The Real Men in Black

by Nick Redfern

  That same year, 1979, was notable for one more encounter with a Man in Black—or, rather, in this particular case, a Man in Brown! The witness was a young news-boy named Warren Weisman, who was delivering newspapers on his regular route in Tuscon, Arizona, early on the morning of February 19th. Suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, a strange object crashed from the skies into a car parked at the side of the road. Such was the ferocity of the impact that it destroyed the back section of the vehicle; the right rear wheel was wrenched from the chassis, and the mysterious device bounced off the car and slammed into a nearby mailbox, knocking it to the ground.

  A shocked Weisman tentatively approached the scene of all the mayhem and could see that the object, whatever its nature, was black in color, shiny, and shaped somewhat like a microwave oven. Weisman stood there for a moment, wondering what to do next; that is, until a dark-colored car appeared out of nowhere and pulled up next to him, and out stepped the Man in Brown, who Weisman later described as a being a scrawny FBI-type. The Man in Brown, in a fashion that made it sound far more along the lines of a stern order than a friendly suggestion, advised Weisman to continue with his newspaper deliveries. Instead, Weisman raced to the safety of his home, leaving the Man in Brown far behind. It was a very wise move, one suspects.

  9

  Colin Bennett Meets Mr. X (Early 1980s)

  Colin Bennett is a true visionary in the field of ufological research, interpretation, and writing, who once had an experience with a Man in Black in Notting Hill, an area of West London, England. “Exact dates and times have gone from me now,” Bennett says, “but it was in the early 1980s when I met a Man in Black. It was a Sunday, I remember, which was particularly quiet, with no phone calls and no one calling at the flat. This silence was most strange since Notting Hill is an area which in those days could, in five minutes, turn into a cross between a Mexico City shoot-out and a riot in the Old Bazaar in Cairo.” Possibly as a hint of what was soon to occur, Bennett notes, “The lack of such activity on this particular Sunday was somewhat unnerving.”

  Bennett decided that to escape the lack of anything meaningful to do, or anyone to hang out with, he would pay a visit to his local cinema, the Coronet. Afterward, he headed home, at around 11 p.m. It was then that something truly odd occurred. As he was about to enter his apartment, Bennett saw “a great light in the sky straight ahead. This light had peculiar characteristics. It was so powerful that had it been a searchlight, I would have been seriously eye-damaged. But no; despite its size and apparent intensity, the light had a soft, relaxing ambience. I shouted down to the basement of the house where Mary, my girlfriend at the time, lived. She came out, and, illuminated by the glow, started to walk up the steel stairs to pavement level.”

  Then something bizarre occurred. The unidentified light changed into something radically different: a Second World War–era British Lancaster bomber aircraft, an aircraft that played an integral role in the conflict with Nazi Germany! Not only that, but the aircraft appeared to be hovering in the sky over Powis Square: “I turned to the right, thinking to myself, If Mary doesn’t see what I am seeing, then I will have to get medical help. But fortunately for me, she did see the bomber as she reached pavement level,” says Bennett.

  Colin Bennett’s Man in Black encounter was preceded by his sighting of a phantom Lancaster bomber.

  It was clear to Bennett that this was not some surviving Lancaster that was being flown to or from an aerospace museum or some similar locale. Indeed, whereas the device looked like a decades-old wartime bomber, its actions suggested this was not the case, as Bennett clearly and quickly realized: The aircraft was silent, there was no movement from its propellers, and there was no evidence of any insignia or undercarriage. If that was not strange enough, the light that had first morphed into the form of a Second World War bomber then altered its appearance yet again. This time it took on the form of a distinctly triangular-shaped craft, and accelerated out of the area at high speed, in a northerly direction.

