“Three Men in Black”
IN SEPTEMBER 2004, I drove up from North Carolina to Clarksburg, West Virginia. My destination was the special room in the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library that since 1991 has housed the Gray Barker Collection, the books and papers of one of the town’s most peculiarly influential citizens. The collection’s genial curator, David Houchin, welcomed me and spent hours chatting with me about the enigmatic man to whom the room was dedicated, passing on to me the oral traditions he’d gathered from its visitors. I spent a week there.
It was a research trip, but also an excursion into my own past. I’ve described in chapter 1 how, as an impressionable twelve-year-old, I’d been in thrall to Barker’s mythmaking. More than forty years had passed since then. My home had shifted southward from Pennsylvania to North Carolina; I’d become a university professor, then a professor emeritus. Though I’d learned to distrust Barker, I never quite outgrew the fearful wonder his They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers had inspired in me. Now I was coming to visit, for the first time, its place of origin.
The air conditioning wasn’t working while I was there, which I counted as fortunate. Sweating (not unpleasantly) in the warm breezes that came softly in through the open windows, I could imagine myself transported back to the early 1960s as I sifted through the files of the man I’d never met, but whose writing set the course for my adolescence and possibly for my life.
We’ve spent the past three chapters with one of the central myths of the UFO lore, the alien abduction. The chapters that remain are devoted to three other myths, hardly less vital to understanding what the ensemble is about. Patterns we’ve noticed in connection with the abductions will repeat themselves, though sometimes with elements missing. The myths may develop in parallel to the wider UFO tradition (Men in Black), as an antecedent to it (the Shaver Mystery), or at its very heart (Roswell, New Mexico).
All three bring the UFO, with varying degrees of literalness, down from the sky and bind it to the life of this earth. The Men in Black, human or nearly human in appearance and distinctive mainly through their taste in clothing, are the alien among us. The Shaver Mystery, with its revelation of monstrosities unsuspected beneath our feet, speaks to the alien within. The legendry that’s grown up around Roswell depicts the alien as shattered, unwilling and helpless, against our flinty deserts. It sounds the theme of the alien dead.
The Men in Black myth, which we’ll look at in this chapter, has much in common with the abductions. Like the abductions, it has a long prehistory. Like them, it takes new shape and new power from the trauma of an individual to whom it can be traced. After a decades-long latency period, it spreads to become part of the culture, its presence taken for granted. And—modifying though not contradicting what I’ve just said—it’s the creation not of a single person but a synergy of two, unifying opposites in a way that might set Jung nodding in satisfaction.
In the case of the abductions, the synergistic duo were the black man and the white woman, Barney and Betty Hill. In the case of the Men in Black, they were Barker of Clarksburg and Albert K. Bender of Bridgeport, Connecticut, whose opposing qualities were less obvious but just as real. Barker was the mythmaker of the pair, by which I don’t mean “liar” or “hoaxer” (although he was both) but a truth teller of the most profound kind, one who brings forth and gives tangible narrative form to what’s buried deep within us, its presence intuited but never quite grasped.
Bender, the hero of the myth, was a simpler sort of man. He was incomparably less gifted than Barker, incomparably less tormented.47 Barker described Bender in the most glowing terms: Air Force veteran, executive (chief timekeeper, actually) at the Acme Shear Company’s Bridgeport plant, a man whose “conversation reflects a wide knowledge of almost everything you can bring up,” whose “piercing eyes seem to look right through you” yet whose warm good humor sets you at ease. Others had a different perspective and portrayed him differently. Bender was a weirdo, a loser, a thirty-one-year-old bachelor obsessed with the occult who lived with his stepfather and entertained himself by transforming a portion of their house into a “chamber of horrors” tricked out with artificial spiders, bats, and shrunken heads.
It was Bender who, in September 1953, encountered the historical three men, ordinary individuals who happened to wear dark clothing and black hats. It was Barker who transformed them into the mythic Three Men in Black, sending them forth on the journey that would take them, years after his death, to movie screens around the world. He promoted Bender, used Bender, made money off Bender. But he also believed in Bender, and when Bender disillusioned him, he fell into despair.
Gray Roscoe Barker was born in 1925 in the tiny village of Riffle, West Virginia. Except for short intervals, he spent the rest of his life in his home state, mostly in Clarksburg. He died in 1984, evidently of complications from AIDS. Two documentary films, one of them a masterpiece, have been made about his life. No one has attempted a biography.
“I am neither a scientist nor a scholar,” he introduced himself in They Knew Too Much. “Nor am I a bookie, as some people misinterpret my occupation when I tell them I am a booker. I also tell them I operate the largest theatrical film buying-booking agency in the state of West Virginia. Charitably, no one else has started a film buying-booking agency in the state of West Virginia.”
He wanted to be a writer. His opportunity came in September 1952, when a seven-foot monster landed in a luminous UFO on a hilltop near Flatwoods, West Virginia, some ten miles from where he was born. (The incident has since been explained, plausibly if not altogether convincingly, as the collocation of an unusually bright meteor, a group of jittery witnesses, and a barn owl flying at them out of the darkness.) He pitched the story to Fate, a pulp magazine dedicated to the occult and paranormal. His investigative piece, “The Monster and the Saucer,” appeared in the January 1953 issue.
