The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrials

The following in-depth article on Men in Black is an excerpt from the book The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial by Jerome Clark.

In the midst of a religious revival in Wales, a young rural woman was visited three nights in succession by a "man dressed in black," the Barmouth Advertiser reported on March 30, 1905. "This figure has delivered a message to the girl which she is frightened to relate."

The revival owed its inspiration to the charismatic Mary Jones, a 38-year- old farmwife and recent convert to ardent Christian faith, who had quickly become a preacher of exceptional power and persuasiveness. Those who accompanied her in her travels through the Welsh countryside noted that mysterious lights seemed to accompany her. This aspect of her ministry was widely remarked on in press accounts--not surprisingly, because journalists saw the lights, too. Since the lights also appeared in places where Mrs. Jones did not happen to be, the association between the lights and her was most likely coincidental. Wales apparently was undergoing what decades later would be called a UFO wave.

The Welsh landscape of early 1905 was rife with supernatural manifestations. Persons affected by the revival reported encounters with Jesus, angels, and demonic black dogs. Satan, too, was met on dark country roads. Perhaps the men in black were his agents, and as dependent on the imagination of the beholder as the other denizens of heaven and hell "seen" by the faithful and the fervent.

Men in black had already been associated with the devil for several centuries. As William Woods writes of medieval encounters in A History of the Devil (1973), "Sometimes the devil wears green or gray, but mostly he is dressed in black, and always in the fashion of the day." In 1730 a 13-year-old Norwegian girl told clerical witch-hunters that six years earlier she and her grandmother had flown on the back of a pig to attend a meeting with Satan. On the way, the clerics wrote in their report of the interrogation, "they met three men dressed in black whom the grandmother referred to as 'grandfathers boys'." Once arrived at their destination, they "went in and sat down at table next to the devil, whom her grandmother called 'grandfather'." "Three men dressed in black" would be heard of again, in a whole new context, over two centuries later.

Albert Bender and the men in black. In the summer of 1947, as "flying saucers" entered public consciousness, a man named Harold Dahl reported that he had observed a UFO as it discharged metallic substances into the ocean water between Tacoma and Maury Island, Washington. The following morning, he claimed, a stranger clad in a dark suit invited him to breakfast in downtown Tacoma, then startled him by reciting a detailed account of Dahl's experience of the previous day, even though at that point it had received no publicity. The stranger then intimated that Dahl and his family would be harmed if he discussed his sighting with anyone else.

Subsequent investigation by the Air Force elicited confessions from Dahl and associate Fred L. Crisman that the two had engineered a fantastic hoax.

Nonetheless, some civilian investigators refused to credit the retraction and charged that the truth about what would be called the "Maury Island mystery" was being covered up. The legend would live on among uncritical flying-saucer enthusiasts. It would mark the first claimed appearance of a man in black in a UFO-era context, though the concept of "men in black" would not be formed until a few years later.

The International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), which came into being in April 1952 under the direction of Albert K. Bender of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was the most successful early UFO organization. Within months of its creation the IFSB had branches in other countries, an active investigations unit, and a magazine, Space Review. But in the fall of 1953 Bender's ardent pursuit abruptly ended. Soon afterwards Bender wrote in Space Review, "The mystery of the flying saucers is no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by orders from a higher source." He urged UFO enthusiasts to "please be very cautious."

To a few close associates, including IFSB chief investigator Gray Barker, Bender related that in late September, after he had confided a UFO theory to an unnamed correspondent, three dark-suited men visited him. The men, who Bender indicated were agents of the U.S. government, imparted the alarming answer to the UFO mystery and threatened him with imprisonment if he told anyone.

Bender's "silencing" obsessed Barker, who would go on to become a prominent writer, editor, and publisher on the fringes of saucerdom. In a February 1954 article he cautiously summarized all that was known, which was not much. The article mentioned Australian ufologist Edgar Jarrold, who recently had received a visitor who told him startling UFO secrets that Jarrold was directed to keep to himself. Not long afterwards a badly frightened Jarrold dropped out of active UFO research.

Almost certainly the Bender and Jarrold matters would have passed into obscurity if not for They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, the book Barker would write two years Later. They Knew Too Much launched the men-in-black legend in ufology. In 246 pages of paranoia-drenched prose, Barker recounted the doings of the sinister "Silence Group," which brought enforcers in dark suits to the residences of UFO researchers who got too close to the truth. Among the victims, Barker asserted, were Bender, Dahl, and Crisman in the United States, Jarrold in Australia, John Stuart and Doreen Wilkinson in New Zealand, and "Gordon Smallwood" (Laimon Mitris) in an unnamed country "outside U.S.A." (Canada). Barker freely speculated that the silencers might be of unearthly origin, and he warned readers that soon they "will be at your door, too, unless we all get wise and find out who the three men really are."

Barker featured what he called the "Bender mystery" in the pages of his magazine The Saucerian (later Soucerian Buttetin), whose readership consisted mostly of persons attracted to the emerging contactee movement. Conservative ufologists paid little attention to men-in-black tales, but such stories frightened and enthralled saucer fans of paranoid disposition.

