Indigo Children
Indigo Children is a New Age concept originated by Nancy Ann Tappe in the early 1970s describing a purported new type of child with extraordinary spiritual sensitivity, psychic abilities, and non-conformist behavioral traits — identifiable, according to Tappe, by an indigo-colored aura visible to those with synesthetic perceptual ability. The concept gained mainstream New Age traction in the 1990s and has been invoked by some fringe theorists as evidence of extraterrestrial genetic influence on humanity, though the connection to UAP research is tenuous.
Origins
Tappe, who claimed to perceive human auras as colors, described noticing a new category of aura color — indigo — appearing in children born from the late 1960s onward. She published her framework in Understanding Your Life Through Color (1982). Authors Lee Carroll and Jan Tober substantially expanded the concept to a global audience with The Indigo Children (1998), which described these children as unusually resistant to authority, spiritually aware, empathic, and often misdiagnosed with ADHD.
Carroll and Tober framed ADHD diagnoses skeptically, suggesting that many children labeled with the disorder were in fact Indigo Children whose advanced spiritual nature made conventional educational structures incompatible with their development — a position mainstream psychology and medicine reject.
Claimed Characteristics
Proponents describe Indigo Children as having some or all of the following traits:
- Heightened psychic or intuitive sensitivity
- Possible telekinetic or other paranormal abilities
- Deep empathy and emotional sensitivity
- Strong resistance to authority and rigid systems
- A sense of entitlement or "specialness" combined with deep purpose
Claimed UAP Connection
The inclusion of Indigo Children in UFO and alien iceberg discussions typically rests on speculation that these children may be human-extraterrestrial hybrids, recipients of extraterrestrial genetic modification, or souls from advanced civilizations incarnated in human form. None of these claims have credible evidentiary support. The host of Video - The Alien and UFO Obscure Oddities Iceberg (Level 2) explicitly dismissed this entry as poorly connected to the UAP phenomenon.