The article was a hit, and Barker was emboldened by its success. The following autumn he would begin to publish (on an office ditto machine) a quarterly called The Saucerian, devoted to news of flying saucer sightings. In the meantime, he’d become the West Virginia state representative and afterward chief investigator for a Bridgeport-based organization called the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), whose president was Albert Bender. Barker had learned about Bender from the letter columns of a science fiction magazine and had written to him. Bender responded enthusiastically.
The IFSB was a thriving organization, the largest flying saucer group of its time, with several hundred members and steadily expanding. By the fall of 1953 it would have branches in twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Canada, England, France, Australia, and New Zealand. Its volunteers—neither Bender nor anyone else received a salary—gathered news clippings on flying saucers, investigated sightings to the best of their ability, and published a twelve-page quarterly called Space Review. This was dedicated to sightings and speculation about the saucers, and it was handsomely produced and printed.
In its writing and its ideas, it was amateurish, almost juvenile. Anyone who comes to Space Review from reading Barker, primed by him to believe that somewhere in its five issues lies the fantastic, terrifying secret that Bender discovered and then was forbidden to reveal, is in for a letdown. What happened to Bender in the fall of 1953 requires some other explanation.
THREE MEN PAY A CALL
On Sunday, September 27, two IFSB members named August Roberts and Dominick Lucchesi, friends of both Bender and Barker, decided to make the two-hour drive to Bridgeport from their homes in Jersey City, to visit Bender. Their car overheated, and they didn’t get very far. But they phoned Bender and heard shocking news. “I know the secret of the disks!” Bender told them. Three men had visited him, Bender added, and had “in effect shut him up completely as far as saucer investigation is concerned.”
Roberts and Lucchesi were stunned. So was Barker, to whom they passed along the information. The following Sunday, October 4, Roberts and Lucchesi drove to Bridgeport and tried to find out from Bender what had happened. But he’d been silenced, frightened nearly out of his wits. He wasn’t talking.
“When did the three men visit you?” they asked.
His reply: “I can’t answer that.”
“Who were the men?”
“Were they from the government?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Do saucers come from space?”
“I can’t answer that.”
Eventually they hit on some questions Bender was willing to answer. The saucers are “going to be both good and bad” for the world. The world won’t come to an end but “there will be changes in everybody’s life.” The truth will be “frightening” even to those familiar with the saucers, who expect something “unusual and fantastic”; just imagine how it will impact those unprepared for it. “They were pretty rough with me,” Bender said of the three men, adding that two of them did the talking while the third stood watching, his eyes fixed on Bender.
“Did you notice what the men wore?” Roberts and Lucchesi asked.
“They wore the same type of clothes and hats,” was Bender’s answer. “Dark clothes and black hats.”
Black hats but only “dark” clothing. It was Barker who would later shade Bender’s description, ever so slightly, into “black suits.” In this shift, the three men’s mythologization would begin.
Barker was baffled. That was what he claimed in They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, and although on a few occasions—well, many occasions—he was known to bend the truth, on this point we can believe him. His friend James Moseley, who knew Barker better than anyone else (Barker’s family included), recalled that “he seemed genuinely to believe that Al Bender somehow had stumbled onto the real nature and origin of flying saucers and been hushed up by government or alien agents.”
Correspondence in the Barker Collection bears this out. In a letter to UFO author Morris K. Jessup, about a year after the IFSB closed, Barker wrote: “There is a lot involved here I would like to know, and I feel I am uncovering it bit by bit.” “Right now,” he wrote to Jessup ten days later, “it seems that the whole question of saucers can be resolved by looking deep into people’s minds for delusions—or—there is something involved so fantastic and perhaps even terrifying that we might be better off not knowing it.” This cryptic remark, which Jessup seems (from his reply) not to have understood, makes sense only as an allusion to some “fantastic” discovery that Barker truly imagined Bender to have made.
The October 1953 issue of Space Review announced itself the final one. The IFSB would be reorganized into a restricted-membership society no longer concerned with flying saucers; members would be refunded for any outstanding issues. The flying saucer mystery, readers were told on the first page, “is no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by orders from a higher source. 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.”
To which the writer—Bender, presumably—added: “We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious.”
We’ll never be sure precisely what happened. We may, however, allow ourselves an educated guess.
In 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy was at the height of his power and influence. Fears of Communist subversion were everywhere. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was active in ferreting out Communists and their suspected sympathizers, the “masters of deceit” who hid behind a thousand disguises. The IFSB got onto the FBI’s radar screen late that August, when one of Barker’s “Chief Investigator” business cards made its way into the hands of an FBI agent who showed up in Barker’s office in Clarksburg inquiring about the organization. The word International in the group’s name must have set alarm bells ringing. It was to be presumed a Communist front.
The notion seems grotesque today. In the context of 1953, it made perfect, if paranoid, sense. In January that year, a panel of scientists had met under the CIA’s aegis to evaluate UFOs and what threat, if any, they posed to American security. The panelists’ conclusion was that they didn’t exist and therefore posed no threat. Popular belief in them, however, could be dangerous, masking the entry of hostile aircraft into our air space. Amateur UFO groups therefore “should be watched. . . . The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind.”
