The Paranoid Style Podcast
The Paranoid Style Podcast
Men In Black
Welcome to the Paranoid Style Podcast! On this episode we make this look good! It's the Men In Black! Far from the lovable "will they-won't they" tension of the popular film starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, these things are actually terrifying and strange. From Bender to Barker, Homburg hats to NICAP's, Flatwoods to Point Pleasant. We insist that you cease your investigations into UFO's and come listen to us instead!
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Music used in this episode is from: Purple Planet Royalty Free Music and sound effects courtesy of https://soundbible.com/.
Opening theme music provided by Tony Molina. You can hear more of his music at https://tonymolina650.bandcamp.com/
ARK: Hey, Sister!
CCK:
ARK: Tell me what you know about the Men In Black.
CCK: They make this look good!
ARK: The real men in black are pretty far removed from the affable “will-they-won’t-they” vibe of the popular film starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.
CCK: Will they? Won’t they? What film were you watching? But you’re correct… there are no catchy theme songs or adorable talking dogs in these stories. They actually come across more as late-night cheese induced nightmares.
ARK: Are we talking brie or a sharp cheddar nightmare?
CCK: More like stilton!
ARK: Whoa…
CCK: First, I want to acknowledge our primary source for today’s episode, a book entitled “The Real Men in Black” by Nick Redfern. So, to get started, let’s get an elementary school level insight into the men in black, although, as we go on, you’ll definitely find that it’s far more complex and strange than the watered-down explanation I’m about to give. Basically, it starts with a UFO sighting or experience, or UFO research…
ARK: Oh, great!
CCK: No, don’t worry, this is real research.
ARK: Whew!
CCK: The men in black or MIB’s generally travel in groups of two or three, they tend to wear black suits, black ties, and often black hats, like the fedora or the Homburg style hat. They show up unannounced and warn people to give up their UFO research or to stop sharing stories of their UFO experiences. They may or may not be working for some secret government agency and they may or may not be human.
ARK: So vague, but I get it… I kinda feel like it’s harder to explain MIB’s without context, so the let’s get contextual. And it starts with a man named Albert Bender. Albert Bender was definitely a man after my cold, dead heart, as he was fascinated by all things freaky. Bender’s fascination with the unexplained developed after the strange disappearance of a squadron of Avenger-class aircraft, known as Flight 19, off the coast of Florida in 1945, followed the same day by the disappearance of the plane sent out to search for Flight 19, which would become an integral part of the Bermuda Triangle legend. But, the draw to the paranormal may have also been a family trait, as there were several tales in his family of ancestral witchcraft practitioners, a cousin that was visited by a woman in black, and another relative that died of a brain hemorrhage after being haunted by a cemetery ghost. But despite the family drama or maybe because of it, Bender loved gothic horror literature, he was into studying the occult, black magic, and witchcraft. And he even fashioned his attic bedroom into a makeshift house of horrors with grotesque creatures painted on the walls, rubber bats and spiders ready to spring from the ceiling on unsuspecting guests, and haunted house sound effects album on the record player. Bender had even toyed with the idea of turning his attic into a scare-attraction for which he could charge an entry fee.
CCK: That attic bedroom, which Albert lovingly referred to as Bender’s Chamber of Horrors, was in a house that he shared with his stepfather. Albert was extremely meticulous about his living space and could tell if something had been moved even a little bit. It was in this room that Albert spent most of his time looking through his telescope, reading about the paranormal and especially ingesting anything UFO related. His obsession with UFOs began after the Kenneth Arnold sighting in 1947, and by 1952, Albert had established possibly the first worldwide network of UFO investigators called the International Flying Saucer Bureau or IFSB. The IFSB even began publishing a quarterly journal called, Space Review. The IFSB really took off; people from all over the world were eager to become members and Albert was receiving letters of inquiry by the sack full. However, just a few months after the IFSB had begun, Albert began to experience strange occurrences.
ARK: The horrible events began on the evening of July 30, 1952, with an anonymous phone call to the Bender household. When Albert Bender answered the phone, there was no response, but Albert got the impression that there was someone on the other side of the line, just listening in silence. Suddenly, Albert felt ill; his head began to spin and throb and he was forced to take to his bed. A few days later and on the mend from the mysterious phone call, Albert decided to catch the newest science fiction film at the local cinema. As he walked home from the late night film, he was convinced that he was being followed. When he finally made it home, his stepfather was already asleep, Albert walked upstairs to his room, but as he approached his room, he noticed an eerie glow coming from the gap beneath the door. Albert flung the door open and hovering in the middle of his room was a bright, shimmering object. Albert turned the light on at which point the strange object disappeared. Albert’s eyes felt irritated and the whole room smelled of sulfur, but even more upsetting was that Albert could tell that his IFSB files had been tampered with.
CCK: As the year went on, the eerie occurrences surrounding Bender started increasing. And in November 1952, he had one of his most unsettling encounters, once again at this local movie theater watching the latest Sci-Fi flick. Bender was in a mostly empty theater when he started to get a feeling of dread and foreboding, a feeling that he was being watched. Bender glances out of the side of his eyes and sees a figure, well-dressed in dark clothing, at the end of the row of theater seats, seemingly materialized out of thin air, staring at him. But his eyes are not human. Bender described the encounter as follows:
ALBERT BENDER: I took a quick glance without turning my head, and saw a man sitting there; then the eyes drew my attention. I turned my head facing him and found myself looking straight into two strange eyes, like little flashlight bulbs lighted up on a dark face. The eyes seemed to burn right into me . . . I felt a spinning in my head and the movie screen blurred. I blinked my eyes several times then closed them for a few seconds. When I opened them the man was gone, yet I heard no movement. Then glancing at the seat to the left of mine, I found him there, still looking at me with those eyes! Could I be mistaken in thinking he had been on the right of me? I couldn't be wrong! Was I losing my mind? The terrible shining eyes deliberately tried to meet mine and hold them in their stare, but I quickly arose and moved to another part of the theater.”
CCK: Now sitting in a different seat, Bender goes back to his movie, but no more than 10 minutes later, the feeling of his head spinning, and nausea returns and now the man, this thing, is sitting directly behind him. Bender flees the theater. Per his account he went and notified the theater manager, who accompanied Bender back into the auditorium with a flashlight to look for the man, but he is nowhere to be found. Bender tries in vain for a few more minutes to watch the film, but ultimately decides to leave. While walking home he begins to feel the prickling at the back of his neck, and as he turns, he is once again staring into the horrible, glowing flashlight eyes. Bender runs the rest of the way back to his house.
ARK: And the weirdness continues. For the next few months, Bender continues to experience migraines, dizzy spells, the occasional manifestation of dark-suited entities, poltergeist activity and the sulfur smells in his attic. And you would think that this constant mental torment would break Bender’s will, but instead, he doubles down on his efforts to discover the truth. Albert Bender hatches a plan and outlines it for the readers of Space Review. The plan was to get as many people as possible to engage in a simultaneous thought projection to try to connect with alien life. Bender included the message that was to be memorized and on March 15, 1953, at 6pm Eastern Standard time, the message should be sent out. It would be known as World Contact Day, or “C-Day” as Bender and the IFSB preferred to call it and the telepathic message was as follows:
MESSAGE: "Calling occupants of interplanetary craft! Calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet EARTH. We of IFSB wish to make contact with you. We are your friends, and would like you to make an appearance here on EARTH. Your presence before us will be welcomed with the utmost friendship. We will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of EARTH. Please come in peace and help us in our EARTHLY problems. Give us some sign that you have received our message. Be responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality. Let us hear from you. We are your friends."
CCK: It is unknown what if any results other members of the IFSB experienced on C-Day, but Albert Bender would later give his account of that night in his book, “Flying Saucers and the Three Men”. After repeating his telepathic message three times, he began to feel very cold, and his head began to ache and as before his nostrils were filled with the scent of burning sulfur. It was then that Bender believes he partly lost consciousness and the room around him seemed to fade away… In his own words:
ALBERT BENDER: Then small blue lights seemed to swim through my brain, and they seemed to blink like the flashing light of an ambulance. I seemed to be floating on a cloud in the middle of space, with a strange feeling of weightlessness controlling my entire anatomy. A throbbing pain developed in my temples, and they felt as if they might burst. The parts of my forehead directly over my eyes seemed to be puffed up. I felt cold, very cold, as if I were lying naked on a floating piece of ice in the Antarctic Ocean. I opened my eyes and to my amazement I seemed to be floating above my bed but looking down upon it where I imagined I could see my own body lying there! It was as if my soul had left my body and I was hovering above it about three feet in mid-air. Suddenly I could hear a voice, which permeated me but, in some way, did not seem to be an audible sound. The voice seemed to come from the room in front of me which remained pitch dark.
