MUFOB ARCHIVE/01 Should ‘Men in Black’ Reports be Taken Seriously
John Harney
Merseyside UFO Bulletin, volume 1, number. 5, September – October 1968
People who witness UFOs and those who attempt to investigate their reports often report strange experiences which appear to have some connection with the UFO mystery. This article is mainly concerned with one aspect of the problem which is at present being much discussed among ufologists: the stories of witnesses or investigators who claim to have been threatened or warned to keep silent about their sightings and/or theories by mysterious visitors and telephone callers.
The main questions to be dealt with are: how serious is the problem, and, what are the best methods of attempting to discover the source of such reports?
Brief History of MIB Reports.
The first report of the MIB variety in the post-war phase of UFO activity is generally agreed to have been contained in statements made by Harold A. Dahl to Kenneth Arnold during the latter’s investigation of the alleged Maury Island sighting of June 21, 1947 (1), According to Dahl, the day after his sighting a man called at his home early in the morning and invited him to breakfast. Dahl said that he was not surprised at this, for men often called on people in his type of work early in the morning for the purpose of buying salvaged logs. The man wore a _black suit_, was of _medium hei_ght and there was nothing unusual about his appearance. _He appeared to be about forty years of a_ge. Dahl accepted his invitation and noted that the man drove a _1947 Buick Sedan_. The man suggested that Dahl should drive his own care and follow him. On the way downtown Dahl _failed to get the licence number_ of the car he was following. The two men went to a cafe and ordered breakfast.
As soon as they sat down the man immediately began telling Dahl, in minute and accurate detail, the events of the previous day when he and others had witnessed the UFOs, The man then told Dahl that _if he loved his family and didn’t want anything to happen to his general welfare, he would not discuss his experience with anyone._
The items italicised in the above account refer to details which recur again and again in more recent MIB reports; The Maury Island case, which is much too involved and complicated to summarise here is still argued over today, but the U.S. Air Force claims that it was a hoax, devised by Harold Dahl and his colleague, Fred L. Crisman, Ruppelt has described it as “the dirtiest hoax in the UFO history”(2). Dahl and Crisman are said to have confessed to the Air Force investigators.
The fullest account of the Maury island affair is given in _The Coming of the Saucers_ (1) , by Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer. If any open-minded person reads Arnold’s account carefully, he will find it very difficult to believe that Crisman and Dahl were able to arrange all the mysterious incidents described by him. Hoax or not, the whole story contains elements which crop up again and again in later incidents, quite apart from the MID incident described.
The classic MIB Case is that involving Albert K. Bender, who closed down his organisation, the International Flying Saucer Bureau, on the orders of ‘three men in black’. The story circulating at the time was to the effect that Bender was studying his collection of UFO data when the solution to the mystery suddenly occurred to him. The MIB visited him, assured him that his guess was correct and warned him not to divulge the secret to anyone else. Bender refused to give reasons for closing the IFSB, but hinted that a government agency was responsible. Bender’s case, along with other stories of a similar nature, received great publicity in the UFO world, and Gray Barker wrote a book on this theme. (3)
In 1963, Bender published his own account of the affair. (4) Far from clearing up the mystery, Bender’s story only served to create more confusion, for in it he claimed that the MIB were beings from another planet who were visiting the Earth at that time for the purpose of extracting a substance from sea water to take back to their own planet for use as food. Anyone who discovered too much about their activities was silenced in order that the aliens could work undisturbed.
Naturally, even the most eager UFO believers found the story unconvincing and it seems to have been generally assumed that Bender had — possibly through overwork — become the victim of an elaborate delusion, a delusion made worse by his interest in horror stories and occultism.
