They already told you there was nothing to discuss. So why are they back on Tuesday?

They will arrive between 9 and 11 in the morning. Not because that is operationally significant, but because it is a reasonable hour, and Men in Black are, in my experience, committed to the appearance of reasonableness. The first meeting — the one where they explained there was nothing to discuss, no incident to report, no reason for your concern — that one you were not prepared for. The second meeting, you can be. The second meeting is the one that has structure, if you know how to impose it.

I am working here from twelve verified accounts gathered across fourteen months, eleven of which concern follow-up visits specifically, and one of which concerns a third visit, which I will address separately at the end because it requires its own category entirely. Twelve witnesses in total. What is consistent across the follow-up cases is this: they know you have been thinking about it. They are there because you have been thinking about it. Whether they are monitoring that or simply inferring it from the interval of time, I cannot say with certainty. Neither could any of the twelve.

Community Notice

How to Ask Which Department They Are From

You will want to ask. You should ask. The framing matters considerably. Do not ask who they work for, because the answer to that question is a deflection that takes up approximately ninety seconds and tells you nothing. Ask instead which department has been assigned to your case. The word ‘assigned’ does a specific amount of work here — it acknowledges their institutional framework without conceding that the first meeting resolved anything, and it implies documentation on your side, whether or not that documentation currently exists. Seven of the twelve witnesses who used this phrasing or something close to it received a partial answer. The most useful partial answer, reported by a woman in Calais, Maine, who would like to be identified only as a retired postal worker, was: ‘You’ve been reassigned to outreach.’ She did not know what she had been reassigned from. She wrote it down immediately after they left, which is the correct instinct.

They came back on a Tuesday, same two, same car. I said, ‘Which department sent you this time?’ and the taller one said, ‘You already know.’ I said, ‘I’d like to hear you say it.’ He did not say it. But he looked at the window ledge, where I keep the dried rosemary, and then he looked back at me, and I think that was the answer.

— Witness, Calais, Maine — retired postal worker, 22 years service

When They Say You Already Know

‘You already know’ is not a deflection in the way that institutional non-answers usually are. I want to be precise about this, because the instinct is to treat it as evasion and push through it, and that instinct, while understandable, is not strategically sound. ‘You already know’ is closer to a calibration. They are establishing whether the interval between meetings has produced any shift in your understanding. The correct response, which I have arrived at through the accounts of people who handled the second meeting well and people who did not, is to say: ‘I know some of it.’ Not what part. Not which part. Just that. This has the dual advantage of being almost certainly true and of requiring them to decide what to confirm.

What they are not is the same category of phenomenon as every other anomalous visitor type in the catalogue. Men in Black are specifically administrative in a way that the Mothman, for instance, is not. They have a process. The process has a second step, evidently, and you are in it. The question of what the process is for, and who designed it, and whether the answer to ‘which department’ would mean anything to someone who has not already been through several more meetings than you have — that question I am not answering today, because I do not think it is the useful question for someone who is standing in their own hallway on a Tuesday morning at a quarter past ten.

I asked which department and he said, ‘You already know,’ and I said, ‘I know some of it,’ and he was quiet for a moment, and then he said the name of the town I grew up in. Not where I live now. Where I grew up. Then they left. I have been to the county archive three times since. I’m not sure what I’m looking for but I’ll know it when I find it.

— Witness, Brattleboro, Vermont — name withheld on request

Before They Leave

Ask for a contact. You will not get one. Ask anyway. The asking is recorded somewhere, and I think it is better to be the kind of person who asked than the kind who did not. One witness, a former surveyor from outside Burlington, told me he asked for a card and the shorter of the two produced one, blank on both sides, which he still has. He keeps it in a sealed envelope. I suggested the county archive might be worth a look, and he said he had already been, which tells me several of these things are connected in ways I am still mapping. The wool blanket in my back seat is there because I do not trust that any of this ends with two visits, and I prefer to be prepared. I have been prepared for twenty-two years. I will tell you when the map is complete.