In 1962, in Flying Saucers and the Three Men, Bender told what he represented as the true story of his silencing. The silencing occurred, he wrote, after he incurred the wrath of monstrous extraterrestrials who kidnapped him to the South Pole. These beings monitored his activities until 1960, when they returned to their home planet Kazik and Bender was freed to tell his tale. Even Barker, who published the book under his Saucerian imprint, privately expressed disbelief, and most readers did not take it seriously.

Still, whatever his off-stage reservations, Barker kept the "mystery" alive in a series of publications, the last of which appeared a year before his death. In 1963 he released both The Bender Mystery Confirmed, an anthology of readers' sometimes strange responses to Three Men, and the more interesting--and even stranger--UFO Warning, John Stuart's allegedly true account of how supernatural sexual harassment drove him and Doreen Wilkinson out of ufology.

There was no way to reconcile Bender's earlier story, sketchy though it was, with the latter tale. Those whose interest in the matter had not yet flagged could only deduce that either the "Bender mystery" was a fabrication from the outset or the first story was true and the second a concoction intended to end years of pestering by UFO buffs. Persons who knew Bender, recalling how frightened he had been in the fall of 1953, remained convinced that government agents had indeed threatened him.

Bender eventually moved to California. Since the late 1960s he has had virtually nothing to do with UFOs and ufologists. It is likely that the truth will come to light only if one day someone finds the relevant documents in an official file--assuming, of course, Bender was in fact the subject of government attention. In the meantime, however, a plausible retrospective interpretation of the episode is possible.

In January 1953 the Central Intelligence Agency, fearing that the Soviet Union might use UFO reports for psychological warfare ends, assembled a panel of five American scientists, under the leadership of physicist H. P. Robertson (see Robertson Panel). Over the next four days, in Washington, D.C., the scientists devoted a total of 12 hours to reviewing data from the Air Force's Project Blue Book. Their final report contended that UFO reports, while all potentially explainable, comprised a danger to national security because they could "overload channels of communication with material quite irrelevant to hostile objects that might some day appear." Thus the Air Force should energetically debunk UFOs and embark on an educational campaign to discourage public interest, thereby reducing the "dangers related to 'flying saucers'."

Furthermore, civilian UFO groups "should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur. The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind."

In September 1953, when Bender allegedly met the three agents, the Robertson panel's existence, formally classified Secret, was unknown to anyone in the civilian UFO community.

There are other, more specific reasons Bender may have drawn official interest. Unlike most other saucer clubs of the period, IFSB participated actively in investigations of UFO reports. The most remarkable of these was a physical-evidence case. Shortly after 9 p.m. on August 19, 1953, residents of New Haven, Connecticut, heard an explosion and observed a fast-moving, ricocheting "fireball" at treetop level. They also saw a freshly made foot-wide hole in a nearby metal signboard. The object apparently had ripped through 20-gauge steel and continued on its way undeterred. Naval Ordnance personnel were on the scene soon afterwards. So was IFSB investigator August C. Roberts, who managed to extract at least one small piece from the sign.

IFSB sent the sample to Col. Robert B. Emerson, a Louisiana-based physicist, member of the U.S. Army Reserve, and IFSB research consultant, later to serve on the Board of Governors of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Emerson said he would contact friends at the atomic-research facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, about having it analyzed. If anything came of this, no record of it survives. A separate analysis arranged through the Wisconsin-based Aerial Phenomena Research Organization determined that a second fragment consisted mostly of copper and copper oxide. This, plus the fireballs movement, ruled out any possibility it was a meteorite.

In a reconstruction of the Bender episode, Michael D. Swords has suggested that Roberts's retrieval of the metal pieces-"under the noses of Naval Ordnance investigators"--would almost certainly have attracted the attention of federal authorities. Furthermore, he writes, IFSB

was a civilian organization actually attempting scientific research on UFOs (case studies, photo analysis, metallurgy). In some significant way it may have been the first such organization probing into the flying discs in this fashion. It also had an expanding international network for sharing projects and information. One such project between Bender and his Australian and New Zealand colleagues was to plot UFO flight paths in hopes of discovering their bases of origin. What do you think U.S. intelligence thought of all this in 1953?

It requires little genius to suspect that the CIA, et al., were monitoring this organization and that several developments indicated that the stage in which the IFSB was only a harmless flying-saucer club was passing. International projects plotting unidentified aircraft flights are plenty enough to concern the CIA. . . . Also it was the period directly following the Robertson Panel and its CIA concerns with the potential Soviet manipulation of the UFO phenomenon. What would intelligence agencies' opinions be about a bunch of Americans preaching an open-arms welcome for strange incoming ships in the sky?

This interpretation does not necessarily require us to believe that the United States government was covering up secrets related to extraterrestrial visitation (nor, of course, does it contradict this view). The copper "fireball" may have been a military device, the aircraft flights those of Allied or Soviet planes. The fantastic, frightening story the three men told Bender may have been concocted for his benefit, to scare him out of further UFO research.

