Although the story of the Men in Black was most certainly that of Albert Bender, it would surely never have achieved the status and legend that it did without the input of Gray Barker. After all, it was Barker’s 1956 book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, that really gave the saga widespread publicity— within the UFO research community and beyond it. Remember too that J. Edgar Hoover himself—the head honcho of the FBI—was moved to obtain a copy of the book in 1958. And it was Barker who published Bender’s title, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, in 1962. Barker, then, was just as important in the development of the MIB mystery as was Bender—and, in terms of providing the story a great deal of public visibility, undoubtedly even more so. Moreover, Barker’s written words had a profound impact on some of those individuals attracted to the UFO phenomenon in general and the Men in Black in particular, including Timothy Green Beckley, who says, “My involvement with the Men in Black started when I was in the third grade. I had to do a book review, and most kids would probably do something like A Tale of Two Cities or a Hardy Boys book. I picked Barker’s book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. I got a B+ on the review. I was mesmerized by the book and by the Men in Black silencing. It was very sinister to me, and has always had a great impression on me.”
Moving on to John Keel, Beckley says, “I first met John at one of Jim Moseley’s meetings. Jim used to have meetings here in Manhattan in the Hotel Woodstock and the Hotel Iroquois. Some of the meetings would attract small numbers of people—12 or 13—and sometimes as many as two or three hundred people. Keel popped up one night, and came in with Mary Hyre, the reporter from Point Pleasant who had seen the Men in Black. This was mid-’60s, and it turned out that John lived in my neighborhood.” As both men were night owls, the young Beckley often went over to Keel’s apartment in the late hours and hung out, listening to Keel entertain him with fantastic stories about “what had happened down in West Virginia with the strange phone calls, the Men in Black, and the Mothman sightings. Keel told me about how he was run off the road once, and was being followed. At first, I thought, This guy has got a really great sense of imagination and is just trying to entertain me. But the more I got into the Men in Black stuff, the more I realized he was quite sincere about it all.”
Allen Greenfield, who photographed a Man in Black in 1969, has crucial data to impart that gets to the heart of the nature of Barker and Keel, whom he describes as being, albeit in very different ways, “two of the most complex human beings I have ever met. And I’m very broadly traveled and have met a lot of unusual people. The fact that they covered some of the same territory should not confuse anyone that they should be approached in the same way. They shouldn’t, at all.”
Greenfield expands on this statement with respect to Keel: “He was a reporter. Now, he was a sensationalistic reporter; he would write the kind of I Found the Island of Hungry Women–type stories for men’s magazines back in the day. That was the genre he worked in for a very long time.” For example, in 1966—when Keel’s paranormal research was in full swing—he published a book called The Fickle Finger of Fate, which was a highly entertaining fictional romp that can best be described as a literary combination of Batman and a Russ Meyer movie, filled with naked girls, dastardly supervillains, and a superhero named Satyr-Man. Greenfield also notes, “There was, shall we say, some definite poetic license in Keel’s writing. But he was an absolutely fascinating individual to sit down and talk with, and he had a spellbinding voice. I would not refer to him as a friend; he actually gave me the creeps. If he had put on a black suit and come to my door, I certainly would have thought: this is one of the Men in Black.”
Perhaps even Keel recognized that in the right circumstances he could very well pass for a mean Man in Black himself: In the opening pages of The Mothman Prophecies, for example, he related how, on a research trip to West Virginia in November 1967, while dressed completely in black, he was mistaken for a devilish entity by a couple whom he was forced to wake up and ask for help in the early hours of a stormy morning after his car had broken down near their home.
Greenfield makes an important distinction between Keel and Barker, with regard to the way they approached their respective investigations into Men in Black cases: “Keel got the facts a lot better than Barker on cases they were both looking at. But Keel was far more credulous, and also more easily fooled, because, in a sense, he was outside of it all. Keel wasn’t a ufologist; he was an observer of ufology. And that’s a very different thing.”
As for Barker, Greenfield offers the following thought-provoking words:
Barker was a part of the phenomenon—that’s what a lot of people miss when they ask, “Was he a hoaxer?” Yes, he was a hoaxer at times. Was he a fraud? No, absolutely not; he was not a fraud. He was a teller of folk tales, but which can also be very truthful. And, to know Gray was to know the phenomenon. He told about realities, but he told them as stories. That was the culture he lived in.