THE VOICE: We have been watching you and your activities. Please be advised to discontinue delving into the mysteries of the universe. We will make an appearance if you disobey.
ALBERT BENDER: I replied in words, though my lips did not move: 'Why aren't you friendly to us, as we do not mean to do any harm to you?'
THE VOICE: We have a Special assignment and must not be disturbed by your people. We are among you and know your every move, so please be advised we are here on your Earth.
ALBERT BENDER: With this the voice faded away, but I could sense that something was watching me. My body seemed to drop suddenly, and I once again regained my senses and realized I was on my bed. The room was filled with yellow mist. Not far from my bed was a shadow, resembling that of a man; but as I made a move to rise from the bed it disappeared. The yellow mist was gradually fading, and my room was becoming normal.
CCK: As Albert Bender returned to a normal state of consciousness, his head was pounding, he felt sick and possibly like he was going mad. He realized that only five minutes had elapsed, his radio had been turned on inexplicably, and the smell of sulfur still lingered in his room.
ARK: And that is why we still celebrate World Contact Day every March 15th! No, but seriously, initially, I think Bender was still unswayed by his odd encounter because in the April issue of Space Review, Bender promised his fellow IFSB members that the July issue would contain, quote “a startling revelation”; alas, July came and went with no startling revelations from Bender and then he had one final visit from the Men in Black… Bender had been out and when he returned home he found his room stinking of sulfur, once again his radio was on and not dialed in to any particular station, just static sounds filled the room which was so hot that Bender was surprised that the room hadn’t caught on fire. As he was getting ready for bed, his head was suddenly filled with the blue swirling lights, like he experienced during his C-Day encounter, he fell back onto his bed and then he realized he was not alone in the room. There were three shadowy figures, hovering about a foot off the ground. They were dressed in all black, even black, leather gloves covering their hands and wore Homburg hats, their faces were indiscernible under the brims of the hats, but their eyes glowed. And they telepathically delivered the following message to Bender:
MIB: You have dedicated yourself to the solution of the strange problem of unidentified objects in your atmosphere. Your interest is deep and sincere, and you have devoted many hours to it. We also know that such interest and determination might lead to something that could harm you.
ARK: And then they transported Albert Bender to their secret hollow earth lair deep in Antarctica.
CCK: Talk about burying the lead…
ARK: The MIB’s continued their story. They came from a planet many, many lightyears away from our galaxy and that they are older than our galaxy as well. The creature’s primary reason for visiting Earth was to extract a chemical from our sea water. And they also admitted that they would kidnap and murder Earth people to use their bodies as disguises. One of their main reasons for needing human suits was part of the revelation that they have quote "some of our people stationed in your so-called Pentagon while we are visiting your planet."
CCK: Well, that tracks.
ARK: They once again advised Bender that he would be best served by not revealing any of this information to anyone, and even if he did, he would never be believed, but if he still insisted on continuing down this path, he would be killed. And then to further drive the point home, one of the creatures dropped its Edgar suit, I mean its human suit, and revealed his true form… which was remarkably similar to that of the Flatwoods Monster!!! DUH! DUH! DUH!
CCK: Uh-huh. And now it’s time for Clarification Corner with CCK. The Flatwoods Monster, or also sometimes referred to as the Braxton County Monster, was an entity first sighted in the town of Flatwood in the County of Braxton in West Virginia. On September 12, 1952, two teenage brothers, Ed and Fred May and their friend, Tommy, witnessed a strange light shoot across the sky and land on the property of one of the local farmers. The three boys, as well as four other young boys that had been playing nearby went to tell Ed and Fred’s mother Kathleen. Kathleen May agreed to accompany all the children to where they saw the object crash down. As they approached a hill overlooking where this object had landed, they could see a red, pulsating light on top of a downed craft, and they could hear a machine-like whine in the air. One of the boys turned his flashlight away from the craft and illuminated a man-like figure, but it was 10 – 12 feet tall. It appeared to be “surrounded by a pointed hood-like shape” that Mrs. May would later liken to the Ace of Spades in a deck of playing cards. The figure had a round, red face and eyes that glowed a greenish-orange color and small, claw-like hands. The creature made a hissing sound and started to glide in the direction of the on-lookers. All the witnesses immediately turned and began to run away. They would later note that as they made their retreat from the strange creature, they noticed a pungent mist spreading over the land which made them feel nauseated. Not too long after, the sheriff and deputy arrived to investigate but found no evidence of any creature or downed aircraft. It would later be concluded by some investigators that the bright object in the sky was a meteor and the creature nothing more than a barn owl perched in a tree, and that the boy’s flashlight caused shadows behind the owl making it appear larger than it was. And this has been Clarification Corner with CCK.
ARK: When Albert Bender came to, he was back laying in his own bed with the familiar ache in his head, there was a yellow mist gradually fading from the room and that pungent smell. Bender realized that thirty minutes had passed since he first laid down. And just a couple of months later, in the October 1953 edition of Space Review Albert Bender announced that he would be shutting down the International Flying Saucer Bureau and stepping away from UFO research for good. As for his reasons behind disbanding the IFSB and that shocking revelation that he never shared, he left the following parting words to his readers: “We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but because of the nature of the information we are sorry that we have been advised in the negative. We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious.”
CCK: One notable member of the IFSB that continued his interest and study into UFO’s was author Gray Barker. Barker joined the IFSB in 1953 and just a few years later, Barker would write his own account of the Albert Bender mystery in a book entitled, “They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers”. While Barker never explicitly states that Bender’s men in black were government agents, it’s implied that Bender could have been visited by some stone-faced government agent types and due to stress, anxiety, mental illness and/or possibly even epilepsy the story morphed into strange creatures taking him to Antarctica. Also, the idea that the government may have been checking in on Albert Bender is not that far out of the realm of possibility, since at that time it is a documented fact that the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was requesting copies of books written about UFO’s and the CIA had formed the Robertson Panel, which was a group that was brought together specifically to investigate the impact on national security that UFO investigative groups might have on the country and to clandestinely watch these group to make sure they were not being infiltrated by any individuals that may try to use the groups for nefarious purposes.
ARK: Gray Barker had another good reason to believe Bender’s MIB story could have just been a couple of G-Men. Because Barker had also had a mysterious visit one night by a man claiming to be an FBI agent and asking questions about the IFSB. A few weeks earlier, Albert Bender had business cards made for the IFSB, including special cards that listed Gray Barker as Chief Investigator for the IFSB. When the FBI agent turned up on Barker’s front step, he had one of the business cards in his possession and stated that the card had been taken off a man from Florida that was brought into the nearby St. Mary’s hospital after suffering an epileptic fit. Barker told the agent that he had given a handful of cards out to close friends, but they all still had them in their possession and that he did not know who this man from Florida could be. This seemed to be good enough for the FBI agent and he left.
CCK: Ok, it is a little hard to reconcile these two stories. On the Albert Bender side, the story is high strangeness to the highest and strangeness degree; however, there were a few fellow IFSB members that remember Bender’s first telling of the story being a little more mundane, still odd, but no secret Antarctica bases. On the Gray Barker side, if true, this account does pretty much sound like a run-of-the-mill visit from an FBI agent that wants to make an assessment of the Chief Investigator for the IFSB, possibly with a bogus Florida-Man story as an in.
ARK: And like you said, we know that the FBI was interested in these UFO research groups. In November 1958, a citizen of Oklahoma City, wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, to voice their concerns about the FBI’s alleged treatment of UFO researchers as he had read about in certain UFO periodicals. J. Edgar Hoover responded quickly that he would be sending a Special Agent out of their Oklahoma City Office to contact the concerned citizen. And the instructions from Hoover to the Oklahoma City branch of the FBI was as follows: “An agent of your office should contact [the letter writer] immediately and secure copies of or information concerning the periodicals described”.