And so IFSB President Albert K. Bender needed to be paid a visit.
“God, but you’re all over the place!” one of the three men exclaimed, looking at the map on Bender’s wall that showed the distribution of the IFSB’s branches.48 Like a cancer, like Communism itself, Bender’s organization was spreading across the world. It had to be stopped.49
They told Bender a horrific story of their own invention—we have no idea what it might have been—scaring him into dropping his research activity. In case that didn’t suffice, they added a more straightforward threat. “I suppose you know you’re on your honor as an American,” one of them told him before leaving. “If I hear another word out of your office you’re in trouble.”
Over the coming months, Bender’s belief in their story began to fade, and with it the idea that UFOs had any significance at all. But the fright he’d received stayed with him, and his saucer pursuits came to seem like a bad dream, a “nonsensical” business to put behind him for good. Besides, he now had other things on his mind. The year 1954 found him wooing Betty Rose, a petite, charming redhead from England whom he’d met by correspondence through the IFSB. They married that October.
For the historical three men, it was mission accomplished. For the mythical Men in Black, the mission had just begun.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO BARKER
“I’m going to say something blasphemous here,” curator David Houchin told Bob Wilkinson, interviewing him for the marvelous 2009 documentary Shades of Gray. “Gray Barker has written one of the Gospels.”
They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers is indeed Gospel-like, though not quite in the sense Houchin intended. Drawing on older traditions, actual events, and actual reports of purported events—slightly retouching them, here and there leaving out inconvenient details and emphasizing the convenient ones—but most of all through combination and juxtaposition, Barker created a dark new gospel of strange things in the sky and stranger things on earth. It’s utterly fantastic, alien to our idea of reality. Yet it conveys a sense of coherence and authenticity, which grows stronger as you come to recognize how deeply rooted it is in the worlds through which Barker moved, how little of it he needed to invent.
This was Barker’s masterpiece. Struggle as he might—he wrote ten more books and uncounted numbers of words in other forums—he could never produce anything like it again. He may have realized that, and it may partly explain the bleak despair that overtook his later years.
For he did despair—of himself, of the avocation-turned-business to which he’d dedicated himself. “UFO is a bucket of shit,” he intoned in a poem that might have served as his obituary. “And I sit here writing/While the shit drips down my face / In great rivulets.” The squalid pranks that became his characteristic, in which he and his friend Moseley took such delight, stemmed not from impish high spirits but from a misery so entrenched it could be soothed only by making fools of others.
UFO author John Keel—who carried the torch of the Men in Black through the 1970s, who coined the acronym MIBs by which they’ve come to be known—understood this. “Gray turned into a total hoaxer,” Keel told an interviewer. “At some point, and I never could find out what really happened, he just gave up and he said, ‘Well, what the hell, we might as well have fun with this.’ And so you have to be very careful with the stuff he published after 1959, because you don’t know whether he’s making it up.”
That was the later Gray Barker. It doesn’t apply to They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. There, Barker was for real.
The book’s themes: Silence. Danger. Warning. “We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious,” were Bender’s words in the final issue of Space Review. And They Knew Too Much ends, apart from its two-page epilogue, with the admonition: “And for God’s sake be careful, Gray!”50
“I have a feeling that some day there will come a slow knocking at my own door,” Barker writes in the epilogue. “They will be at your door too, unless we all get wise and find out who the three men really are.”
That “slow knocking” hadn’t yet happened, and Barker wondered why. “Why hadn’t the three men visited me?” Wasn’t he important enough? Sure, he’d received the usual “telephone calls, often with no one at the other end, that plague all saucer researchers.” In his later, prankster years, he would make enough of those calls himself. But these were only “cranks and harmless crackpots.” Where were the three men in black?
I often thought it might be worth being silenced and warned to keep quiet about what I knew if I could actually have something definitely confirmed as to the origin and purpose of the saucers.
Maybe I will some day experience that cold feeling of mingled satisfaction and fear, of triumph and defeat. I hope not.
Something genuine, all the more powerful in its ambivalence, speaks through these words. It speaks in disguise, but with unmistakable integrity. If you ask me, what was it? I will answer with a question:
What did it mean to be a closeted gay man in 1950s West Virginia?
Of Barker’s sexual orientation, there’s no doubt. It was common knowledge, normally left unspoken, among UFOlogy’s cognoscenti. He wrote, as fiction, autobiographical accounts of his prowls through Clarksburg’s sleazier locales in search of partners. A scandal, apparently involving sodomy with underage boys, landed him in court late in 1962. He was put on probation, assigned a court-appointed psychiatrist. His family, isolated and living far from Clarksburg, remained in the dark. “I didn’t learn nothing of the gayness until after his death,” his niece remembered years later, adding: “Back then you didn’t talk about people being gay.”
No. You didn’t. We’ll never know what went on inside Gray Barker as the realization dawned that there was something about his essence as a male that was, for his time and place, literally unspeakable. We can be sure, however, that it took place in a state of enforced, absolute silence.
The three men never “visited” him with their threats and warnings. They dwelt with him day in and day out. He knew what it was to have a secret too terrible to be revealed; he felt in his body and soul the forces that kept that secret hidden, made it impossible to imagine. Not a hint of this surfaces in They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. Yet it pervades the entire book.
