Mystery of the Men in Black: The UFO Silencers

by Timothy Green Beckley

  I just opened the door and said, come in. That too is not entirely characteristic of me, either. I don't know what was the matter with me then to be so lax, so open. So the man came in, asked if he could sit down, and I said, yes. So he took a seat, and while doing so I noticed that his attire struck me as a little odd. He wore a black suit—a neatly tailored black suit—black shoes, black socks, and what looked like a very dark blue shirt—it wasn't quite black—and a black tie. He wore a derby—you just don't see derbies very often these days—and that was black, too. The derby was round and polished, and I thought to myself, my God, this guy looks like an undertaker.

  We sat down, and I said to myself, this character is as bald as an egg, and indeed he was. He didn't even have eyebrows, or eyelashes for that matter, and I saw this as soon as he removed his derby. He had smooth skin, like a soft plastic, smooth, like a dolls. But it was a dead white color. His nose was very small, set low and set rather far back. His features didn't have the normal balance. His lips were ruby red— brilliant red—which I thought was odd, and I wondered about it.

  As we talked, he wanted to know about the Stevens case. I asked him what he wanted to know, specifically. He began to question me, and to everything I said he would nod and agree with. He'd say, "That's the way I understand it." His eyes were—remarkable. They weren't round. They weren't slit-like. And from where I was sitting, I really couldn't tell the color of his eyes. They certainly appeared to have an iris pupil, but I wasn't observant enough to see the color, except that they were darkish, perhaps dark blue—I'm just not sure.

  The lights glowed very brightly and I noticed when he sat quite still he had the appearance of a clothing store dummy. His suit looked like it had just been put on, as though it had never been worn before or even walked in for that matter. And not a wrinkle. Flawless, with a nice sharp crease in the pants. And the odd thing was, when he seated him­ self, the crease just stood right out over the knee. The super perfection of this individual's attire, even after he sat down, was still absolutely- perfect—it struck me as uncanny. He confirmed that it was as he understood it, and I wondered why he was even asking me these ques­tions if he already knew the answers. The only talking he did was to ask me "what happened next?"

  He didn't lead me on, or ask me too many questions. He simply kept the conversation going by saying, "And then what?" Other than that he didn't speak much and when he did talk he spoke in an expres­sionless monotone. This was the way I recognized his voice being the one on the telephone earlier. It was characteristic. He spoke flawless English, absolutely perfect English with no accent whatsoever. He con­structed no phrases and contracted no sentences—just a sequence of words very evenly spaced. A scanning speech they call it. His voice was completely neuter and passive—no inflection, no intonation, no noth­ing! Just like you'd get from a machine that could talk, if you could pic­ture that.

  He was wearing gloves. They looked like gray suede, and he idly brushed his lips with the back of the glove, and when he put his hand down, the back of his glove was bright red, and the red on his mouth was smeared. At that point I said to myself, this guy is some sort of queer—he's wearing lipstick. Then I could see that his mouth was per­fectly straight. He did not have what we call lips, so the lipstick, I con­cluded, was there as some sort of decoy, so to speak, only it was done poorly. The lips did not turn down. They did not smile. They did not turn up, nor did they form an oval. They were just simply flat, like a dummy—Charley McCarthy—and I didn't see any teeth, and his head seemed to blend into his collar. He had a receding chin, and he didn't move his head at any time. Neither did he nod his head. He was per­fectly immobile except that his entire body moved. He could appar­ently read my mind, telling me that I had two coins in my left pocket. Everything else was in my wallet, and it was in bills. So I admitted that I did have two coins, and he asked me to remove one of them and hold it in my hand. I put my hand in my pocket and took out the larger of the coins—the penny.

