Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (10 page)

Since most UFO enthusiasts believe that flying saucers are space vehicles from another planet, they cannot fit the apparently very human MIB into their theories. Multi-armed, bug-eyed monsters are more acceptable as UFO pilots than olive-skinned, Oriental-looking gentlemen. There have been monster reports in a growing number of landing and contact cases, but reports of the human-type greatly outnumber them. This is why some leading UFO researchers speculated for years that flying saucers might be coming from behind the “Bamboo Curtain” in Asia. But in 1967, the Soviet news agency, Tass, openly accused the CIA of controlling the phenomenon and causing the widespread sightings in Tashkent, which is in southwestern Russia. Those sightings somehow inspired a revival of religious beliefs, and Soviet officials viewed such actions as part of some fiendish capitalist conspiracy.

Today, the term “Men in Black” is generic and is applied to any mysterious stranger who appears at the site of a paranormal event. However they do not always dress in black or look Oriental. Instead of having the classic olive complexion, some appear to be deeply tanned, even during the middle of winter. They often walk unsteadily, like they are drunk, and display other symptoms of “the bends” (a reaction to too much nitrogen in the blood). They speak slowly, parrotlike, as if they are reciting memorized speeches. Their dark eyes are usually described as being “hypnotic.” Many witnesses have also commented on their hair, which is usually an unnatural color – as if it were dyed. Some have very short hair, like a crewcut just growing back in, with a neatly shaved circle toward the back of the head. They don’t have much of a sense of humor but, when they do laugh, a kind of cackle escapes their lips. Some seem to have difficulty breathing, gasping between words. In a few cases, the MIB seemed perfectly normal in every respect, until they made a small blunder of some kind. When offered a dish of Jell-O, one of these more “normal” types tried to drink it. Offered a cigar, another tried to chew it up and eat it rather than light it.

The majority of the MIB are well-dressed in expensively cut suits, usually black or gray, and made of a glossy, slightly reflective material. In a number of reports, they are seen wearing shoes with unusually thick rubber soles. One odd consistency in these reports is that their clothing usually seems to be brand new. The soles of their shoes look unwalked upon. They look as if they have just left their haberdashers. Yet in a number of instances, their brand-new clothes were strangely out of date. They were wearing styles that had been out fashion for several years or, even more odd, they were dressed in styles that came into fashion several years later! The same peculiar feature is apparent in their vehicles. They have been seen in automobiles that were 20 years old, or older, yet were as perfect as a showroom model. Witnesses who have entered the MIB vehicles reported that they smelled new.

Black Cadillacs with heavily tinted windows seem to be their preferred mode of transportation but, in recent years, they have also appeared in Volkswagens and Fords. One witness in the Midwest claimed he was visited by a tall, extremely thin, cadaverlike man who traveled in a car that seemed to be assembled from the parts of many makes and models. Phantom campers, station wagons, and panel trucks have also been reported with increasing frequency. Witnesses in several cases have managed to get the license numbers of the mysterious vehicles, but police checks revealed that no such numbers had been issued!

This is not a phenomenon restricted to the U.S. The MIB have been reported in many parts of the world, including Italy, Germany, Spain, Great Britain, and Sweden. In 1973, a young Swedish journalist working on a UFO story was sitting in a restaurant outside of Stockholm, when a stranger walked over to his table and sat down uninvited. “You should give up your interest in flying saucers,” he stated flatly in perfect Swedish. Before the startled reporter could ask any questions, the man rose and quickly left the restaurant. The only unusual thing about him was his clothes, the reporter recalled. They didn’t seem to fit properly.

There have been countless episodes of this type in the U.S. In 1968, Peter Stevens, a young building contractor near Albany, NY, was sitting in a snack bar when “a tall, tan, saturnine-looking man” sat down on the stool beside him. “There have been people watching the sky every night down by the river in Scotia,” the man said suddenly. “People who look for UFOs should be very, very careful.” Like the Swedish mystery man, this one then made a quick exit. At my request, Stevens later made some drawings of the man. He sent the best one to me. A few weeks later, he and his wife returned home to find their house had been ransacked. Nothing was missing
except the MIB drawings!
A few months later, Peter Stevens suddenly died.