However, stories of witnesses and investigators being ‘silenced’ either by sinister, black-garbed figures or more convincingly by ordinary looking men who purported to be government officials persisted through the years until the vast increase in UFO reports since about 1964 brought with it some quite convincing reports of attempts to intimidate witnesses. At the present time controversy rages concerning the findings of John Keel, who claims that the MIB are very real and very active. Keel has published a number of articles on the subject (5) and reports which tend to support his claims are available from other sources. (6)
Local Appeal for Information
In the last issue of this Bulletin we appealed for unpublished information concerning reports of visits by the MIB and other odd experiences in connection with UFO sightings and events. This appeal for information was published in the Liverpool Echo (7) and Broadcast on BBC Radio Merseyside. Only three letters were received in response and these were merely requests for information.
However, the possibility that some victims of such experiences may be deluded was mentioned in the Echo and in the radio interview. Nobody likes to think that he is subject to delusions, so to begin with we are at once faced with an obstacle to any serious enquiry into this matter. An obvious question is: why did we receive no local reports of the MIB or suchlike, in view of the adequate publicity given to the appeal? Possible answers are:
- Because there were no such experiences to report,
- There were such incidents but the victims did not report them (a) because they did not want to be thought of as being deluded or because they were afraid of possible damaging or undesirable publicity, or (b) because the MIB would not let them.
Needless to say, the first alternative is likely to prove to be the most popular explanation, but it must be pointed. out that the technique used locally is very unlikely to be successful, whichever of the alternative answers given above happens to be the truth. The approach favoured by John Keel, that of personally interviewing many UFO witnesses, listening sympathetically to them and gaining their confidences seems more likely to pay dividends.
The Two Main Attitudes to the Problem
These may be briefly stated thus:
- Genuine reports of witnesses being silenced having photographs confiscated etc., are due to the activities of government security agencies or individuals posing for some unknown reason, as government agents. All other such reports are hoaxes or delusions.
- Some of the reports are genuine, but theories about government agents or people impersonating them are inadequate to account for important details given in the reports. The exact nature and purpose of such incidents remain a mystery.
If we now look at a few cases it may help us to decide between these alternatives, or perhaps to decide to continue to keep both of them in mind, in view of the lack of conclusive proof one way or the other
The Wanaque Reservoir Police and the ‘Air Force Officer’
A very detailed investigation of the UFO sightings and associated incidents in the vicinity of Wanaque Reservoir, Now Jersey was made by Lloyd Mallan. (8) Among the chief witnesses were members of the Wanaque Reservoir Police. Mallan found that they seemed reluctant to talk and eventually discovered one of the main reasons for this state of affairs.
After the sighting of a UFO over Wanaque Reservoir on January 11, 1966, Sergeant Ben Thompson, of the Wanaque Reservoir Police reported the incident to the Government and claimed that they sent an investigator who interviewed the policemen at Lakeland High School. The investigator is said to have insulted them and told them that they were just seeing things. Sergeant Thompson and other policemen who claimed to have been there at the time said that the man was an Air Force officer.
Mallan made exhaustive investigations of this claim and found that Project Blue Book said they had no official report of any incidents at Wanaque as apparently they had received no official requests for an investigation. As a result of his investigations, Mallan came to the following conclusions: “Certainly no Air Force officer gathered the UFO observers into the auditorium of Lakeland Regional High School to deride them about their sighting, Nor was any officer of the Army or Navy responsible for this situation. Such a situation, by the ways is normally outside the province of the FBI.”
Mallan also observed: “When it comes right down to the hard facts, the only of official UFO investigators are those under the supervision of the Air Force Project Blue Book.”
None of the Reservoir Police officers could remember the name of the Air Force officer they alleged had spoken to then at the High school. Also Major Harold O’Connell, Base UFO Investigator at McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey, observed to Mallan “those Wanaque police officers must be pretty poor cops if they didn’t get the name of the investigator who was interviewing them. Or especially ask for his ID card – which is an absolute identification of his military service.
It seems that in this case all the evidence suggests that no official investigator actually interviewed the police officers. Amateur investigators from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) had visited the area, but they could not be held responsible for the incident. For amateurs there is obviously no future in going about the country insulting policemen!
It is interesting to note that Malian does not seem to have been able to obtain any details of the alleged encounter between the policemen and the Air Force officer. In view of the officers’ emotional reactions to this event, one would expect a somewhat fuller report from them.