  It was a bright new copper penny, and I held it up in my fingers, but I was asked to hold it flat in the palm of my hand. I did so and looked at him not knowing what to expect next. "Don't look at me, watch the coin," he said. And I did. It suddenly began to develop a sil­very color—and the silver became blue, and then I had trouble focus­ing. I could focus on my hand perfectly well—that was my reference point—but the coin simply was gone. Not abruptly. It simply slowly dematerialized—it just wasn't there anymore. I didn't smell anything. I didn't feel anything. I didn't hear anything.

  I was just fascinated at that point. I was spellbound, and I knew something strange was happening in my hand, because I could feel the weight of the penny going away. I don't know how he did this. He didn't perform any hocus-pocus; he didn't move his hands in any way.

  Then with a sudden change of subject he asked if I knew Barney and Betty Hill. I said I'd heard of them, yes, but I don't know them per­sonally or anything about them, except that I was under the impression that Barney Hill had died. To that, his only response was, "That's right, and do you know what he died from?" I said that I wasn't entirely sure, but I thought he died suddenly, so it might have been from a heart attack. I later found out that this was not so. And he said, "That is not entirely the case. The reason he died was because he knew too much!" He added, "Barney didn't have a heart, just like you no longer have a coin." It's pretty convincing evidence to me that these things can be done. I knew it, with my own eyes, it's not a second-hand thing that could have been rigged.

  Later I discovered that Barney Hill had died under suspicious circumstances. Then he told me—or, rather stated—that I had tape recordings on the Stevens case in my possession. Naturally, I was a lit­tle frightened after the coin disappeared. I got a little more uneasy when he ordered me to destroy the tapes and any other correspon­dence, and anything I had in writing or otherwise that had anything to do with UFOs. It was not the least bit indignant, not the least bit angry, he just said, do it. That's all he said and he would know when I had done so. He did leave a threat that if I didn't do so, I would suffer the same fate as Barney Hill. He did not say that he would come back or anything, just that he would know. It was all put in an inhuman machine-like way.

  As he spoke his last words, I noticed that his speech was slowing down, slowing up markedly, not slowing down in a phonograph way, with a change in pitch. His words became slower and farther spaced, but retained the same tonality. He slowly got to his feet unsteadily and he said, "My energy is running low—must—go—now—goodbye." He spoke like that. He walked a few steps to the door—I never got his name. I must have been absent of my senses that night. I opened the door for him and he clung tightly to the wall and walked down the steps one foot at a time—in other words he didn't go from step to step; he took one step at a time with both feet on the step, very unsteadily. And I was afraid that he might fall, and I watched him, he very slowly walked to the corner of the building, not the way he had come in, but towards the other way.

  He walked to the corner of the building and held on to the corner of the building for a long moment and then he disappeared around the corner. Well, as he was going out, I saw a bright light coming down the driveway. As he disappeared around that corner I first became aware of the light, and I thought he was getting into a car. I figured he must have a car parked in the driveway. But it was different; no ordinary automobile headlights; the light was bright, bluish-white, and it was a cold light, brilliant. I did notice one other thing. I didn't see his shadow as he walked. I suppose he was walking towards the light and wouldn't cast a shadow, and I reasonably and firmly believe that, if he were in the beam, he would have cast a shadow, because he was of material sub­stance, no question about that.

  Next, I rushed to the kitchen window which was right alongside the driveway, because I wanted to see if he were getting to a car, and I didn't see anything. I didn't see any light, nor any car, nor did I see any man. I rushed out to the front porch—that's the only way to
get out of the driveway, because there's the large hedge on one side and the house on the other. You can't get through the hedge very easily.

  I waited there for a few moments, but nothing came out of the driveway, so I went off the porch, went to the entrance of the driveway, I didn't see anything—cars were going by, but I didn't see any cars going out, and I didn't see anything in the driveway. So I wondered if perhaps it had gone through. You could drive through this driveway and around back of the other house and come out another driveway. It's sort of a horseshoe-shaped driveway, which serves three houses. So I didn't know what to make of it. I didn't think to look up. It just didn't occur to me. If I had looked up, I might have seen something or I might have not, I don't know. I was shaken badly. I'm not a little boy afraid of the dark, but I wanted to know who was around me.

