Artist rendition of the encounter
Three months ago, Reddit user Excellent_Eagle posted a story titled ‘Aliens in Tom Collins’ to r/limerickcity. The story described a bizarre encounter with ‘two young women’ in the smoking area of the Cecil Street pub ‘Tom Collins’. LMFAO061contacted Excellent_Eagle aka Bernard for an interview, discovering some strange links between his encounter and historic local cult activity.
“It was Friday night and a couple of my mates went out. We went to the Glen Tavern, then ended up in the Commercial and then up to Tom Collins. I had moved onto the Whiskey at that stage now, to be honest.”
Excellent_Eagle aka Bernard left his friends sitting inside near the bar to smoke a cigarette outside. The small smoking area is an alley between the pub and a row of old red brick Georgian townhouses. Smooth varnished wickerish chairs , Jameson barrels and tables with wrought iron legs populate the alley. Any surface that isn’t cobbled is painted a bright red, the same colour as the iconic front façade of the pub.
“It was busy-ish , usual Tom Collins on a Friday night. I was standing just across from the door facing out into the alley. I was just scanning the room, taking it in and saw there was this couple of young ones sitting at a barrel next to me. I just happened to notice their shoes. They were wearing the exact same pair of dirty old runners.”
The two young women were sitting on stools sipping on what Bernard guesses was a spirit mixed with Coca-Cola.
“They were adidas runners, both pairs dirty and worn; it stood out to me cause they were all done up other wise – hair , makeup and all that kind of craic. Both pairs of runners were dirty and worn in the exactly the same way; they were identical.”
“They were both attractive in a similar way; they looked a little bit like the older daughter in Modern Family. They weren’t identical but were a bit similar. They weren't talking, just looking around having a drink likeI was.”
Bernard sat with it for a few minutes until the weirdness was too much to not acknowledge; he lent over and asked, ‘are yous on the same team?’ They both looked at him as if they didn’t understand so he asked once again ‘You’ve the same runners on, are you on some sports team or something?’
They looked at each other and drew closer to Bernard. “I repeated what I asked, but I fleshed it out more in case they were foreign.”
The nearest one to Bernard simply responded in a vaguely Irish accent, “We’re in the Family.”
“It was now my turn to be puzzled, so I asked what she meant. She responded, ‘We’re in the family, WE ARE IN THE FAMILY.’ Not aggressively, mind you, just like she wanted to be clearly understood.”
“You know when you're half-cut, and you're just bulletproof, nothing really phases you, I just moved on, started the ‘are you having a goodnight?’ light chat sort of thing and didn’t really think about it.”
“Then they stood up and moved a bit closer. They were just kind of standing there. I didn’t for a second think they were coming onto me they looked about 25 and Im on the far side of 40.”
Feeling pressured by their presence Bernard attempted to keep the conversation going asking “Are there more of you around with the same runners on?”
“They both stopped dead still , and said at exactly the same time ‘We’re in the family.’”
“Then they went normal and started asking where I was going that night and I said just back into my friends. They wished me a good night and headed off I just went back inside.”
“Its bizarre , I have no idea what to make of it. Its all kind of a blur now. The runners were incongruous and what they were saying itjust didn’t make any sense. ”
Bernard went back into his friends and didn’t mention it to them. “ I woke up and I was like that was fucking weird. I posted on Reddit about it cause it was so strange. Everyone in the comments was talking about cults , only thing I could think of describing it was Aliens.”
The most notable aspect of this story and the thing that first sparked Bernards attention was the identical pairs of runners that the ‘Aliens’ wore. Bernard describes them as ‘light grey adidas with three stripes of blue on the side. The soles were that elastic band colour.”
The matching pairs of runners prompted Redditors in the comment section to compare them to the famous suicide cult ‘ Heaven's Gate’. In March 1997 , the cult led by Marshall Applewhite committed mass ritual suicide, resulting in the deaths of 39 people. They believed their suicide would result in their souls boarding an alien spacecraft that was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. On the day of their suicide, the members were covered in purple shrouds and all wore black shirts and sweatpants with matching pairs of Nike Decade runners. Applewhite chose the black and white shoes as he found them stylish and was “able to get a good deal” by buying in bulk. The sneakers hold no resemblance to the ones sported by our Collins cultists but the parallel gives the story a bit of sauce.
Heavens Gate mass suicide
The Heavens Gate cult is long gone, yet a pair of former members keep the groups website running. Mark and Sarah King left the group before 1997 and missed the mass suicide. They were contacted by the cult and asked to keep the website running after ‘The Exit’. The Kings still follow the teachings of Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles (Heaven's Gate co-founder who died of liver cancer in 1985), believing that they failed in their spiritual journey to ascend to the ‘Next Level’. There is absolutely zero chance that Heaven's Gate has reestablished itself in America, let alone Ireland.
LMFAO061 contact with Mark King from 2024
The logistics of a whole cult wearing the same shoes daily is difficult to justify. Imagine the cost of buying shoes in bulk? What if a new member joined a couple of years in and there were no pairs that fit? What if the leader goes to buy more of the shoes and they are discontinued? An organisational nightmare, a spectacle probably reserved for special ceremonies and not for pub smoking areas.
Bernard describes them as being about 25 years old, with one having ‘redder hair and the other had darker’. They were ‘similar to eachother’ with one wearing ‘a sort of trouser suit’. Bernard's recollection seems to point to the fact that they were just regular-looking patrons of Tom Collins; a probe into whether the bartenders have any recollection of the pair yielded nothing.
