There is a knock at the door. When you answer it, a man is standing outside. Perhaps there are two of them. Sometimes three. They wear dark suits, white shirts and ties. Their clothes are immaculate but somehow slightly wrong, either old-fashioned, too new or simply inappropriate for the occasion. They know your name. More troublingly, they know what you saw.
Perhaps it was a light moving strangely across the night sky. Perhaps something came down in a field. Perhaps you reported it to the police, wrote to a newspaper or told a local UFO group. Whatever happened, these men would apparently prefer you to stop talking about it. Sometimes they claim to represent the government. Sometimes they produce identification. Sometimes they do not bother explaining themselves at all. They ask questions, issue warnings and occasionally display an unsettling knowledge of things they should have no way of knowing. Then they leave.
The encounter ought to provide the simplest explanation imaginable. Government officials have arrived because the mysterious object really belonged to the government. Except that some of the Men in Black do not behave very much like men. They struggle with ordinary objects. Their speech is peculiar. Their faces look artificial. They move strangely. Some seem unfamiliar with everyday human behaviour. And occasionally they appear to know what someone is thinking.
Long before Hollywood gave them sunglasses, neuralyzers and Will Smith, the Men in Black had already become one of the strangest figures in UFO folklore. But when we trace the story backwards, we find something fascinating. There was no ancient legend of mysterious black-suited officials waiting to be rediscovered. We can actually watch The Men being created.
Today’s card has turned –
XVI – The Men
One possible ancestor of the Men in Black appeared almost simultaneously with the birth of the flying saucer era.
In June 1947, harbour patrolman Harold Dahl claimed that he had been aboard a boat near Maury Island in Washington State when he witnessed strange doughnut-shaped objects in the sky. According to the story, debris fell from one of them, injuring his son and killing the family dog. The following morning, Dahl said, he encountered a man wearing a dark suit who seemed to know precisely what had happened. The stranger warned him not to discuss it. It sounds remarkably like a Men in Black encounter. Unfortunately, the Maury Island case is a dreadful foundation on which to build anything. US government investigators regarded the original UFO story as a hoax, and historical accounts report that Dahl and his associate Fred Crisman admitted as much. The strange visitor entered UFO literature largely through later retellings. History
The man who really put the Men in Black on the doorstep was Albert K. Bender.
Bender was not a casual UFO witness. In 1952 he founded the International Flying Saucer Bureau, an early civilian organisation devoted to investigating the rapidly growing flying saucer phenomenon. Its members corresponded, collected reports and published a newsletter called Space Review. Skeptical Inquirer Then, in 1953, Bender abruptly shut the organisation down. The final issue of Space Review contained an extraordinary announcement. The organisation claimed that the mystery of the flying saucers was no longer a mystery, but that the information could not be published because it was being withheld on orders from a higher source. Wikipedia
Bender became reluctant to discuss what had happened. His colleague Gray Barker was considerably less reluctant. Barker had entered the UFO world after investigating the 1952 Flatwoods Monster reports in West Virginia. He became involved with Bender’s organisation, wrote for Space Review and began pursuing the story of why Bender had suddenly abandoned his research. Skeptical Inquirer
In 1956 Barker published They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. There they were. Three mysterious men dressed in black who had supposedly appeared to Bender and frightened him into silence. Barker’s book transformed an obscure story circulating among UFO enthusiasts into something much larger. Historians of UFO culture regard it as a crucial point in the development of the Men in Black legend. Wikipedia But Bender’s own version became considerably stranger. In Flying Saucers and the Three Men, published in 1962, Bender described beings whose eyes apparently glowed and whose appearance was decidedly less government-agent and considerably more supernatural. The visitors were no longer merely sinister officials suppressing inconvenient information. They had become part of the UFO mystery itself. History And this created a wonderfully unsettling ambiguity that has followed the Men in Black ever since. Who exactly are they supposed to be?
One explanation is obvious. Government agents. The early Cold War UFO era overlapped with intense military secrecy. Experimental aircraft, radar systems, nuclear installations and intelligence operations existed alongside genuine public anxiety about unidentified objects in the sky. Actual military and intelligence personnel really did interview witnesses and investigate UFO reports.
The British government did too. Thousands of pages of British UFO material eventually released by the Ministry of Defence include observation reports, correspondence and investigations covering decades of sightings. Intriguingly, the National Archives specifically notes that the files even contain a report involving an encounter with “Men in Black” on a railway line in London. National Archives So the appearance of an official-looking investigator after an unusual sighting is not inherently mysterious. But folklore rarely leaves a perfectly sensible government official alone.
As the Men in Black stories multiplied, their behaviour became increasingly peculiar. They might arrive in immaculate black cars. They might display identification that witnesses later could not verify. They sometimes appeared strangely pale or oddly proportioned. Their voices could sound unnatural. They asked questions whose answers they apparently already knew. In some accounts they seemed almost to be performing humanity rather than inhabiting it.
That development fascinated writer and UFO researcher John Keel. During his investigations of strange events around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the 1960s, Keel encountered stories involving mysterious visitors alongside UFO reports, strange telephone calls and the creature eventually known as Mothman. Rather than treating every anomaly as evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft, Keel increasingly argued that the phenomenon might be something stranger and more elusive. His Men in Black did not necessarily work for Washington. They might not even be human.
