Introduction
Rest assured, to many whom have experienced some form of ufotic experience, followed by later visitations of a surrealistic nature, the Men in Black (MIB) scenario may be considered more fact than fiction. Regardless of what you may think about this aspect of the UFO – Extraterrestrial continuum, fact or fiction, it seems to have evolved to a mythological level of its own. Will the mysteries behind the MIB ever be solved? Can humanity, at its present level of evolution, hope to answer the previous question? Or are we not yet ready for the answers, psychologically, emotionally, or physically. Could be we are not ready. But that won’t keep us from the attempt to find them.
It is best to look at all paranormal experience with an open mind, free from ridicule, beratement or other human communicative frailties. The following investigation into the MIB phenomenon is an attempt to provide an objective look at and an historical overview of the subject.
Maury Island Incident – Overview
This is probably the only case on record of a Hoax indirectly leading to the death of UFO Investigators. The story surfaced from Ray Palmer (editor of Amazing Stories), regarding a man called Fred Crisman who claimed to have actual physical evidence of a flying saucer.
Palmer passed the story onto Kenneth Arnold, who was investigating UFO reports in the Northwest. Arnold interviewed Crisman an his associate Harold Dahl who claimed they were harbor patrolmen (their first lie). Crisman reported that they had seen a doughnut-shaped craft dump piles of slag like material on the beach of Maury Island in Pugent Sound. The next morning a mysterious man in black had threatened Dahl, who claimed the man said ‘I know a great deal more about this experience of yours that you will want to believe.’.
The 2 men showed Arnold the material who in turn contacted an Army Air Force intelligence officer, Lieutenant Frank Brown, who flew up from Hamiltion Field in California in the company of another Air Force officer.
The 2 Air Force officers immediately recognized the material as ordinary aluminum but did not say so in front of Arnold due to the fact that he would feel embarrassed. While flying back to Hamiltion, their B-25 caught fire and crashed, killing both officers.
Crisman and Dahl later confessed to investigators that they had made up the story. Before his death Crisman changed the Maury Incident story to that of an American Plane dropping radioactive waste instead of a UFO dropping unknown substances.
The Men in Black – Overview
All things considered, UFO research has become pretty much of a circus today, and the most intriguing and controversial sideshow skirting the edges is the question of the “silencers,” or the mysterious “Men in Black.” There is a strong subliminal appeal in these accounts of visits by mysterious dark-suited figures (I have been visited myself, as have others I’ve known) attempting to silence UFO witnesses. A typical situation would be that a witness has a UFO sighting or UFO-related experience. Shortly thereafter he is visited by one or more “odd”-looking men who relate to him the minutest details of his experience, even though he has as yet told no one for fear of ridicule or other reasons. The men warn him about spreading the story of his experience around and sometimes even threaten him personally, sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly. Any evidence, if it exists, is confiscated in one way or another. Sometimes the visit is for some totally meaningless reason and the subject of UFOs is hardly mentioned, if at all. But again, the men all seem to look alike.
We actually seem to find ourselves in close proximity to beings who obviously must be directly connected in some way with the objects themselves or the source behind them, yet they seem to be functioning unobtrusively within the framework of our own everyday existence.
The classic conception of an MIB is a man of indefinite age, medium height and dressed completely in black. He always has a black hat and often a black turtleneck sweater. They present an appearance often described as “strange” or “odd.” They speak in a dull monotone voice, “like a computer,” and are dark-complicated with high cheekbones, thin lips, pointed chin, and eyes that are mildly slanted.
The visitors themselves are often on absurd missions. They have reportedly posed as salesmen, telephone repairmen or representatives from official or unofficial organizations. Their mode of transportation is usually large and expensive cars — Buick’s or Lincolns, sometimes Cadillac’s, all black, of course.
I might note at this point that their physical appearance also has included beings that have pale-greyish skin, and that some of them have been seen to have blond hair, yet they wear the clothing and drive the cars previously described.