The phrase “We’re in the Family” actually holds a strange significance to Limerick. ‘The Family International’ (TFI – NOT THE IRISHPUBLIC TRANSPORT PEOPLE) or as they are more infamously known ‘The Children of God’, is a cult founded by David Berg in the late 1960s. Berg told his followers that God was love and since sex is love, there are no limitations to who can have sex with whom, regardless of age or familial relationship. Despite this, its membership was massive in the 1970s with over 10,000 members and 130communities in the 1970s. At its peak , over 5000 children were born into the cult including Jaoquin and River Phoenix.
David Brandt Berg / Moses David/ Mo / King David / Father David
Former members of the group describe childhood ‘sex-dates’ with elderly men, many describing the normalisation of sexual abuse from the age of three. The scale of exploitation within the cult is gargantuan and completely out of the scope of this article.
In 1972, the cult left America due to bad press and began to recruit in other countries. Groups of COG moved into large, overcrowded houses all over the world.
Co-author of ‘Not Without My Sister’, Juliana Buhring lived in one such house in Castleconnell, Co Limerick, sometime in the 1990s and early 2000s. The book details Buhring's travels around Ireland selling balloon animals and children's face paint in town squares , one of the many money-making and proselytising ventures of the Family.
Originally, The Family exploited the counterculture of the60 and 70s , playing Christian rock to the throngs of disenfranchised youth strutting around Southern California. Berg, ‘responding in part to the sexual liberality of that time period’ (direct quote from davidberg.org) employed a new tactic called ‘Flirty Fishing’. ‘Ffing’ involved female members or ‘fisherwomen’ using sex as a tool to lure non-members or ‘fish’ into the cult. Ffing resulted in over 200,000 men being fished between 1971 and 2001, its effectiveness mostly ending due to the spread of STIs within the Family. Groups of young women were sent out to hotels and bars as ‘bait’. Did Bernard encounter members of a forgotten Family enclave in Tom Collins? The connections are tangential at best. Although a residual Family International crowd operating in Limerick isn’t impossible.
The Children of God produced ‘True Comix’ a periodical styled like underground comics that were popular at the time
When the cult's presence in Castleconnell was discovered years later by Buhring's book and media appearances, the local community was bewildered that such a circle could’ve operated under their noses for so long. The Limerick Post contacted people from around Castleconnell all of which had absolutely no notion of the group operating nearby, one man stating, “there was certainly no gossip around the village.” In the Family's heyday, the disparate groups that spread around the world only had to follow the rulings of David Berg, not really participating in any overarching organisation.
LMFAO061 contacted TFI to inquire whether there is any group still living in Limerick. The TFI seems to still work under the same organisational system, stating “The Family International (TFI) is not organized as a church or fellowship. TFI is an online network of individuals committed to reaching the world with God’s love and assisting disadvantaged people through humanitarian and charitable programs. The principal connection between members is through our websites and inspirational publications. As such, there are not any centers or formal fellowship or worship services.” They provide no physical worship services and instead communicatethrough a monthly magazine called ‘Activate’. It would be very difficult tofind out whether a group was still operating in Limerick although Buhring stated that in 2007 she was ‘positive’ that the group was still active in Ireland.
We have not found any proof that a TFI group is operating in Limerick today, but there's a chance there is. A Reddit user commented on Bernard's post saying that the TFI were ‘drummed out of Castleconnell and they moved into another big house on the Dublin road by Herbert’s pub.” LMFAO061 contacted himfor more information and found that as recently as 2016 there was a faction living ‘in a large house divided into flats’ and that they lived in the furthest one from the road. Buhring in her book describes time in a ‘large country house’ and remembers walking up a hill towards a pub. The user detailed an encounter with the group two of his friends had in 2012,
“Another couple of lads I knew were out for a spin around town one summer evening and two girls walked up to the car (Honda Legend, nice yoke) and after a chat asked for a ride home. They were both flakin hot so the lads were only too happy. They got invited in to watch a DVD. Left in front ofthis movie on their own for a few minutes they realized that it was a recruitment DVD for their cult and they said then the whole 'family' started coming out of the woodwork and before they knew which way was up the room was full of brainwashed young girls and one old guy. They were too embarrassed and it was too awkward for them to leave right away but eventually they got out of there.” The user gave a general area on Google Maps for the location of the compound, but we have found no buildings big enough to suit a group of the size in the story.
This is where the investigation ends at present. The only thing to do would be to start knocking on doors and probably catch a harassment charge. A small group of TFI members could plausibly still be living in Limerick, if they did not bother anyone and held no official connections to the TFI organisation. The two women that Bernard met could have been emissaries from the Family, maybe their first time out in a long time, which explains the awkward responses. Bernard explicitly stated that he did not get the impression that they were coming onto him, and it was he who started the conversation in the first place; maybe their flirty-fishing skills were a bit rusty.
Perhaps they were simply bored and decided to mess with a drunk fella. According to Tik Tok and other cool apps that are hip, some friend groups wear the same shoes to foster camaraderie and to make themselves feel superior to ‘squads’ without matching shoes. They could’ve learned about The Family from a tacky Netflix documentary or a true crime podcast and thought the phrase sufficiently creepy to get out of conversation with a drunk stranger.
Overall, the most plausible theory comes from one very intelligent Reddit user: “Two of the band members from BIIRD perhaps? They played in the Milk Market last night.”
If you have any information related to this story or similar experiences please contact limericksaucer123@gmail.com
