A forty-minute visit to a Presidio County ranch ends with six confirmed goats and one whose current position on the matter remains her own.

At approximately 11:20 PM on Tuesday, rancher Dolores Vásquez stepped onto the back porch of her property outside Marfa to investigate what she described as ‘a sound like someone dragging a screen door across gravel, but from the sky.’ What she found in her yard was not a screen door. It was approximately four feet tall, stood on two legs, had eyes she described as red-adjacent, and was positioned near her goat enclosure with what she characterized as focused attention. It remained there for forty minutes. She watched it from the porch. It did not appear to watch her back, which she noted she found ‘polite, under the circumstances.’

The Visit: What Happened, In the Order That It Happened

Vásquez has ranched in Presidio County for twenty-two years. She keeps seven goats. She named all seven. She provided all seven names to this reporter, unprompted, and requested they be included in this article. In the interest of accuracy and out of respect for the animals involved, they are: Consuela, Beatriz, La Pequeña, Ernestina, Two-Times, Gordita, and the one referred to in this report as the unavailable goat, whose name is Remedios. Vásquez confirmed that five of the remaining six are behaving normally. Ernestina, she noted, ‘has been thoughtful since Wednesday, but that is not new for Ernestina.’ Remedios has not responded to her name, food, or the sound of the gate latch since the entity departed. She is present. She is standing. She is, by most observable metrics, fine. She has simply, in Vásquez’s words, ‘gone somewhere else in her mind and has not come back.’

Community Notice

It didn’t touch them. It didn’t go in the pen. It just stood there looking at them like it was trying to remember something. Then it left. Remedios hasn’t said anything since. I’m not saying those two things are connected. I’m just telling you what happened.

— Dolores Vásquez, Presidio County Rancher, Primary Witness

Two additional witnesses corroborate the broad outline of events. Vásquez’s neighbor, Félix Orozco, was driving back from Presidio on Route 67 when he observed what he described as ‘a shape in the Vásquez yard that was not a person and was not a coyote and was not something I have a word for.’ He did not stop. He drove home, poured himself a glass of water, sat with it for a while, and called Vásquez in the morning. The third witness is Vásquez’s cousin, Elena, who was visiting from El Paso and was asleep during the incident but woke at approximately 11:30 PM with what she described as ‘a strong feeling that something was being evaluated.’ She looked out the window, saw the entity, and went back to bed. She described her decision to go back to bed as ‘the right call, and I stand by it.’

On Remedios, Specifically

Vásquez took Remedios to a veterinarian in Marfa on Thursday morning. The vet, Dr. Antonia Leal, found no physical injury, no signs of blood loss, and no unusual vitals. She described Remedios as ‘neurologically present but experientially somewhere else,’ and then paused for a long moment and said she was going to write that down because she’d said it better than she expected to. She did not speculate on cause. She recommended observation and noted that goats sometimes have episodes. Vásquez confirmed that Remedios has never previously had an episode. She also confirmed that Remedios was, prior to Tuesday, the most communicative of her seven goats, in that Remedios had opinions about feeding schedules and expressed them.

Neurologically present but experientially somewhere else. That’s the best I can give you. Come back in a week. If she’s still like this in a week, we’ll talk about what else to rule out.

— Dr. Antonia Leal, DVM, Marfa Veterinary Clinic

Vásquez says she is not frightened. She said this twice, in a way that suggested she had thought about it and arrived at it honestly rather than reflexively. She would like Remedios to come back, by which she means come back in the sense of being Remedios again, not in the sense of having gone anywhere. Remedios is still in the yard. She is eating. She is standing in the sun in the morning, which she has always done. She just doesn’t look at you when you call her. Vásquez says that if the entity comes back, she will watch it from the porch again, because that seemed to go well the first time. She is leaving the porch light off. She is not sure that matters, but she is leaving it off anyway. She asked that this report note that her goats are, on the whole, fine. This report notes it.