A retired insurance adjuster from Flagstaff has experienced something genuinely remarkable and would like to discuss it with someone who deserves to hear it. That someone has not yet materialised.

Patricia Odum, seventy-one, retired insurance adjuster, Flagstaff, Arizona, has been taken aboard a craft. She has met beings. She has been returned, more or less intact, with a number of questions answered and a number of others raised, and she has sat with this experience for fourteen months before deciding, carefully, that she would like to talk about it. What she has discovered in those fourteen months of selective disclosure is that the category of people she considers worth talking to — people who approach the subject with intellectual seriousness, working knowledge of the documented literature, and a basic agreement that the Earth is round and was visited by human beings in 1969 — is, for the moment, empty. I am not sure this surprises her. I am not entirely sure it surprises me.

I should say that I spoke with Patricia by telephone on a Tuesday evening, which is unusual for me — I keep Tuesday evenings for the county archive, and I was running behind, and I had a cup of Pendlewick’s Earl Grey going cold on my desk in a way I found quietly mournful throughout our entire conversation. I mention this only to establish that I came to the interview with no particular axe to grind and a mild but specific grievance that had nothing to do with her. I think it made me a fair listener. I have taken the notes. I have read them twice. I have placed them in the correct folder. Patricia Odum experienced something that meets every threshold I apply to accounts of the Tall Whites, and she is being treated, in the forums she has tried, as an entertainment rather than a source.

Community Notice

What She Saw, And What She Will Not Repeat To Just Anyone

Patricia’s account, which I will not reproduce in full here because she has asked me not to and because I have found that honouring that request tends to produce better working relationships with witnesses over time, involves a period of approximately four hours on the night of the ninth of March, 2023, a stretch of highway outside Flagstaff that she describes as "the one I’ve driven nine hundred times and never once found interesting," and three witnesses — herself, a woman named Darlene who asked to be identified only as a retired schoolteacher from Sedona, and a man named Curtis, who has not responded to follow-up contact and whose surname Patricia has chosen not to provide. This is not, in my experience, an unusual arrangement. Three witnesses is a meaningful number. Two of them are talking.

I have spent forty years assessing the credibility of claims for a living. I know what a fabricated account looks like. I know what a mistaken account looks like. This was neither of those things. And I will not sit across from someone who thinks Stanley Kubrick filmed the moon landing and explain that to them. I have too much self-respect and too little time.

— Patricia Odum, retired insurance adjuster, Flagstaff, Arizona

The forums Patricia has tried — and she has tried several, because she is a methodical woman who believes in due diligence — have not served her well. The first dismissed her because she referenced Charles Hall’s testimony, which apparently marks one as either credulous or a plant depending on which thread you are reading. The second asked, within four replies, whether she had considered that the beings she encountered were actually reptilians in disguise, and when she said she had considered it and found it unsupported by her direct experience, the thread devolved. The third forum was the one with the moon landing contingent, and that is where the matter of her selectivity hardened into policy. She left. She did not return. She has since described her disclosure strategy as "finding the one sensible room," and has so far concluded that the sensible room remains theoretical.

She came to us for one meeting. She sat down, she had her tea, she listened for about ten minutes, and then she said, very politely, that she appreciated our interest but that the group’s foundational assumptions needed work before she could engage in good faith. She left a very nice tip. We haven’t seen her since.

— Darlene (surname withheld), retired schoolteacher, Sedona, Arizona — witness and former disclosure-attempt companion

I want to be precise about where I stand on this, because I think precision is warranted. Patricia Odum’s account is serious. Her manner of holding it is serious. The fact that she has spent fourteen months finding no audience she considers adequate is not evidence of obstruction or evasion — it is evidence of a woman who has applied the same standards to her disclosure that she applied to thirty-five years of insurance claims, which is to say, she is not releasing the findings until she trusts the recipient. That is not unreasonable. That is, in fact, exactly what I would do. What concerns me is not Patricia’s selectivity. What concerns me is the implication of it — that she has looked, carefully, for fourteen months, and the room she needs does not yet exist. I would like to suggest that this is a problem worth taking seriously, and I would like to suggest it to the specific category of people who can hear that without immediately asking me about Stanley Kubrick. I am aware that this is also a form of selectivity. I have made my peace with it.