In the late 1980s, and mid- to late 1990s, there occurred a veritable wave of Men in Black activity across both the United States and Great Britain that was directly linked with the so-called alien-abduction phenomenon. There were the typical threats, both in person and via telephone; mail went missing, or at the very least showed clear evidence of tampering; and deep paranoia overwhelmed certain players in the sagas. All the while, the Men in Black looked on with icy, approving eyes at the chaos and mental carnage they were generating.
From respected investigator Peter Hough comes a truly remarkable account with ties to the Men in Black. Of the many and varied cases that Hough investigated, one concerned a police officer, Philip Spencer, who in 1987 allegedly stumbled across an apparent alien creature on Ilkley Moor, Yorkshire, England. Hough’s investigation suggested that Spencer had suffered a degree of missing time—of the type that is typical of alien-abduction incidents—but the most notable aspect of the story was an amazing piece of evidence that Spencer had at his disposal to back up his extraordinary claim: a solitary photograph displaying a small, dark-colored creature striding up a grassy slope on the moors.
In an attempt to determine what had occurred during the period of missing time, Spencer was hypnotically regressed, and recalled being taken onboard a large, silver-colored flying saucer, where he underwent some form of physical examination, and was given a warning about a future ecological disaster that would affect the Earth. More significantly, the regression allowed Spencer to accurately recall in his mind the image of the alien entity that he encountered: It was small in height, somewhere in the region of 4 feet; it had pointed ears, large eyes, a small mouth, huge hands, and three fingers on each hand that reminded Spencer of large sausages.
But that was not all. Guess who was soon to put in an appearance. Yes, you guessed right. On a Friday evening in January 1988, events took an even stranger turn for Spencer. Hearing a knock at his front door, Spencer duly opened it, only to find himself confronted by two middle-aged men, dressed smartly in business suits. Ominously, both flashed Ministry of Defense identity cards bearing the names Jefferson and Davis.
Spencer, puzzled and even somewhat alarmed, duly invited the men in and carefully listened as Jefferson announced that they had come to interview him about his UFO experience on the moors the previous year. Even more odd, Spencer had only discussed his encounter with three civilian UFO investigators; yet the men from the Ministry—or allegedly from the Ministry—apparently knew all about his experience and fired off a barrage of pointed questions and demands to the perplexed officer in relation to his UFO encounter.
Perhaps mindful of the fact that he was dealing with officialdom, Spencer admitted to having taken one photograph, but stated that it was in the possession of a friend. In reality, however, the negative was in Peter Hough’s hands at the time in question. With this revelation, the two men suddenly lost all interest in further communication and quickly left as mysteriously as they had first arrived. Was this, perhaps, because they realized they were too late to retrieve Spencer’s potentially priceless evidence of his alien abduction? Who were the mysterious pair? Were they, possibly, covert operatives of the British government? Or did they have origins of a much stranger nature? To this day, the true identities of Jefferson and Davis remain mysterious.
Moving on almost a decade, we have yet another case from the British Isles. Irene Bott, formerly the president of the Staffordshire UFO Group, investigated a notable case implicating the Men in Black in the alien-abduction controversy. Shortly after establishing her group in 1995, Bott was plunged into a situation involving a witness to a UFO who may very well have also undergone a period of so-called missing time. Expressing deep desire to learn more about what occurred to him than the fragmentary memories that were circulating around his brain, the witness contacted Bott and related the details that surrounded his viewing, in the early hours of a 1995 morning, of a brightly lit, triangular-shaped object in the low skies of the county of Staffordshire.
The witness was certain that there was more to the case than he could consciously recollect, and expressed a keen desire for help in unraveling what had really taken place. As a result, Bott referred the witness to a colleague in her group, and the two discussed the details over the telephone. Crucial to the issues under discussion in this book is this: Shortly after returning home from work one day, the witness found that a note had been pushed through his letterbox warning him not to proceed any further with the investigation of his UFO encounter.
Naturally deeply concerned, the man asked his neighbors if they had seen anyone lurking in the vicinity of his house who might conceivably have been responsible for the strange and unsettling note. Fortunately, one neighbor had seen something unusual that day. Shortly after the witness had set off for work, a black car pulled up outside his house. A man dressed entirely in black and carrying an equally black briefcase exited the vehicle, marched quickly up the driveway, shoved a piece of paper through the letterbox, hastily returned to the car, and drove off at speed. That’s right: One of our mysterious characters had struck again. And it was an encounter that justifiably led Irene Bott to ask the still-unresolved question “Was this a British Man in Black?”