  “But there were more wonders to come,” says Bennett, in what is certainly an understatement: “Lo, upon entering Mary’s flat there was a Man in Black sitting on the settee. Mary nervously introduced me, though to this day neither of us can remember his name—another mystery. She said that the man—let’s call him Mr. X—had called to see a man named John who lived directly above in the ground-floor flat, but John happened not to be in. Mr. X had, therefore, asked Mary—through the door speaker-phone—if he might wait in her flat for a short while pending the arrival of John. She had agreed to this, and opened the door to let him in, a feature of the scene which was astonishing to me. Notting Hill, as I have said, was an extremely dangerous place to live in at this time, and no lone woman—young or old—in her right mind would ever let a stranger into her dwelling place late at night under any circumstances.”

  This clear example of a curious lack of any sense of thought for one’s personal, physical safety when dealing with the Men in Black mirrors to a truly uncanny degree the 1976 case of Dr. Herbert Hopkins of Maine. One might be inclined to strongly suspect that these black figures hold some sort of sway over our mental faculties and our ability to think logically and coherently.

  Bennett says of the enigmatic visitor: “Our Man in Black was quite friendly and affable. An educated, sophisticated person, he had a good English educated accent. However, his appearance fitted parts of the MIB formula: aged around late 30s to early 40s, bronze-blond hair falling down his shoulder in curls; a tanned face. True to form our Mr. X wore a smartly cut jet-black suit with neat black tie and white shirt.”

  Bennett and Mary then chose to tell Mr. X all about the fantastic, shape-shifting vehicle they had just seen in the skies over Notting Hill. His response, however, was probably not the one that the pair was anticipating: He did not crack a joke, was not even mildly amused, but was certainly not dismissive of the affair either. In fact, Bennett reveals something very interesting and illuminating: “I am being careful not to push the argument here— I got the impression that he knew all about what we had just seen. He received our experience in far too calm and collected a manner for my taste. He was almost like a Don who was calmly considering the points of an essay that had just been read to him by a student and was ready to give grades. I got the impression that he was checking out our reactions, and that the suit and tie, hair and face, were disguises.”

  Bennett adds that he was not frightened by the Man in Black, and in no way did the man suggest, in the formulaic sense, that Bennett and Mary should forget about what they had just seen. Rather, Bennett recalls, “After a brief, witty chat, he said that he had decided not to wait for John, and he would be on his way. It was as if he had heard what he wanted to hear and John had become irrelevant. Politely thanking Mary for letting him stay for a while, he disappeared into the Notting Hill night, which, as usual, just happened to be aglow with the blue lights of police vans, instead of the lights from UFOs.”

  Paralleling almost precisely the way in which Allen Greenfield’s dark character seemingly immediately vanished into nothingness back in 1969, and the way Richard D. Seifried’s pair of MIB disappeared 10 years later, so Bennett’s Man in Black performed a mystifying maneuver, as he reveals: “As soon as Mary closed the door, I got up, opened the door, and our visitor was gone. In Isaac Newton’s universe I should have caught our Man in Black going across the yard and up the basement steps, but no, he wasn’t there. I asked a gaggle of policeman if they had seen anyone coming up the basement steps. But they had seen no one, and gave menacing glances at my hippy-length hair of those days. Under these circumstances, asking if they had seen a disappearing Man in Black would not have been wise.”

  By this time, the fact that the man had vanished from sight under very curious circumstances, and the utter illogicality of Mary having casually invited a stranger—and a black-suited stranger at that—into her home with nary a thought for her own safety, were both starting to play deeply on Bennett’s swirling min
d:

  I sat Mary down and calmly interrogated her. Why had she let him in? She did not know why. I got a little angry and told her she could have been murdered. She became very upset at the whole business and I decided to pressure her no longer. I should add that Mary was a well-educated girl with a degree in physics. She was a confident and alert woman, somewhat conservative, and a Notting Hill veteran in the bargain. Her behavior on this occasion was most peculiar. I then realized that she was in shock, and I stopped applying pressure. A personal note: she would not let me stay the night with her, as I usually did. This was the beginning of a fracture in the relationship which I believe to this day was caused by the UFO/MIB incident.

