extraordinary%20encounters

16 Alien diners
Klarer, Elizabeth, 1980. Beyond the Light Barrier.
Cape Town, South Africa: Howard Timmins.
Alien diners
An alien family ate at a restaurant and stayed
overnight in a motel in suburban St. Louis in
May 1970, according to ufologist John E.
Schroeder, who interviewed employees and
heard a strange and comic tale. Dorothy
Simpson, a front desk clerk at the motel and a
fellow member of the UFO Study Group of
Greater St. Louis, tipped Schroeder off to the
incident soon after its occurrence.
Simpson was examining billing documents
at her desk at 10:30 A.M. on May 15 when a
“whistling sigh” sounded. She looked up, and
on the other side of the desk stood four tiny
people, apparently members of a family: a
couple and their two children. All looked
strikingly alike. All were youthful in appearance,
and the children were nearly the height
of the ostensible parents. They were so short
that they barely reached the level of the desk.
They were all expensively dressed, the males
in tailored suits, the females in pastel peach
dresses. Their hair did not look real. Odd as it
seemed, Simpson suspected that they were
wearing wigs.
In a falsetto voice the man said, “Do you
have a room to stay? Do you have a room to
stay?” She told him what the charges would
be, but he seemed not to understand what she
had said. He turned to his female companion
as if expecting her to clarify matters, but she
remained silent. An uncomfortable period of
silence followed, broken finally when the man
reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick
wad of bills, many of large denomination.
The bills were so crisp and new that Simpson
wondered if they were counterfeit, but some
quick informal testing suggested they were
not. She took two twenty-dollar bills from the
stack and gave the rest back.
Because the man was too small to reach up
to fill out the reservation form, Simpson said
she would do it for him. He said his name was
“A. Bell.” As he stepped forward she got a bet-
ter look at him and was able to compare his
face with his companions’. According to
Schroeder, whose composite description
comes from his interviews with Simpson and
other motel employees who saw them, they
were “wide at eye level, their faces thinned
abruptly to their chins. Their eyes were large,
dark and slightly slanted. . . . Their noses had
practically no bridges and two slits for nostrils,
and their mouths were tiny and lipless—
no wider than their nostrils. All look uniformly
pale. (Color descriptions varied from
pearl to pale pink to light grey.)”
“And where are you from?” Simpson asked.
At that the man’s arm shot upward as if pointing
to the sky, and he said, “We come from up
there. Up there.” The woman pushed his arm
down and spoke for the first time. She said
they were from Hammond, Indiana, and she
gave a street address. The man signed the register
but did it so awkwardly that Simpson
thought he seemed not to know how to use a
pen. The woman wanted to know where they
could eat. Simpson indicated the direction of
the motel restaurant.
Meanwhile, the bellhop came over to store
their bags while they ate. At the manager’s insistence
Simpson checked the Indiana address
and learned that both the name and the address
were bogus. The bellhop checked the
parking lot for a car with an Indiana license
plate but found none.
The hostess who led the strange family to a
table in the restaurant noticed that the chins
of even the adults barely reached the top of
the table. The man read aloud from the menu
and kept asking odd questions about where
milk, vegetables, and other common foods
come from. The woman ordered peas and
milk for herself and the children, and for the
man peas, a small steak, and water. Their eating
was similarly peculiar. Each picked up a
single pea with a knife, brought it to his or her
tiny mouth, and inhaled it with a sucking
sound. The father was unable to get even a
small piece of steak through his slit of a
mouth. They stopped eating all at the same
time. The man produced a twenty-dollar bill