In popular culture, men in black (MIB) are United States federal government agents who wear black suits and prevent UFO witnesses from sharing evidence related to their encounters. MIB don’t necessarily wear dark suits and work for the government — the term “men in black” can refer to any mysterious figures who appear after UFO sightings.
Some people believe that the mysterious men in black are actually aliens in disguise. While some offer a rosy picture of UFO phenomena, other saucer enthusiasts believe sinister forces oppose the Space Brothers’ benevolent mission. Some of these are extraterrestrial and others terrestrial, and they work together to thwart the emergence of the truth.
Among the early victims of this evil “Silence Group” was Albert K. Bender of Bridgeport, Connecticut. In 1952 Bender formed the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), which met with immediate success, but he shut it down the next year under mysterious circumstances.
Bender confided that three men in black had told him the terrifying answer to the UFO mystery and turned his life into a nightmare. He would say no more. Through the “Bender mystery” the legend of the men in black came into the world. As Barker observed, a man in black had played a role in the Maury Island Incident ( I suggest you read about that incident). According to Barker, the MIB were ranging as far away as Australia and New Zealand, scaring still more UFO buffs into silence.
By the late 1980s MIB tales had become sufficiently common that “The Journal of American Folklore” took note of them in a long article. Just who the MIB were remained unclear. To saucerians enamored with conspiracy theories, they were enforcers for the Silence Group, associated with international banking interests that sought to stifle the technological advances and moral reforms the Space Brothers wanted to bestow on Earthlings.
To others, they were alien beings. In 1962 Bender came down on the side of the alien school. Breaking his nine-year silence in “Flying Saucers and the Three Men,” which he insisted was not a science-fiction novel, Bender revealed that the men in black who drove him out of ufology were monsters from the planet Kazik.
Even Barker, the book’s publisher and a big Bender promoter, said privately and out of ear shot, that maybe it had all been a “dream.” Fear of the MIB was generated in part by worries about the possible attacks by UFOs.
In Keel’s rendering UFO intelligences are not simply extraterrestrials but “ultraterrestrials”-entities from unimaginable other dimensions of reality. Worse, they definitely do not like us at all. Human beings, Keel thunders, are “like ants, trying to view reality with very limited perceptive equipment. . . . We are biochemical robots helplessly controlled by forces that can scramble our brains, destroy our memories and use us in any way they see fit. They have been doing it to us forever.”