Moving across the Atlantic and back to the United States, a classic MIB case comes from Marie Jones, a prolific author on countless things both paranormal and mysterious, who says, “I’ve always had a big interest in unusual phenomena, and alternative things. But, with UFOs, I got involved with the Center for UFO Studies in the late 1970s, and I was also in MUFON—the Mutual UFO Network—for a good 15 years. But it was in the mid-1990s, after I returned to San Diego after living in Los Angeles that I had some very weird experiences that sound like something to do with the Men in Black.”
Author Marie Jones had a run-in with the MIB while investigating alien abductions in the 1990s.
It all began, says Jones, in 1995, when she placed an advertisement in a free local newspaper asking for people to get in touch if they were interested in UFOs. It was an action that proved costly with respect to Jones’s emotional state of mind. “From that ad,” Jones reveals, “a woman contacted me, whom I’d prefer not to name, but whom I’ll call Anna. She was like a biker chick. We really hit it off and we decided to form a group and it took off really quick; we were very active and did a lot of investigations, particularly with alien-abduction cases and witnesses.”
As the two got to know one another, Anna confided in Jones that she was experiencing some serious harassment that sounded very much like classic MIB tactics. Strange people were telephoning their house, and there were knocks at the door from curious-looking characters. Jones adds with regard to this aspect of the story, “She and her husband lived in a semi-rural area, so they were a bit isolated, which made it more worrying. There were threats on the phone, strange issues with the phone like unusual noises on the line and electronic interference, and things like that. And the more we talked and I got to know her, the more these things started to happen to my phone.”
Jones, at least partly as a result of her friendship with Anna, it seems, was now herself a target of the Men in Black. Nevertheless, being of a strong and determined character, Jones was not about to let a bunch of skinny, pasty, black-suited souls from who-knows-where push her around. That’s not to say the calls weren’t disconcerting, however. “It was always a male caller,” she said, “and the person on the other end had a very robotic voice. They almost sounded like they were talking through some kind of voice-changer. It was very stilted, very robotic. This person was telling me what clothes I had on, what book I was reading, what room I was in. And the place where I lived, you couldn’t see in it. The calls kept coming and this person was telling me more and more personal things that they never should have known.”
Carefully and deliberately instilling in Jones’s mind the notion that her every move was being scrutinized by all-powerful, unseen eyes of a potentially deadly nature can only be interpreted as a classic scare tactic—at which, as we have seen, the Men in Black are adept. Jones, tired and fried by the whole situation, wanted hard answers as to what was afoot and why she and Anna were being targeted: “So I started asking Anna if she knew anything about these calls. She said that yes, she had been getting similar calls with a really robotic voice. But she also said that some of the people she had seen—she’d seen them on her property late at night, and her husband would run outside with a gun—moved like robots. They were very stiff, very stilted, and stared without blinking their eyes. But they looked human.”
As the high strangeness continued, Jones became even more concerned and affected by the way in which her previously orderly world was rapidly plunging into unrelenting chaos, disorder, and stark terror: “I told my husband at the time, ‘Don’t answer the phone!’ But, looking back, it was crazy that I was even thinking like that. I mean, you have to answer the phone, but it really intimidated me. And some of the calls were late at night when my husband—who was a musician—would be gone rehearsing or playing. And this person would always know when I was alone. Always. It was very strange; I could not get rid of this feeling that there was something not right. It wasn’t just the way his voice sounded; it was the whole atmosphere. It was horrible.”
Jones has her own thoughts on the nature of the mysterious man’s agenda. Unsurprisingly, she concludes that the tone, nature, and modus operandi of the Man in Black seemed to radiate both hostility and threat. And many of those threats seemed to be directly linked to Jones’s studies of alien-abduction cases and data:
I believe that what he was trying to do was to let me know that he knew a lot about me and could hurt me if he wanted to. He never actually outright said anything like he would hurt me, but that was definitely the idea he was getting across. It was an insinuation. It was creepy. Looking back on it, the interesting thing is that he was less interested in talking about UFOs as a subject, but much more interested in talking about the group and what the group was doing with our abduction research.
