The Relic: A Warning for the Unwary

Introduction

Our ancestors kept traditions for a reason. Culture does not tend to endlessly self-replicate without any meaning for the people who live within it. This raises the important question of why religious ritual has survived the ravages of the evolutionary process for (at least) tens of thousands of years if it is merely the product of mistaken conceptions of the world. The modern world is actually becoming more religious, not less [1]. Why? 

Cognitive evolutionary theorists and medical anthropologists seem to have the beginnings of an answer. Ritual works, and appears to be a natural response to something. 

According to Winkelman [2], the psychological impact of ritual is capable of producing physical healing through the placebo effect. This same psychological component produces strong senses of in-group solidarity, contributing to the formation of communities. Individuals with genes that predisposed them to dissociation and extraordinary experiences could've thus been more likely to survive than those without, and rituals were gradually developed that encouraged such experiences [3]. 

Kalweit [4] speculates that religions have their roots in unusual experience, and in experiencers trying to replicate the conditions that gave rise to their encounters through ritual.

What sort of experiences would give rise to ritual/religious behaviour? Shushan [5] convincingly argues that the spontaneous near-death experience may have been among them. Cutchin [6] highlights that a large percentage of those who apparently return from death find that they have developed extrasensory capabilities that they did not previously possess. They may have increased IQ, the ability to sense the thoughts of others or even to perceive apparitions. According to Vallee [7], similar strange developments take place in the lives of those who come into close contact with unidentified flying objects. 

It seems that psychological and social benefits would not be the only results of regular, ritualised contact with the unknown. 

If some forms of ritual (like shamanic trance) exist in response to the advantages gained from supernatural experience, then what can we say about rituals that developed to repel evil? If paranormal phenomena are the roots of religion, then perhaps a similar experiential basis exists for various taboos and prohibitions. After two decades of misfortune, Jim Hunter would likely agree that such taboos might've existed to protect us from something... 

The Discovery

Jim Hunter contacted paranormal investigator and prolific author Brad Steiger in the mid-1980s to report his ongoing experiences with entities that the latter came to label 'Deiform Spirits'. By Steiger's definition, these are spirit entities that "have congealed in certain places" they deem sacred [8]. Meddling with these places or taking things from them can anger these beings, with unpredictable consequences. 

Hunter's involvement with the Deiform Spirits began when he was just seventeen years old. His father worked for a large South Pacific import company, and so the family moved around frequently - but in 1967, the Hunter family was living in New Zealand. It was March of that year, just shortly after Jim's seventeenth birthday. He had gone on holiday to the isolated coastal town of "Kawhai" [9], and was swimming off the shore when he came across a smooth metallic object lodged between two boulders.

Wrenching the strange object out of its hiding place, Hunter saw that it was shaped like a flat oval, encrusted with algae and seaweed, and seemingly inscribed with some kind of strange symbology. It weighed roughly one pound. Intrigued, he took the item home and showed it to his father. 

Mr. Hunter figured that it was probably of Maori origin, and so encouraged Jim to show it to the local Maori community. After about two weeks, they told him that they had no idea what the object was [10]. 

Shortly afterwards, an ambiguous figure arrived on the Hunters' doorstep. He introduced himself as a journalist with the New Zealand Herald, and claimed that he had heard about the object from a Maori contact of his. He asked to examine the object, and concluded that it was "made of some kind of bronze alloy". The alleged journalist asked to take the object back to Auckland to run tests on it [11]. 

The Hunters declined, having already inquired about having a metallurgical analysis of the object done at a university in Christchurch. As far as Jim knows, these tests were never performed, and the object instead languished in a drawer for the next year before the family relocated to New York in May of 1968. 

When Jim went to retrieve it while packing his suitcase, he discovered that it had gone missing. He suspected someone he knew had stolen it, but he had to accept the loss given his limited time left in the country.

Scare Tactics

Amidst the bustle of Auckland International Airport, Jim found himself on his own while his parents bade goodbye to some friends. Two strange men approached him - described as "Polynesian types" - and identified themselves as being affiliated with New Zealand Inland Revenue. 

They asked if he was taking anything illegal out of the country, and despite their professionalism, Jim soon found them very intimidating. They asked specifically about "any relics, art objects, or the like". 