If this is indeed what happened, Bender would not be the last victim of such a counterintelligence scheme. In the early 1980s Albuquerque physicist and UFO enthusiast Paul Bennewitz became the target of intimidation after he monitored electronic signals emanating from a nuclear installation near Kirtland Air Force Base. Bennewitz decided that these messages were of extraterrestrial origin, sent from UFOs operating in the area. The signals, which were not illusory, were part of a highly classified military experiment, though there is no reason to think they had anything to do with UFOs. When Kirtland authorities learned of Bennewitz's eavesdropping, they turned on him with a vengeance, employing psychological-warfare techniques that one observer and partial participant has claimed were intended to trigger an emotional collapse. If so, they succeeded. Bennewitz was already entertaining dark, conspiratorial theories about UFOs and their intentions; operatives from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations passed on disinformation, alleged to be the U.S. government's deepest UFO secrets, which confirmed and enlarged on Bennewitz's fantasies. Bennewitz became so distraught that soon afterwards he was hospitalized. He subsequently retired from the UFO scene. (See Dark Side.)

The Jarrold affair, it is now known, was neither so menacing nor so mysterious as Barker made it out to be, and it had nothing to do with the "Bender mystery." Jarrold's flying-saucer obsession had placed him in an unstable state that soon led to an emotional breakdown and the break-up of his family. The purportedly enigmatic visitor whom Barker linked to Bender's men in black was in reality--as Barker privately knew--an itinerant occultist, contactee, and retired bank security guard named Gordon Deller. Deller told the impressionable Jarrold that flying saucers were of "etheric" (other-dimensional) origin, that etherians had chosen Jarrold as one of their earthly agents, and that their coming had to do with an imminent geological cataclysm. Deller also called on Jarrold's New Zealand friend and colleague Harold Fulton, who dismissed him as an amiable crackpot. After leaving New Zealand, Deller traveled to the United States and Canada where he may have met, among others, Laimon Mitris.

John Keel and the MIB. By the mid-1950s the legend of the men in black had become fixed in the imaginations of saucerdom's most excitable. Yet, with the arguable exception of the early Bender affair (as opposed to the later Bender book), it was much ado about little beyond fabrication, paranoia, and Barker's promotional genius. Probably the notion of men in black would have devolved into vague memory had it not been for the efforts of John A. Keel. Through Keel men in black were not only revived but transformed into something else entirely: the "MIB."

Though he did not appear on the UFO scene until the mid-1960s, Keel would become one of the most influential writers in the history of ufology. At a time when the mainstream ufological consensus had only recently embraced reports of even briefly observed UFO occupants (later to be called close encounters of the third kind), Keel, essentially a demonologist, championed a far more exotic vision of the UFO phenomenon than anyone but fringe figures had fancied heretofore.

Among the entities whose activities Keel chronicled were not-quite-human individuals who intimidated witnesses and who seemed linked with UFOs. Sometimes, he wrote, they threatened witnesses who had not told anyone else about their sightings. Usually they wore dark suits, sometimes with turtleneck sweaters, and had dark complexions and Oriental features. Others were pale and bug-eyed. Their behavior was frequently odd, as if they were operating in an environment alien to them. In many cases they drove black Cadillacs or other Limousine-like vehicles. Keel had no doubt that his informants were telling the truth because he himself had seen these entities on more than one occasion.

Keel claimed to have had numerous phone conversations with a "Mr. Apol," who "did not know who or what he was. He was a prisoner of our time frame. He often confused the past with the future. I gathered that he and all his fellow entities found themselves transported backward and forward in time involuntarily, playing out their little games because they were programmed to do so, living--or existing--only so long as they could feed off the energy and minds of mediums and contactees." A Long Island woman allegedly saw Mr. Apol. She knew it was he because when he stepped out of a black Cadillac he shook her hand--his own was "as cold as ice"--and so introduced himself. She said he resembled a "Hawaiian."

In Keel's view MIB are ubiquitous presences in human history, responsible for or related to such disparate phenomena as the Grim Reaper image, vampire lore, and demonological visitations. "A dark gentleman in a cloak and hood is supposed to have handed Thomas Jefferson the design for the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States," he has written. "Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and many others are supposed to have had enigmatic meetings with these odd personages." Another, according to Keel, was Malcolm X. Keel claims, moreover:

Men In Black are also an integral part of the Oriental belief in the King of the World. Ancient tradition in parts of China, Tibet and India claims that there is an underground city where the King of the World runs everything by sending spies and minions to the surface. They dress in black robes and suits, of course, their countenances are very Oriental. In the Middle East, they move around the deserts in black robes and headdresses.

Oz Factor. Late one November afternoon in 1980, at the University of Pennsylvania library, Peter M. Rojcewicz was doing research for a Ph.D. thesis on the folklore of UFOs. "I sat alone in a wing facing a large window to the south," he would recall. "I had the table closest to the window, facing the window. Without any sound to indicate that someone was approaching me from behind, I noticed from the corner of my right eye what I supposed was a man's black pant leg. He was wearing rather worn black leather shoes."

The stranger walked around the table and briefly looked out the window, his back to Rojcewicz, then turned and sat down. He was dark-complexioned, tall, thin, sunken-eyed, and wearing a rumpled black suit. Speaking articulately with a slight accent Rojcewicz thought to be "European," he asked what the young man was doing. A short conversation on UFOs followed. When the stranger asked if he had ever seen a UFO, Rojcewicz said he was more interested at the moment in stories of flying saucers than in the question of whether UFOs existed as physical spacecraft.