“Then the world isn’t going to come to an end?” Lucchesi and Roberts ask Bender, and the world’s ending is a recurrent theme in They Knew Too Much. This was Gray Barker’s experience: a careless action, a word too revealing could have brought his world to a sudden end. He knew that. He conveyed it to his readers.
I was one of those readers. My terrible secret wasn’t Barker’s—I’ve described it in chapter 1; it was the knowledge no one could speak of, the knowledge I would not admit to myself, that my mother was dying. Yet there was enough in common that I knew in my gut: Barker spoke the truth. “Deep calleth unto deep,” says the Bible (Psalm 42:7), and like so much in the Bible—like so much in the gospel according to Gray Barker—this is absolutely true. Gray Barker’s deep unconscious called out to me through the pages of his book. My deep unconscious answered.
So did the culture’s. Which is why Men in Black became four Hollywood movies, and why the hit TV series of the 1990s, The X-Files, draws on themes that Barker introduced in the 1950s. But that’s getting ahead of our story.
ANTECEDENTS
We’ve seen this before, with Barney Hill and the alien abductions. An individual’s trauma is injected into the culture. It spreads beneath the skin; it manifests itself on large scale years or decades later. Yet, though that individual—Barney Hill, Gray Barker—is the fountainhead from which the myth springs, it has a prehistory as well.
A Man in Black appears at the very dawn of the UFO era, in the bizarre and tragic episode known as the Maury Island incident, which unfolded in Tacoma, Washington, in the summer of 1947. A certain Harold Dahl, who claimed to be a harbor patrolman but in fact made his living selling lumber he’d salvaged from the waters of Puget Sound, reported having been out on his boat on June 21 when he spotted six doughnut-shaped objects in the sky. One of them seemed to be in mechanical trouble, circled in the air by the other five. After discharging a heavy dark slag, the object flew off with its five companions.
At seven the next morning a man showed up at Dahl’s home, inviting him to breakfast in a café. The man seemed to be about forty, “wore a black suit, was of medium height, and there was nothing unusual about his appearance.” But what followed showed that there was something indeed extraordinary, not to say supernatural, about the man himself. As he and Dahl waited for their breakfast to arrive, the stranger related to Dahl down to the minutest detail what Dahl had seen the day before, what he and his crew had experienced. This was proof, the stranger told Dahl, “that I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe.”
The man left Dahl with a warning: “if he loved his family and didn’t want anything to happen to his general welfare, he would not discuss his experience with anyone.”
We have only Dahl’s word for all this, and as it turned out Dahl was lying. The sighting over Puget Sound never happened; the six doughnut-shaped objects never existed. This eventually became clear, but not before two Air Force officers who’d flown in from California at the end of July to investigate Dahl’s story were dead. Their plane had crashed on their return flight, killing them both.
It’s not quite clear when the Man in Black first entered the story. My own guess, although I admit there’s some evidence to the contrary, is that Dahl invented him sometime after the plane crash. Originally Dahl spoke only of the malfunctioning UFO, which in retrospect might seem a foreshadowing of the doomed airplane. Once the two officers were dead, his storytelling instincts led him to the next step. A black-clad stranger, Death personified,51 had paid a prophetic visit in advance of the real thing.
There were older precedents. The Man in Black, sometimes explicitly called by that name, is a stock figure in the confessions of seventeenth-century witches. He’s the Devil. Or, perhaps, he’s an indeterminate archetypal figure—a “UFO” of his era—whom the witch-hunters found it reasonable to identify with the Devil.
He appeared in Scotland in 1670 as “a man in black cloaths with a hat on his head, sitting at the table.” In England in 1682, he was “a gentleman in a field . . . his apparel . . . all of black.” By century’s end, he’d crossed the Atlantic. Tituba, the slave woman from Barbados whose graphic testimony set the Salem witch trials in motion (1692), told her rapt audience how “a tall, white-haired man in a dark serge coat” had offered her “pretty things” and “tell me he God and I must believe and serve him six years.”
The UFOlogists have found special interest in a story from Norway in 1730, after Europe’s witch-hunting vogue had passed. A thirteen-year-old peasant girl named Siri Jørgensdatter told her local ministers—who took her seriously, though no one else did—how her deceased grandmother had been a witch who’d flown with her on a sow’s back to a feast with the Devil. “On the way they met three men dressed in black whom the grandmother referred to as ‘grandfather’s boys.’” The Devil himself, also in black, was “grandfather.”
This seems a perfect analogue to Albert Bender’s three men in black. No more so, however, than the three men “all dressed in black” who came down from the moon in 1683 to torment Abraham Cardozo. Here we find them outside the European Christian cultural sphere, though admittedly not far outside it. (As we saw in chapter 2, Cardozo, though Jewish, had been brought up a Catholic in Spain.) It’s unlikely that Gray Barker had read about Siri Jørgensdatter’s testimony. It’s impossible that he’d read Cardozo’s, which was first translated from the Hebrew (by me) long after Barker’s death.
Coincidence? Never to be ruled out. But an alternative option needs also to be considered: that Bender’s historical experience with three frightening visitors had summoned something from the collective unconscious into the pages of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers: the alien, be it demon or Devil or death itself, that moves among us, haunting and dominating us, forcing us into terrified silence about those truths of which we yearn to speak. This image resonated, in widening circles. In the late twentieth century, it became first a staple of the UFO tradition, then part of the shared American cultural awareness.