  The rest of the night I kept the outside lights on. I kept the kitchen lights on as well. The "interview" took only a matter of min­utes. I can't tell how many, because I didn't have much of a sense of time, maybe 20 minutes. One other thing that comes to mind—when he came to the house, the dog, half collie and half German Shepherd, began to whine, and ran into the closet and hid. The cat was unmoved. But the dog was horrified. I had quite a time getting the dog out of the closet. He was so frightened he had even urinated right there. I was afraid if he was outside he would never have come back in. Normally, the dog is not a scaredy-cat. Really, he's a darned good watchdog. I'd never seen him frightened of anything at all. He just has no fear. And if anyone made a move towards me or any member of my family, well, he's right there.

  I did something irrational then. I took out my revolver. I have a .38 Special for self-defense. I never had to use it, but I have had a few scares with junkies coming into the office looking for drugs and I decided I should have a weapon for protection. The police had to be called a couple of times, and the Chief of Police advised me to purchase a handgun. I was unwilling at first. I never before had a gun in my life. I never handled one, except when I was a kid, I had a BB-gun. I dislike guns, but he advised me to carry one, and his plea was put so strongly that I finally relented, secured a permit and purchased a personal weapon. He said, "I know you're not going to shoot anyone. You're safe enough to have a permit." I guess he regards me as a fairly stable individual.

  So, I sat at the kitchen table with the gun—terrified. Then, after a while I got up, taking the gun with me. I had the tapes and UFO- related correspondence in the other room, and I just ruined the whole thing. I demagnetized the tapes—all of them—and I destroyed them physically. I absolutely wanted to get rid of them. And so I burned every damned thing I could.

  Eventually my family returned from the drive-in and I told them of the experience. My boy said, "let's look at the driveway," and he got a flashlight. He wanted to see if there were any tire marks. And right in the middle of the driveway we found a series of marks that looked like a stalled caterpillar tractor-trailer, not indented in the top but there was some sand and stuff that had blown on the driveway and the marks were in the sand. The marks were about 4 inches wide and continued for about a foot-and-a-half. The driveway was not clean; there had been a storm, and there was a lot of sand blowing around, and if any­thing had been moved out of the driveway there would be a continu­ous track, and no automobile could possibly have made it, being that the driveway is too narrow for a car to get far enough so its wheels could get in the middle of it. Also, they had been too deep and distinct to have been made by a motorcycle. A rubber tire doesn't make a track that looks like that—even snowtreads. This looked like it was an imprintable metal—a clean-edged metal.

  The marks were gone the next day and the driveway had not been used in the meantime. And there was no high wind during the night. It had been quite calm. No traffic in the driveway. Immediately after everything had been destroyed I called a woman reporter I knew who had been doing a story on this particular case for the National Enquirer. I asked her to tell them not to publish anything on the case, that I would not endorse it. I wanted this stopped right then and there. And I really hated to spoil those tapes. They weren't hurting anybody.

  I was still terrified though I slept well that night. A week later I had recurrent nightmares in which I could see this creature's face get­ting bigger and closer. The nightmares stopped in about a week and they did not come again. But since then I had an awful lot of trouble with the telephone. And I just about drove the telephone people crazy with my complaints. I had this difficulty with the phone going dead and not being able to call outside. Patients would complain that they were unable to reach me, and wasn't I answering the phone anymore. And time and time again they would get a voice telling them that the number they'd dialed was no longer in service. That's a standard tape the telephone company uses. And I assured them that the phone was in service, never has it been out of service, and never will it be out of ser­vice—as long as I'm alive anyway.