Despite his repeated denials of having any such objects, the pair were persistent. They eventually insisted that he come with them to a hotel room for a private baggage check. Frightened, Jim called his father over, who demanded to see their ID cards and asked why they couldn't simply check his son's baggage where they were standing. He got a nonsensical reply in return, and responded by calling for a patrolling constable. Finally taking the hint, the bizarre figures wordlessly "shuffled" away [12]. 

There were no further incidents until the Fall of 1968. By that time, Jim had enrolled in Columbia University for the freshman year of his undergraduate course. Shortly after the start of the term, a middle-aged man who claimed to be an Italian art dealer approached him. Predictably, this man had somehow heard that Jim had lived in New Zealand and wanted to know if he had brought any interesting artifacts home. 

Presumably starting to suspect that something was amiss, Jim told the 'art dealer' that he didn't have any relics. This didn't stop the man from approaching him two further times to ask the same question [13].

It was around this time that Jim discovered that three of his closest friends in New Zealand had been harassed by figures who seemed to be the same people he had encountered at Auckland airport. 

The letters his friends sent to him used words like "weird", "creepy" and "spooky" to describe the men. Apparently situations had escalated enough that the police had gotten involved, and one girl's life had been threatened. 

"You Have Acted Unjustly"

Jim transferred to Stanford University in 1970, and immediately after he had gotten a telephone installed in his new apartment, he received a bizarre and ominous call. An anonymous voice warned him never to return to New Zealand. 

A second call (from a high-pitched female voice) told him that he was being surveilled by a group that he had wronged by acting "unjustly" and "not returning things to their proper owners" [14]. 

Throughout his time at both Columbia and Stanford, he received over thirty mystery phone calls regarding New Zealand and the stolen artifact. 

In 1972, Jim was on holiday in San Francisco between graduate work and beginning a teaching career in the Sacramento suburbs. Just a few weeks before starting work as a teacher, he received another phone call to his hotel room. On the other end was a male voice, who said that he "had acted wisely by not returning to New Zealand".

Three days after he'd begun work at the school, a student he'd never seen before stopped off in his classrom. While this wasn't inherently unusual for obvious reasons, the child walked towards the blackboard and drew some strange symbols. Jim's heart dropped - these were the same markings that were on the object from Kawhai. The student asked Jim if he knew what they meant, to which he desperately insisted that he tell him where he'd seen them. 

Swiftly erasing the symbols and laughing, the student said that he had just been "fooling around" before making a rapid exit from the room. When Jim described the offending student to his colleagues, he was frightened to discover that nobody could identify him. He would never see the boy again [15]. 

After teaching at a high school level for four years, Jim was finally offered a teaching assistant position at a major university. He began his doctorate program in the Fall of 1976. Four days after starting at the university, someone rang his room and reprimanded him for theft. The voice from the other end of the line accused him of "acting unjustly" and demanded that he "should never take anything from where [he] found it". 

By the time Jim contacted Brad Steiger, the harassment was infrequent but still ongoing. 

Conclusion

Anthropologist Mary Douglas [16] describes taboos as being for "hedging divinity off" - protecting the supernatural from contact with the profane world, and protecting the profane world from chaotic contact with the supernatural. Supernatural disorder seems to act as a contagious agent according to Douglas, with those who break taboos spreading their misfortune to those they come into contact with. Ritual could almost be thought of as a form of quarantine. 

This reminds me of the descriptions given of visitors to 'window areas' such as Skinwalker Ranch being followed home by unwelcome supernatural guests [17]. This same terrifying effect was observed among Jim Hunter's close friends, who were harassed by the phantom strangers despite presumably not having had much contact with the mystery object. The hitchhiker effect - as this phenomenon has been called - will be the topic of an upcoming article. Watch this space. 

Bibliography

1. Sherwood, H. (2018) ‘Religion: Why Faith is Becoming More and More Popular’, The Guardian, 27 August.

2. Cited in Shushan, G. (2018) ‘Chapter Five: Interpretations, Implications, and Conclusions’, in Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 200–247.

3. Ibid. 

4. Kalweit, H. (2000) Shamans, Healers, and Medicine Men. Boston: Shambala.

5. Shushan, G. (2018) ‘Chapter Five: Interpretations, Implications, and Conclusions’, in Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 200–247.