CCK: And the FBI was also interested in the MIB’s themselves, as we’ll see in this next tale. UFO investigator Harold Wilkin’s received an anonymous letter describing the following events, and Wilkin’s believed the letter to be authentic and reliable. As did the editors of Mystic magazine that published the account in their August 1954 issue. The informant’s story took place in the office of a Los Angeles based attorney that specialized in finding missing persons. In January 1953, there were suddenly two strange men that had been given prestigious positions in the company, without anyone really knowing why or who these people were, besides the director of the company, who was staying particularly silent on the subject. The men were described as tall, no less than 6 ½ feet, but extremely thin, almost emaciated. They were very pale, with skin so white that it seemed to have a bluish tint to it. Their eyes were large and very dark, almost completely black and they were always dressed in the now-familiar black clothing. The informant claimed that these two men did not appear to have any joints in their wrists or hands. And they seemingly possessed remarkable strength, as one story goes, one of the strange men leaned on top of a metal filing cabinet and with just his hand, he managed to make a half-inch dent in the top of the cabinet. Eventually, concerned about who these guys were, one of the employees at the attorney’s office reported this to the FBI. Two G-men were dispatched to investigate; however, the strange, tall men in black, were already gone.
ARK: But allegedly, the FBI did confiscate the filing cabinet and somehow this person that wrote the letter learned that the FBI’s metallurgy division determined that it would have taken 1200 pounds of force or more to produce those indentations in the cabinet. J. Edgar Hoover was contacted about that story as it appeared in the Mystic Magazine and what he had to say about it was “I would like to advise you that the article you mentioned is entirely incorrect with reference to the FBI, and there is no information on the matter which I can give you”.
CCK: As we move out of the 1950’s and in the 1960’s, we get one of the most amazing tales of high strangeness that still endures to this very day, and I must admit, I was a little shocked to learn how big a part the men in black play in this legend. That is the legend of the Mothman, most famously chronicled in the book The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel.
ARK: The Mothman was a creature that haunted the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia beginning in November 1966 and whose presence may have been a harbinger of death and destruction. The first sighting of Mothman was by five gravediggers working in a cemetery in the town of Clendenin. They saw what they described as a brown, human-shaped, winged beast rise from out of a thicket of trees and fly away into the distance. Three days later, the same creature would be seen by two young, couples that were out cruising by the West Virginia Ordnance Works, which was an abandoned explosives factory, situated just a few miles north of the town of Point Pleasant. The four people were driving around the old factory when they saw two red lights pointing in their direction from the shadows. They were not red lights however, they were the glowing red eyes of a large creature, possibly 6 ½ to 7 feet tall as one of the witnesses would later attest and with giant wings. The young couples in the car immediately sped away, but the creature followed them. Shadowing their car all the way until they reached the Point Pleasant city limits. Once back in the town they went straight to the sheriff’s office to report what had happened. They told their story to deputy Millard Halstead, who knew all four of these people and had no reason to think they would be making this story up. Halstead did a search of the area, but did not find anything.
CCK: And those are just two of the strange encounters with the Mothman; over the weeks and months that followed there were several more reports of sightings of the beast, but it was all overshadowed by the event that happened on December 15, 1967. On that day, the Point Pleasant’s Silver Bridge that spanned the Ohio River and connected Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, suddenly collapsed into the river, killing 46 people. After this tragedy, the Mothman encounters stopped, and although there was an earthbound explanation for the collapse, a flaw in a single eye-bar in a suspension chain, many Point Pleasant citizens think the disaster was directly linked with the presence of Mothman.
ARK: And it was during this two-month period between the first Mothman sighting and the disaster on the Silver Bridge, that the Men in Black were in full force in West Virginia, and specifically, they seemed particularly interested in one journalist. A woman name Mary Hyre, a Point Pleasant correspondent for the Messenger newspaper. Her first strange visitor was short, less than 5 feet tall, and he wore his hair in a bowl cut, with dark, hypnotic eyes that Mary claimed never blinked, and thick soles on his shoes. The man seemed completely entranced by Hyre’s ballpoint pen and when Hyre told him he could keep it, he let out an inhuman cackle and ran out of the door.
CCK: I mean… I love a good pen, so this does not seem weird to me.
ARK: Another encounter Mary Hyre had was with a pair of MIB. They looked like identical twins, and were dressed similarly in black overcoats. They showed up one evening at the newspaper office and began making rather awkward conversation of the flying saucer variety. One of the MIB’s stated that there had recently been a lot of UFO activity in the area, and Hyre agreed. And then the man started in with a barrage of questions for Hyre: “Had anyone asked Hyre not to publish the details of the UFO activity? What would her response be is someone did warn her not to print anymore stories about UFO’s or Mothman sightings?” To which Hyre’s reply was “I’d tell them to go to hell.” After uttering this forthright statement, she turned her head for just a moment and when she looked back, the men were gone.
CCK: And at this time in Point Pleasant, Mary Hyre was not the only person having these strange encounters with these odd men. Several of the Mothman witnesses reported having encounters with the MIB’s. One of the witnesses described her encounter as follows: "The MIB wore black suits, black hats, and sunglasses. They drove black cars -Cadillacs, I think. ... They looked like human beings, but their skin was somewhat transparent. You could see the veins in their hands very clearly. Their fingers were longer than a normal person's fingers, as well. Daddy shook hands with them, and he said they were awkward in shaking hands. They seemed to not know what to do or how to shake hands." Another witness said that while she and her daughter were driving they were almost run off the road by a strange man all in black with what looked like a bushy, costume store wig on his head. Another couple was visited by a man in black that came with a tape recorder but seemed completely unfamiliar with how to thread or operate it. Around this time, the Mothman witnesses who were being questioned by these strange men, were no longer being asked questions about UFO’s or Mothman and now the MIB’s seemed to be focusing all their inquiries on people like Mary Hyre and the UFO researcher John Keel.
ARK: These examples seem more in line with Albert Bender’s version of the MIB’s and their otherworldliness. And this next encounter is even better and by far, my most favorite MIB encounter that I have ever heard. This is Dr. Herbert Hopkins’ account. Dr. Hopkins was a general practitioner living in Orchard Beach, Maine. Dr. Hopkins was working with a patient named David Stephens, who claimed to be an alien abductee. In October 1975 David experienced missing time after seeing anomalous aerial lights while driving. Dr. Hopkins, who had experience in the field of hypnosis, had been recently doing regression therapy work with David. On the evening of September 11, 1976, Hopkins was home alone when the telephone rang. When he picked up the phone, the person on the other end said they were a member of the New Jersey UFO Research Organization, and they wished to speak to Hopkins regarding David’s case. For some reason that Hopkins could not later explain, he agreed to talk to this man about David’s case and invited him over to the house, without even asking for the man’s name or clarifying how they got his information. Dr. Hopkins hung up the phone and went to go turn on the light outside his front door only to find his visitor was already there, already making his way up the front stairs to the door. Keep in mind this is way before cell phones were a thing. Hopkins also noted that there was no car parked in sight and no public payphone anywhere near his home. Hopkins opened the door for the man anyway and let him right in, still not securing a name, but perhaps Hopkins was just in shock at the odd appearance of his visitor. The man was extremely thin, his black suit appeared too large for him and hung off his frame, on his hands he wore grey, suede gloves. His skin was deathly white and when he removed his black homburg, his head was completely bald and smooth, it did not even appear that it was shaven, the man also lacked eyebrows and eyelashes. But, all of this strangeness paled in comparison to the man’s lips. They were thin, they looked more like a slit just cut into the man’s face and they were bright red, especially in contrast with his bone-white skin. The Man in Black immediately started in with questions about the patient, David Stephens, and his alien-abduction experience. Once he started speaking, Hopkins was starting to notice even more strange characteristics about the man. He had no detectable accent, and spoke in an unemotional and monotone voice. Hopkins noted that he seemed robotic in both physical appearance and his mannerisms. As Hopkins started to speak, the Man in Black started tapping the back of his fingers against his lips and that is when Hopkins noticed that the red from the man’s lips was actually transferring onto the grey gloves; the man in black was wearing lipstick, perhaps a crude attempt at making his face appear more human-like.