And this man, instead of asking about UFOs, would say something like, “Your group is familiar with this abductee or that abductee,” or with this person or that person. He was letting me know that he knew what the group was doing. I have no idea where he was getting the information from, unless he had my phone tapped. And he was even telling me things about what I’d done back in my 20s, what book I had lying on the bed, and what I was wearing at the time. It just gave me the creeps; very creepy.
Eventually the situation began to take its toll on both Anna and Jones, to the point that there really seemed to be only one viable option left available to the pair: Somewhat reluctantly, they elected to close down their research group, and Jones moved back to Los Angeles to live. She says today of Anna and the whole experience with the Men in Black: “I have no idea of what became of her, but I can tell you that I am not someone who is easy to intimidate. I’m very confrontational; I’ll fight. But this person scared me so much that I literally walked away from my group. And I’ve never had that happen before. It was a weird kind of foreboding feeling. It made me want to back away and get this person out of my life. I even felt that something not right was going to happen; it was awful.”
Investigative author Chris O’Brien has a similar account to relate that also focuses on the MIB/alien-abduction connection. In this particular case, the female witness was referred to him by an unusual source: a sheriff’s office in Colorado, O’Brien’s state of residency. He takes up the story: “One of the things she mentioned happened right when we were having all sorts of intense waves of UFO activity, in the spring of ’94 and through the fall of ’95, in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. She kept a very extensive journal, and I cross-referenced some of her claims with our reports and, sure enough, there was a definite correlation. When she would claim to have these UFO experiences, these abductions, we would get UFO sightings reported to us on the exact same nights, but from other people—which I thought was very intriguing and gave some credence to her story, in my mind.”
And then there came a deeply worrying development: The woman’s mail failed to arrive on a disturbingly regular basis, and she ended up having to file claims with the post office. Then, on one particular day the woman noticed a large black car that looked like it had just been driven out of a 1960s showroom parked at the end of her driveway. Something sinister was going on, she felt. And, given that this involved the Men in Black, could it really have been anything but sinister?
O’Brien says of this development, “It looked like a brand-new, old car—which is kind of an oxymoron, but that’s what she said. And there were these two guys outside the car whom she said looked like the Blues Brothers, going through her mail—getting it out of the mailbox, opening it, and so on. She was watching all this through a spotting scope and was able to catch some details, but as soon as she started heading down there—she got on her ATV and hauled ass—they took off. This happened a number of times before she had to get a Post Office box in town. But she still had problems—not as bad, though—and this went on for about a year before it finally finished.”
Fortunately, the woman had been able to get a very good look at the strange pair on one occasion when they raided her mailbox. Based on O’Brien’s words, they might very well have stepped straight out of the shadowy confines of poor old Albert Bender’s attic: “They had the Fedoras, the wrap-around shades, the skinny ties; it was the whole Men in Black deal. I tried to get her to come up with another description, something a bit more credible-sounding than ‘like the Blues Brothers.’ But, that’s all she would say: They looked like Jake and Elwood!”
The experiences of Marie Jones and Chris O’Brien’s source may have come to an end, but there are others that still merit our attention. Oregon-based anomalies researcher and writer Regan Lee says of an alien-abductee with whom she had contact in the 1990s, “I’ll call her Jane. She had a UFO encounter in the early 1990s in the Gold Hill area campground in Oregon. She recalled through hypnosis and flashbacks that she had been abducted by aliens; given a medical examination. She had several more encounters and UFO sightings, some witnessed by others who were with her.”
And, yet again, our old friends were just itching to come looming out of the darkness. “It was while she was experiencing these sightings, encounters, and telepathic communications with entities,” Lee says, “she had a strange thing happen with Men in Black, which occurred in the month of July, at the institution at which she was then working.”
It was a blistering-hot day when Jane’s attention was drawn to three tall, golden-skinned, bearded men. They were dressed in black suits, black hats, black shoes, and very heavy, woolen, full-length coats that—surely at this stage of the game I scarcely need to say—were also black in color. Jane pondered the undeniable strangeness of three men in black wool coats in July, and mused upon the possibility that they might be nothing stranger than visiting rabbis, although they seemed far more Asian than Jewish. Jane told Lee that even though the three men were deep in conversation with one another, she was unnerved to see that their eyes were focused intently upon her, and even appeared to be assessing her in some fashion.