Asking whether Gray Barker was a truthful, honest person is like asking if Homer was a historian. It’s a non-question; it’s completely misunderstanding what one is dealing with. Gray was as much a part of the phenomenon as Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers. It was not reportage; he was telling the story, not attempting to come up with a pseudo-scientific explanation. And he could slip over into parable and metaphor, which was more about truth than a simple recitation of facts would ever be. All of that is the art of interpreting Gray Barker.
Perfectly demonstrating that Barker’s involvement in ufology went way beyond merely chronicling hard facts, Jim Moseley admits, “Me and Barker pulled a couple of UFO hoaxes, and, I think, Barker pulled some hoaxes on Keel in the Point Pleasant context too. The funny thing is that Keel liked Barker, but he hated me. But, Barker and me, we were pretty much from the same camp and close friends.”
Moseley reveals the details of one such cosmic caper: “There was one hoax where me and Barker took motion-picture of a UFO, which was about 30 or 40 seconds of film that I used in my lectures when I went on the college circuit. This was really just a little toy saucer that was dangled out the window of the car. I was driving the car, Barker was dangling it out the window, and a third guy, who was a friend of his, was on the roof of the moving car taking film of it. So, you’ve got all this different motion that looked fairly realistic. This would have been about 1966.”
Faked UFO incidents aside, Moseley stresses that, as far as his written output was concerned, Barker wasn’t a hoaxer, but he did have his own, unique style of telling a story that confounded and confused some of his readers: “Those cases he wrote about did happen, but they have been misconstrued, sometimes deliberately even by Gray, in order to make it a good story. But that’s all. Gray could tell a great story by using his imagination, but still based on the facts. The truth is in his stories, but it’s the way he presented it, as stories, that a lot of people don’t always get.”
Greg Bishop, who corresponded with Keel and met with him in New York City in 2001, echoes the words of both Moseley and Greenfield when it comes to trying to understand and dissect the nature of Barker: “It’s obvious if you talk to Moseley, and look at some of Barker’s writings, that he did have a genuine interest in the UFO subject, and thought there was a real mystery. He was also willing to bend the facts. But, that doesn’t mean that the Bender story had nothing to it. It’s the genesis of the whole Men in Black thing. It’s the archetypal MIB story— as it relates to UFOs in the latter part of the 20th century. Barker, through Bender’s story, created that mythos.”
UFO authority Greg Bishop with John Keel, author of the acclaimed book The Mothman Prophecies.
When it comes to unraveling Keel, Bishop says, “His influence is incredibly huge, and the influence, I think, is mainly in his ideas, which were backed up by years and years of actually talking with people. That being said, he—like Barker—was not above bending some facts, or even making some up. But that doesn’t bother me because it was his ideas that count: taking people, shaking them out, and pushing them in a new direction just by the sheer force of his writing and his storytelling.”
Bishop offers the following as his parting words on Keel: “A nonfiction writer can be a great storyteller too, and Keel was one of the best at doing that. He was a Gonzo-Fortean, he was a trickster, and he knew it too. But he wasn’t hoaxing—his fact-bending had a purpose: He was doing what he had to do to get a message and a theory across that he absolutely believed.”
Jerome Clark has his own take on Barker and Keel:
Barker started out as a serious figure, but relatively early realized that he was never going to solve the mystery so he might as well have fun with it, thus all the exploitations and even outright hoaxes. Only he would have known what he really believed. From my conversations with him, I had the impression that his views were not unlike John Keel’s, except that unlike Keel felt he no need or desire to reflect on it with any degree of concentration. And yes, he was a magnificent storyteller.
As for Keel, I think—I know, because he was sending field reports to me in the late 1960s—that he came upon genuine weirdness and reported on it generally accurately. As you well know, it’s not hard to find weirdness if you go looking for it. Unfortunately, Keel insisted upon laying his crazy interpretations on all this material. He had a medieval mind and, worse, a cracked one. At his very best moments Keel’s contribution to ufology and anomalistics was a decidedly mixed one. Mostly, he was a textbook example of a crank. I am sure, more to the point, that Barker was playing phone pranks on Keel; maybe other hoaxes too. That wasn’t because Barker was a Walter Mitty type, however. He was a trickster who enjoyed putting one over on anyone who might be receptive, and God knows Keel was receptive. His paranoia made him quite gullible.
