extraordinary%20encounters

Albert K. Bender’s sketch of one of the three “men in black”
who visited his Connecticut house in September 1953 and
gave him the solution to the UFO mystery (Fortean Picture
Library)
eventually wrote Flying Saucers and the Three
Men (1962) for Barker’s small publishing
company. In what nearly all readers saw as an
amateurish science-fiction novel passing itself
off as factual, Bender identified the three men
as space people who abducted him to Antarctica,
where Bender met monstrous beings at
an alien base.
The dismal reception afforded Bender’s
book would likely have ended MIB talk if not
for the emergence in the latter 1960s of John
A. Keel, who coined the term “MIB.” Keel, a
freelance writer living in New York City, secured
a generous book contract from a major
New York publisher to write what was intended
to be the definitive work on UFOs. An
occult theorist strongly attracted to demonology,
Keel held UFOs and their occupants
to be shape-shifting entities from a sinister
otherworld. Among their agents were
MIB who, in common with their brethren,
Men in black 171
sought to confuse, manipulate, and even destroy
those who encountered them or sought
to uncover the truth about them. Keel collected
MIB reports from several states and further
claimed that he had interacted with them
personally. In Keel’s view, MIB have played a
behind-the-scenes role in much of human history
and belief.
For the most part, Keel’s MIB could not
have passed easily for human. They were darkfeatured
(or, conversely, unnaturally pale),
bug-eyed, and confused; and their behavior
betrayed their unfamiliarity with the earthly
environment and social customs. For some
reason, they usually drove black limousines,
frequently Cadillacs.
Other investigators collected similar re p o rt s
f rom around the world. Some suggested that
the MIB we re government or military operat
i ves, others that they we re aliens. By 1966,
e ven the U.S. Air Fo rce was hearing of such incidents
and tried to run them down, without
success. Colonel George P. Freeman, a Pe n t agon
spokesman for the U.S. Air Fo rc e’s UFOi
n vestigating Project Blue Book, complained,
“We have n’t been able to find out anything
about these men” (Keel, 1975). In the 1990s,
ufologist William L. Mo o re would allege,
though without providing substantiating evidence,
that “Men in Black are really gove r nment
people in disguise . . . members of a
rather bizarre unit of Air Fo rce intelligence
k n own currently as the Air Fo rce Special Activities
Center (AFSAC)” (Mo o re, 1993).
In recent years, Jenny Randles, a wellregarded
English ufologist, has looked into
MIB cases in Britain. In her view, some are
genuinely puzzling, sometimes involving witnesses
who have never heard of the phenomenon
yet describe many of its classic features.
From interviews and official documents, Randles
was led to the conclusion that a secret department
of the Ministry of Defense was
monitoring certain kinds of UFO reports.
See Also: Kazik; Keel, John Alva
Further Reading
Barker, Gray, 1956. They Knew Too Much about Fly -
ing Saucers. New York: University Books.