The Real Men in Black

by Nick Redfern

  For a man in his 20s, and verging upon his 30s by the time he seriously immersed himself in the UFO arena, not to have had a girlfriend, or a wife, might strike many as being odd. Certainly, it would not have been a healthy situation for Bender, physically or mentally, sitting all alone in a dark attic on weeknights and a dark cinema on the weekends. Indeed, repressed sexual energy can wreak mental and physical havoc upon a person’s well-being. Not only that, but such repression can manifest within the subconscious in surprising and vivid ways.

  In the pages of his 1962 book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, Bender revealed the details of a late-1953 incident following his decision to close down the International Flying Saucer Bureau that can be considered little more than amusing soft-core porn. As usual, this encounter began with the smell of sulfur, and, lo and behold, his three Men in Black were once again quickly on the scene to transport Bender back to Antarctica. This time, however, it was a much more pleasant and far more rewarding experience: Three hot Barbarella-style space-chicks dressed in figure-hugging white outfits removed every stitch of Bender’s clothing, leaving him naked as the day he was born. The astonishingly obliging babes from the stars then massaged some form of skin-warming liquid into every part of Bender’s body...without exception.

  The aliens then reassured Bender that this was all for his own good. Indeed, they asserted that the mysterious liquid “will make life better for you. There is one dreaded disease on your planet which all persons fear, and you will have no need to fear this once you have received this treatment” (Bender 1962). Logic suggests that the dreaded disease that all persons fear was almost certainly cancer. And, recall that Bender had, long before his UFO experiences even began, a wholly irrational fear of developing cancer, which easily befitted the illogical mindset of the classic hypochondriac.

  What all this tells us about Bender is that he had repressed sexual fantasies about getting it on with a trio of gorgeous space girls, a terror of developing cancer— conveniently lessened by a reassurance from the aliens that he will now be forever cancer-free—and longstanding anxieties about having been visited by agents of the FBI adorned in black Fedoras or Homburgs. Those internal worries then collided in chaotic fashion, duly spilled out of Bender’s subconscious, and fell right into the heart of a semi-awake, altered state borne out of an undiagnosed condition of the brain—hence the sulfur-like smells, the strange out-of-body sensations, and the blackouts that went along with integral parts of the story. Remember, too, that Bender had a cousin who, years before, had supposedly been visited by a Woman in Black. We cannot rule out the possibility that Bender (who was well aware of the story) subconsciously added aspects of that affair to his own. And thus, as a result of this curious, and possibly even unique chain of events, were born the Men in Black.

  Greg Bishop also suggests that Bender’s experiences may have been entirely of his own making—although certainly not from a deliberately deceptive or deceitful perspective:

  I think that because Bender was so involved in the occult, maybe this played on his subconscious and he had the experience in kind of a hypnagogic, waking dream state. For me, that makes more sense than evil entities that actually came into his room. I think that the interaction between our minds and the UFO phenomenon is a lot more important than people realize. And, if there was anything there, then Bender’s predisposition, because of his occult and horror background, would be that he would have a negative experience with whatever it was that appeared. Bender may have had some kind of a real experience, but became fantasy prone to the point of delusion. It’s more like a Walter Mitty character where the world’s revolving around him and it’s exciting.

  Bishop’s theory that some of Bender’s experiences may have been hypnagogic ones is significant. Hypnagogia is a term that describes the stage between wakefulness and sleep—a stage in the sleep process that may be dominated by a wide variety of sensory experiences. For example, those in hypnagogic states have reported hearing voices ranging from barely audible whispers to wild screams. Others have heard random snatches of speech—largely nonsensical, but occasionally containing unusual, fictional names—and some have seen disembodied heads, or what appear to be fully formed entities in their bedroom. All of this typified Bender’s experiences. Humming, roaring, hissing, rushing, and buzzing noises are also frequently reported by people experiencing hypnagogia.