Lee elaborates on the nature of the entities that Jane encountered: “They seemed eerily aware of, and interested in Jane. There was no warning or other interaction, or references to UFOs, yet their very presence could be construed as a warning. It served to startle Jane; she associated the encounter with her abductions and sightings. The bearded men suggest, to me, a religious aspect. Jane was a religious person. I don’t know for sure but I think she was a Mormon. Were the beards connected with that somehow? Maybe they used Jane’s religious frame of reference to get her attention.”
A few weeks later, says Lee, Jane was listening to a radio talk-show in her car, when one particular caller related over the airwaves her very own UFO experience in Colorado. The caller’s encounter was followed by a visit from three men dressed completely in black clothing. Not surprisingly, Lee reveals, “This story gave Jane a jolt, wondering if the three Men in Black she saw weren’t the same phenomena. Jane wondered if she hadn’t been ‘marked or implanted’ by the aliens and if she was being followed.”
In other words, a typical side effect of the MIB experience—paranoia—had infected yet another unfortunate soul.
Then there is the 1996 experience of Greg Bishop, a prolific author and researcher on a wide range of topics, including UFOs, psychedelics, and conspiracy theories. Bishop’s account is a fascinating one, as it also contains an integral ingredient of Chris O’Brien’s revelations— namely, the involvement of MIB-style characters rummaging through the mail of individuals intimately linked to the alien-abduction controversy. Significantly, Bishop’s story is steeped in distressing paranoia.
Bishop begins thus with his unsettling tale: “Mail tampering is the darling of the clinical paranoids, but nearly every piece of mail that the late researcher and alien-abductee Karla Turner sent to my P.O. box looked like it had been tampered with or opened. Since this is easy to do without having to be obvious, we figured someone was interested in her work enough to make it clear that she was being monitored. She took to putting a piece of transparent tape over the flap and writing ‘sealed by sender’ on it. Karla pretty much took it for granted after awhile, and suggested I do likewise.”
It was unnerving experiences such as those with Karla Turner that had a profoundly negative psychological effect on Bishop and his state of mind at the time. In a frank and open fashion, Bishop states today, “During my extremely horrible paranoid period, when I had a year or two of ridiculous paranoia, which would have been about 1996 or ‘97, I thought there were people taking pictures of the house—which there really were. I actually did see somebody once take a picture and quickly drive away. Today, I wonder if it could very well have been real-estate people, but back then, I was like: It’s the Men in Black.”
And as Bishop saw more and more demons hiding under every rock—or, perhaps, more and more Men in Black lurking within the heart of every black shadow and dark recess—things began to get progressively worse. Bishop was on a terrifying downward spiral that showed no signs of ending:
I thought people were reading my computer screen from outside the house. I thought my landlord upstairs was following me through the house. It was really weird: one night I was up at 2 in the morning and I walked into the bedroom, and I could hear somebody walk into the bedroom upstairs. It was the same apartment floor-plan upstairs as mine. For about five minutes, the person walked everywhere I did, right after me. I could hear the floor creaking right above me in every room I went into. Things like this, I built into this framework of paranoia. I was stressed, paranoid, and thinking there were these MIB-types outside the house. Maybe there were. But, you know, whether I was being watched or not, if you’ve got a vast, paranoid conspiracy made up in your mind—as I did at the time—then everything fits into it; and it did fit with the thing with Karla [Turner] and the mail getting opened.
Thankfully, Bishop was eventually able to take significant steps back from the darkness that was beckoning with bony fingers. The negativity and the cold fear in which he had been enveloped for so long began to ease, and eventually faded away. Today, Bishop—who still plays a significant role in ufological research and writing, but for whom paranoia no longer has any place in his life—says of his year or two of personal hell, “I got out of that state of mind for one simple reason: I was just so tired of being paranoid. It wears on you; it makes you physically and mentally tired. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t being watched, or that there weren’t mail problems. There were. But, I couldn’t live like that, in fear, any longer.”
Unfortunately, as we have seen, not everyone has proven to be quite as lucky as Greg Bishop: The dark and winding highway incessantly traveled by the Men in Black is one littered with disaster, misfortune, and mental collapse.