6. Cutchin, J. (2022) Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death & the Paranormal Vol One. Horse & Barrel Press.

7. Vallee, J. (2008) Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. San Antonio: Anomalist Books.

8. Steiger, B. (2007) ‘Chapter Nine: Sacred Places of the Deiform Spirits’, in Shadow World: True Encounters with Beings From the Darkside. San Antonio Tex.: Anomalist, pp. 192–216.

9. As far as I can see, there is no coastal town in New Zealand by this name. The location was likely the town of Kawhia on the country's North Island, probably misspelt by Steiger. 

10. Steiger, B. (2007) ‘Chapter Nine: Sacred Places of the Deiform Spirits’, in Shadow World: True Encounters with Beings From the Darkside. San Antonio Tex.: Anomalist, pp. 192–216.

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid. 

16. Cited in Hansen, G.P. (2001) The Trickster and the Paranormal. Philadelphia: Xlibris Corporation.

17. Lacatski, J.T., Kelleher, C.A. and Knapp, G. (2021) Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insider’s Account of the Secret Government UFO Program. 

 

The Flatwoods Seance

Looking up from the fog-shrouded fields of Braxton County, Tommy Hyer and Edward and Fred May saw a blinding light streak across the sky before apparently coming down on a nearby farm. It was September 12th of 1952, and the three terrified boys ran back to the May household to tell their incredible story. I imagine that most of this blog's readers will be familiar with what happened next. Accompanied by a local National Guardsman and two other children, the group ventured onto the farm - and were eventually met with one of the most bizarre beings ever recorded in the annals of UFO history: the now infamous Flatwoods Monster.

A Baffling Sequel

Twelve years later, it seemed that the Flatwoods Monster was not yet done with the human race. The strange story apparently transmitted to ufologist Gray Barker by its ill-prepared protagonists also seems to suggest that the entity involved with the 1952 events might not have been a material extraterrestrial, but rather some aberrant form from the spirit world.

Gray Barker's knowledge of the events was made public by Riley Hansard Crabb writing for the Borderline Sciences Research Foundation in 1967. Crabb had previously received a letter from the witnesses, but had not been in further contact with them until Barker investigated the case. Crabb's letter made it clear to him that the witnesses were college students who had picked up an interest in the flying saucer mystery, and had quickly concluded that the answer to said mystery lay in the metaphysical realm as opposed to outer space.

Norman Schreibstein and Ervin Vertleib lived somewhere in Pennsylvania, and they'd decided to establish a home-grown flying saucer observatory in Norman's home in early 1964. One of their first ventures into the ultraterrestrial world would yield far more dramatic results than many seekers could hope to receive after years of work. For reasons best known to themselves, they set their sights on establishing contact with the Flatwoods Monster. 

Contact!

Drawing used for the seance

To begin with, the boys elected to draw up a picture of the robot-like apparition on a large sheet of paper. They found a suitable model for this makeshift idol in the May family's witness sketches that had appeared in Gray Barker's Saucerian Bulletin. The drawing was stuck up on the wall of the observatory, the lights were turned out and the group all sat down the meditate. At this point, Schreibstein and Vertleib had been joined by individuals named Mark Kaplan and Patricia Morgan, as well as Norman's unnamed skeptical cousin. 

Upon sitting in the dark for roughly fifteen minutes, a light appeared above their heads in the room. The floating orb lazily circled the room. Another light briefly appeared and disappeared. Perhaps predictably, Schreibstein's cousin promptly fled the room. 

Showing boundless dedication, Vertleib reached out into the darkness. He felt a disembodied hand clasp his own and firmly shake it, as if in acknowledgement that contact had been successfully established. At this point, the group needed a way to properly communicate with the entity that was manifesting in their room - and they decided on a simple code for the floating light to follow - one circle for yes, two for no. 

Crabb doesn't say who was first to break the silence, but the first question they asked was whether the entity in question was the Flatwoods Monster. They received a single circle in response, signalling 'yes'. They next asked if the entity minded if they told others about their encounter, which was answered 'no'. The entity responded in the affirmative to a question on whether it was friendly, and then offered no firm answer when asked if it was limited to appearing at Norman's house. 

"If you are solid, give us some sign."