Flying saucer contactees seem to have more trouble with these mysterious men than any other single group. It is not unusual for a witness to receive unwelcome nocturnal visitors of this type soon after his encounter with a grounded UFO. The standard procedure is to openly threaten the witness, advising him to keep his UFO experience to himself. If the witness has managed to collect any kind of physical evidence, the MIB will demand it in forceful terms. There are almost endless variations to the games they play, however.

Stan Gordon, one of Pennsylvania’s most active UFO investigators, has come across several bizarre MIB cases involving not UFOs, but tall, hairy monsters. (There has been an epidemic of Bigfoot-type “creature” sightings throughout the U.S. in 1973-74.) In one creature case, the monster appeared outside a house trailer and left some sharply defined footprints. The witnesses reported directly to Gordon. The footprints were not mentioned in the local news media, but while they were photographing the impressions with a Polaroid camera, a station wagon with Ohio license plates pulled up. A man who seemed slightly tipsy climbed out, looked at the footprints, and then grabbed the Polaroid snapshots away from the witness. “You have just taken a picture for us,” he announced. Then he kicked at the footprints, smoothing the dirt over them and destroying the evidence. The witnesses became angry and told him they were going to call the police. He leaped into his vehicle and raced away. As in so many cases, his license numbers were unregistered. (Think about this for a moment. There are nearly 100 million vehicle registrations in the U.S. If you tried to invent a false license number, chances are you would come up with a number that is actually in use.)

Sometimes the MIB’s tactics are subtler. They are cunning imposters. For years, amateur UFO investigators heard stories about Air Force officers who threatened witnesses into silence. They never bothered to collect descriptions of these officers, but simply assumed that the Air Force was engaged in some kind of conspiracy of silence. Following a wave of such “silencings” in 1967, I discovered that the witnesses had been visited by bogus officers, usually short men with Oriental features, who adopted the names of actual military personnel from nearby bases. For instance, if a Sergeant Snodgrass was stationed nearby, a “Colonel Snodgrass” would drop in on local witnesses. In February 1967, Air Force headquarters in the Pentagon recognized the problem by issuing a letter to all commands urging security officers to be alert for these phantom airmen. Since impersonating a military officer is a violation of federal law, the FBI was also alerted, and their agents became involved in several UFO episodes. But the MIB remained elusive…

Scores of other investigators, including well-known personalities such as Ivan T. Sanderson, Otto Binder, Brad Steiger, Dr. James McDonald, and Dr. J. Allen Hynek have become involved in MIB cases. All had unwelcome experiences with mysterious telephone monitors. Sanderson’s phone on his farm in the mountains of New Jersey was plagued with harassing noises and interference, and his mail was apparently being closely watched. Peter Stevens and his wife changed their phone number several times, but the harassment persisted, even after they switched to an unlisted number. Stan Gordon recently revealed that “a great amount of mail containing reports from our investigators, and signed affidavits from witnesses, never arrived at our office. One investigator who had detailed information on a very strange case, mailed the report to us three different times, and we still never received any of them.”

Disturbingly, investigators who suspected their mail was being screened have suddenly received batches of mail from communist and neo-Nazi organizations. If any government agency were actually watching their mail, it would look as if they were engaged in subversive activities.

These manipulations have contributed to the atmosphere of paranoia that has dominated the UFO field for years. The common conclusion is that only the government – the CIA or the military – has the machinery needed to tap large numbers of phones and intercept the mails. But I learned that these same problems often plagued the official investigators. Official reports and photographs sent by mail, instead of courier, have even been switched en route with doctored documents! The MIB seem to have an intelligence organization that makes our CIA seem like a bunch of cub scouts. They have often zeroed in on UFO witnesses who have not disclosed their sightings to anyone. It is not unusual for a family to return to their home after watching UFOs cavort above their front yard and have the phone ring immediately, sometimes with nothing but silence on the other end, sometimes with a mysterious voice warning them to keep their mouths shut.

