Budi and Sari Wulandari have told three people combined. They have not told each other.

The Wulandari property sits about eleven kilometers outside Flores on a road that doesn’t have a name on any map I could find, and on Tuesday morning at approximately 5:40 a.m., both Budi Wulandari and his wife Sari saw something standing in their garden near the cassava. They have not spoken about it to each other. Not on Tuesday. Not since. Both of them, separately, to separate people, described the same thing in the same words. The two people they told have now talked to each other. That’s my third witness. That’s how I’m here.

Sari told her sister in Bajawa by phone Tuesday afternoon. Budi told a man he works with at the agricultural co-op on Wednesday morning before the shift started. Neither of them knew the other had said anything. When I asked Budi directly whether he and Sari had discussed what they saw, he looked at the middle distance for about four seconds and said, in translation: "We agreed not to." I asked when they agreed. He said they hadn’t discussed that either. That answer is now on page six of my outstanding notebook and I have underlined it twice.

Community Notice

We agreed not to. We have not discussed agreeing.

— Budi Wulandari, witness, via interpreter

The description both of them gave, independently, to their respective confidants: short, wide through the shoulders, moving low, with a face that Sari called "too interested" and Budi called — and I am reading directly from my notes here — "like it was already knowing us." The cassava was disturbed. The disturbance was about one meter in diameter. The entity, by the time either of them looked a second time, was not there. Anyone who follows this network’s coverage of the Ebu Gogo will recognize those details without me having to stack adjectives on top of them.

I am staying in Flores through the weekend. I have asked Budi and Sari if they would be willing to sit in the same room and tell me what they saw at the same time, together. Budi said he needed to think about it. Sari said she would prefer not to. That is the most interesting pair of answers I have received in a calendar year that has already included some very interesting answers. I have three cases of Dragon Ice left in The Evidence Vehicle and Gerald does not need me for anything. I can wait.