The man suddenly shouted, "Flying saucers are the most important fact of the century, and you're not interested?" Startled and afraid that he might be dealing with a lunatic, Rojcewicz tried to calm him, and the man lapsed into silence. Then he stood up "as if he were mechanically lifted." He placed his hand on Rojcewicz"s shoulder and said (as close as Rojcewicz could remember), "Go well in your purpose." Rojcewicz did not watch him go. But a few seconds later he became abruptly fearful as the strangeness of the encounter hit him.

I got up, walked two steps in the direction he had left in, turned around, and returned again to my seat. Got up again. I was highly excited and finally walked around the stacks to the reference desk and nobody was behind the desk. In fact, I could see no one at all in the library. I've gone to graduate school, and I've never been in a library when there wasn't somebody there! No one was even at the information desk across the room. I was close to panicking and went quickly back to my desk. I sat down and tried to calm myself. In about an hour I rose to leave the library. There were two Librarians behind each of the two desks!

Rojcewicz here describes an odd impression some UFO witnesses have described but whose significance went unappreciated until British ufologist Jenny Randles took note of what she called the "Oz Factor"-"the sensation of being isolated, or transported from the real world into [another] environmental framework ... where reality is but slightly different." The Oz Factor figures in other MIB reports as well.

Official agents? In early 1967 Col. George P. Freeman, a Pentagon spokesman for Project Blue Book, reported that unknown individuals posing as Air Force officers or as government agents were threatening UFO witnesses, sometimes even confiscating photographs. "We have checked a number of these cases," he said. "We haven't been able to find out anything about these men. By posing as Air Force officers and government agents they are committing a federal offense. We would sure like to catch one."

A few months later, in May 1967, a man identifying himself as Maj. Richard French called on an Owatonna, Minnesota, woman. "He was about five feet nine inches tall with a kind of olive complexion and pointed face," she later told John Keel. "His hair was dark and very long--too long for an Air Force officer, we thought. He spoke perfect English. He was well educated." He wore a fashionable gray suit, white shirt, and black tie.

In the course of the conversation, which dealt with a UFO experience she and a friend had undergone the previous November, French complained of stomach problems, and the woman replied that he might try some jello. French said he would return for some if the problems continued. The following morning he showed up at the door, and the woman sat him down with a bowl of Jello, which he proceeded to try to drink. "I had to show him how to eat it with a spoon," she recalled. Coincidentally--so one assumes--in the early to mid 1960s the Pentagon spokesman for Project Blue Book was someone named Richard France.

According to ufologist William L. Moore, "the Men in Black are really government people in disguise . . . members of a rather bizarre unit of Air Force intelligence known currently as the Air Force Special Activities Center (AFSAC). . . . As of 1991, the AFSAC, headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, has been under the operational authority of the Air Force Intelligence Command centered at Kelly Air Force Base in Texas." Moore alleges that "Gray Barker's early-'50s hype" inspired operatives to dress in dark suits and to imitate the men in black of early and later lore. Presumably, if we are to credit Moore's assertions, "Richard French" was having fun at the expense of a UFO witness.

Indeed, many accounts concern individuals who look and behave like normal human beings, or at least normal military officers or intelligence agents, albeit ones who appear under peculiar circumstances (see, for example, North Dakota CE3).

Consider this March 16, 1993, story from the Groom Lake, Nevada, area, near the site of a highly classified military base at which stealth aircraft are being flown and from which unsubstantiated rumors of captured UFOs and extraterrestrial technology have circulated for years. A couple who had come to watch aerial activity from a hill adjacent to the base saw strange UFO-like lights that, subsequently and confusingly, seemed to transform themselves into an automotive vehicle. After the sighting was concluded, the witnesses sensed that half an hour of the encounter was unaccounted for. Soon afterwards they underwent hypnosis during which they "recalled" an abduction by gray-skinned UFO beings. The man was taken into the craft while the woman was led into a white van she had seen earlier as the two were driving to the site. According to an account written by the male witness, ufologist William F. Hamilton III:

Inside the van, two men, dressed entirely in black with black baseball caps on their heads, subjected her to intrusive procedures. They administered some drops in her right eye and placed an odd instrument into her left ear canal. She remembered seeing electronic instruments inside the van as well as automatic rifles. She also recalls that these men admonished her not to speak about her experiences. She did not see the little Gray [alien] during this period, nor does she remember exactly how she was placed back in position by our truck.

Stories like this one show that the MIB image not only continues but continues to be adaptable to new circumstances and to fresh ufological contexts.

MIB in experience and imagination. In some instances, as we have seen, men-in-black reports can be plausibly interpreted as instances of official interest in UFO sightings, especially those of an unusually evidential nature. MIB reports, on the other hand, tend, as we have seen, to have an outlandish, surrealistic flavor. Keel, Rojcewicz, and other chroniclers, who take the stories at face value, have offered various explanations based on their belief in occult phenomena (see Paranormal and Occult Theories about UFOs). Others, for example Hilary Evans, see MIB experiences as psychological experiences of a particularly remarkable kind, though he acknowledges the limitations of this sort of reductionism.

Unless all those reporting such experiences are lying--an appealing proposition for which, unfortunately, no good evidence exists--it is hard to imagine an explanation that does not force us to exceed the boundaries of current knowledge. Yet MIB (as opposed to men-in-black) stories, products solely of memory and testimony, can be little more than curiosities.

