On February 4, 1987, a woman in Tallahassee, Florida called the cops on a man playing in a park with six “unkempt” children. In doing so, she unwittingly sparked a long-lasting conspiracy theory about the government’s involvement in child sex abuse that—thanks in part to recent theories surrounding Comet Ping Pong or the Jeffery Epstein’s death—still enjoys life to this day, centered around a mysterious group called The Finders.

By their own account, The Finders were a kind of alternative lifestyle commune based in the Washington, D.C. area, made up of 20 adults and 7 children around the time of the 1987 arrest. Whether they’re more Manson Family or Merry Pranksters—abusive Satanists or whimsical followers of a charismatic leader named Marion Pettie—depends on how much you’d like to read between the lines on the official reports, and which side of the conspiracy theory you fall. Whether they were evil or harmless, the existence of The Finders seemed to revolve entirely around Pettie, a high-school dropout who said later in life that the group began in the 1930s, when he rented two apartments in D.C. and “opened them up for anybody that wanted to come in, and the idea in my head was that they were going to teach me something about power, money, or sex.”

The release of the Finders documents, after years of requests, is as good a time as any to look back at an incident that set the stage for several modern child trafficking conspiracy theories. These were among the most heavily requested documents from the FBI due to the lingering, decades-old allegation that the group was some kind of front for the CIA, which led to a coverup of the Finders’ most heinous and abusive activities. Anyone looking for a smoking gun in the docs will come away disappointed. But even just the agreed-upon facts around The Finders, and the mysteries those facts create, make for a compelling yarn in their own right.

Late last month, after years of demand from conspiracy theorists, the FBI released over 300 pages of documents related to The Finders—a D.C.-based organization whose origins date back before WWII but didn’t become known to the general public until that phone call in Tallahassee swept them up in the Satanic Panic of the late 80s. The police reports, memos, and archival press clippings—particularly related to the arrest of two members in 1987 on misdemeanor child-abuse charges that were dropped a few weeks later—have recaptured the attention of conspiracy theorists around the Internet.

Pettie, who died in 2004, eventually evolved his group so that he was giving orders, and the Finders who obeyed would be forced to experiment with their lives in unconventional ways. To Washington City Paper in 1996, Pettie described his life’s work as a “topsy-turvy university” where he learns from the “fools” who come and follow him. Here’s the Finders experience as described by former member Robert Terrell, who met Pettie in 1971:

“Pettie used the term ‘pressure cooker,’” he says. “The idea was to explore your own person and discover your own true nature. You can’t do that just sitting at a desk or on a couch in a routine way. You have to have some experiences, so Pettie was good at structuring experiences from which you could learn. He called himself the ‘game caller,’ and what that meant was that he’d call a game for you to do something where you’d gain experience.”

For Terrell, game playing ranged from working a temp accounting job in a downtown D.C. law firm to catching a flight to Japan on two hours’ notice to gather information on Japanese companies and report back to Pettie. It was a subculture built on whimsy and intrigue, undergirded by a sense of tribal affiliation.

The Finders eschewed private property, taught their kids through “hands-on” experience, and were essentially invisible to the outside world until Feb. 4, 1987. When police responded to the aforementioned 911 call, they found two men in their 20s with six kids aged two to seven, all six of whom were dirty, bug-bitten, underfed, and living in a smelly van, according to police reports. The men were identified as Michael Holwell and Douglas Ammerman, and their conduct when questioned, as described in a handwritten report, was certainly suspicious:

“This writer spoke to Suspect #1, who stated that he and Suspect #2 were teachers from Washington D.C., and they were enroute to Mexico with the children. Suspect #1 stated that they were going to Mexico to set up a school for brilliant children. When asked about the parents of the children, Suspect #1 became very evasive and stated that the children’s parents were in Washington D.C. Suspect #2 refused to give this writer any information, and he pretended to faint when told he was under arrest for child abuse. Suspect #2 fell face down on the ground and refused to stand up. He was carried by this writer and two other law enforcement officers and placed into a patrol vehicle.”