CCK: The man in black told Hopkins that he, Hopkins, had two coins in the left pocket of his pants; this was true. The man in black told Hopkins to take one of the coins and hold it in the palm of his open hand, which Hopkins did. The mysterious guest then instructed Hopkins to keep his eyes on the coin. Hopkins watched as the silver coin began to get blurry and turn blue and then it changed from it’s solid metallic form into vapor and then faded into nothingness. The man in black asked Dr. Hopkins if he knew of Barney Hill. Dr. Hopkins gave only the vaguest response, that he knew that Barney Hill, along with this wife Betty, had claimed to have been abducted by aliens and that Mr. Hill had recently died. The man in black, in a not-so-subtle threat, advised the doctor that what he just did to the coin was the same thing he did to Barney Hill’s heart. And if Dr. Hopkins did not immediately destroy all his notes regarding the David Stephens affair, then the same fate would befall him.
ARK: Of course, Barney Hill actually died of a cerebral hemorrhage but, maybe like the lipstick, this was the Man in Black’s attempt at drama. Suddenly, the man in black’s speech began to get slower and when he stood, he seemed very unsteady on his feet, making his way to the door in a drunken stagger. The man in black made his way down the stairs, gripping on to the railing and said that his energy was running low. Hopkins stood in his doorway watching as the man in black made his way slowly and cautiously down the stairs and towards a very bright light that was in his driveway, the light was so bright that Hopkins could not tell what was parked there. He closed the door and ran to the kitchen window to get a better view, but in the few seconds it took for him to reach the kitchen, the man in black and the light were gone.
CCK: The lipstick and the drama paid off in spades, because by the time Hopkins’ wife and children returned home after seeing a movie, Hopkins was in a near-panic and was demagnetizing all the audio tapes from the interviews he did with David Stephens. And while I’m sure Hopkins hoped that destroying that evidence would be enough, it was not. For a week after that strange visit, Hopkins was plagued by mysterious phone calls to his home and recurring nightmares about the man in black. The stories go on and on. And there are some striking similarities between the stories, but there is still a burning question: What are the men in black?
ARK: You wanna start with the mundane and work our way up to freaky?
CCK: Save the freakiest for last.
ARK: Ok. It could’ve all just started as the hallucinations of a sick man. That’s not to say there wasn’t some credence or truth to Albert Bender’s experiences. It is highly probable that Bender may have been investigated, interrogated, and possibly even intimidated by three men in suits over his interest in UFO studies. But, a lot of people draw the line at the way the story was expanded to include a secret base in Antarctica, or the three hot alien babes that stripped him of his clothes and massaged him with a skin-warming, cancer-fighting space lotion. While this all just could have been the fantasies of a lonely, obsessive-compulsive, hypochondriac living in his step-dad’s attic, there is also a theory that Nick Redfern outlines in his book, The Real Men in Black. Those symptoms that Albert Bender was plagued with upon his first encounters with the MIB’s… headaches, dizziness, light-headedness, and the smell of sulfur, could all be symptoms of epilepsy, a condition that causes seizures. Sometimes those seizures can result in hallucinations, confusion and fear, and strong, imaginary odors, and those affected by such seizures often describe the mysterious odors as resembling burning rubber and sulfur. And as for the alleged poltergeist activity that Bender experienced, amazingly, that may also be linked to epilepsy. In 1958, a parapsychologist named William Roll introduced the term recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, or RSPK. Roll believed that repeated neuronal discharges, such as those that result in epileptic symptoms, might also be able to cause RSPK, which would manifest itself as poltergeist activity near the person experiencing these symptoms.
CCK: So, if the men in black were initially a creation of an overly creative and overactive brain, then Gray Barker and John Keel, both writers who can be credited with the men in black mythos as it is still perceived today were what…? Men who never let the facts get in the way of a good story, maybe?
ARK: Well, that brings us to possible explanation number two… it was all just an elaborate hoax. Bender and Barker both were science fiction aficionados, they were both raised on monster movies and gothic literature, as for John Keel, he was a campy writer, the kind of sensationalism you’d find in men’s magazines of the time. But, that’s not to say if it was a hoax, that it was a nefarious one, it could be seen more as the telling of folk tales… there are kernels of truth, there is a lesson to be gleaned, but it’s told in a fantastical way in order to hold the audience.
CCK: Or maybe the men in black are just government agents.
ARK: Simple, yet intriguing. Tell me more.
CCK: William Moore, a writer and UFO researcher, believes that some men in black were working for the government, specifically from the U.S. Air Force Intelligence. But, these weren’t just your run-of-the-mill G-men. These were agents that created a character, wore disguises and even used other forms of trickery in their interrogation of witnesses, perhaps to frighten, confuse, and disarm the witness. Moore believes this group has its origins in something known as the 1127th Field Activities Group, which was a unit made up of safe-crackers, cat burglars, lock-pickers, impersonators, and masters of deception, basically the kind of resume you’d want your trickster men in black to have.
ARK: Or maybe, they are not part of a government agency, but they want you to think that they are. So, let’s talk NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. This was a group of UFO researchers that was established in 1956. And since its inception, it actually has been considered one of the most well-respected UFO research groups in the United States, probably due a lot to its prestigious members, like their founder, a physicist named Thomas Townsend Brown and board of governors, which included Vice Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, who was the first head of the CIA, and Rear Admiral Delmer S. Fahrney, chief of the U.S. Navy’s guided-missile project. But, there are some people that believe that NICAP investigators were sometimes a little too tenacious with their handling of witnesses at times.
CCK: Yeah, and I must admit, even the name has an official air to it… the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, I bet there were plenty of times when a witness is approached by one of these guys flashing a badge and telling witnesses to stop talking about their experiences and you feel like you’re being intimidated by a government goon or a man in black. But for what end?
ARK: Territorialism. For some reason, it seems to me that especially in the UFO research field, there is this refusal to work together or to share resources. A NICAP member shows up, warns a witness not too speak to anyone else, confiscates their photos or evidence and now its their case and they’ll be the only ones to have a say in it either way.
CCK: All of that makes a lot of sense… however, it doesn’t explain that so many of these encounters involve beings that seem to exist in this uncanny valley. They don’t just act odd, they also look odd as well. So, perhaps MIB’s are aliens! The trench coat collar popped up and the hat pulled down low, some wraparound sunglasses and working primarily at night, keeping to the shadows can hide a multitude of oddities that might out these creatures as not quite human.
ARK: And it was Albert Bender’s narrative that these aliens admitted to him that they can wear human suits and that these disguises helped them infiltrate high stations in the American government. But, speaking of Albert Bender again, maybe he did more than just breathe life into a great, enduring story… maybe he also created something else… a tulpa.
CCK: Little Spanish foods?
ARK: No, that’s tapas… A tulpa… In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition it is the physical manifestation of one of Buddha’s three bodies, an emanation body. But as the knowledge was passed around and then adopted by 20th century theosophists, it came to mean a thought-form, or basically, an entity or being that is conjured up solely from the imagination of the conjurer. But, once this entity is in the physical world, it becomes part of reality, behaving and acting as it will, without any additional input from the imagination that initially conjured it.
CCK: Let me see if I have this straight. One day Albert Bender thinks he sees a freaky-deaky guy watching him the movie theater. This scares him so profoundly that he can’t stop thinking about it, so then he starts seeing them everywhere. Enter Gray Barker who takes this concept that Albert Bender had of men in black and he gives them even more motivation and substance via his writing which is then read by several other people who now also believe in these things known as men in black and that belief and acceptance of these thoughtforms allows them to actually manifest in reality.
ARK: Correct.
CCK: And then to maintain that foothold in our reality, they need people to a. keep believing in them and b. fear them, much like Bender feared them at the start.
ARK: Yes.
CCK: Which is why they tend to seek out people that have already had a frightening experience and frighten them even more to feed off their terror. Which is why some place like Point Pleasant in the 1960’s was perfect feeding grounds for the MIB’s because there was such heightened emotion.
ARK: Exactly!