One provisional interpretation, more descriptive than explanatory, might be that such occurrences take place in an "experiential reality"--a kind of subjective state that, at least in its ostensible physical setting, is indistinguishable from event-level reality; yet within this seemingly familiar environment, unearthly entities of various kinds appear and interact with the experient. They may be no more "real" than figures in unusually vivid dreams; thus, for example, they leave no footprints when they are seen to cross a muddy field.

This is in itself an extraordinary hypothesis, positing a kind of hallucinatory experience unrecognized by psychology, whose notion of what comprises a hallucination is far more modest, and it is hard to imagine how such an explanation could apply to that minority of cases involving more than one witness. Even by UFO-report standards, MIB stories are hugely anomalous. Possibly MIB are a strange experiential phenomenon inspired by UFO sightings but not truly related to them.

Thomas E. Bullard, a folklorist specializing in UFO-related beliefs, has placed MIB in a broader tradition of mysterious visitants:

[A]lmost a sense of familiarity attaches to the Men in Black. They step into the shoes vacated by angels and demons to serve as modernized versions of otherworldly messengers, modified to reflect extraterrestrial rather than supernatural employment but clearly functionaries in the same mold. Even high gods like Odin in Norse mythology sometimes disguised themselves and roamed the earth to dispense justice or stir up strife among humans, but this sort of work usually devolved on a servant class of beings. In classical belief demons populated the earth in great number, as did fairies in Celtic folklore, and like fairies these demons worked to help or harm mortals. In Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian and Islamic beliefs these beings lost some of their choice of action as they divided into two distinct camps, one loyal to God and the other henchmen of the devil. . . . Devils and demonic beings enjoy broader license for mischief as they cause harm by whatever means their evil imaginations can devise.... [T]he primary activity of demons is to tempt humans into sin. For this purpose demons often disguise themselves by transformation and a common motif in folklore leaves an imperfection in the disguise, often the cloven hoofs of the devil going unchanged. Strange feet and an "artificial" or doll-like look are common traits of Men in Black as well. The devil of folklore sometimes rides a black carriage, the nearest thing to a Cadillac, and often has considerable knowledge and power. If he harms a human he may have to win the permission or cooperation of the victim first, often by trickery; but the saint with a trust in God knew that the devil had no power over the faithful. This theme perhaps reflects the usual harmlessness of Men in Black despite their ability to threaten and scare a witness, though the parallels between devil lore and Men in Black lore are mostly remote. We can even wonder if MIBs are really evil, since their warning to keep silent might offer good practical advice after all, everything considered.

Interview with Peter Rojcewicz

Well it was 1980 and I was just beginning formal academic investigation into the UFO phenomenon and I was in a research library in Philadelphia United States and I was probably two hours into this present session of reading and I as looking through some fo the literature on UFO's and at the time it was in the fall and it was already getting dark, sun had set and it was a strange day high erratic winds, clouds, rain then it would, the sun would come up very unpredictable weather patterns for the day and as I recall I was sitting reading and at one point I looked down and all of a sudden I saw a pant leg, black shoe, black pant standing next to me and I looked down and I said oh to myself oh boy here I am choosing a quiet part of the library and now somebody is going to come by and sit next to me or bother me. SO I never looked up immediately and I saw this individual move around to the table, and ah sit down and he was ah, having with him three or four books. And he put them in front of himself and I never looked up at his face at this point but I saw he was all dressed in black, black suit, that is to say a black jacket, black pants, white shirt, had a black Texas like string tie, ah, and sat with his hands folded didn't say anything for three to five minutes. Eventually engaged me in conversation asked me what I was doing. I told him I was beginning an investigation into the UFO phenomenon, feeling a little bit sheepish about mentioning that to anybody, ah, since I had no point of view or attitude or whatsoever, it started as an academic exercise. And at a certain point he said well do you believe in the reality of UFO's and I really wasn't into having a conversation with anybody at this point once I get into this study mode I like to plough ahead and so I said to him I gave him a kind of a classic anthropological social science answer, saying well I don't have to be interested in whether they're real or not I'm just interested in the stories behind them. At this point the individual became highly volatile, highly excitable, even ah, angry. And he yelled at the top of his lungs "UFO's are the most important fact of this century and you're not interested." And I looked up at this individual and he was very, very gaunt, he was probably about 6 foot one and weighed if anything 130 pounds at most. His black suit looked like he had slept in it for the last week, very unclean he had deep sunken eyes oily hair, ah it was combed back and a deep resonant voice that struck me as being European but I couldn't locate the country, very, very articulate. At that point I calmed him down thinking surely he was going to be asked to leave the library but no one every came around which was a little bit strange. Eventually he got up and when he got up it was very mechanical like, as if he was lifted from a crane, everything was straight and his body didn't show any kind of natural movement to it and he walked over to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said to me "Go well on your purpose" and I just figured he was some kook, maybe some fraud you know religious individual proselytizing and he walked out. As soon as he left I had this intense feeling of fear, I mean really absolutely immobilizing fear. I had a sense that this person was not just what the eye led me to believe, another weird individual off the streets of Philadelphia and I had the sense of real, real horror. I got up out of my chair and walked around the books, the stack of books to the research section and normally there are three librarians there to meet the needs of graduate students, there was not anybody behind the desk. The guards that are normally are by the door weren't there, there were no graduate students, this is about now quarter to seven pm on a weekday in a very in an Ivy League library. There was someone always there at least guards at the door. There wasn't a single person in the library and at this point I panicked, this wasn't reality that I knew I went back to my chair I was hyper ventilating and it took me about 45 to 50 minutes before I could get up again, get the courage to walk once again around to the research library desk and as I did fifty minutes later, everybody was in its place, must have been 50 to 60 students, librarians there, the guards at the door. And nothing. Very very strange. At this point I must point out that I had not read or heard or otherwise encountered anybody who had what is called a man in black experience which is probably the most cryptic and strangest side show of the overall UFO experience so it wasn't a matter of my being predisposed towards it, I had just begun in a matter of days of looking into the UFO experience and I had no knowledge of these intimidators if you will who often meet, come to investigators, people who have had UFO experiences and so when that happened to me it was only about three months later that I came across some of the literature about men in black experience and at that point I said to myself hmmm this is very interesting, perhaps there is something here more than you know psychosis.