Someone else who became acquainted with Keel when Men in Black activity was at its height in the 1960s was acclaimed paranormal authority Brad Steiger, whose astonishing words may help to clarify why Keel was so intrigued by the mystery of the MIB: “Sometime in 1966, [when] I was in New York working on my book Valentino, I visited Ivan T. Sanderson at his farm in New Jersey, then, later, called John Keel, who had said, ‘When you’re in town give me a call.’ He took me to my first Chinese restaurant, and we had a delightful evening. And then we went back to his apartment, whereupon he began to alter my reality when he began telling me stories about researching Mothman and his encounters with the Men in Black.”
And this is where things proceeded to get very, very strange. His voice dropping ever so slightly, but certainly noticeably, in tone, Steiger said to me, “I’ve never put this in any of my books, and I feel a little awkward, but on the other hand, what I am about to tell you really happened. John was a good-sized fellow and I couldn’t see how just anyone could frighten him; and, at that time, I was 30 years old, in good shape, bench-pressing 450 pounds. I was like, ‘Bring it on! I’m not afraid of any Men in Black!’ Then he began to tell me of the visitations he’d had with three men who had not knocked, but had entered, his apartment. They literally came through the door. He told me of an evening when they were challenging him to lay off the whole Mothman thing; to lay off UFOs, if he knew what was good for him.”
Having heard that astounding aspect of the story— which sounds astonishingly like Albert Bender’s experiences with the three MIB that materialized in his attic— you might think, Could it get any stranger? Yes, it could, and it certainly does. Back to Steiger:
John was the sort of person who responded to threats like the red flag to the bull. But, he said to me that, on this occasion, [the MIB] reached under his sink and took out a jug of Clorox. They asked, “What is this?” and John said, “That’s disinfectant; it’s very powerful.” They brought it over to him, took the cap off, and gave him a smell. John wrinkled his nose, and when they asked if it was Clorox, he said, “Yes, that’s what it is. Now put it back before you spill it.” Whereupon the three of them—in front of him—put it to their lips one at a time and took large gulps of it. Now, by the time John had finished the evening, telling me stories like this, I decided that maybe I wouldn’t be quite so brave and quite so powerful. I began thinking, We’re not dealing with FBI agents or the Air Force.
Then there are the memorable words of Colin Bennett, a firsthand witness to a Man in Black in the early 1980s: “Barker may indeed have written episodes of supposed UFO history himself just to keep the narrative going, or kick-start it when it lagged. But skeptics, foaming at the mouth, should be warned here that this is not witness to their claims of the falsehood of all ufological experience. Story-breeders may fulfill precisely the object of contact: not only will they tell the story, they will expand it, adding episodes of their own in order to try and initiate mythological change and development.... Such mimetic game-play operates on the recognized principle that when we imagine we create a form of life.”
What we can ascertain from the combined words of Greenfield, Beckley, Steiger, Moseley, Bishop, Bennett, and Clark is that one must be very careful how one interprets the published words of both Barker and Keel. And one must also note that this mighty duo had no qualms about turning a fairly good story into an atmospheric and Gothic one—a bright, sunny day becomes the proverbial dark and stormy night. They were not, however, simply concocting stories from their collective imaginations. Rather, they were telling fantastic truths, albeit in somewhat distorted, imaginative, literary fashions. The reason? To provoke new thought, ideas, and paradigms.
Thus, the Men in Black certainly live, but perhaps our idea of them as derived from the works of Barker and Keel should be viewed through careful filters.
We may now have somewhat of an understanding of the complex players and chain of events that led to the early formation of the MIB legend. This same legend, however, cannot, under any conventional circumstances, explain the myriad encounters with the Men in Black that followed—and that continue to follow—in the dark wake of Bender’s hallucinogenic experiences. There may, however, be an explanation for this conundrum. And it’s an explanation that takes us on a wild ride into some truly fantastic realms of possibility.
The imagery provoked by Bender’s three Men in Black and the tales of their visits and threats were, and still are, undeniably powerful and emotive ones. And, much like a modern-day meme, such imagery quickly spread throughout the UFO research community, eventually reaching the U.S. government, J. Edgar Hoover, the military, the media, and the world of Hollywood. These undeniably powerful motifs, born of Bender and elaborated upon by the story-telling techniques of Barker and Keel, and subsequently instilled in the minds of thousands of people, may have inadvertently led to the creation of a whole new breed of Men in Black that extended far beyond anything Bender and Barker could have dreamed of back in the early 1950s. It is the breed of the Tulpa. And if you don’t have an understanding of the nature of the Tulpa, you are now about to.