Case description
On an October night at his family’s farmhouse in Iowa, Brad Steiger recalled sitting on the edge of his bed, unable to sleep. He was not yet five. The house was L-shaped: from his bedroom he could look across to the kitchen window and see his parents inside. In his 1995 interview with Art Bell, he said the house then lacked electricity and running water.
Steiger heard a wash tub being pulled from its place near the well to a position beneath the kitchen window. He wondered why the family’s collie was not reacting to someone outside. A small figure appeared, looking in at his parents. At first he mistook its unusually large head for a helmet. Watching from his separate window, he kept staring until the figure turned toward him.
He remembered large, reptilian-looking eyes. In the kitchen light he could not confidently distinguish its colour. The eyes seemed to enlarge until they filled his awareness; his next recollection was waking the following morning. Dennett’s later account adds pointed ears, slender fingers at the window and vertical pupils. Neither account describes a spacecraft or the child boarding one.
Years later, Steiger recognized a similar figure in a painting commissioned by a woman who had grown up in a neighbouring Iowa town. She told him of her own childhood experience. He associated the encounter with his lasting interest in unexplained phenomena.
The catalogue places the event near West Bend in October 1940 and calls the container a pail. Steiger’s interview supplies the October setting before his fifth birthday and calls it a wash tub. His explanation of the house reconciles the bedroom viewpoint with the figure watching his parents through their kitchen window.
