Four households have now reported structured sorting activity outside their bins on non-collection days. One of them said something that got written down.

On a Thursday morning in late February, at approximately 6:40 a.m., a resident of a rural property outside Heppner, Oregon, opened her front door and found three entities in structured formation sorting through her recycling bin. They were separating glass from plastic. They appeared to have a system. She closed the door, waited four minutes, opened it again, and they were still there. This is not the first account of this kind that has come to WTC, and it is not, based on what I have been told by the other three households who contacted us, the strangest part.

The strangest part is that some things you say make it stop, and some things you say make it continue, and at least one thing a witness said appears to have been recorded. I have spoken with all four households. Their accounts are consistent in structure if not in detail, which is the kind of consistency I have learned, over nine years of this work, to take more seriously than the other kind. The entities described match the profile cataloged under Reptilian Humanoid in WTC’s standing database — bipedal, methodical, not apparently distressed by being observed. Three of the four witnesses noted what they described as a clipboard. The fourth did not see a clipboard but could not rule one out.

Community Notice

Based on combined witness accounts, here is what the record shows: Asking them to leave, directly and by name — as in, "please leave" or "you need to go" — produced no response in three out of four cases. Asking what they were looking for produced what one witness described as "a pause, like they were deciding something," followed by continued sorting. Explaining that collection day was not until Friday appeared, in two separate accounts, to extend the activity. One witness used the phrase "I pay my taxes" and immediately regretted it, though she cannot fully explain why. The activity in her case lasted an additional twenty-two minutes.

I didn’t say anything after that. I just went and made coffee and waited. By the time I came back they were gone and the recycling was sorted better than I’ve ever done it myself. The glass was grouped by color.

— Witness, Morrow County, Oregon — name withheld by request

What appears, across accounts, to correlate with cessation: saying nothing. Standing in the doorway, visible, not speaking. Three witnesses who did this reported the activity concluded within ten minutes. Whether they leave because the audit is complete or because silence registers as something else is not a question I can answer. I have added it to the second notebook. What I can tell you is that the one witness whose statement was apparently noted down was also the one who asked the most questions, which I find neither surprising nor comforting, and which I have been thinking about since I drove back from Heppner on a road I had not previously had reason to take, in the dark, with the voice recorder bouncing around somewhere under the passenger seat.