CCK: Wow. It’s like the nightmare Tinker Bell, only instead of believing and claps, its believing and blood curdling screams that makes the tulpas real. There is another possibility…
ARK: Robots? Demons? Future people sent back in time to correct deviations in the timeline, aka time crimes?
CCK: No. Maybe they’re Galaxy defenders?!
ARK: Whoa! Whoa! Let’s not get crazy with this… ARK: Hey, Sister!
CCK:
ARK: Tell me what you know about the Men In Black.
CCK: They make this look good!
ARK: The real men in black are pretty far removed from the affable “will-they-won’t-they” vibe of the popular film starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.
CCK: Will they? Won’t they? What film were you watching? But you’re correct… there are no catchy theme songs or adorable talking dogs in these stories. They actually come across more as late-night cheese induced nightmares.
ARK: Are we talking brie or a sharp cheddar nightmare?
CCK: More like stilton!
ARK: Whoa…
CCK: First, I want to acknowledge our primary source for today’s episode, a book entitled “The Real Men in Black” by Nick Redfern. So, to get started, let’s get an elementary school level insight into the men in black, although, as we go on, you’ll definitely find that it’s far more complex and strange than the watered-down explanation I’m about to give. Basically, it starts with a UFO sighting or experience, or UFO research…
ARK: Oh, great!
CCK: No, don’t worry, this is real research.
ARK: Whew!
CCK: The men in black or MIB’s generally travel in groups of two or three, they tend to wear black suits, black ties, and often black hats, like the fedora or the Homburg style hat. They show up unannounced and warn people to give up their UFO research or to stop sharing stories of their UFO experiences. They may or may not be working for some secret government agency and they may or may not be human.
ARK: So vague, but I get it… I kinda feel like it’s harder to explain MIB’s without context, so the let’s get contextual. And it starts with a man named Albert Bender. Albert Bender was definitely a man after my cold, dead heart, as he was fascinated by all things freaky. Bender’s fascination with the unexplained developed after the strange disappearance of a squadron of Avenger-class aircraft, known as Flight 19, off the coast of Florida in 1945, followed the same day by the disappearance of the plane sent out to search for Flight 19, which would become an integral part of the Bermuda Triangle legend. But, the draw to the paranormal may have also been a family trait, as there were several tales in his family of ancestral witchcraft practitioners, a cousin that was visited by a woman in black, and another relative that died of a brain hemorrhage after being haunted by a cemetery ghost. But despite the family drama or maybe because of it, Bender loved gothic horror literature, he was into studying the occult, black magic, and witchcraft. And he even fashioned his attic bedroom into a makeshift house of horrors with grotesque creatures painted on the walls, rubber bats and spiders ready to spring from the ceiling on unsuspecting guests, and haunted house sound effects album on the record player. Bender had even toyed with the idea of turning his attic into a scare-attraction for which he could charge an entry fee.
CCK: That attic bedroom, which Albert lovingly referred to as Bender’s Chamber of Horrors, was in a house that he shared with his stepfather. Albert was extremely meticulous about his living space and could tell if something had been moved even a little bit. It was in this room that Albert spent most of his time looking through his telescope, reading about the paranormal and especially ingesting anything UFO related. His obsession with UFOs began after the Kenneth Arnold sighting in 1947, and by 1952, Albert had established possibly the first worldwide network of UFO investigators called the International Flying Saucer Bureau or IFSB. The IFSB even began publishing a quarterly journal called, Space Review. The IFSB really took off; people from all over the world were eager to become members and Albert was receiving letters of inquiry by the sack full. However, just a few months after the IFSB had begun, Albert began to experience strange occurrences.
ARK: The horrible events began on the evening of July 30, 1952, with an anonymous phone call to the Bender household. When Albert Bender answered the phone, there was no response, but Albert got the impression that there was someone on the other side of the line, just listening in silence. Suddenly, Albert felt ill; his head began to spin and throb and he was forced to take to his bed. A few days later and on the mend from the mysterious phone call, Albert decided to catch the newest science fiction film at the local cinema. As he walked home from the late night film, he was convinced that he was being followed. When he finally made it home, his stepfather was already asleep, Albert walked upstairs to his room, but as he approached his room, he noticed an eerie glow coming from the gap beneath the door. Albert flung the door open and hovering in the middle of his room was a bright, shimmering object. Albert turned the light on at which point the strange object disappeared. Albert’s eyes felt irritated and the whole room smelled of sulfur, but even more upsetting was that Albert could tell that his IFSB files had been tampered with.
CCK: As the year went on, the eerie occurrences surrounding Bender started increasing. And in November 1952, he had one of his most unsettling encounters, once again at this local movie theater watching the latest Sci-Fi flick. Bender was in a mostly empty theater when he started to get a feeling of dread and foreboding, a feeling that he was being watched. Bender glances out of the side of his eyes and sees a figure, well-dressed in dark clothing, at the end of the row of theater seats, seemingly materialized out of thin air, staring at him. But his eyes are not human. Bender described the encounter as follows:
ALBERT BENDER: I took a quick glance without turning my head, and saw a man sitting there; then the eyes drew my attention. I turned my head facing him and found myself looking straight into two strange eyes, like little flashlight bulbs lighted up on a dark face. The eyes seemed to burn right into me . . . I felt a spinning in my head and the movie screen blurred. I blinked my eyes several times then closed them for a few seconds. When I opened them the man was gone, yet I heard no movement. Then glancing at the seat to the left of mine, I found him there, still looking at me with those eyes! Could I be mistaken in thinking he had been on the right of me? I couldn't be wrong! Was I losing my mind? The terrible shining eyes deliberately tried to meet mine and hold them in their stare, but I quickly arose and moved to another part of the theater.”
CCK: Now sitting in a different seat, Bender goes back to his movie, but no more than 10 minutes later, the feeling of his head spinning, and nausea returns and now the man, this thing, is sitting directly behind him. Bender flees the theater. Per his account he went and notified the theater manager, who accompanied Bender back into the auditorium with a flashlight to look for the man, but he is nowhere to be found. Bender tries in vain for a few more minutes to watch the film, but ultimately decides to leave. While walking home he begins to feel the prickling at the back of his neck, and as he turns, he is once again staring into the horrible, glowing flashlight eyes. Bender runs the rest of the way back to his house.
ARK: And the weirdness continues. For the next few months, Bender continues to experience migraines, dizzy spells, the occasional manifestation of dark-suited entities, poltergeist activity and the sulfur smells in his attic. And you would think that this constant mental torment would break Bender’s will, but instead, he doubles down on his efforts to discover the truth. Albert Bender hatches a plan and outlines it for the readers of Space Review. The plan was to get as many people as possible to engage in a simultaneous thought projection to try to connect with alien life. Bender included the message that was to be memorized and on March 15, 1953, at 6pm Eastern Standard time, the message should be sent out. It would be known as World Contact Day, or “C-Day” as Bender and the IFSB preferred to call it and the telepathic message was as follows:
MESSAGE: "Calling occupants of interplanetary craft! Calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet EARTH. We of IFSB wish to make contact with you. We are your friends, and would like you to make an appearance here on EARTH. Your presence before us will be welcomed with the utmost friendship. We will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of EARTH. Please come in peace and help us in our EARTHLY problems. Give us some sign that you have received our message. Be responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality. Let us hear from you. We are your friends."
CCK: It is unknown what if any results other members of the IFSB experienced on C-Day, but Albert Bender would later give his account of that night in his book, “Flying Saucers and the Three Men”. After repeating his telepathic message three times, he began to feel very cold, and his head began to ache and as before his nostrils were filled with the scent of burning sulfur. It was then that Bender believes he partly lost consciousness and the room around him seemed to fade away… In his own words:
ALBERT BENDER: Then small blue lights seemed to swim through my brain, and they seemed to blink like the flashing light of an ambulance. I seemed to be floating on a cloud in the middle of space, with a strange feeling of weightlessness controlling my entire anatomy. A throbbing pain developed in my temples, and they felt as if they might burst. The parts of my forehead directly over my eyes seemed to be puffed up. I felt cold, very cold, as if I were lying naked on a floating piece of ice in the Antarctic Ocean. I opened my eyes and to my amazement I seemed to be floating above my bed but looking down upon it where I imagined I could see my own body lying there! It was as if my soul had left my body and I was hovering above it about three feet in mid-air. Suddenly I could hear a voice, which permeated me but, in some way, did not seem to be an audible sound. The voice seemed to come from the room in front of me which remained pitch dark.