it seems to me that whatever the men in black are, whatever the reality of the men in black are they seem to be a kind of embodiment of antithesis, that is to say, they seem to negate or play the opposite role of the individual's attitudes or belief, or consciousness and so here being a kind of agnostic at the time, I don't know if they're real and I don't even care. He chose the other point of view. What I find interesting is that in the men in black cases that I know both through my own investigation and in the literature it seems that if the experience evokes terror in an individual if you play into that fear it seems as if you're feeding the phenomenon, as if you're providing it a reality frame for it's continuation. IF however, you starve it by showing its opposite face, I'm not interested it seems as if rather than feeding it you force it to feed upon itself and that it starves and dissipates and there are a number of individuals who I respect in the scientific community in the academic community who have said the same thing basically. That if you can short circuit the phenomenon rather than feeding into it it seems to go its own way with out any negative effect upon the experiencer. I think this is what happened here It was a matter of a kind of short circuit.

WHAT HAVE YOU FIGURED OUT IN THE LAST 12 YEARS? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

Well one of the first things I figured out I think that a sense of humour is absolutely a critical tool for anybody looking into these anomalous experiences and I don't mean that to be funny in a sense that I think a sense of humour is crucial. When you laugh at something you're both involved and invested and into the experience but by laughter also brings you back a step, you're also detached and objective and can pass some judgement on it so that's one thing I've learned is to ah to laugh and to ah, be open enough to not take it all too seriously.

** SO WHAT'S THE JUDGEMENT THAT YOU'VE ARRIVED AT? WHERE ARE YOU NOW IN UNDERSTANDING?

It may sound like small peanuts to someone who is a true believer but I am at the point now where I believe that the UFO phenomenon is an authentic experience it is a real authentic powerful emotional experience for people that cannot be easily explained by the usual scientific approach. Whether or not it's extra terrestrial, whether or not it's actually a piece of physical hardware from some other planet remains to be proven but my feeling is at this point that there's something quite anomalous and I feel that the reality is, is a paradoxical one and neither wholly objective and concrete and real but neither is it wholly subjective and imaginary and therefore unreal. IT is a kind of experience that combines both of these objective and subjective realities in one hybrid kind of reality and I think this is probably the key to what the purpose if there is one, or design if there is one, behind all of these transpersonal experiences, behind these anomalous experiences to it's as if there's a cosmic tutor out there and at different times, and at different places taking on, on different shapes that tell us something crucial about what it means to be human that we are both objective and matieral and flesh but we also have a consciousness a psyche and therefore we have a transcendent nature and both exist simultaneously and how to live in a reality frame called the human and how do we live in a reality that is neither totally objective nor totally subjective but omnijective if you will, to use a term that my late friend Michael Talbot used to use, you know how to live that kind of world.

WHAT WHAT CONFUSES ME IS THE NOTION THAT THIS IS, THIS IS A MODERN FORM OF AN ANCIENT MYTH. I DON'T KNOW IF THAT MEANS THAT IT'S REAL -- OR THAT WE'RE JUST MAKING IT UP?

To say that the UFO phenomenon is a modern form of an ancient myth is full of dangerous words. First of all the word myth is precarious today. When we use the word myth we usually use it as a synonym for falsehood. For non-factual, for distortion for error. But the word mythology has, comes from again, a hybrid of two kinds of realities: mythos and logos. Mythos basically meant a story anything muttered from the mouth of a man or a woman an account, a narrative an experience. And logos had something to do with a verifiable . reality a kind of fact, and mythology is the fusion of mythos, a story and account, and some kind of reality that's ascertainable, observeable and even recordable.

THAT'S INTERESTING WE BELIEVE IT TO BE JUST THE OPPOSITE.

That's right.

THAT IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH FACT.