  I had to inform them when they had trouble reaching me to immediately contact the phone company and tell them it's a medical emergency and that the operator would get hold of me. In several instances, however, they couldn't even reach me through this method. The operator said she just couldn't get through. In one particular case, a patient had to get through to me, so the operator rerouted the call. I've also had calls cut off, and people getting quite upset with me because they'd said I'd hung up on them. I had to assure them over and over that this just wasn't true. Lots of times there have been clicks fol­lowing background sounds indicating an open line someplace, and I could hear things going on, and they weren't going on here or at the other end of the telephone line. I never heard any voices. I just heard sounds, something being moved, or paper rustling, or whatever. I did some complaining myself to the telephone company—many times— but there was no way, they informed me, that anybody could get through my line, except at the central station, where a repairman could —but there was nothing there. No repairman was on the line—at any time.

  They had telephone men come out here and listen. They con­nected a "demand-on" tape recorder, so that anytime the phone would be used, the recorder would start automatically. It would also start any time the instrument would ring. In fact, the mechanism was locked in. I couldn't take it off even if I wanted to. The telephone people con­tacted me and reported there was no question about it: somebody was tampering with the telephone. So they put in a separate relay stack for my phone, locked in a separate steel box, so nobody—absolutely nobody—could touch it.

  In summation, there is no telephone close enough to my back door that he could have made it there by the time I turned the light on. I don't have enough basic knowledge to guess about this, the only thing I know for sure, from what he said about the coin, is the reference he made about the coin: that it was no longer on this plane. He didn't say planet, or place—but plane. Scientists have theorized for years on alter­nate dimensions. As to what I think this man was, or where I think he

  may have come from, from his statement, and from the fact that the coin did vanish, is that there are other dimensions. And, I truly believe that this individual undoubtedly was from another plane. I must then go along with what many think: that there are other dimensions. And I think this man undoubtedly was from such a place. He is not an invader. I don't think so, anyway. But I do feel he—and others like him—are around, nosing about. I don't think they intend to do harm to any of us, and certainly as the known record verifies, they haven't hurt anyone as yet. Now there is this nagging, pinching question in the back of my mind that disturbs me quite often—what really happened to Barney Hill?

  ###

  Just as investigator Spiegel was concluding the interview, Dr. Hopkins' wife walked into the room. She was prompted to discuss the strange events which had so discombobulated her husband.

  "When we came home that night he was so shaken that he couldn't remain still for very long. He had the gun out on the table. I'd never seen my husband that way—so shook up like that. He said that he
just didn't want to have anything further to do with UFOs. He was all white and shaking. We saw him destroy everything he had on the subject (as he was told to). Or else, as he related it, he would join Bar­ney Hill. We didn't want that alternative. As he brought out in the interview, we've had more trouble with our telephone since the inci­dent. People can't seem to reach us. They call—the line is busy. We're not on the phone. There have been days—two days in a row—that people just couldn't get us. He's had it, you know. He didn't want to talk about it. He was afraid to! He didn't know what would happen to him. That was quite a night, one we'll always remember. Coming home and seeing the gun out like that on the table. He was that scared. And as John, our son said, 'Dad, what good is the gun to a person like that. The bullet will probably pass right through him.' I said that I wished we'd been here—he might not have come. Now, every time we go out to a movie, I'm afraid to leave him here alone. I'm always fearful now, if he opens his mouth, what might happen next?"

  Researcher Pat Dela Franier of the Stratford UFO Research Team in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, was not shy about reporting on this MIB episode.

  ###

  It looks like there might have been an MIB incident at Camp Bordon. Camp Bordon is a Canadian Forces Base located just outside of Toronto. I was engaged in writing the story at the back of the September issue [of my publication] at the time it happened, and I was stuck at the scene of the radar room. Tracy, one of my members, was going to Camp Bordon with her father, and said she would ask if I could get into the radar room there. When they arrived at the camp they pulled up to one of those gate stations where the cars are checked when they go in. The public can enter this base but have to state who they are going to see to get in. Lou had been there many times before, being a Korean War Veteran.