THE VOICE: We have been watching you and your activities. Please be advised to discontinue delving into the mysteries of the universe. We will make an appearance if you disobey.
ALBERT BENDER: I replied in words, though my lips did not move: 'Why aren't you friendly to us, as we do not mean to do any harm to you?'
THE VOICE: We have a Special assignment and must not be disturbed by your people. We are among you and know your every move, so please be advised we are here on your Earth.
ALBERT BENDER: With this the voice faded away, but I could sense that something was watching me. My body seemed to drop suddenly, and I once again regained my senses and realized I was on my bed. The room was filled with yellow mist. Not far from my bed was a shadow, resembling that of a man; but as I made a move to rise from the bed it disappeared. The yellow mist was gradually fading, and my room was becoming normal.
CCK: As Albert Bender returned to a normal state of consciousness, his head was pounding, he felt sick and possibly like he was going mad. He realized that only five minutes had elapsed, his radio had been turned on inexplicably, and the smell of sulfur still lingered in his room.
ARK: And that is why we still celebrate World Contact Day every March 15th! No, but seriously, initially, I think Bender was still unswayed by his odd encounter because in the April issue of Space Review, Bender promised his fellow IFSB members that the July issue would contain, quote “a startling revelation”; alas, July came and went with no startling revelations from Bender and then he had one final visit from the Men in Black… Bender had been out and when he returned home he found his room stinking of sulfur, once again his radio was on and not dialed in to any particular station, just static sounds filled the room which was so hot that Bender was surprised that the room hadn’t caught on fire. As he was getting ready for bed, his head was suddenly filled with the blue swirling lights, like he experienced during his C-Day encounter, he fell back onto his bed and then he realized he was not alone in the room. There were three shadowy figures, hovering about a foot off the ground. They were dressed in all black, even black, leather gloves covering their hands and wore Homburg hats, their faces were indiscernible under the brims of the hats, but their eyes glowed. And they telepathically delivered the following message to Bender:
MIB: You have dedicated yourself to the solution of the strange problem of unidentified objects in your atmosphere. Your interest is deep and sincere, and you have devoted many hours to it. We also know that such interest and determination might lead to something that could harm you.
ARK: And then they transported Albert Bender to their secret hollow earth lair deep in Antarctica.
CCK: Talk about burying the lead…
ARK: The MIB’s continued their story. They came from a planet many, many lightyears away from our galaxy and that they are older than our galaxy as well. The creature’s primary reason for visiting Earth was to extract a chemical from our sea water. And they also admitted that they would kidnap and murder Earth people to use their bodies as disguises. One of their main reasons for needing human suits was part of the revelation that they have quote "some of our people stationed in your so-called Pentagon while we are visiting your planet."
CCK: Well, that tracks.
ARK: They once again advised Bender that he would be best served by not revealing any of this information to anyone, and even if he did, he would never be believed, but if he still insisted on continuing down this path, he would be killed. And then to further drive the point home, one of the creatures dropped its Edgar suit, I mean its human suit, and revealed his true form… which was remarkably similar to that of the Flatwoods Monster!!! DUH! DUH! DUH!
CCK: Uh-huh. And now it’s time for Clarification Corner with CCK. The Flatwoods Monster, or also sometimes referred to as the Braxton County Monster, was an entity first sighted in the town of Flatwood in the County of Braxton in West Virginia. On September 12, 1952, two teenage brothers, Ed and Fred May and their friend, Tommy, witnessed a strange light shoot across the sky and land on the property of one of the local farmers. The three boys, as well as four other young boys that had been playing nearby went to tell Ed and Fred’s mother Kathleen. Kathleen May agreed to accompany all the children to where they saw the object crash down. As they approached a hill overlooking where this object had landed, they could see a red, pulsating light on top of a downed craft, and they could hear a machine-like whine in the air. One of the boys turned his flashlight away from the craft and illuminated a man-like figure, but it was 10 – 12 feet tall. It appeared to be “surrounded by a pointed hood-like shape” that Mrs. May would later liken to the Ace of Spades in a deck of playing cards. The figure had a round, red face and eyes that glowed a greenish-orange color and small, claw-like hands. The creature made a hissing sound and started to glide in the direction of the on-lookers. All the witnesses immediately turned and began to run away. They would later note that as they made their retreat from the strange creature, they noticed a pungent mist spreading over the land which made them feel nauseated. Not too long after, the sheriff and deputy arrived to investigate but found no evidence of any creature or downed aircraft. It would later be concluded by some investigators that the bright object in the sky was a meteor and the creature nothing more than a barn owl perched in a tree, and that the boy’s flashlight caused shadows behind the owl making it appear larger than it was. And this has been Clarification Corner with CCK.
ARK: When Albert Bender came to, he was back laying in his own bed with the familiar ache in his head, there was a yellow mist gradually fading from the room and that pungent smell. Bender realized that thirty minutes had passed since he first laid down. And just a couple of months later, in the October 1953 edition of Space Review Albert Bender announced that he would be shutting down the International Flying Saucer Bureau and stepping away from UFO research for good. As for his reasons behind disbanding the IFSB and that shocking revelation that he never shared, he left the following parting words to his readers: “We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but because of the nature of the information we are sorry that we have been advised in the negative. We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious.”
CCK: One notable member of the IFSB that continued his interest and study into UFO’s was author Gray Barker. Barker joined the IFSB in 1953 and just a few years later, Barker would write his own account of the Albert Bender mystery in a book entitled, “They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers”. While Barker never explicitly states that Bender’s men in black were government agents, it’s implied that Bender could have been visited by some stone-faced government agent types and due to stress, anxiety, mental illness and/or possibly even epilepsy the story morphed into strange creatures taking him to Antarctica. Also, the idea that the government may have been checking in on Albert Bender is not that far out of the realm of possibility, since at that time it is a documented fact that the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was requesting copies of books written about UFO’s and the CIA had formed the Robertson Panel, which was a group that was brought together specifically to investigate the impact on national security that UFO investigative groups might have on the country and to clandestinely watch these group to make sure they were not being infiltrated by any individuals that may try to use the groups for nefarious purposes.
ARK: Gray Barker had another good reason to believe Bender’s MIB story could have just been a couple of G-Men. Because Barker had also had a mysterious visit one night by a man claiming to be an FBI agent and asking questions about the IFSB. A few weeks earlier, Albert Bender had business cards made for the IFSB, including special cards that listed Gray Barker as Chief Investigator for the IFSB. When the FBI agent turned up on Barker’s front step, he had one of the business cards in his possession and stated that the card had been taken off a man from Florida that was brought into the nearby St. Mary’s hospital after suffering an epileptic fit. Barker told the agent that he had given a handful of cards out to close friends, but they all still had them in their possession and that he did not know who this man from Florida could be. This seemed to be good enough for the FBI agent and he left.
CCK: Ok, it is a little hard to reconcile these two stories. On the Albert Bender side, the story is high strangeness to the highest and strangeness degree; however, there were a few fellow IFSB members that remember Bender’s first telling of the story being a little more mundane, still odd, but no secret Antarctica bases. On the Gray Barker side, if true, this account does pretty much sound like a run-of-the-mill visit from an FBI agent that wants to make an assessment of the Chief Investigator for the IFSB, possibly with a bogus Florida-Man story as an in.
ARK: And like you said, we know that the FBI was interested in these UFO research groups. In November 1958, a citizen of Oklahoma City, wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, to voice their concerns about the FBI’s alleged treatment of UFO researchers as he had read about in certain UFO periodicals. J. Edgar Hoover responded quickly that he would be sending a Special Agent out of their Oklahoma City Office to contact the concerned citizen. And the instructions from Hoover to the Oklahoma City branch of the FBI was as follows: “An agent of your office should contact [the letter writer] immediately and secure copies of or information concerning the periodicals described”.