And therefore we have distorted view of reality. IF in fact, much of our, if, if life is a kind of combination... whose life is it -- a fusion of accounts, stories, of things that are so true so verifiable that words fuse it, words are almost impotent to describe it. We all have experiences. Love for example, I mean no matter how much we try to describe something like love or virtue or consciousness we can't. No words are adequate to describe it. These are the mythological dimensions, it's the dimension of meaning of our lives, of quality, of values in our lives and I think what the phenomenon is saying is that we need a kind of mythological perspective again, to get back to that original idea that there are some realities and some truths which are so profound that normal language or the the materialistic bias of our scientific paradigm are not sufficient to get at these things. And so I think that we're suffering from a kind of, of failure to observe and realise reality.

HMM BUT THE SPACESHIP TODAY IS IT THE SAME DOES IT COME FROM THE SAME SOURCE SAY AS THE FAIRY DID FOR THE IRISH?

Well these are, you're asking big questions here, that is to say what is the source the ultimate source, the trigger.

WELL I GUESS I'M WONDERING IF IT'S US? AND IF EACH CULTURE DEFINES THE SYMBOL AND HOW THE MESSAGE IS DELIVERED?

If we're dealing with the reality that is omnijective, that is if the UFO phenomenon is truly paradoxical in the sense that it deals both with objective, physical properties, as well as mental slash psychic properties, then to say is it, does the UFO experience have a source in ourselves is to miss half the reality the answer is yes and no. Ok that is to say, the UFO experience I believe involves an interplay between both mental aspects and physical properties.

do UFO experience have a source in ourselves the answer is yes and no. What do I mean by that? There is a field of study called depth psychology which people like C.J. Jung and James Hillman who went beyond Jung in many respects, posit that there are certain structures in the human mind which you can call archetypes that organize our experiences. And they, they create in us a kind of threshold of experiences so that human beings feel, fantasize imagine things or act within a certain range, that we call the human. Towards the end of his life Jung started to believe that these archetypes not only existed in the mind but under certain conditions, under certain, what we call states of consciousness, could in fact, transgress the psychological field of experience and actually manifest themselves, however temporarily in a physical state in the outer world it is quite possible he said, that there is some level of our human mind that overlaps with outer reality as if there was a doorway between the inner life and the outer life, and it may well be that UFO's and apparitions and experiences and encounters with the men in black are in fact archetypal insofar as they share this common background, they come from the transcendent background where the nature o fmind and the nature of nature overlap, and so to ask is it in here, out there is really be talking about an objective or subjective world, when the world in fact may be a combination of both omni objective.

Quantum physics suggests that the world is trickier, that reality is not compeltely concrete and physical and as material as we thought, that the actual scientist entering into the level of fundamental reality may affect it change it by virtue of trying to control it and record it objectively. So Heisenberg's theory of uncertainty I think applies that our own tool of measurements as we try to measure anomalous phenomenon or subatomic particles, in order to measure it the scientist has to see it, in order to see it the scientist has to bring in photon and photons are energy and they bombard the very electron that we want to isolate and locate precisely and so it's the entrance of this tool of measurement which becomes an active participatory element inside the experience.

That is to say whatever that reality out there, that factor x, which seems to repeat throughout the course of human history, all through the human adventure, reasonable people, intelligent people have been encountering this factor x and it seems as if there is a kind of element within the phenomenon, it updates itself as if it is trying to communicate something of its nature with us and says if it uses what is important in the cultural world view at the time to communicate itself. So that the faeries in fact were this, were a form of this anomalous reality, that human beings encountered in the past and UFO's today have experiences, have close resemblences to the fairy encounters that the faeire is themselves have strong resemblences to the alleged or presumed extra terrestrials of of modern day UFO lore. To say that they have resemblences is not to say that I'm reducing UFO experiences to fairy lore, they are discreet but related, they are separate but not separated we see a kind of updating every evolving phenomenon I feel that that has existed always.

I think it's a great mistake from my point of view, to think that the abduction experience is something that happens in the 20th century. I think that one who is conversant with the literature of world folklore and religion and philosophy can in fact find that the abduction experience is one of those ah, back through time. Ah, for example, if you look through world folklore you will find for example that the lore about ah, witches are such that they ah, often will abduct individuals and carry them with great expanses of land -- the devil of tradition also is known to be able to carry away individuals. Incubi succubae, and various kinds of enigmatic spiritual beings also have the same ability to carry people away.

But perhaps the strongest comes from the fairy lore and the fairies were known to abduct human beings, children, men and women for various purposes. One of the strongest parallels has to do with the children. Fairies were often believed in the lore of British Isles and western and eastern europe to steal children very early out of, out of the womb and they would steal these children and leave in their place often weak or sickly fairy facsimilies and they would often die and beliefs around crib deaths were perhaps the source for the story of the changelings. But perhaps there was something else there. The children were often said to be carried away by the fairies, they were taken by the good people you call them the good people because you fear them and therefore you don't want any retribution to fall upon you. And the idea was that the fairies needed human beings to invigorate their blood line, that there was a kind of need on part of fairy fate to have human warmth and human blood ah, as if there was a kind of cross species inter species relationship going on -- very much like what we find today in the abduction lore.

I WAS GOING TO SAY, YOU COULD SUBSTITUTE ALIENS FOR FAIRIES THERE AND THE SENTENCE WOULD BE AS CORRECT.