In 1969, a blonde woman visited witnesses in West Virginia and Ohio, winning instant admission to their homes by claiming to be “John Keel’s secretary.” Somehow, this woman was able to locate people I had interviewed, but had never written about. She carried a clipboard and asked a series of involved, very sophisticated questions – not the kind of questions usually asked by UFO enthusiasts, or even by the Air Force. Over the years, other pseudo-investigators have turned up claiming to represent nonexistent universities or amateur organizations like NICAP and APRO, while they deliberately acted in strange, suspicious ways, adding to the dissension that has always kept the UFO field in confusion.

Deception and paranoia are the MIB’s stock in trade. It becomes impossible to sort the genuine government agents from the frauds. The late Frank Edwards reported the story of a minor official at a large industrial plant, who saw a huge glowing object at 4:30 a.m. one morning in Dec. 1965. The man stopped on his way home and reported the sighting to the state police. A few hours later, two “military officers” appeared at his plant and questioned him for two hours. At the conclusion of the interview, one of the officers said, “We can’t tell you what to do, but we can offer a suggestion: Don’t talk about this matter to anyone.” How had the two officers heard of the sighting and moved so fast? And why would they go through so much trouble over a fairly routine sighting?

Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer who has been active in UFO research for many years, tells of two men “engaged in work requiring a military clearance” who saw a UFO land in North Dakota on a rainy night in Nov. 1961. Thinking it was a plane in trouble, they stopped their car and ran toward the object. “Their surprise was understandably great when they discovered humanoids around the craft, one of which boldly waved them off in a threatening manner,” Hynek says. The men did not report their sighting, but the next day one of them was called out from work and introduced to two strangers. “They asked to be taken to his home,” Hynek reported, “where they examined the clothing he had worn the night before, especially his boots, and left without further word.” How had the pair located the witness? And why the interest in his shoes?

When the two men who were allegedly taken aboard a UFO near Mississippi’s Pascagoula River in 1973 were examined at a nearby Air Force base, the military doctors carefully examined their shoes and scraped samples from their soles… Betty and Barney Hill, another pair of famous contactees, threw the shoes they had been wearing at the time of their abduction into the back of a closet. Later, they found the shoes were covered with a powdery fungus…

Some MIB incidents have been the work of mischievous UFO fans – mere hoaxes. For example, shortly before the mammoth flying saucer convention held in NYC in June 1967, many of the well-known UFO enthusiasts in the NY area received phone calls from a lady identifying herself as “Princess Moon Owl.” She claimed she had just arrived from the asteroid Ceres. The lady managed to create quite an uproar in UFO circles.

All the speakers at the 1967 convention were taped by a young man who planned to make copies of the speeches for later sale. He lived in an exclusive apartment house in midtown Manhattan, in an apartment cluttered with expensive electronic gear and shortwave radios. Soon after the convention ended, he returned to his apartment one day and found someone had broken in. The convention tapes were scattered around the room, but none of his valuable equipment had been stolen. Whoever had broken in was obviously interested in the tapes only, and the tape of Ivan Sanderson’s speech in particular. Sanderson had studied the UFO phenomenon for years and was convinced that it was a terrestrial-based mystery, not the work of an “advanced technology” from some distant planet. Later, he published a book on that theme, risking the wrath of all those who believed in extraterrestrial intelligences.

In my own investigations into the hundreds of MIB cases and their Watergate-style break-ins, I uneasily recognized a common factor in all of them. Our Men in Black are mainly interested in
retrieving evidence that might point to terrestrial UFO origins.
The earliest MIB incidents back in 1947 revolved around cases in which the witnesses had either recovered earthly substances at UFO sites, or had seen earthmen or normal terrestrial vehicles in conjunction with their sightings. The MIB were concerned with recovering such evidence and discrediting these eyewitnesses. (Although these cases are usually slighted by UFO investigators who believe in extraterrestrial visitants, there are many episodes – reliably witnessed – in which UFOs have descended and discharged passengers, who then entered ordinary automobiles and drove off. In some cases, the automobiles themselves were dropped by the UFOs.)