This final question was a mistake. This became clear to the group as the whole house started to violently shake, and deafening crashes were heard in the observatory room. In terror, someone flipped the room's light switch, causing the spiralling light to immediately vanish. Norman was appalled to see that his PA system and microphone had been smashed, and that the camera the group had been hoping to use to photograph the phenomenon had been thrown across the room and had had its lenses unscrewed. A model airplane had been broken as it hurtled to the floor, and it lay among chaotic heaps of books and other detritus.

Somehow undeterred by the threatening display, the boys swiftly turned the lights out again and sat around in their seance circle. The light appeared once more, floating just above Vertleib's head. He impulsively reached up and grabbed it - and was stunned to grasp a "sharp, metallic structure". This object remained in his hands for roughly ten seconds before it jerked itself away and continued its flight around the room. 

The activity in the room escalated one final time, as Mark and Norman felt humanlike fingers touch their foreheads and Patricia felt one touch her throat. The floating light started to lurch around, divebombing the seance participants and being met with screams of alarm. As if satisfied by the terror it had inflicted, the light dove into the Flatwoods Monster drawing and disappeared. Norman claimed that the drawing was hot to the touch shortly afterwards. Patricia soon developed a sore throat, and Mark and Norman had terrible headaches. 

Follow-Up

Three strange men showed up to Norman Schreibstein's house in September of that year. Perhaps they were curious about the letter he had sent to Crabb, or perhaps they were late to the punch in dealing with the seance. Although both Norman and Ervin were familiar with the concept of the Men in Black, Norman didn't recognise the figures at first. Instead, he assumed that the men had a genuine interest in flying saucers, and so happily allowed them access to the observatory. 

Bizarrely, the men seemed largely disinterested in the books and UFO memorabilia on display throughout the seance room, but rather focused their attention on the electrical equipment in the space. They carefully examined the PA system, and inquired about the specific make of his tape recorder. Crabb pointed out that Albert Bender experienced problems with his radio in the attic that played host to many of his encounters with the Men in Black. It was as they prowled around his observatory investigating various wires and dials that Norman started to feel a cold chill scuttle down his back - he suddenly knew that these 'men' were not human beings. 

Almost as if they'd sensed the shift in their host's awareness, the men turned to leave. Before they did so, however, they sternly told Norman to "get the hell out of flying saucer research if you know what's good for you" - as well as threatening him with "serious consequences" if he told anyone about their visit. It seems he later did this anyway and was entirely unharmed.

In the next few months, Schreibstein experienced four more visits from a phantasmal stranger. Crabb likened this character to a stereotypical CIA agent, and Norman described him as being "about 33" in age and being roughly 6ft in height. The man had dark skin and wore distinctive horn-rimmed glasses, as well as a strange ring on one of the fingers of his left hand. Perhaps predictably, the CIA man also warned Norman to leave flying saucer research. 

The boys were apparently not frightened by these tricks, and Gray Barker claimed that they actually had "other psychic experiences", which they were unfortunately not happy to be made public at the time of Crabb's writing. 

Source 

Who Flys the Saucers? by Riley Hansard Crabb, 1967

Whispering Clowns in the Woods: The Genesis of a Panic

Hysteria consumed the globe in 2016 - starting in Summer and concluding after Halloween. There were men patrolling neighbourhoods across the world dressed as clowns, and these sinister figures were menacing children, chasing pedestrians and even sometimes attacking people with various weapons. Several arrests were made, proving that the majority of these clowns were flesh-and-blood criminals exploiting a growing atmosphere of panic, but there are certainly some reports which seem to be slightly more mysterious. The first of these anomalous reports took the form of the first report of the entire panic. Today I am taking you to Fleetwood Manor in Greenville, South California - be warned, there are clowns in the woods.

This photo fits the description of the first two clowns

Outbreak! 

The young son of a woman named Donna Arnold would become patient zero in a coulrophobic hysteria that would soon reach pandemic proportions across the globe in the Summer of 2016. It was 8:30pm on the 21st of August - and the boy could see two men dressed in bright clothing in the nearby forest behind the local basketball court. As he looked closer, he soon realised that he was looking at two clowns - one of whom was wearing a red fright wig and the other had a black star painted on his face. The clowns apparently whispered something to him, but what exactly this was remained unclear throughout the reporting. Donna was originally skeptical of her son's claims, but felt it necessary to report the incident to the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office just in case. She told her son to calm down and assured NBC News that she wasn't eager to let rumours of clowns spread across the community. She said that her son had 'seen clowns in the woods whispering and making strange noises'.