Their cars often operate with the headlights off, but ghostly purple or greenish glows illuminate the interior. Unusual insignia have been seen emblazoned on the doors and the license plates are always unidentifiable or untraceable.
The fabric of their clothes has been described as strangely “shiny” or thin, but not silky — almost as if they have been cut from a new type of fabric.
Their often mechanical behavior has caused them to be described by some as being like robots or androids (think back to the Dulce lab).
A lot of descriptions of some of these “folks” are pretty bizarre. A businessman’s family in Wildwood, New Jersey, was visited by an unusually large man whose pants legs hiked up when he sat down, revealing a green wire grafted onto his skin and running up his leg.
There are other cases of MIB appearing on the other side of a wet, muddy field after a heavy rain, but having no mud whatever on their brightly shined shoes and in the bitter cold, out of nowhere, wearing only a thin coat. Their shoes and wallets all seem new and hardly broken in.
They are not alone. They seem to have faceless conspirators in the nation’s post offices and phone companies. Researchers and witnesses often report their mail going astray at an unusually high rate and being bothered by bizarre phone calls where they are spoken to by metallic, unhuman-sounding voices.
Unusual noises on the phone, intensifying whenever UFOs are mentioned, and voices breaking in on conversations, have all led many people to suspect that their phones are being tapped.
One can’t discuss the MIB for long without mentioning the name of John A. Keel, an author who has written much about them. Keel has done more than any other writer to publicize this bizarre aspect of the UFO situation. Keel suggests that the UFO are part of the environment itself and come from another time-space continua; that most of the UFO phenomena is psychic and psychological rather than physical. Well, I personally would not define it that way, although those two components are certainly deeply involved in what’s going on.
The first noted appearance of the MIB was in 1947, at the scene of the Maury Island incident, where some debris was ejected from a disk, and subsequently recovered by officials, who loaded them on an Army bomber which crashed on takeoff.
To illustrate a little how bizarre some of the incidents are regarding the MIB, I have assembled a short list of some of the more interesting factors in some cases:
An ex-Air Force man is gassed and interrogated by MIB after he has learned classified NASA secrets. Close-up photos of UFOs were seized from a teenager who is also directly threatened by MIB.
MIB sighted in the lobby of the U.S. State Department leave a mysterious artifact.
MIB poses as Air Force officers to silence witnesses.
MIB tries to buy before-hours Coke and sings to birds in trees.
MIB disintegrates a coin in a witness’s hand and tells him that his heart will do the same if he talks.
Men In Black – Summary
What an interesting, intriguing and eclectic history this MIB phenomenon carries with it. Military men being drugged, and yet at other times MIB posing as military personnel. Described as possible oriental in feature “high cheekbones, big almond eyes, pale toned skin” often hairless, the MIB are accounted appearing to those having had singular lonely ufotic experiences.
Their almost surreal like appearances and actions, sometimes threatening, sometimes not; Their singular knowledge that only those they visit could have been privy to regarding an Extraterrestrial event experienced earlier; their relationship to a numerous and wide variety of paranormal events’ .UFO sightings, actual extraterrestrial visitations with lone humans, abductions or attempted abductions, their threats to prevent attempts of contactees to communicate knowledge of their experiences to the wider world; at the very least, this all leads one to consider an attempt at a controlled agenda.
Other considerations might be: commonality of human delusion to inter-dimensional activities that humanity is only just beginning to experience; an extraterrestrial controlled activity itself, with its own agenda; the activities of a government within a government, operating beyond the laws of society, alone or in conjunction with extraterrestrial forces to control human knowledge. There are numerous other possibilities, all of which contain some elements and mixes of the above scenarios.
The open mind must, at least, consider all the fore mentioned. But regardless of whatever truths that lay behind the MIB experience, one can accurately say that this phenomenon has developed into mythology all it’s own. It is now up to humanity to raise its level of consciousness to a point where this mythology will be understood for the reality it represents.