Karl Veich and the Man in Black
Karl Veich, West German representative of the International UFO Bureaus had been working on a UFO report which he considered to be important. He was planning to post it next day to the IUFOB, when the phone rang. A voice told him: “Mr Veich, it would be unwise of you to mail that report,” Veich asked who was calling and the voice said “A voice of caution and wisdom that tells you now – do not mail that report. Nothing but harm will come of it.”
Veich posted the report the next day. Shortly after noon a dark-complexioned man aged 30 to 35 years old, entered his shop (Veich is a chemist) and ordered a bottle of aspirin. The man then asked Veich why he had posted the report after he had been told not to. The man refused to identify himself and left the shop. Veich ran to the front of his shop and saw a black car speeding away. A strange feature of the car was that the windows were almost totally black. As any ufologist who has not already read this report will have guessed, Veich’s UFO report never reached its destination.
Different Aspects of the Problem in the U.S.A.
Although stories about the harassment of UFO witnesses and investigators have come from various countries ever since 1947, they have been particularly persistent in the U.S.A. Such stories often sounded very convincing. Witnesses claimed to have been visited by men purporting to be FBI agents, or dressed in Air Force uniform. These men confiscated UFO photographs and warned witnesses to keep quiet about their sightings. Naturally, many of the UFO groups took these reports seriously and complained bitterly to the Air Force.
In January 1967, however, ufologists got quite a shock when Colonel George Freeman, the Pentagon spokesman for Project Blue Book, revealed that the U.S. Air Force was just as annoyed about the mystery men as the ufologists were. (9) Colonel Freeman cited several cases. A man bearing credentials from the North American Air Defence saw Mr Rex Heflin, who had taken a series of UFO pictures in California in 1965, and demanded the origals. The photographs were never returned and NORAD denied any knowledge of the incident.
In February, 1960, Mr Joe Perry, of Grand Blanc, Michigan, took a similar set of pictures and was visited by two men posing as FBI agents who confiscated his photographs. Colonel Freeman denied that these incidents were connected with the Air Force UFO investigation and was quoted as saying: “We haven’t been able to find out anything about these men. We would sure like to catch one!”
On the other hand, investigators have recently brought to light many incidents of a more unlikely character. These include stories of visits from mysterious ‘men in black’, who are said to drive about in black cars which are very old models but are nevertheless said to look brand new. These cars either have false licence plates or none at all, yet are completely successful in evading the police. The MIB are also said to drive up to witnesses’ homes at night and take flash pictures of their houses with the aid of cumbersome-looking cameras mounted on tripods. In other words, most of the reported actions of the MIB appear to be completely nonsensical.
One of the contributing, factors to the present confusion about this problem is the very conservative approach to the UFO mystery by many of the note influential American enthusiasts. Such a statement will seem incredible to anyone with little knowledge of the subject, but it is this conservatism which has probably led to the loss of many interesting reports and has succeeded in distorting the true picture of the world-wide UFO mystery through the years.
Published accounts of the work of Project Blue Book have made it plain that reports of UFO occupants were either thrown into the nearest waste paper basket or placed in a file marked ‘CP’ – crackpot. The more serious UFO organisations tended to adopt a somewhat similar policy with the result that the more bizarre aspects of the mystery were for long neglected or left to groups which were notorious for their lack of competence and objectivity. However, it seems that the situation has recently improved although one suspects that the amount of weight which investigators give to each report depends overmuch on how far the report fits in with their theories. It appears that some ufologists, many of them comparatively new to the subject, have now almost completely discarded the popular approach of collecting data to support a particular theory, (e.g., UFOs are spaceships from other planets; UFOs are occult phenomena; otherwise inexplicable UFO reports are hoaxes and delusions, etc.) The present fashion seems to be a recognition of the fact that the UFO phenomena are extremely complex and have apparently endless ramifications.
How Serious if the Problem?