BENDER REDUX
In 1962, six years after They Knew Too Much, Barker brought Bender back on stage for an encore. Bender’s own book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, published under the imprint of Barker’s Saucerian Books, revealed at long last who the three men were and what they’d told him. As an extra bonus, it explained why people weren’t seeing flying saucers anymore. (The great UFO waves of the 1960s, which would make nonsense of Bender’s explanation, were still in the future.)
The three weren’t government agents. They weren’t even “men.” They took human form—albeit with strange glowing eyes—so as not to scare Bender out of his wits, but in their proper shapes were hideous creatures like the Flatwoods monster. They came from outer space but maintained a base in Antarctica, carrying out a time-limited mission for the benefit of their home planet. They gave Bender a small metal disk, telling him that when he wanted to contact them, he should hold it tightly in his palm and close his eyes, while repeating the word “Kazik.”
They could materialize and dematerialize at will, and in the same fashion they teleported Bender to the interior of their spacecraft. There they implanted in him an “impulse” that would cause his body to disintegrate if he ever revealed to anyone what had befallen him. He must preserve absolute secrecy until such time as his Kazik disk should disappear. When that happened, he would know that they’d left our planet for good. Then he could speak freely.
In late 1960 the disk vanished. Two years later he published his book.
Hardly anyone took it seriously.52 Even Barker, in “Epilogue by the Publisher,” expressed reservations. Maybe Bender had let himself get tangled up with “occult forces which he misinterpreted as representing interplanetary visitation”; maybe he was just hallucinating. The real three men in black, Barker suggested in an epigram that echoed through the UFO world of the time, were named Boredom, Frustration, and Disgust.
Above all, Disgust. Barker’s friend Moseley has plausibly suggested that the absurdity of Bender’s tale was what finally shattered Barker’s faith that there was some genuine mystery in the flying saucers, drove him to the dismal conviction that the UFO was “a bucket of shit.” To those of us reading it in 1962, Flying Saucers and the Three Men seemed pure inanity. Only in retrospect can we see there was something more.53
Bender’s book foreshadowed the abduction tradition, then still in utero. (Betty and Barney Hill had their precipitating UFO experience the previous September, but they hadn’t yet begun to undergo hypnotic regression.) It was written in the pattern of the flying saucer “contactee” literature of the 1950s. Yet it broke the mold with extraterrestrials who weren’t loving space brothers but coldly efficient exploiters come to Earth to make use of its resources and content to leave humankind to its fate afterward. Meanwhile they regularly abducted humans, partly out of necessity, partly from what appears to be sadistic amusement. They told Bender they’d “carried off many of your people to our own planet” to experiment on them and exhibit them, as well as “to use their bodies to disguise our own.” Bender himself they treated, not exactly cruelly, but with stony indifference to the toll their visitations took on his health and peace of mind.
The examination table is here—in the form of “a strange-looking table reminiscent of a hospital operating table” upon which Bender is laid. So is the implant theme: apart from the “impulse” that will turn Bender to dust if he says anything out of line, he suspects the aliens may have left him with a physical implant that’s causing his persistent headaches.
Paralyzed and helpless on the “operating table,” Bender undergoes a sexual violation that’s as close to those of the 1990s abductions as one could expect from the buttoned-up world of pre-sexual-revolution UFOlogy. “Three beautiful women, dressed in tight white uniforms”—a photographic negative of the three men in black—approach him, caress him, strip him “naked as the day I was born” and pour liquid all over his body.54 His body grows warm, they massage every part of it “without exception.” This is supposedly happening in November 1953, about the same time that in real life Bender’s dormant libido was beginning to assert itself, as we gather from his courtship of Betty Rose the following year. An unanticipated side effect of an encounter with three men in black: the recovery of one’s natural heritage as a sexual male.
MIBs
Meanwhile, others had begun to see men in black. A casebook published in 1997—the same year that the cinematic Men in Black made its debut in movie theaters—records some sixty “MIB” incidents, the lion’s share of them from the 1960s.
Normally the MIBs appear singly or in pairs. The classic trio does occur from time to time, but it’s infrequent.55 The data is unruly and confusing, and it’s hard to draw the boundaries between the actual MIB manifestations and other possibly related events that attach themselves to the witnesses’ stories. These may be paranormal or just peculiar and annoying, like telephones that make weird noises on the line or go inexplicably dead. Occasionally a bit of symbolism provides a clue to the meaning of an event, as when “a man in a black hat and cloak” is seen carrying a sickle, like the traditional embodiment of death. MIB-themed pranks, parasitic on the burgeoning tradition and sometimes very cruel, have been known to happen.
A Maine physician named Herbert Hopkins, a brilliantly talented man of medicine with a long interest in occult and spiritualistic phenomena and (according to his nephew) with a significant drinking problem, told a particularly strange story. He’d been engaged in the hypnotic regressions of a UFO abductee, and he’d made tapes of those regressions. On the evening of September 11, 1976, a man in black showed up at Hopkins’s home to demand he destroy those tapes.