  The most fantastic aspect of the story was still to come, however. It is an aspect that Bennett has never forgotten: “I made my way back to my own flat on the second floor. I bent down to put food into the cat dish. As I straightened up I knew I had lost some time. By my three clocks and wristwatch it was still 11:05 pm—the time I left the cinema! It was impossible to square the time from my purchase of the cat food to the walk back to the flat—20 minutes in all. I phoned Mary and said I wanted to talk about this, but she refused.” (There is a particularly novel theory to explain time displacement and manipulation as they relate to the Men in Black, which will become apparent in a later chapter.) The next day, Bennett “met with the said John and told him that I had met a friend of his the previous evening. I described our MIB to him, and John said he did not have any kind of friend who corresponded remotely to that description. Well there we are—a UFO, a Man in Black, and a girlfriend who no longer would have anything to do with me!”

  Bennett concedes, nearly 30 years later, “I am well aware that skeptics might say that as regards the Man in Black, I had experienced my own form of hallucination.” Countering such an argument, or the notion that the whole thing was some big laugh at his expense, Bennett makes a very good point: “But if he was some joker, how he got past Mary, how he synchronized his arrival with the sky display, and how he made me feel I had lost some time remains a mystery to me.”

  10

  Modern Men in Black (Late 1980s and 1990s)

  In the late 1980s, and mid- to late 1990s, there occurred a veritable wave of Men in Black activity across both the United States and Great Britain that was directly linked with the so-called alien-abduction phenomenon. There were the typical threats, both in person and via telephone; mail went missing, or at the very least showed clear evidence of tampering; and deep paranoia overwhelmed certain players in the sagas. All the while, the Men in Black looked on with icy, approving eyes at the chaos and mental carnage they were generating.

  From respected investigator Peter Hough comes a truly remarkable account with ties to the Men in Black. Of the many and varied cases that Hough investigated, one concerned a police officer, Philip Spencer, who in 1987 allegedly stumbled across an apparent alien creature on Ilkley Moor, Yorkshire, England. Hough’s investigation suggested that Spencer had suffered a degree of missing time—of the type that is typical of alien-abduction incidents—but the most notable aspect of the story was an amazing piece of evidence that Spencer had at his disposal to back up his extraordinary claim: a solitary photograph displaying a small, dark-colored creature striding up a grassy slope on the moors.

  In an attempt to determine what had occurred during the period of missing time, Spencer was hypnotically regressed, and recalled being taken onboard a large, silver-colored flying saucer, where he underwent some form of physical examination, and was given a warning about a future ecological disaster that would affect the Earth. More significantly, the regression allowed Spencer to accurately recall in his mind the image of the alien entity that he encountered: It was small in height, somewhere in the region of 4 feet; it had pointed ears, large eyes, a small mouth, huge hands, and three fingers on each hand that reminded Spencer of large sausages.

  But that was not all. Guess who was soon to put in an appearance. Yes, you guessed right. On a Friday evening in January 1988, events took an even stranger turn for Spencer. Hearing a knock at his front door, Spencer duly opened it, only to find himself confronted by two middle-aged men, dressed smartly in business suits. Ominously, both flashed Ministry of Defense identity cards bearing the names Jefferson and Davis.

  Spencer, puzzled and even somewhat alarmed, duly invited the men in and carefully listened as Jefferson announced that they had come to interview him about his UFO experience on the moors the previous year. Even more odd, Spencer had only discussed his encounter with three civilian UFO investigators; yet the men from the Ministry—or allegedly from the Ministry—apparently knew all about his experience and fired off a barrage of pointed questions and demands to the perplexed officer in relation to his UFO encounter.

  Perhaps mindful of the fact that he was dealing with officialdom, Spencer admitted to having taken one photograph, but stated that it was in the possession of a friend. In reality, however, the negative was in Peter Hough’s hands at the time in question. With this revelation, the two men suddenly lost all interest in further communication and quickly left as mysteriously as they had first arrived. Was this, perhaps, because they realized they were too late to retrieve Spencer’s potentially priceless evidence of his alien abduction? Who were the mysterious pair? Were they, possibly, covert operatives of the British government? Or did they have origins of a much stranger nature? To this day, the true identities of Jefferson and Davis remain mysterious.

