A federal office has confirmed the case is active again. It has not confirmed why the original paperwork looks like it spent time underwater, belongs to a different agency, and is missing pages thirteen through forty-one.

The federal correspondence file on what the Office of Interagency Resource Management designates as ‘Case 7-Bravo-Incident Series, Southwestern Corridor’ has been officially reopened. That is the news they gave us. What they did not give us — what nobody at that office has been willing to put a name to — is an explanation for the condition of the original file, which arrived at our document request window in a manila folder that had clearly been wet, dried, wet again, and then processed through a redaction system that appears to have had a strong opinion about pages thirteen through forty-one. I am standing in the parking lot of the federal building in question right now, and I am going to keep standing here until someone explains that to me or the lot closes at five. I have a case of Dragon Ice and I have done worse for less.

What The File Is, And What It Currently Is Not

The file concerns a sustained pattern of encounters reported across three counties between 2019 and 2022. Thirty-three witnesses on record. Descriptions consistent across accounts: bipedal, scaled, between six and seven feet tall, exhibiting what multiple witnesses characterized as deliberate avoidance behavior around populated areas and deliberate approach behavior around drainage infrastructure. That is the profile. That is what you would expect to be in a file pertaining to Reptilian Humanoid sighting reports in the southwestern United States. What you would not expect is for that file to be indexed under the Department of Agricultural Land Use Coordination. We asked about that. We were told it was an administrative matter. I have written ‘administrative matter’ in my notebook with a question mark I went over four times.

Community Notice

The file came to us in the condition it came to us in. I am not in a position to speak to prior custody. I am not in a position to speak to prior custody at all.

— Federal Office Spokesperson, Name Withheld Per Agency Request

The water damage is not incidental and it is not uniform. The damage is concentrated on specific sections. Pages thirteen through forty-one are gone entirely — not redacted in the standard sense, not blacked out, gone, as in those pages do not exist in the physical object that was handed to us. The file goes from page twelve to page forty-two mid-sentence. The sentence that gets cut off begins with the words ‘consistent presence near.’ I want to know what it was near. I have been trying to find out what it was near since Tuesday. It is now Friday. I have not eaten a real meal since Wednesday but that is a separate issue and Claudia does not need to know about it.

Thirty-Three Witnesses, Zero Retracted Statements

Of the thirty-three witnesses documented in the accessible portions of the file, WTC has made direct contact with eleven. Not one of them has walked back their original account. Several of them added details they say they didn’t report initially because they assumed those details wouldn’t be taken seriously. One witness — a water utility supervisor from outside Las Cruces who asked that her name not be published — told me she reported what she saw to two separate agencies before anyone wrote it down. She knew the description fit the Reptilian Humanoid pattern because she had done her own reading after the fact. She was not surprised the file had problems. She said, and I am reading directly from my notes here because I want to get this exactly right: ‘If that file were complete, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

If that file were complete, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

— Water Utility Supervisor, Las Cruces Area, Name Withheld By Request

The file has been reopened. That is the official position. What that means in practical terms — whether it means the missing pages are being reconstructed, whether it means the cross-department filing is being investigated, whether it means someone in an office somewhere is asking the same questions I am asking in this parking lot — has not been stated. The agency’s position, as relayed through its spokesperson, is that the reopening is an active matter and that active matters are not subject to public comment. I have that on recording. I have it on the backup recording. I have written it in the notebook under a section I am calling ‘Things That Are Technically An Answer.’ It is a short section. I am going back to the window at 4:45. I have a list.