That is to say there are many similarities, there are some differences too, and it would be incorrect to say that one is merely a synonym for the other. I think it's an ongoing updating phenomenon, but I think what we're seeing here is something that has a common source through time and space, even though at the surface there are culturally specific details that change from time to time from culture to culture. It still seems to me that the core experience of this human confrontation with an apparently non human entity results in the individual human being being taken away is there in constant.

DO WE KNOW THE SOURCE? I MEAN DO WE KNOW WHERE IT COMES FROM?

Well it's at least partially from ourselves, and that is not to say we know anything about it, because the self is so alien the soul, the psyche, this inner world is so alien to our everyday ego, that it might as well be talking about something alien out there, you walk into any bookstore and you see the self help section it has nothing to do with self, those books have everything to do with ego. The self is a reality an experiential field that is so strange and so alien to our ego that to touch it brings about the same kind of feelings of awe, and terror and wonder and, and and even paralysis, as people who encounter UFO's, apparitions, men in black. If Jung is correct and there is some part of overlap between the human soul, the nature of our psyche and our consciousness and the nature of nature, then we know at least partially that reality, the reality of this phenomenon is not totally detached from us, that we do have some, some say in whether or not the experience is positive, whether or not the experience will facilitate further growth in our life, whether it'll expand our perception to see beyond our limitations or whether or not our life will become ah - ah useless to us or failed or whether or not we will become you know people in crisis, that the consciousness and the attitude I feel, that you have, plays a great part in whether or not this experience, the experience with an anomalous reality becomes positive, or negative because at least part of the source is ourselves..

AND THE OTHER PART IS. . .

Ad the other part is factor x

THE OLD FACTOR X.

Factor x. So this is important because most people will say ah, he's merely interpreting this experience in psychological terms, and I'm not, or I'm doing it in a very precise way, as long as we understand that part of our psychology may in fact materialise even in the form of a physical space craft, as wild as that seems, as long as we understand that part of pur psychology is always outside of ourselves always behond our understanding, always alien to our ego on the one hand, and the other sense that it's that that ah, we know so, very little about self, you know and reality at the same time so I'm not, so psychology and, I'm not merely saying that it has to do with hallucination. There are parts of the psyche that psychology has no understanding about -- and perhaps there are reality states that have their source in a human observer and witness and yet still have a reality however temporarily in the other world.

WELL MAYBE IT'S IT'S TIME JUST TO LEAVE ROOM FOR MYSTERY. MAYBE THERE ISN'T AN ANSWER, MAYBE THEY WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND, IS THAT BECAUSE IS THAT A COP OUT, IS THAT AN EASY WAY OUT?

the 20th century with such wonderful developments in science and medicine and technology we think that we pretty much have reality covered, yet the strange thing is the more we learn about the you know the fundamental nature of reality the more we find out we really need to know. And I think there's something about a world view that is to say the world view that we have, the cultural lens that we have to, to encounter reality is very crucial to whether or not we become happy people, useful people, productive people, psychologically you know, viable people, and I think what the phenomenon may be saying to us in some respect is that reality is much larger than what we come to believe it is and that we're doing ourselves damage, both physically and spiritually and cognitively by reducing the human spirit and the human, and the human psyche to too small an area of expression. And it often fills with demons if you regulate the human, the human impetus for wonder in exploration and for questing, what is the quest of modern men and women, what questions are we asking about who we are and where are we going, and what does it mean to be a human being, perhaps this is some kind of imperative both from within and from without and in an omni-objective world there can be no distinction between in and out, but a reality that's asking us to renegotiate our relationship with our own selves and its place in the world.

why some people have an encounter with the men in black, why some people see a UFO experience why one person is, is you know one of many witnesses who see apparitions of the virgin Mary and (unclear) ...Yugoslavia, it's hard to answer. IT has, it seems it has nothing to do with gender, has nothing to do with money in the bank, has nothing to do with whether or not you're a prominent person, it may have something to do with the fact that some people are more predisposed to entertain things outside of their inherited world views. IT may be that some people just happen to have a serendipitius experience with the wall of their reality frame cracks for a moment and through the crack they can shimmerings of another experince, of another reality and for one moment, just for a moment, there's enough doubt about the view of reality that they've grown up with for them to see thrugh it in wonder, and that might change their life to go on the quest. What if science is only a synonym for reality. What if there is more to reality than science itself imagines?

even if we can find a natural or or, extra terrestrial or physiological explanation for UFO's it would still not answer that big question of meaning. In terms of meaning why thes common patterns, why the similarity in the motifs from account to account, what do they mean? And how do you explain the after effects that is the transformative experience the UFO experience or a near death experience have on people, what does it mean in terms of those common features. This common after effect, it helps some people, it destroys other people. How can you rectify that, what is a relationship betwen those common recurring after effects with that stable core of motifs and patterns of response that people have, these questions are there, in terms of the meaning of the experience, even if we do find a biological or natural or extra - terrestrial explanation for these things.

And for those people who are predisposed to see every moment of their life, however strange, however weird it is from your training or from your teaching your education but if you're truly able to see every moment of life, however strange it may be, as a potential difference to you, as potentially the difference to all mankind as a kind of tutor, I can learn from this it challenges me fine, i can learn from this, it terrifies me -- fine I can learn from this. And potentially whatever it is we've got something here that I think is worth our investigation.

Source: www.allinonefilms.com/html_pages/rojcev.htm