A police deputy was dispatched to investigate the matter, and he uncovered several other sightings of kooky characters dressed as clowns. An anonymous individual said that she had seen a 'large-figured' clown with a blinking nose stood under a post light near a garbage dumpster area. The strange man waved at her and she nervously waved back, but the enigmatic entertainer did not approach her or harm her in any way. He seemingly just stood there. The neighbourhood had suddenly been taken over by clowns. Another woman claimed that her son had told her that he had heard clanging chains accompanied by a banging noise at the front door.

Things would only spiral out of control from there - and although Donna had disbelieved her son, she would soon be forced to reevaluate this conclusion when thirty children approached her the day after her son had allegedly seen the phantom figure and asked her if she had seen the clowns in the woods. Although the reporting somewhat differs among my myriad of sources, it would seem to be the case that her son then took her to where he had seen the clowns - and she would become the second confirmed adult witness of the phenomenon. She saw two clowns in the forest 'flashing green laser lights' before they ran off into the woods. It had taken one day for the clown hysteria to reach epidemic proportions among the child population of the area.

The Greenville County Sheriff's Office released a report based on the findings of their investigations in the week of the first sighting, and most of the details from the former two paragraphs are sourced from there. The Greenville police also said that children had told them that the clowns had showed them 'large amounts of money' in order to persuade them to follow them into the forest according to the police report obtained by ABC News. The children also believed that the clowns lived in 'a house located near a pond at the end of a man-made trail in the woods'. This might've sounded like a fantastical detail pulled from a fairytale, but deputies working for Master Deputy Ryan Flood searched the forest and found a house matching this exact description after following a trail - but it was completely empty and didn't contain any 'clown paraphenalia'. Every time they investigated this house, they continually failed to find 'clothing or anything else' that might've indicated that anyone lived there. Flood stated that he didn't think there were any circuses in town, and that there was apparently no history of unusual clown sightings in the area. Interestingly, he also stated that there were no CCTV cameras installed anywhere that the clowns had allegedly been spotted, and so the reports were all impossible to substantiate.

Nothing Spreads Faster Than Fear 

It took three days for the clown hysteria to spread beyond Fleetwood Manor. On the 23rd of August, Greenville City Dispatch responded to a late-night call from Shemwood Crossing on Shemwood Lane about a menacing clown which had made its getaway in a dark car after being confronted. The residents told a crew from WSPA News that they had been alerted to the presence of more clowns when their children had told them that the costumed freaks were lurking by the local playground. They chased after the clowns, whereupon the odd characters high-tailed it out of there in a mysterious vehicle. This took place at roughly 9:00pm. The police were planning to increase patrols in this region.

The letter sent to Fleetwood Manor tenants

Just because it had spread didn't mean that it wasn't still holding Fleetwood Manor in its clown-gloved hand. On the 24th, the manager of the apartment complex sent a letter to all their tenants warning them about the alleged presence of the clowns and encouraging them to call the police if they saw anything strange. Greenville County law enforcement was apparently conducting routine patrols around the apartments in light of the reports. A community activist by the name of Bruce Wilson noted that there were between 200 and 300 children in the area, and told WDTV News that he was now getting involved in making sure that the police are 'doing the right thing'.

It was 8:20pm on Monday, August 29th when the Greenville Sheriff's Office received a panicked phone call from a 12-year-old girl on White Horse Road. She was calling from Emerald Commons apartment complex, and she told deputies that she had seen a man riding on a blue bike taking photographs of children from around her backyard area. Shortly after she noticed this, a man wearing a black jacket and a clown mask emerged from the woods 'before going away'. This newly-infected apartment building was 20 minutes away from Fleetwood Manor.

The Lakehouse

In October of that year, Matthew Teague and a team of reporters for the UK newspaper The Guardian ventured to South California to report on the clown situation from the scene of the crime, as it were - and they found that things had changed quite considerably. The clown panic had already gone global, stretching across the United States and then spreading to the United Kingdom. Within the next few days it would move to Spain, Chile, Singapore, Brazil, Sweden, Mexico and Denmark.

