While there may be plenty of subreddits dedicated to ID-ing weird creepy crawly critters found in the wild — and in lurking around our homes — Redditor u/Young_oka was convinced the bug he saw wasn’t a spider, a centipede or a weird-looking beetle, but rather a massive ET praying mantis hellbent on making him its dinner.

On Saturday, the Redditor headed to r/Humanoidencountersto share the harrowing tale of his face-off with the massive insect, one he says ambushed him in his sleep when he was just 19 years old.

I found it
byu/Young_oka inHumanoidencounters

“I woke up and looked at the doorway of my bedroom, and I see a figure standing in the doorway,” he began his now-viral post of the incident, one that went down during his time in Vidor, Texas. After sitting up and nabbing “a better look at the thing in the doorway,” he quickly realized he was dealing with an alien, one he likened to “a 6-foot tall mantis-looking thing.”

“It had two legs and mantis-looking arms but the front of the [c]law was made of 4 long fingers, it had eyes that wrapped around the top of its head, the eyes were as black as obsidian glass,” he recalled, noting the “pale greenish gray” being looked as though it was “malnourished.”

“About the time I realize what I'm looking at I said ‘what the fuck’ out loud and then it rushed at me,” he continued. I did what any reasonable person in that situation would do with their back-to-wall. I punched it between its big black eyes.”

Yet just as he gave the creature a good 1-2  feet tall — “I felt its skin on my knuckles, it felt like a mushroom,” he explained — their smackdown was interrupted by “a blinding white flash,” one that sent him zooming forward to the next morning.

“I woke up laying flat in my bed seemingly tucked In,” he added, noting that a few items around his home were misplaced following the encounter.

He ended his post with a clarification for any skeptics shrugging off his experience like another piece of bad copypasta: The ordeal was all too real.

“Let me be extremely clear, I wish this was a bad dream,” u/Young_oka concluded. “The evidence tells me otherwise. Don't think I'll ever forget those big black eyes.”