CCK: And the FBI was also interested in the MIB’s themselves, as we’ll see in this next tale. UFO investigator Harold Wilkin’s received an anonymous letter describing the following events, and Wilkin’s believed the letter to be authentic and reliable. As did the editors of Mystic magazine that published the account in their August 1954 issue. The informant’s story took place in the office of a Los Angeles based attorney that specialized in finding missing persons. In January 1953, there were suddenly two strange men that had been given prestigious positions in the company, without anyone really knowing why or who these people were, besides the director of the company, who was staying particularly silent on the subject. The men were described as tall, no less than 6 ½ feet, but extremely thin, almost emaciated. They were very pale, with skin so white that it seemed to have a bluish tint to it. Their eyes were large and very dark, almost completely black and they were always dressed in the now-familiar black clothing. The informant claimed that these two men did not appear to have any joints in their wrists or hands. And they seemingly possessed remarkable strength, as one story goes, one of the strange men leaned on top of a metal filing cabinet and with just his hand, he managed to make a half-inch dent in the top of the cabinet. Eventually, concerned about who these guys were, one of the employees at the attorney’s office reported this to the FBI. Two G-men were dispatched to investigate; however, the strange, tall men in black, were already gone.
ARK: But allegedly, the FBI did confiscate the filing cabinet and somehow this person that wrote the letter learned that the FBI’s metallurgy division determined that it would have taken 1200 pounds of force or more to produce those indentations in the cabinet. J. Edgar Hoover was contacted about that story as it appeared in the Mystic Magazine and what he had to say about it was “I would like to advise you that the article you mentioned is entirely incorrect with reference to the FBI, and there is no information on the matter which I can give you”.
CCK: As we move out of the 1950’s and in the 1960’s, we get one of the most amazing tales of high strangeness that still endures to this very day, and I must admit, I was a little shocked to learn how big a part the men in black play in this legend. That is the legend of the Mothman, most famously chronicled in the book The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel.
ARK: The Mothman was a creature that haunted the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia beginning in November 1966 and whose presence may have been a harbinger of death and destruction. The first sighting of Mothman was by five gravediggers working in a cemetery in the town of Clendenin. They saw what they described as a brown, human-shaped, winged beast rise from out of a thicket of trees and fly away into the distance. Three days later, the same creature would be seen by two young, couples that were out cruising by the West Virginia Ordnance Works, which was an abandoned explosives factory, situated just a few miles north of the town of Point Pleasant. The four people were driving around the old factory when they saw two red lights pointing in their direction from the shadows. They were not red lights however, they were the glowing red eyes of a large creature, possibly 6 ½ to 7 feet tall as one of the witnesses would later attest and with giant wings. The young couples in the car immediately sped away, but the creature followed them. Shadowing their car all the way until they reached the Point Pleasant city limits. Once back in the town they went straight to the sheriff’s office to report what had happened. They told their story to deputy Millard Halstead, who knew all four of these people and had no reason to think they would be making this story up. Halstead did a search of the area, but did not find anything.
CCK: And those are just two of the strange encounters with the Mothman; over the weeks and months that followed there were several more reports of sightings of the beast, but it was all overshadowed by the event that happened on December 15, 1967. On that day, the Point Pleasant’s Silver Bridge that spanned the Ohio River and connected Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, suddenly collapsed into the river, killing 46 people. After this tragedy, the Mothman encounters stopped, and although there was an earthbound explanation for the collapse, a flaw in a single eye-bar in a suspension chain, many Point Pleasant citizens think the disaster was directly linked with the presence of Mothman.
ARK: And it was during this two-month period between the first Mothman sighting and the disaster on the Silver Bridge, that the Men in Black were in full force in West Virginia, and specifically, they seemed particularly interested in one journalist. A woman name Mary Hyre, a Point Pleasant correspondent for the Messenger newspaper. Her first strange visitor was short, less than 5 feet tall, and he wore his hair in a bowl cut, with dark, hypnotic eyes that Mary claimed never blinked, and thick soles on his shoes. The man seemed completely entranced by Hyre’s ballpoint pen and when Hyre told him he could keep it, he let out an inhuman cackle and ran out of the door.
CCK: I mean… I love a good pen, so this does not seem weird to me.
ARK: Another encounter Mary Hyre had was with a pair of MIB. They looked like identical twins, and were dressed similarly in black overcoats. They showed up one evening at the newspaper office and began making rather awkward conversation of the flying saucer variety. One of the MIB’s stated that there had recently been a lot of UFO activity in the area, and Hyre agreed. And then the man started in with a barrage of questions for Hyre: “Had anyone asked Hyre not to publish the details of the UFO activity? What would her response be is someone did warn her not to print anymore stories about UFO’s or Mothman sightings?” To which Hyre’s reply was “I’d tell them to go to hell.” After uttering this forthright statement, she turned her head for just a moment and when she looked back, the men were gone.
CCK: And at this time in Point Pleasant, Mary Hyre was not the only person having these strange encounters with these odd men. Several of the Mothman witnesses reported having encounters with the MIB’s. One of the witnesses described her encounter as follows: "The MIB wore black suits, black hats, and sunglasses. They drove black cars -Cadillacs, I think. ... They looked like human beings, but their skin was somewhat transparent. You could see the veins in their hands very clearly. Their fingers were longer than a normal person's fingers, as well. Daddy shook hands with them, and he said they were awkward in shaking hands. They seemed to not know what to do or how to shake hands." Another witness said that while she and her daughter were driving they were almost run off the road by a strange man all in black with what looked like a bushy, costume store wig on his head. Another couple was visited by a man in black that came with a tape recorder but seemed completely unfamiliar with how to thread or operate it. Around this time, the Mothman witnesses who were being questioned by these strange men, were no longer being asked questions about UFO’s or Mothman and now the MIB’s seemed to be focusing all their inquiries on people like Mary Hyre and the UFO researcher John Keel.
ARK: These examples seem more in line with Albert Bender’s version of the MIB’s and their otherworldliness. And this next encounter is even better and by far, my most favorite MIB encounter that I have ever heard. This is Dr. Herbert Hopkins’ account. Dr. Hopkins was a general practitioner living in Orchard Beach, Maine. Dr. Hopkins was working with a patient named David Stephens, who claimed to be an alien abductee. In October 1975 David experienced missing time after seeing anomalous aerial lights while driving. Dr. Hopkins, who had experience in the field of hypnosis, had been recently doing regression therapy work with David. On the evening of September 11, 1976, Hopkins was home alone when the telephone rang. When he picked up the phone, the person on the other end said they were a member of the New Jersey UFO Research Organization, and they wished to speak to Hopkins regarding David’s case. For some reason that Hopkins could not later explain, he agreed to talk to this man about David’s case and invited him over to the house, without even asking for the man’s name or clarifying how they got his information. Dr. Hopkins hung up the phone and went to go turn on the light outside his front door only to find his visitor was already there, already making his way up the front stairs to the door. Keep in mind this is way before cell phones were a thing. Hopkins also noted that there was no car parked in sight and no public payphone anywhere near his home. Hopkins opened the door for the man anyway and let him right in, still not securing a name, but perhaps Hopkins was just in shock at the odd appearance of his visitor. The man was extremely thin, his black suit appeared too large for him and hung off his frame, on his hands he wore grey, suede gloves. His skin was deathly white and when he removed his black homburg, his head was completely bald and smooth, it did not even appear that it was shaven, the man also lacked eyebrows and eyelashes. But, all of this strangeness paled in comparison to the man’s lips. They were thin, they looked more like a slit just cut into the man’s face and they were bright red, especially in contrast with his bone-white skin. The Man in Black immediately started in with questions about the patient, David Stephens, and his alien-abduction experience. Once he started speaking, Hopkins was starting to notice even more strange characteristics about the man. He had no detectable accent, and spoke in an unemotional and monotone voice. Hopkins noted that he seemed robotic in both physical appearance and his mannerisms. As Hopkins started to speak, the Man in Black started tapping the back of his fingers against his lips and that is when Hopkins noticed that the red from the man’s lips was actually transferring onto the grey gloves; the man in black was wearing lipstick, perhaps a crude attempt at making his face appear more human-like.