The visitor was tall and thin, with a black suit, black tie and shoes, pants with a razor-sharp crease that didn’t flatten even when he sat down. He wore a derby—an unusual article of clothing for 1976, yet shiny and new—which prompted Hopkins to think, “This guy looks just like an undertaker.” The derby is reminiscent of the MIBs’ reported habit of driving obsolete cars that seem brand new. Along with Hopkins’s “undertaker” association, it suggests a link with the archaic, the ancestral, the dead.
The MIB had another odd feature, which Hopkins realized when the man brushed his “ruby-red” lips with the back of his glove and the color came off, leaving a slit of a mouth behind. “I said to myself, ‘This guy is some kind of queer. He’s wearing lipstick!’”—and at this point in his tape-recorded narrative, Hopkins laughs.
Soon afterward, Hopkins watched in amazement as the man dematerialized a penny that Hopkins held in his palm. The coin became blurry, then faded away, never (the man told him) to be seen again “on this plane.” The man spoke of Barney Hill, who died because he “knew too much”—those exact words—because “he did not have a heart, just as you no longer have a coin.” The same would happen to Hopkins unless he destroyed the abduction tapes and correspondence, and everything he had that related to UFOs.
Which, after the stranger left, he proceeded to do.
It’s hardly possible that the event took place as described. The witness is flawed; his story filled with fantastic details which, if taken at face value, would leave reality as we know it in shambles. What he relates may have been an alcohol-fueled hallucination or a fantasy so vivid that he afterward took it for a memory. Saying this, however, is not the same as denying it any significance.
Its homosexual overtones are particularly interesting, in the light of what we’ve seen about Gray Barker (whose fingerprints appear here and there in Hopkins’s narrative).56 The abduction story that Hopkins was engaged in exploring hints at a gay relationship. The two abductees were very young men who lived together in a trailer; they may have been lovers, or possibly not; Hopkins may have been unsure. The uncertainty may have evoked unconscious anxieties about homosexuality. These took embodied form in the apparition of “some kind of queer” possessed of extraordinary and fatal powers, who came to him by night, home alone, his family gone to a movie and not expected back anytime soon.57
Seen from this perspective, Hopkins’s Man in Black externalized the uneasiness he felt over the abduction case in which he’d gotten himself so deeply enmeshed, gave him his justification for purging all traces of it from his home. Destroy it all! the apparition commanded. Perhaps with a measure of relief, Hopkins obeyed.58
MEN IN BLACK AND X-FILES
“Have you heard of men in black?” a lady was asked, presumably not long after 1997. She exclaimed in response: “Of course, everyone’s seen Men in Black!”
The woman had no interest in UFOs, hardly any knowledge of the subject. The names Gray Barker and Albert Bender, far less Herbert Hopkins, would have meant nothing to her. But thanks to its dazzling silver screen success, the mythos of an obscure, disreputable West Virginia promoter was part of her world, a recognized feature of the cultural landscape. The original Men in Black, opening in over three thousand theaters across the country, was the second-highest grossing film of 1997 (after Titanic). Fifteen years later, Men in Black 3 surpassed it to become the highest-grossing film in the Sony franchise, drawing millions of moviegoers not only in this country but in Japan, Germany, and the UK as well. Of course, she’d heard of men in black. Hadn’t everybody?
But what did “everybody” know about them from the movies named after them?
The galaxy defenders;
Here come the Men in Black
They won’t let you remember.
That was the refrain of the soundtrack of the 1997 film, carrying on the Barker-Bender tradition more than forty years after it first appeared in They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. With a twist, however, that reminds us that the abductions came in between. In 1956, the Men in Black interdicted only the free expression of what you’d discovered or experienced. In 1997, they went after your memories themselves.
Yet these were the good guys of the Men in Black movies, which eventually multiplied into three (and now four). In this respect, the original Men in Black was a reaction against the hit TV series of its time, The X-Files.59
In July 1997, when Men in Black was released, The X-Files had finished its fourth season. UFOs had been central to that show from its beginnings. Its pilot episode (September 1993) was about alien abductions and the implants left behind in the victims, one of which is retrieved by FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully but suppressed, as UFO evidence normally is, by their higher-ups. Mulder’s obsessive pursuit of the paranormal is explained by his little sister’s having been abducted when he was twelve. The name given to his partner Scully is sometimes explained as a nod by the show’s creators toward Frank Scully, author of the 1950 bestseller Behind the Flying Saucers. MIBs as such, however, remain marginal to The X-Files plotlines, and a moment’s reflection will suggest why. The show’s watchwords “Trust no one” would make little sense in a world where the sinister truth-suppressors wear uniforms identifying them as such.
The X-Files drew instead on a more indirect spinoff of the gospel according to Barker. The 1980s had seen the burgeoning of a baroque counterhistory of the postwar period, in which the UFO aliens not only had landed, but were in intimate collusion with the US government.
At the end of 1984, a document came to light that claimed to be a briefing paper written for Dwight Eisenhower in November 1952 by the head of the CIA. It informed the president-elect of the existence of Operation Majestic-12, a supersecret group of twelve leading scientists and military and intelligence officers charged with studying the crashed disk at Roswell and the alien bodies found near it.60 The Harvard astrophysicist Donald Menzel, famous as a vocal, bigoted, and effective debunker of all things UFOlogical—the author of three books declaring UFOs to be nonsense—was one of the twelve. Whoever forged the “MJ-12” document, as it’s come to be called, must have had a quirky sense of humor. But he or she conveyed a serious message, not lost on the creators of The X-Files: people can be the opposite of who they seem. You never know who you’re dealing with.