  Moving on almost a decade, we have yet another case from the British Isles. Irene Bott, formerly the president of the Staffordshire UFO Group, investigated a notable case implicating the Men in Black in the alien-abduction controversy. Shortly after establishing her group in 1995, Bott was plunged into a situation involving a witness to a UFO who may very well have also undergone a period of so-called missing time. Expressing deep desire to learn more about what occurred to him than the fragmentary memories that were circulating around his brain, the witness contacted Bott and related the details that surrounded his viewing, in the early hours of a 1995 morning, of a brightly lit, triangular-shaped object in the low skies of the county of Staffordshire.

  The witness was certain that there was more to the case than he could consciously recollect, and expressed a keen desire for help in unraveling what had really taken place. As a result, Bott referred the witness to a colleague in her group, and the two discussed the details over the telephone. Crucial to the issues under discussion in this book is this: Shortly after returning home from work one day, the witness found that a note had been pushed through his letterbox warning him not to proceed any further with the investigation of his UFO encounter.

  Naturally deeply concerned, the man asked his neighbors if they had seen anyone lurking in the vicinity of his house who might conceivably have been responsible for the strange and unsettling note. Fortunately, one neighbor had seen something unusual that day. Shortly after the witness had set off for work, a black car pulled up outside his house. A man dressed entirely in black and carrying an equally black briefcase exited the vehicle, marched quickly up the driveway, shoved a piece of paper through the letterbox, hastily returned to the car, and drove off at speed. That’s right: One of our mysterious characters had struck again. And it was an encounter that justifiably led Irene Bott to ask the still-unresolved question “Was this a British Man in Black?”

  Moving across the Atlantic and back to the United States, a classic MIB case comes from Marie Jones, a prolific author on countless things both paranormal and mysterious, who says, “I’ve always had a big interest in unusual phenomena, and alternative things. But, with UFOs, I got involved with the Center for UFO Studies in the late 1970s, and I was also in MUFON—the Mutual UFO Network—for a good 15 years. But it was in the mid-1990s, after I returned to San Diego after living in Los Angeles that I had some very weird experiences that sound like something to do with the Men in Black.”

  Author Marie Jones had a run-in with the MIB while investi
gating alien abductions in the 1990s.

  It all began, says Jones, in 1995, when she placed an advertisement in a free local newspaper asking for people to get in touch if they were interested in UFOs. It was an action that proved costly with respect to Jones’s emotional state of mind. “From that ad,” Jones reveals, “a woman contacted me, whom I’d prefer not to name, but whom I’ll call Anna. She was like a biker chick. We really hit it off and we decided to form a group and it took off really quick; we were very active and did a lot of investigations, particularly with alien-abduction cases and witnesses.”

  As the two got to know one another, Anna confided in Jones that she was experiencing some serious harassment that sounded very much like classic MIB tactics. Strange people were telephoning their house, and there were knocks at the door from curious-looking characters. Jones adds with regard to this aspect of the story, “She and her husband lived in a semi-rural area, so they were a bit isolated, which made it more worrying. There were threats on the phone, strange issues with the phone like unusual noises on the line and electronic interference, and things like that. And the more we talked and I got to know her, the more these things started to happen to my phone.”

  Jones, at least partly as a result of her friendship with Anna, it seems, was now herself a target of the Men in Black. Nevertheless, being of a strong and determined character, Jones was not about to let a bunch of skinny, pasty, black-suited souls from who-knows-where push her around. That’s not to say the calls weren’t disconcerting, however. “It was always a male caller,” she said, “and the person on the other end had a very robotic voice. They almost sounded like they were talking through some kind of voice-changer. It was very stilted, very robotic. This person was telling me what clothes I had on, what book I was reading, what room I was in. And the place where I lived, you couldn’t see in it. The calls kept coming and this person was telling me more and more personal things that they never should have known.”