When the news crew got there, Donna Arnold was still eager to tell them about the clowns she had seen with her son, and she pointed them towards the woods and explained about the abandoned house from which the clowns had allegedly originated. Intrigued, the reporters followed the odd little path down towards the house in the forest - and found it just as derelict as it had been initially described - but something odd had happened in the two months since it had been reported on. Although the balcony was sagging down and someone had boarded up the windows, a modern security system had been installed outside it, apparently quite recently. New bags of potting soil had been left near to the basement door. It still looked as if nobody had lived in it for years, but it seemed that someone was now planning something.

Perplexed, the confusion felt by the reporters would only grow in strength when a gleaming white Mercedes of a new model pulled up to the house shortly after sunset. The driver stepped out of the mysterious vehicle - which 'looked as out of place as any clown car' - and she was immediately ambushed by the waiting pack of reporters. They asked her about the house and she said that she had bought it recently as an investment due to it sitting on a free space of five acres in an area that was otherwise quite densely populated. Interestingly, she refused to give her name - and was wearing an in-ear headset which meant that it was often quite difficult for the reporters to tell if she was talking to them or to someone on her phone. When they asked her about the clown sightings, she scoffed at them and asked why none of the children had taken photographs on their phones - which they could obviously work far better than she could and so it made no sense to her that there was still no evidence.

Thinking that this information would comfort Donna, Teague naively went back to her house and told her this. She laughed at him and then invited him to come round to the back of the home. The house backed onto the dense woods in which the clowns had first appeared - and Teague couldn't help but notice the ugly dent in the back door where the paint appeared to have been chipped away. With complete conviction, she told him that the clowns had hit the door with a chain. She had seen them hit the door with a chain and then run off into the forest as soon as she approached them with the intention of making them answer for their crimes. She was now certain that there were men dressed as clowns in the forest out to torment the good people of Greenville.

Sources 

Reports of Clowns Trying to Lure Kids Into Woods in South Carolina Prompt Investigation for ABCNews

Clown Sightings: The Day the Craze Began for The Guardian

Creepy Clown Sightings in South Carolina Cause a Frenzy for The New York Times

Creepy Details Released in South Carolina Clown Sightings for CBS News

Children Claim Clown Tried to Lure Them Into South Carolina Woods for CBS News

Reports of Creepy Clowns Spooking Residents of Greenville, SC for NBC News

Apartment Complex Warns Residents About Clown Trying to Lure Kids into Woods for CNN

Another Child Reports Clowns in South Carolina Woods for CBS News

More Clown Sightings in Greenville, Deputies Say for WSPA News

Residents Anxious After Clown Sightings, Letters Received at South Carolina Apartments for WDTV News

Venusians on a Plane

The title was a 'Snakes on a Plane' reference, if you didn't catch that. Anyhoo - today I have a bizarre story to tell you, which was initially related to UFOs Northwest by the main witness to the event in question. The witness in question was just going about her duty as a flight attendant, but her job became a lot more complicated when three exceedingly odd passengers boarded the plane during a routine stop. What happened next would convince the witness that these people were anything but human...

