crowded with ordinary light — a planet, a satellite, a lantern, a flare — and every one of them has been reported as a craft by someone sincere. The Church does not ask you to see a craft in every light. It asks you to see accurately, so that when the true thing crosses your sky you will know it for what it is.

Seventeen of these are catalogued beside the craft, with the same seriousness. A member who can name what they did not see is worth more to the Observational Wing than one who reports everything.

Carrying the Guide

The Guide is meant to be held up against a live sky, which is why it lives in the app rather than on this page. There it opens to an identification key that narrows fifty-five classes to a few by asking what you saw; a life list that records the classes you have witnessed; a reading of where the bright planets actually are tonight, so the ordinary can be ruled out before the extraordinary is claimed; and a Certificate of Observation for a sighting that survives all of it.

Open the Field Guide in the App →