Motel Coffee and Mrs. Landry’s Patterns
We had stayed the night in Brookings. Two rooms, five people to a room. Grandpa — formerly “Professor” — got his own, naturally. He still insists on covering all lodging costs, though I’m convinced at this point it’s mostly because he can’t fall asleep with Caleb snoring three feet from his head.
We met around 7:45 AM to continue our discussion from yesterday in the motel’s breakfast area. Styrofoam cups, lukewarm coffee, a basket of blueberry muffins in their individual plastic sleeves. The usual. Vernon brought his own thermos of herbal tea again, which Jennifer mocked for being “high-maintenance survivalist chic.” He responded by citing a 1983 study on gut flora and long-term caffeine consumption. Donna didn’t intervene, just watched it unfold with a kind of quiet amusement.
Mathew had taken notes on Mrs. Landry’s non-verbal cues and found her emotional responses consistent with someone telling the truth. Donna agreed — and pointed out something we all seemed to miss in the moment: Mrs. Landry never once tried to convince us. She simply recalled. With detail, yes, but no effort to push us into belief.
Josh cross-referenced a couple of her childhood descriptions with cases he recalled from MUFON newsletters from the early 70s. He thinks her mention of a “cold hall, no edges” could match some of the older contact narratives out of Nebraska. I chimed in with an idea for compiling these testimonies geographically — possibly plotting out similar experiences across state lines. She and Robin might run point on that.
As for Grandpa, he’s still processing. At one point, he said, “There are patterns emerging in her account — but not the kind that can be resolved with anecdote alone.” He was half-distracted, sketching something in his notebook. When I asked to see it, he turned it away. “Not yet,” he said.
Robin thinks the metal sample we took from Mrs. Landry’s yard might be contaminated — not with radiation, but with something magnetically altered. She plans to run a few baseline tests back at her campus lab once we loop back north.
The group is split on how to categorize the Landry case. Caleb calls it “internally consistent folklore,” while Jennifer suspects long-term trauma response layered over possible real events. No one is dismissing it outright. That says something about how far we’ve all come in journey.
We’re heading inland next. Klamath Falls. Grandpa wants us to follow up on a lead from a retired fisheries officer who claimed he found an “impossible print” in the snow two winters ago. Josh is skeptical — says it sounds more like a Bigfoot detour — but Grandpa insists it’s not a cryptid case. Says there’s electromagnetic interference involved.
We leave this afternoon. Roughly 160 miles. We’ll stop halfway for food and fuel. I think I’ll ride with Robin and Vernon this time, if only to dodge another lecture from Caleb on 1950s Air Force cover-up documents.
Miles Driven: 0