Masterful photo editing, me

The Man in Seat 23D
On an undisclosed date somewhere between 1985 and 1989, the anonymous witness was a flight attendant working for a passenger airline on a flight going from Palm Springs, California to Portland, Oregon. She had been employed with the unnamed airline company for 29 years, and requested that she maintain her anonymity and that the company maintained theirs due to her fear of repercussions if the story got out. She made it abundantly clear that she did not want any sort of payment or publicity from her story, and she also struck the researcher tasked with interviewing her as someone who 'knew things' that only a flight attendant could've.
On its way to Oregon, the plane ended up briefly stopping in San Francisco. Among those who boarded the jet during this period were three characters who 'seemed quite unusual'. One of them was a man who the witness estimated to be about 30 years old, one was a child of roughly 8 years, and the third and final individual was only described as being middle-aged. The witness and her fellow crew members thought that the 30-year-old was bizarre in both appearance and demeanour. He was said to have 'very piercing eyes and an unusual forehead'. All three of the odd passengers were dressed in what the witness described as 'Sears Roebuck' work clothing, and boarded the plane with no carry-on luggage of any kind.
The 30-year-old sat in seat 23D, and got the attention of the witness after the plane took off - asking for details about the mass and velocity of the aircraft. It is implied by both the source material and common sense that the witness didn't know the answer to this, and she found it to be 'a very strange question'. When the time came to order food and drinks, the weird man didn't seem to know what the attendant was referring to when she talked about the names of various items, and was only able to choose after she listed everything that was available. The man in 23D would repeat all of this information to the other two members of his party, both of whom were completely silent throughout the entire duration of the flight.
Later on in the flight, the man in 23D started to talk to the passenger seated ahead of him. Desperate to hear what was being said by the bizarre character, the flight attendant chose to sit next to someone she knew - and didn't like - so that she could eavesdrop. She said that the man 'asked some very unusual questions' and that he repeated everything that was said to him the rest of his three-man posse. Eventually the man asked for the restroom, and the flight attendant pointed it out to him. After this, while he was setting about returning to his seat, the curious witness approached him and asked him how old he was. He dodged this question by telling her instead that he 'had been to other planets'.
Once the flight, which must've felt like the longest the attendant had ever been on, finally landed in Portland - the attendant disembarked with the passengers. Outside the plane, it was now the man's turn to approach the flight attendant - asking her why she would sit with someone she hated. This alarmed her, because it seemed as if the man had somehow read her mind. She alleged that the weird passenger then went on to provide her with an even weirder answer to her previous question - 'You asked how old I am - I am light-years old'. The witness felt that this was 'no joke' and that he was being completely serious, likely due to the extremely odd behaviour and apparently psychic abilities that the man had already demonstrated. She later saw the three odd passengers enter a limousine with darkened windows. She noted that this was very unusual 'for three people dressed in work clothing'. The witness concluded her statement by saying that she had not experienced anything else like this before or since, and that her fellow crew-members were also very disturbed by the event.

Analysis
Okay so I can tell you one thing for nothing - our mystery man is not light-years old. Light-years are used to measure the distance that light travels in one year as opposed to any sort of period of time, and so this minor twist could be used to perhaps cast doubt on the story as a whole - or at least on the suggestion that the mystery man was as alien as he said he was. However, I don't actually see it this way - seeing as there are innumerable cases of ostensibly-alien entities making bizarre and obviously-bogus statements like this one, and some of those cases even involve physical evidence attesting to something anomalous having actually been there despite its blatant absurdity. Also, the chances of the mystery man having been a human prankster are significantly lowered, in my opinion, by his apparent ability to read the flight assistant's mind.
While speaking to the investigator who initially recorded this story, she also stated that she was married to an Air Force Serviceman who was involved in top secret projects. Although he never outright admitted this to her, he also never denied that he 'had stints of duty at Area 51', which his wife suspects might be the case. This is backed up by the long periods he has spent at Nevada air bases throughout their marriage. This provides the witness with at least a tangential link to the UFO phenomenon outside of this occurence.

Source
UFOs Northwest - Flight Attendant Recalls "Unearthly" Passengers on Aircraft

The Vanishing of Alfred Beilhartz

Photograph of the missing boy

It was July 2, 1938 - and the Beilhartz family had decided to go camping deep within the Rocky Mountain National Park as a summer vacation. On the day in question, they were going to Estes Park to do some fishing - and were hiking along a trail close to a creek by the name of Roaring River at approximately 8am. Their son, Alfred Edwin Beilhartz, was roughly 4 years old at the time, and was walking along at the back of the line formed by his family. His parents would eventually realise that he had seemingly fallen severely behind and was now no longer anywhere they could see him. This would begin a desperate 10-day-long search operation throughout the region - but Alfred Beilhartz would never return...