CCK: The man in black told Hopkins that he, Hopkins, had two coins in the left pocket of his pants; this was true. The man in black told Hopkins to take one of the coins and hold it in the palm of his open hand, which Hopkins did. The mysterious guest then instructed Hopkins to keep his eyes on the coin. Hopkins watched as the silver coin began to get blurry and turn blue and then it changed from it’s solid metallic form into vapor and then faded into nothingness. The man in black asked Dr. Hopkins if he knew of Barney Hill. Dr. Hopkins gave only the vaguest response, that he knew that Barney Hill, along with this wife Betty, had claimed to have been abducted by aliens and that Mr. Hill had recently died. The man in black, in a not-so-subtle threat, advised the doctor that what he just did to the coin was the same thing he did to Barney Hill’s heart. And if Dr. Hopkins did not immediately destroy all his notes regarding the David Stephens affair, then the same fate would befall him.
ARK: Of course, Barney Hill actually died of a cerebral hemorrhage but, maybe like the lipstick, this was the Man in Black’s attempt at drama. Suddenly, the man in black’s speech began to get slower and when he stood, he seemed very unsteady on his feet, making his way to the door in a drunken stagger. The man in black made his way down the stairs, gripping on to the railing and said that his energy was running low. Hopkins stood in his doorway watching as the man in black made his way slowly and cautiously down the stairs and towards a very bright light that was in his driveway, the light was so bright that Hopkins could not tell what was parked there. He closed the door and ran to the kitchen window to get a better view, but in the few seconds it took for him to reach the kitchen, the man in black and the light were gone.
CCK: The lipstick and the drama paid off in spades, because by the time Hopkins’ wife and children returned home after seeing a movie, Hopkins was in a near-panic and was demagnetizing all the audio tapes from the interviews he did with David Stephens. And while I’m sure Hopkins hoped that destroying that evidence would be enough, it was not. For a week after that strange visit, Hopkins was plagued by mysterious phone calls to his home and recurring nightmares about the man in black. The stories go on and on. And there are some striking similarities between the stories, but there is still a burning question: What are the men in black?
ARK: You wanna start with the mundane and work our way up to freaky?
CCK: Save the freakiest for last.
ARK: Ok. It could’ve all just started as the hallucinations of a sick man. That’s not to say there wasn’t some credence or truth to Albert Bender’s experiences. It is highly probable that Bender may have been investigated, interrogated, and possibly even intimidated by three men in suits over his interest in UFO studies. But, a lot of people draw the line at the way the story was expanded to include a secret base in Antarctica, or the three hot alien babes that stripped him of his clothes and massaged him with a skin-warming, cancer-fighting space lotion. While this all just could have been the fantasies of a lonely, obsessive-compulsive, hypochondriac living in his step-dad’s attic, there is also a theory that Nick Redfern outlines in his book, The Real Men in Black. Those symptoms that Albert Bender was plagued with upon his first encounters with the MIB’s… headaches, dizziness, light-headedness, and the smell of sulfur, could all be symptoms of epilepsy, a condition that causes seizures. Sometimes those seizures can result in hallucinations, confusion and fear, and strong, imaginary odors, and those affected by such seizures often describe the mysterious odors as resembling burning rubber and sulfur. And as for the alleged poltergeist activity that Bender experienced, amazingly, that may also be linked to epilepsy. In 1958, a parapsychologist named William Roll introduced the term recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, or RSPK. Roll believed that repeated neuronal discharges, such as those that result in epileptic symptoms, might also be able to cause RSPK, which would manifest itself as poltergeist activity near the person experiencing these symptoms.
CCK: So, if the men in black were initially a creation of an overly creative and overactive brain, then Gray Barker and John Keel, both writers who can be credited with the men in black mythos as it is still perceived today were what…? Men who never let the facts get in the way of a good story, maybe?
ARK: Well, that brings us to possible explanation number two… it was all just an elaborate hoax. Bender and Barker both were science fiction aficionados, they were both raised on monster movies and gothic literature, as for John Keel, he was a campy writer, the kind of sensationalism you’d find in men’s magazines of the time. But, that’s not to say if it was a hoax, that it was a nefarious one, it could be seen more as the telling of folk tales… there are kernels of truth, there is a lesson to be gleaned, but it’s told in a fantastical way in order to hold the audience.
CCK: Or maybe the men in black are just government agents.
ARK: Simple, yet intriguing. Tell me more.
CCK: William Moore, a writer and UFO researcher, believes that some men in black were working for the government, specifically from the U.S. Air Force Intelligence. But, these weren’t just your run-of-the-mill G-men. These were agents that created a character, wore disguises and even used other forms of trickery in their interrogation of witnesses, perhaps to frighten, confuse, and disarm the witness. Moore believes this group has its origins in something known as the 1127th Field Activities Group, which was a unit made up of safe-crackers, cat burglars, lock-pickers, impersonators, and masters of deception, basically the kind of resume you’d want your trickster men in black to have.
ARK: Or maybe, they are not part of a government agency, but they want you to think that they are. So, let’s talk NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. This was a group of UFO researchers that was established in 1956. And since its inception, it actually has been considered one of the most well-respected UFO research groups in the United States, probably due a lot to its prestigious members, like their founder, a physicist named Thomas Townsend Brown and board of governors, which included Vice Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, who was the first head of the CIA, and Rear Admiral Delmer S. Fahrney, chief of the U.S. Navy’s guided-missile project. But, there are some people that believe that NICAP investigators were sometimes a little too tenacious with their handling of witnesses at times.
CCK: Yeah, and I must admit, even the name has an official air to it… the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, I bet there were plenty of times when a witness is approached by one of these guys flashing a badge and telling witnesses to stop talking about their experiences and you feel like you’re being intimidated by a government goon or a man in black. But for what end?
ARK: Territorialism. For some reason, it seems to me that especially in the UFO research field, there is this refusal to work together or to share resources. A NICAP member shows up, warns a witness not too speak to anyone else, confiscates their photos or evidence and now its their case and they’ll be the only ones to have a say in it either way.
CCK: All of that makes a lot of sense… however, it doesn’t explain that so many of these encounters involve beings that seem to exist in this uncanny valley. They don’t just act odd, they also look odd as well. So, perhaps MIB’s are aliens! The trench coat collar popped up and the hat pulled down low, some wraparound sunglasses and working primarily at night, keeping to the shadows can hide a multitude of oddities that might out these creatures as not quite human.
ARK: And it was Albert Bender’s narrative that these aliens admitted to him that they can wear human suits and that these disguises helped them infiltrate high stations in the American government. But, speaking of Albert Bender again, maybe he did more than just breathe life into a great, enduring story… maybe he also created something else… a tulpa.
CCK: Little Spanish foods?
ARK: No, that’s tapas… A tulpa… In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition it is the physical manifestation of one of Buddha’s three bodies, an emanation body. But as the knowledge was passed around and then adopted by 20th century theosophists, it came to mean a thought-form, or basically, an entity or being that is conjured up solely from the imagination of the conjurer. But, once this entity is in the physical world, it becomes part of reality, behaving and acting as it will, without any additional input from the imagination that initially conjured it.
CCK: Let me see if I have this straight. One day Albert Bender thinks he sees a freaky-deaky guy watching him the movie theater. This scares him so profoundly that he can’t stop thinking about it, so then he starts seeing them everywhere. Enter Gray Barker who takes this concept that Albert Bender had of men in black and he gives them even more motivation and substance via his writing which is then read by several other people who now also believe in these things known as men in black and that belief and acceptance of these thoughtforms allows them to actually manifest in reality.
ARK: Correct.
CCK: And then to maintain that foothold in our reality, they need people to a. keep believing in them and b. fear them, much like Bender feared them at the start.
ARK: Yes.
CCK: Which is why they tend to seek out people that have already had a frightening experience and frighten them even more to feed off their terror. Which is why some place like Point Pleasant in the 1960’s was perfect feeding grounds for the MIB’s because there was such heightened emotion.
ARK: Exactly!
CCK: Wow. It’s like the nightmare Tinker Bell, only instead of believing and claps, its believing and blood curdling screams that makes the tulpas real. There is another possibility…
ARK: Robots? Demons? Future people sent back in time to correct deviations in the timeline, aka time crimes?
CCK: No. Maybe they’re Galaxy defenders?!
ARK: Whoa! Whoa! Let’s not get crazy with this…