MJ-12 was only the start. The legends grew more elaborate and fantastic. Not only had there been other crashes besides Roswell, all of them naturally covered up; not only were the remains of the disks and their pilots being kept by the military at Nevada’s supersecret Area 51—but the government had even made contact with the aliens in 1964, and a few years later had made a pact with them. The aliens would share their technology; in return, the government would allow them to abduct a specified number of Americans to experiment on, Nazi-style. But the agreement broke down. A bloody confrontation in 1979 ended in a standoff, with the aliens left entrenched in underground bases in our Southwest.
Meanwhile we ordinary folk go about our business, blind to all this, imagining (for example) that the Strategic Defense Initiative of the Reagan years was directed against the Soviet threat rather than the extraterrestrials who were its real target. The truth was out there, as The X-Files would have it. But only a few dogged investigators, like Mulder and Scully on the next decade’s TV screens, struggled to peel away the layers of official duplicity that kept it hidden.
Gray Barker died in December 1984, the same month that MJ-12 was discovered (or more likely fabricated). The Men in Black were the villains of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers; Barker considered the possibility they might be government agents. He didn’t take the next logical step, though, of villainizing the government. “Surely,” he wrote, “the government, more than we saucer investigators, was in a position to know what was best for the country.” Bender was put “on your honor as an American” not to reveal the secret, and Roberts, Lucchesi, and Barker himself all respected such a promise.
This was in 1956, an era when three out of four Americans trusted the government to do right “always” or “most of the time.” Then came Vietnam; then came Watergate. By the mid-nineties, the times they had a-changed. The “trust” figure, as measured by polls, had plunged to the dismal level that it’s at today: around 20 percent. Government was at best impotent to protect its citizens. At worst, it might be complicit with those who’d use us as experimental animals. Such was the matrix of belief out of which The X-Files grew.
In Men in Black, the system of values is turned upside down. The suppression of truth is not a crime but a civic necessity. The suppressors are given the likable human faces of Will Smith playing the young and black Agent J, and Tommy Lee Jones, the middle-aged white Agent K, who’s charged with initiating his new partner into the ways of the dark-clad brotherhood.
“We ain’t got time for this cover-up bullshit!” the Will Smith character cries out. His mentor sternly rebukes him: “The only way these people get on with their happy lives is they do not know about it”—“it” being the penetration of human society by thousands of covert extraterrestrials. This soothing ignorance is what Agents J and K are here to maintain.
Not that ETs are necessarily a bad lot. The vast majority, the Jones character explains, are law-abiding creatures who’ve come to Earth to make an honest living. But a few rogues among them menace the planet and must be kept under surveillance. Hence the MIB, “a secret organization that monitors alien activity on earth.”
Another reversal: the Men in Black, walking among us as aliens, are the ones charged with keeping the real and possibly deadly aliens under control. Yet their own alienness, though softened and attenuated, is still potent enough to set them apart.
A mighty brotherhood—they have the power to overrule any organ of government known to the public—they’re also a profoundly lonely one. They’ll never be recognized for their work in saving and sustaining human civilization. And they never, never get the girl. Beautiful and tender ladies pass through their orbit; there’s attraction, requited and reciprocal—and hopeless. Ordinary earth women are beyond their sphere, and in Men in Black 3, where the MIB are expanded to include Women in Black, fraternization within the organization is forbidden. Celibate as monks, unseen and unsuspected, they shelter us daily from horrors beyond our imagining.
The opening sequence of the 1997 movie conveys the MIB’s supreme authority, as well as the double meaning of alien that’s key to the film’s message. A truckload of illegal Mexican immigrants has been stopped by border control authorities. The officers are in the midst of browbeating the hapless passengers when the Jones character steps in. He speaks kindly to the newcomers in Spanish, welcomes them to the United States. The immigration police are thanked and told to get lost. These Mexicans are “good” aliens; they pose no threat. There are, of course, aliens of another kind, as we discovered one fine September morning four years after the original Men in Black came out.
There’s no doubt that communications professor Barna Donovan is right. The movie’s subtext is “multiculturalism, integration, and the problematic issues around immigration,” which the passage of twenty years hasn’t made any less problematic. But there’s another, deeper layer as well. Again and again, the theme of effacement of memory crops up. The Jones character and, after he gets the hang of it, the Smith character point a blinking tube called the “neuralizer” at innocent bystanders who’ve seen terrifying, uncanny sights that no one ought ever to see. Presto! their memories vanish. They “remember” of the event only what the Men in Black tell them they should.
The soundtrack, intoned by Will Smith, says it all:
The title held by me, M.I.B.
Means what you think you saw, you did not see . . .
Hypnotizer, neuralizer
Vivid memories turn to fantasies . . .
Cause we see things that you need not see
And we be places that you need not be . . .