Bloodhounds and the Damned Dam
His parents briefly performed a preliminary search to try and find their missing son (he was just one son of apparently ten children in the Beilhartz family), and when they had no luck they decided to call in the park service for assistance. The rangers were operating under the assumption that Alfred may have fallen into the nearby creek and drowned, and so they proceeded to dam the river. This dam consisted of a fence line adorned with barbed wire - there was no way that his body could be carried downstream and not be instantly found by the team of rangers searching for the unfortunate child. When this returned no results, they dragged the bottom of the river for good measure, but also found nothing to indicate where Alfred had gone. After five days, they gave up searching the river.
His parents told the rangers that they were certain that he must have been abducted. They knew that their son wouldn't just leave his family - and they were (unsurprisingly) unconvinced that he had fallen into the river. At this point, the rangers called in some bloodhounds from the nearby Colorado State Penitentiary. According to David Paulides (one of the usual suspects when it comes to discussing cases such as this) claimed that the bloodhounds were able to follow the boy's scent '500ft uphill' from where his parents had been when he vanished. This is obviously exceptionally bizarre, seeing as he disappeared when he was behind them as opposed to in front of them as the scent trail suggested. More bloodhounds were apparently called in, and followed the same paradoxical trail, only to lay down in defeat when they reached a fork in the road. The search was eventually called off after a total of 10 days spent looking for the missing child.

Devil's Nest and the Mystery Man
Meanwhile - on July 3rd - William J. Eells and his (unnamed in the newspaper report) wife were also hiking in the Rocky Mountains National Park. They had made it quite far up the Old Fall River road when they got tired and decided to stop for a rest. While resting, they decided to look up at the beautiful slopes of Mount Chapin - only to see a young boy sat on a rock in a section of the mountainside known as the Devil's Nest. This spot was six miles west of where Alfred Beilhartz had intially vanished from, and Mr. Eells expressed his disbelief that any child could have gotten up to that spot without assistance.
The child - presumed to be Alfred at this point - apparently made a 'shrill noise', walked out to look over the ledge and then left the scene. Paulides says that it was as if he was jerked back out of view, but Wikipedia instead asserts that he simply walked out of sight. The Eells decided to retreat to the carpark, where they heard the news about the missing boy. Upon returning home, they checked the newspaper and confirmed that the photograph of Alfred Beilhartz within it matched the child they had seen in the Devil's Nest. They promptly drove back to the park and talked to the rangers, but the rangers stated that it would've been 'totally impossible' for Alfred to have made his way up to the slope in question - and that the rangers themselves couldn't even manage it themselves in under two days and without carabiners and ropes. They did eventually send a group of over 150 men to search Devil's Nest, but they came back empty handed.
The next development in this increasingly-bizarre case came on July 8th, when the FBI announced that it was performing forensic tests on a piece of 'soiled' bandage that had been found in an abandoned cabin in the park. The disclosure of this finding was prompted by the insistence of the boy's parents that their son must've been kidnapped. Apparently Alfred had a blister on his foot at the time he had vanished, and his mother had bandaged it using similar material. It is unclear what came of this test, but I can be fairly sure that nothing did - otherwise there would be information available about it.
On this same day, a woman by the name of Mrs. CA Linch who lived in Big Spring, Nebraska, allegedly saw Alfred and a mysterious man walking along a highway together as she and her husband were driving from Big Spring to Ogallala. She told her brother-in-law WB Linch (of Lincoln, Nebraska) about her sighting, and he then went to speak to a Denver detective sergeant by the name of Fred Renovati two days later on behalf of his sister-in-law. He said that she 'was positive the boy was the one whose picture she saw'. Seemingly nothing came of this odd lead either.

Held to Ransom? 

A photograph of the Beilhartz family with an arrow indicating Alfred

Alfred Beilhartz had been missing for five months when his father was given a ransom note in November. It contained instructions for leaving $500 (equivalent to $8,900 as of 2018) in a tin can one block away from the Beilhartz family home in return for the safe return of their missing son in 24 hours, and also ominously said that 'the boy doesn't take to us'. However, by the 29th of that month the police were fairly certain that this was a hoax. This belief was all but confirmed by another police announcement announcement a day later saying that they had investigated two possible suspects - who were accused of attempting to extort money from the family. The suspects were not named and were apparently not being held, but here is where the trail of information about the Beilhartz disappearance stops - and so it is difficult to know what happened next. I imagine that it would've been announced if the suspects were confirmed to be guilty, but the ransom note was also never confirmed to not have been a hoax.

Sources
Disappearance of Alfred Beilhartz on Wikipedia and all of the newspaper clippings provided as sources for that page. Some of the stranger details of this case were, of course, pointed out by David Paulides in an interview he did for MUFON on the 19th of February 2013 - which can be enjoyed here.