  Finally, whether due to hypnagogia, epilepsy, or some other condition, all the evidence points to Bender’s encounters being definitively home-grown. If further evidence were needed to bolster this theory, we have it. In early 1954 Bender met Betty, the woman of his dreams, and the two were married on October 18th of that year. No one should be surprised to learn that from then on the hot girls from the stars discreetly bid Bender farewell, as did the Men in Black.

  The most significant statement on this matter comes from Gray Barker, who, in 1980, said of Bender to researcher and author Jerome Clark, long after the Bender story had become a part of UFO history: “If I’d been there in his room while he was in ‘Antarctica’ maybe I would have seen him lying in his bed in a trance” (Randles 1997).

  Let us now learn more about the remaining two characters that were as instrumental in generating and nurturing the Men in Black legend as was Albert Bender: Gray Barker and John Keel.

  14

  Hoaxes

  Although the story of the Men in Black was most certainly that of Albert Bender, it would surely never have achieved the status and legend that it did without the input of Gray Barker. After all, it was Barker’s 1956 book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, that really gave the saga widespread publicity— within the UFO research community and beyond it. Remember too that J. Edgar Hoover himself—the head honcho of the FBI—was moved to obtain a copy of the book in 1958. And it was Barker who published Bender’s title, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, in 1962. Barker, then, was just as important in the development of the MIB mystery as was Bender—and, in terms of providing the story a great deal of public visibility, undoubtedly even more so. Moreover, Barker’s written words had a profound impact on some of those individuals attracted to the UFO phenomenon in general and the Men in Black in particular, including Timothy Green Beckley, who says, “My involvement with the Men in Black started when I was in the third grade. I had to do a book review, and most kids would probably do something like A Tale of Two Cities or a Hardy Boys book. I picked Barker’s book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. I got a B+ on the review. I was mesmerized by the book and by the Men in Black silencing. It was very sinister to me, and has always had a great impression on me.”

  Moving on to John Keel, Beckley says, “I first met John at one of Jim Moseley’s meetings. Jim used to have meetings here in Manhattan in the Hotel Woodstock and the Hotel Iroquois. Some of the meetings would attract small numbers of people—12 or 13—and sometimes as many as two or three hundred people. Keel popped up one night, and came in with Mary Hyre, the reporter from Point Pleasant who had seen the Men in Black. This was mid-’60s, and it turned out that John lived in my neighborhood.” As both men were night owls, the young Beckley often went over to Keel’s apartment in the late hours and hung out, listening to Keel entertain him with fantastic stories about “what had happened down in West Virginia with the strange phone calls, the Men in Black, and the Mothman sightings. Keel told me about how he was run off the road once, and was being followed. At first, I thought, This guy has got a really great sense of imagination and is just trying to entertain me. But the more I got into the Men in Black stuff, the more I realized he was quite sincere about it all.”

  Allen Greenfield, who photographed a Man in Black in 1969, has crucial data to impart that gets to the heart of the nature of Barker and Keel, whom he describes as being, albeit in very different ways, “two of the most complex human beings I have ever met. And I’m very broadly traveled and have met a lot of unusual people. The fact that they covered some of the same territory should not confuse anyone th
at they should be approached in the same way. They shouldn’t, at all.”

  Greenfield expands on this statement with respect to Keel: “He was a reporter. Now, he was a sensationalistic reporter; he would write the kind of I Found the Island of Hungry Women–type stories for men’s magazines back in the day. That was the genre he worked in for a very long time.” For example, in 1966—when Keel’s paranormal research was in full swing—he published a book called The Fickle Finger of Fate, which was a highly entertaining fictional romp that can best be described as a literary combination of Batman and a Russ Meyer movie, filled with naked girls, dastardly supervillains, and a superhero named Satyr-Man. Greenfield also notes, “There was, shall we say, some definite poetic license in Keel’s writing. But he was an absolutely fascinating individual to sit down and talk with, and he had a spellbinding voice. I would not refer to him as a friend; he actually gave me the creeps. If he had put on a black suit and come to my door, I certainly would have thought: this is one of the Men in Black.”

