Luverne

From there, the case started to get even more odd because the first reported sightings came two weeks after the crash.

On May fourth, a police officer in Luverne, Minnesota, close to the South Dakota line, spotted a woman who looked like Patty sitting alone in a booth at a Hardee's.

She'd reportedly been nursing a glass of water there for more than five hours, right up until closing time, and then she walked over to an all-night diner nearby.

When the officer asked her name and she wouldn't give it, he decided to ask her where she was from.

Here was a drifting woman who looked so much like Patty that a cop arrested her on the resemblance alone, and even Patty's ex-boyfriend admitted the voice was similar.

Notably, she told the court she was traveling between Seattle and Montana, which is essentially the same I-90 corridor where so many of the sightings were clustered.

And if you'll recall, the woman in Luverne told the officer she was from the Holy Land, which sounds an awful lot like someone who'd later call herself a missionary.

That said, I can't prove the two women were one and the same, and Morning Star certainly doesn't account for all 5,000 tips.

One of the first widely reported possible sightings occurred on May 4, 1989, about two weeks after Patricia disappeared.

A police officer in Laverne, Minnesota, encountered a woman at a Hardee's restaurant who he believed resembled Patricia.

He was hundreds of miles away from the crash site, which meant that Patricia had somehow traveled a considerable distance in a very short period of time.

But according to reports, this woman, who he thought was Patricia, had been sitting alone inside the Hardee's for about five hours just drinking water.

... not help her medical problems, or those over-plucked '90s eyebrows, unfortunately.

And 10 miles away in Luverne, Minnesota, the same thing was happening to a man.

Waking up at 3:00 AM, he was convinced he was having a heart attack, and he then spends three days in the hospital and leaves with no diagnosis.

Now, there is something that Forensic Files quietly left out, and that is that this did not just happen in South Dakota and Minnesota.

Yeah, we're on a pretty big deficit.

Um, I know I live by Luverne, Minnesota, and it's- it's fairly sandy where I'm at, but, um, man, a- a lot of that rain did run off.

And I'm, um, in the past month, I'm up over nine inches by my place.

Wow.

But that was not the end of the story.

Because about two weeks later, a totally unrelated police officer was eating at a fast food restaurant in Luverne, Minnesota, which was about seven hundred miles away from the crash site.

Now, even though this officer lived and worked in a completely different state, they'd actually heard about Patricia Meehan's disappearance and seen pictures of her because her case was now national news.

So when this officer looked across the restaurant he was in and saw a middle-aged woman with strawberry blonde hair sitting in a booth by herself, silently drinking water and just staring off into space, he immediately recognized her as Patricia.

Absolutely.

And it's interesting, like, you know, we're our offices in Laverne, Minnesota, right? So just kind of looking back in the city of Laverne, over the last 30 days, we're about five and three quarters inches of rain.

And Of course, we needed it, right? But to your point earlier, we aren't doing the crop much good anymore.

The corn crop was black-layered around the first part of September.

But Grandpa Bob, who founded the company in 1960, he was a farmer first.

And great-grandpa Ed actually ended up selling a – what was it – Quarter of land down in Laverne, Minnesota, back in the 30s, and bought a section of land southwest of Arthur, North Dakota.

And the rest is kind of history.

Of course, Grandpa liked to be in front of the public and liked to sing.