What you think you saw, you did not see. As a teenager, I saw my mother’s gradual slide toward death. I also didn’t see it. Denial, they say, is not just a river in Egypt; at times it’s a prerequisite for survival. The Men in Black are bullies but also saviors. (“I know we might seem imposin/But trust me if we ever show in your section/Believe me, it’s for your own protection.”) I think of Bender’s haunting image of the “impulse” within him, capable of disintegrating his body so that “very little will be left of it.” That’s what Barker’s sexual impulses could have done to his life—and on one occasion came very near doing—if they hadn’t been ruthlessly checked. Courtesy of the Men in Black, who see things that you need not see and be places that you need not be.
In the poster for the original movie they were two: black-suited, eyes hidden behind dark glasses, arms crossed as they menacingly faced the viewer. Similarly with the mediocre and forgettable 2002 sequel. But in 2012, when the third of the series appeared, they’d become a trio: Will Smith, flanked by Jones on one side and by Josh Brolin, playing the Jones character’s younger self, on the other.
Men in Black 3—Three Men in Black. The circle back to They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers is complete.61
Notes
47. Though nearly four years older than Barker, Bender outlived him by more than thirty years, dying in 2016 at age ninety-four. In this respect also, the Barker-Bender pair resembles Barney and Betty Hill (see the end of chapter 3).
48. As Bender reported it in his October 4 conversation with Roberts and Lucchesi. Michael D. Swords, whose similar but somewhat divergent explanation of the IFSB’s closing inspired my own, lays proper weight on this detail. “The men were astounded at how widespread and cosmopolitan IFSB had become so quickly.”
49. Even at the time, some guessed this might be the reason for the IFSB’s disbanding. Bender had to personally assure the group’s British representative that “neither suspected Red activity nor dishonesty was the cause of its dissolution”—an assurance given in good faith, if the visitors didn’t reveal their true motives. He later was to speak of the “fantastic rumor” that the IFSB was “a Communist organization, forced to shut down by the government.”
50. Written to Barker by a New Zealand UFOlogist, allegedly visited by a “bloke” from whom he learned “too much” about UFOs for his own good.
51. Like the ominous “old man dressed in black and enwrapped in black” of Talmudic legend, who encountered a Jewish high priest in the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple, his appearance conveying to the unfortunate man that he was doomed to die within the year. I’m not suggesting any direct influence of this ancient story on Dahl or any other participant in the drama he set in motion. Rather, I’m proposing that the Man in Black appears in diverse cultures as a representation of death, and that some of the modern riffs on the theme can be understood through this symbolism.
52. At least among the UFOlogists. The Bender file in the Barker Collection contains a letter from Bender (July 21, 1962) reporting that “the Vice-Pres. of Acme Shear called me on the phone today and told me how much he liked the book and is a firm believer.” The same letter complains that Barker doesn’t write and won’t return Bender’s phone calls—a marker of how their relationship had soured.
53. And, indeed, more to Bender than present-day UFOlogists are apt to give him credit for. Asked by Roberts and Lucchesi to suggest a subject for a science-fiction story, Bender replied: “Suppose there was another world out in space, and there the people were black. What do you think would happen if they came to this planet? Do you think they would help the colored or the white people? You know the prejudices that exist here, and if they came to Earth, what do you think would happen?” This was 1953; the landmark events of the civil rights movement hadn’t yet happened. Yet Bender was alive to “the prejudices that exist here,” and intuited the UFOs’ potential to mirror the society’s racial torment.
54. Antonio Villas-Boas (see chapter 4) was also stripped and anointed with a thick transparent liquid in preparation for sex with his spacewoman. If I didn’t know better—it wasn’t until 1965 that more than a handful of English-speaking UFOlogists heard of Villas-Boas—I would say that Bender knew his story and was imitating it.
55. As in one bizarre case from 1968, where the three men appeared in the shapes of . . . Gray Barker, James Moseley, and John Keel! This is oddly parallel to what Cardozo describes from 1683: the three men in black, initially seen on the moon, took on the appearances of Sabbatai Zevi, Sabbatai’s prophet Nathan of Gaza, and the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Isaac Luria.
56. The claim that Barney Hill “knew too much” is an obvious echo of Barker. The MIB’s disappearing-coin trick is reminiscent of the vanishing of Bender’s Kazik disk, while the threat that Hopkins’s heart will be dematerialized suggests the “impulse” that would “disintegrate” Bender’s body. On at least one occasion, Barker was photographed wearing what appears to be lipstick.
57. Think of the apparitions that plagued Morton Schatzman’s patient “Ruth,” described in chapter 2.
58. There’s other evidence that sexuality was a troubled issue for the Hopkins family, which they transformed into tales of strange visitations. Hopkins’s son John reported a visit to him and his wife Maureen from a bizarre couple, a man and a woman, thirteen days after his father’s MIB encounter. Underlying this story is John and Maureen’s regular practice of mate-swapping, which they engaged in along with alcohol and drugs until eventually Maureen shot John dead in their backyard.
59. Pointed out to me by film scholar Barna Donovan.
60. Roswell, which had lain in near-total obscurity for almost three decades, was rediscovered in 1978. See chapter 8.
61. It’s curious that the latest cinematic iteration of the theme, released in June 2019, is entitled not Men in Black 4 but Men in Black: International—as if the number 3 has a special significance, marking a limit that ought not to be surpassed.