  Perhaps even Keel recognized that in the right circumstances he could very well pass for a mean Man in Black himself: In the opening pages of The Mothman Prophecies, for example, he related how, on a research trip to West Virginia in November 1967, while dressed completely in black, he was mistaken for a devilish entity by a couple whom he was forced to wake up and ask for help in the early hours of a stormy morning after his car had broken down near their home.

  Greenfield makes an important distinction between Keel and Barker, with regard to the way they approached their respective investigations into Men in Black cases: “Keel got the facts a lot better than Barker on cases they were both looking at. But Keel was far more credulous, and also more easily fooled, because, in a sense, he was outside of it all. Keel wasn’t a ufologist; he was an observer of ufology. And that’s a very different thing.”

  As for Barker, Greenfield offers the following thought-provoking words:

  Barker was a part of the phenomenon—that’s what a lot of people miss when they ask, “Was he a hoaxer?” Yes, he was a hoaxer at times. Was he a fraud? No, absolutely not; he was not a fraud. He was a teller of folk tales, but which can also be very truthful. And, to know Gray was to know the phenomenon. He told about realities, but he told them as stories. That was the culture he lived in.

  Asking whether Gray Barker was a truthful, honest person is like asking if Homer was a historian. It’s a non-question; it’s completely misunderstanding what one is dealing with. Gray was as much a part of the phenomenon as Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers. It was not reportage; he was telling the story, not attempting to come up with a pseudo-scientific explanation. And he could slip over into parable and metaphor, which was more about truth than a simple recitation of facts would ever be. All of that is the art of interpreting Gray Barker.

  Perfectly demonstrating that Barker’s involvement in ufology went way beyond merely chronicling hard facts, Jim Moseley admits, “Me and Barker pulled a couple of UFO hoaxes, and, I think, Barker pulled some hoaxes on Keel in the Point Pleasant context too. The funny thing is that Keel liked Barker, but he hated me. But, Barker and me, we were pretty much from the same camp and close friends.”

  Moseley reveals the details of one such cosmic caper: “There was one hoax where me and Barker took motion-picture of a UFO, which was about 30 or 40 seconds of film that I used in my lectures when I went on the college circuit. This was really just a little toy saucer that was dangled out the window of the car. I was driving the car, Barker was dangling it out the window, and a third guy, who was a friend of his, was on the roof of the moving car taking film of it. So, you’ve got all this different motion that looked fairly realistic. This would have been about 1966.”

  Faked UFO incidents aside, Moseley stresses that, as far as his written output was concerned, Barker wasn’t a hoaxer, but he did have his own, unique style of telling a story that confounded and confused some of his readers: “Those cases he wrote about did happen, but they have been misconstrued, sometimes deliberately even by Gray, in order to make it a good story. But that’s all. Gray could tell a great story by using his imagination, but still based on the facts. The truth is in his stories, but it’s the way he presented it, as stories, that a lot of people don’t always get.”

  Greg Bishop, who corresponded with Keel and met with him in New York City in 2001, echoes the words of both Moseley and Greenfield when it comes to trying to understand and dissect the nature of Barker: “It’s obvious if you talk to Moseley, and look at some of Barker’s writings, that he did have a genuine interest in the UFO subject, and thought there was a real mystery. He was also willing to bend the facts. But, that doesn’t mean that the Bender story had nothing to it. It’s the genesis of the whole Men in Black thing. It’s the archetypal MIB story— as it relates to UFOs in the latter part of the 20th century. Barker, through Bender’s story, created that mythos.”

  UFO authority Greg Bishop with John Keel, author of the acclaimed book The Mothman Prophecies.

  When it comes to unraveling Keel, Bishop says, “His influence is incredibly huge, and the influence, I think, is mainly in his ideas, which were backed up by years and years of actually talking with people. That being said, he—like Barker—was not above bending some facts, or even making some up. But that doesn’t bother me because it was his ideas that count: taking people, shaking them out, and pushing them in a new direction just by the sheer force of his writing and his storytelling.”

