In a suburb of Saint-Louis, Missouri, USA, on May 15, 1970, Dorothy Simson was doing her work at her motel desk, as usual, examining billing documents, when she heard what she described as a "whistling sigh."
She looked up and saw that four people were standing in front of her desk. They were not normal people. They very very tiny, and looked strikingly alike, as if they were the members of the same family. There was a man, a woman, a boy, a girl. They all looked young, and the "children" was almost as tall as the "parents." But they were all so tiny that the just reach the desk.
Dorothy saw that they all looked expensively dressed. The males were in tailored suits, the females in pastel peach dresses. Their hair did not look real, to the point that Simpson thought that they were wearing wigs.
In a high pitched voice, the man said:
"Do you have a room to stay? Do you have a room to stay?"
Dorothy Simpson said so, and told him the price, but the man did not seem to understand what she had said, and he turned to the female as if she could help him understand, but she said nothing. There was an uncomfortable period of silence, and finally the man reached into his pocket and took out a pile of banknotes, some of large value, and handed them to Dorothy Simson.
Simson noticed that the banknotes were very crisp, to the point that she suspected that they were counterfeit, but a quick informal testing suggested they were authentic.
So, she took two twenty-dollar bills, covering a stay for the strange family, and gave back the rest. She asked the man to sign up the room reservation form, but the man was so small that he could not reach the form on the desk, and Simpson did it for him. The man declared that his name was "A. Bell."
He stepped forward, so Simpson had a better look at his face and realized how strange it was.
Simpson asked:
"Where are you from?"
The little man's answer was odd. He shot an arm upward, pointing at the sky, and said:
"We come from up there. Up there."
But the woman pushed his arm down, and spoke for the first time, saying that they were from Hammond, Indiana. She gave a street address.
The man then signed the register, but so awkwardly that Simpson thought that he did not seem to now how to use a pen.
Then, the woman asked where they could eat, so Dorothy Simpson indicated the direction of the motel's restaurant and the little family went there.
In the course of events, several members of the motel personal became aware of the weirdness of the tiny "family." The motel manager insisted to Dorothy Simon that she checks the Indiana address the woman gave, and it appeared that both the name and the address were bogus.
While the weird four were at the motel's restaurant, the bellhop came over to store their luggage. He checked the parking lot to find a car with an Indiana license plate, but there was none.
The hostess who led the strange family to a restaurant table noticed that the chin of even the adults just reached the top of the table.
The little man read the menu aloud and kept asking odd questions about where milk, vegetables, and other common food come from.
The woman ordered peas and milk for herself and the children, and peas, a small steak, and water for the man. Their manner of eating was weird: each picked up a single pea with a knife, brought it to his or her tiny mouth, and inhaled it with a sucking sound. The father was unable to get even a small piece of steak through his mouth that was just a slit. They stopped eating all at the same time, and the man gave a 20$ bill to the waitress, who went to get change. But when she returned, they were all gone.
They were then found by the bellhop, who retrieved their luggage and stepped into the elevator to lead them to their room. But when the elevator door opened, the small family stepped back, showing fright and confusion. The bellhop had to reassure them that there was no danger in stepping in an elevator.
After letting them into the room, he turned on the lights, and the man suddenly began shouting at him that the light would hurt the children's eyes. The bellhop himself was now frightened by the small people and fled without waiting for a tip.
The bellhop, the manager, and Dorothy Simpson agreed that they would watch for the little people's departure next morning, but they could not see them again, although the front door was the only door they could pass through without setting off a security alarm. The alarms were checked, and were in good order.
The case became known by a ufologist of the UFO Study Group of Greater St. Louis, who informed ufologist John E. Schroeder of incident soon after it happened. John Schroeder came to interview the five motel employees who had dealt with the tiny people, and he found them all sincerely bewildered by the weirdness of the events.
Schroeder noted the description the motel personal gave: the little people were wide at eye level with their faces thinning abruptly to their chins. The eyes were large, dark and slightly slanted. The noses had practically no bridges, two slits for nostrils, and the mouths were tiny and lipless, no wider than their nostrils. All were pale skinned, with color descriptions varying from pearl to pale pink to light grey.