Critics will say that in publishing this article we are falling into the trap of being sidetracked from the main UFO problem by apparently giving credence reports which are merely the results of hoaxes, paranoid delusions exaggerations and plain lies. It is true that the problem of assessing the reliability of the reports is a formidable one, in view of the lack of physical evidence and the unpredictability of the reported phenomena. In the field of psychical research, Hansell (10) has described in detail how highly intelligent people with scientific training and experience, can be fooled by faulty memory, cheating and trickery in experiments, wishful thinking and other factors which make psychic experiences and experiments seem more impressive than they really are. As many of the alleged MIB experiences seem to involve phenomena of the kind familiar to psychic researchers, Hansell’s criticisms could no doubt profitably be borne in mind when investigating such reports. Whatever the cause of MIB and similar reports, they should be studied seriously along with all the other phenomena associated with UFOs.
How Should the Problem be Tackled?
The reports by John Keel concerning the MIB and other strange occurrences have attracted a good deal of criticism and in some quarters amusement. Flying Saucer Review reports that there is said to be a group of scientists interested in UFOs who burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter whenever they see a John Keel document. It also seems that some of the criticisms have been couched in terms more appropriate to the wilder extremes of politics than to scientific enquiry. There is only one way to deal with the startling claims of John Keel and others who have written in similar vein and the editor of Flying Saucer Review has summed it up neat1y thus:
“If chair-borne critics, writers, UFO-buffs or laughing scientists are urged to say Mr Keel is wrong, then it is incumbent upon than to get out and about and to thoroughly investigate his claims. If they do not do this they will find themselves on insecure ground.” (11)
When enquiring into such reports it should of course be realised that some of them can be quite easily explained. On the one hand, there are people who become mentally ill and suffer from delusions; on the other hand there is evidence that in some countries government agencies do interfere with amateur UFO investigations.
Conclusions
The foregoing article is just a brief summary of the ‘associated phenomena’ situation, with particular reference to MIB reports. We have not probed deeply into the subject but the following conclusions may be tentatively stated:
- Some of the reports are worthy of serious investigation.
- Investigation work already carried out should be checked by other investigators, where possible.
- Attempts should be made, to find rational explanations for individual reports,
- Newcomers to the subject should be warned of the possible psychological dangers in becoming involved with this aspect of the subject.
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References
1. ARNOLD, KENNETH and RAY PALMER. _The Coming of the Saucers_. Privately published by the authors. 1952.
2. RUPPELT, EDWARD. _The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects_. Ace Books Inc., New Fork.
3. BARKER, GRAY, _They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers_. Tower Books, New York, 1967
4. BENDER, ALBERT, _Flying Saucers and the Three Men_. Neville Spearman, London. 1963.
5. KEEL, JOHN. ‘The Sinister Men in Black’, _Fate_ (Douglas, Isle of Man) August 1968; ‘From My Ohio Valley Notebook’, _Flying Saucer Review_, Vol. 13, no. 3; ‘West Virginia’s Enigmatic ‘Bird’. _Flying Saucer Re_view, Vol.14, no.4.
6. STEIGER, BRAD & JOAN WRITENOUR. _Has the UFO Invasion Started? The Allende Letters_. Tandem Books, New York. 1963; _New UFO Breakthrough_. Award Books, Now York/Tandem Books, London, 1968; STEIGER, BRAD, _The Flying Saucer Menace_, Award Books, New York/Tandem Books, London. 1967; SANDERSON, IVAN, _Uninvited Visitors_. Cowles Education Corp., New York, 1967.
7. ‘The Men in Black Puzzle Experts’. _Liverpool Echo_, September 12, 1968.
8. MALLAN, LLOYD, ‘What Happened at Wanaque, NJ?’ _Science and Mechanics_, May and June 1967.
9. FAULKNER, ALEX, ‘Mystery Men in ‘Flying Saucer’ Probe’, _Sunday Telegraph_, London, January 29th, 1967.
10. HANSELL, C.E.N. _ESP – A Scientific Evaluation_. Macgibbon and Kee, Ltd., 1966.
11. ‘No Polemics’. _Flying Saucer Review_, Vol 14, no, 5.
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