  Bishop offers the following as his parting words on Keel: “A nonfiction writer can be a great storyteller too, and Keel was one of the best at doing that. He was a Gonzo-Fortean, he was a trickster, and he knew it too. But he wasn’t hoaxing—his fact-bending had a purpose: He was doing what he had to do to get a message and a theory across that he absolutely believed.”

  Jerome Clark has his own take on Barker and Keel:

  Barker started out as a serious figure, but relatively early realized that he was never going to solve the mystery so he might as well have fun with it, thus all the exploitations and even outright hoaxes. Only he would have known what he really believed. From my conversations with him, I had the impression that his views were not unlike John Keel’s, except that unlike Keel felt he no need or desire to reflect on it with any degree of concentration. And yes, he was a magnificent storyteller.

  As for Keel, I think—I know, because he was sending field reports to me in the late 1960s—that he came upon genuine weirdness and reported on it generally accurately. As you well know, it’s not hard to find weirdness if you go looking for it. Unfortunately, Keel insisted upon laying his crazy interpretations on all this material. He had a medieval mind and, worse, a cracked one. At his very best moments Keel’s contribution to ufology and anomalistics was a decidedly mixed one. Mostly, he was a textbook example of a crank. I am sure, more to the point, that Barker was playing phone pranks on Keel; maybe other hoaxes too. That wasn’t because Barker was a Walter Mitty type, however. He was a trickster who enjoyed putting one over on anyone who might be receptive, and God knows Keel was receptive. His paranoia made him quite gullible.

  Someone else who became acquainted with Keel when Men in Black activity was at its height in the 1960s was acclaimed paranormal authority Brad Steiger, whose astonishing words may help to clarify why Keel was so intrigued by the mystery of the MIB: “Sometime in 1966, [when] I was in New York working on my book Valentino, I visited Ivan T. Sanderson at his farm in New Jersey, then, later, called John Keel, who had said, ‘When you’re in town give me a call.’ He took me to my first Chinese restaurant, and we had a delightful evening. And then we went back to his apartment, whereupon he began to alter my reality when he began telling me stories about researching Mothman and his encounters with the Men in Black.”

  And this is where things proceeded to get very, very strange. His voice dropping ever so slightly, but certainly noticeably, in tone, Steiger said to me, “I’ve never put this in any of my books, and I feel a little
awkward, but on the other hand, what I am about to tell you really happened. John was a good-sized fellow and I couldn’t see how just anyone could frighten him; and, at that time, I was 30 years old, in good shape, bench-pressing 450 pounds. I was like, ‘Bring it on! I’m not afraid of any Men in Black!’ Then he began to tell me of the visitations he’d had with three men who had not knocked, but had entered, his apartment. They literally came through the door. He told me of an evening when they were challenging him to lay off the whole Mothman thing; to lay off UFOs, if he knew what was good for him.”

  Having heard that astounding aspect of the story— which sounds astonishingly like Albert Bender’s experiences with the three MIB that materialized in his attic— you might think, Could it get any stranger? Yes, it could, and it certainly does. Back to Steiger:

  John was the sort of person who responded to threats like the red flag to the bull. But, he said to me that, on this occasion, [the MIB] reached under his sink and took out a jug of Clorox. They asked, “What is this?” and John said, “That’s disinfectant; it’s very powerful.” They brought it over to him, took the cap off, and gave him a smell. John wrinkled his nose, and when they asked if it was Clorox, he said, “Yes, that’s what it is. Now put it back before you spill it.” Whereupon the three of them—in front of him—put it to their lips one at a time and took large gulps of it. Now, by the time John had finished the evening, telling me stories like this, I decided that maybe I wouldn’t be quite so brave and quite so powerful. I began thinking, We’re not dealing with FBI agents or the Air Force.