Yet Keel also demonstrated, rather beautifully, how easily the legend could manufacture itself. In The Mothman Prophecies, he described being stranded late at night in 1967 and wandering around looking for a telephone. His dark clothing and suspicious behaviour apparently caused local people to wonder whether he was one of the mysterious Men in Black. The investigator had accidentally become the monster. Wikipedia That tiny incident tells us a great deal. Once people know what a Men in Black encounter is supposed to look like, an ordinary stranger can suddenly fit the pattern.
There is another problem. Gray Barker was a wonderful storyteller. He was also perfectly willing to blur the line between investigation and entertainment. Writer John C. Sherwood later revealed that as a teenager he had collaborated with Barker on a fabricated UFO story involving a fictional researcher called Dr Richard H. Pratt and mysterious “blackmen”. Barker published the material as though it were part of the UFO mystery. Wikipedia
That does not prove that every Men in Black account was invented by Barker. It does tell us that the man who did more than almost anyone to popularise the phenomenon was quite prepared to add fictional material to the mythology. And mythology is exactly what it became.
By the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, historians of conspiracy culture have traced how the Men in Black became incorporated into increasingly elaborate theories about UFO secrecy, government conspiracies and extraterrestrial activity. Wikipedia Their identity could change according to whatever explanation was required. If governments possessed crashed alien spacecraft, the Men were government agents protecting the secret. If aliens were infiltrating society, the Men were aliens disguised as humans. If UFOs were supernatural or interdimensional, the Men could be manifestations of the same phenomenon. If somebody was deliberately muddying the UFO subject with false information, the Men became disinformation agents. They were almost impossible to disprove because they could become whatever the story needed them to be.
Then popular culture got hold of them. By the time Men in Black reached cinemas in 1997, the sinister visitors had undergone an extraordinary transformation. The frightening strangers who supposedly arrived after a UFO sighting had become witty government employees whose job was not merely intimidation but managing extraterrestrial activity on Earth. The film did not invent the Men in Black. It domesticated them. And that has produced a peculiar reversal.
Today, someone encountering two men in black suits after reporting a UFO would almost certainly already know the mythology. The story now precedes the experience. That does not mean every person reporting such an encounter is lying. Memory is not a recording device, and people interpret ambiguous events using ideas already available to them. A genuine official visit, an intrusive journalist, a private investigator or simply an oddly dressed stranger can acquire entirely different significance once the Men in Black exist as a cultural category.
There is also something deeper beneath the black suits. The Men appeared during the Cold War, when governments genuinely kept enormous secrets. People knew intelligence agencies existed but usually had little idea what they did. Military aircraft were being developed in secrecy. Nuclear weapons had transformed international politics. Surveillance and counter-intelligence were realities. At exactly the same time, people began reporting impossible machines in the sky. The Men in Black connected those anxieties perfectly.
The UFO says: Something extraordinary is happening.
The Men say: Someone already knows.
And perhaps that is why they have survived. A strange light in the sky is unsettling. But the idea that somebody knocks on your door the following morning and already knows exactly what you saw is much worse. Because now the mystery has changed.
You are no longer wondering whether you imagined it.
You are wondering who else was watching.
XVI – The Men
The Men is the card of secrecy, pressure and the uncomfortable feeling that somebody else knows more than they are telling you.
When it appears, information is being controlled. That does not necessarily mean there is a conspiracy around you, but it does suggest that you should pay attention to what is being withheld as carefully as you listen to what is being said.
The Men can represent authority, intimidation or someone attempting to make you doubt your own experience. It can also warn against the opposite danger: constructing an enormous hidden explanation simply because part of the story remains unknown.
Not every unanswered question conceals a conspiracy.
But neither should authority automatically be mistaken for truth.
This card asks you to return to what you actually know. Separate evidence from assumption. Notice who benefits from your silence, but also ask whether fear is filling gaps that facts cannot yet fill.
When The Men appear, ask yourself: What do I actually know, what am I merely being told, and why am I being discouraged from asking another question?
Keep asking.
Just perhaps check through the curtains before answering the door.
Sources
Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, University Books, 1956. The foundational published account that brought Albert Bender’s mysterious visitors to a much wider audience and helped establish the Men in Black within UFO folklore. The first edition was published in New York in 1956. WorldCat
Albert K. Bender, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, 1962. Bender’s later account developed his original story considerably, portraying the three visitors as distinctly strange beings rather than straightforward government officials. History
The National Archives, “UFO Reports”. An excellent primary-source gateway into Britain’s official UFO files. The collection includes reports passed through government departments and even correspondence describing an encounter with Men in Black on a London railway line. National Archives
John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies, 1975. Important to the later development of Men in Black folklore and Keel’s wider interpretation of apparently connected UFO and paranormal phenomena. Keel also recorded the wonderfully instructive occasion on which his own behaviour caused him to be mistaken for a Man in Black. Wikipedia
John C. Sherwood, “Gray Barker: My Friend, the Myth-Maker”, Skeptical Inquirer. Particularly valuable when assessing Barker as a source. Sherwood described collaborating with Barker on deliberately fabricated UFO material involving mysterious black-clad figures, demonstrating how easily invention could enter the developing mythology.
