They had been around for ages, to be sure, these ‘flying saucers,’ but only a very few people seemed to pay any attention to them before the Arnold sighting, then they seemed to be everywhere. Seen by multitudes, they made their way into books and movies and songs, successfully ‘invading’ nearly every facet of human culture. The saucer era had arrived.
As the years passed and public interest in UFOs grew, so did the paranoia. It was only too obvious that the governments of Earth were powerless against such ‘alien’ technology and, indeed, the ‘public opinion’ aspect of the phenomenon posed a very real problem for the feds and it seemed they were only too willing to go to extraordinary lengths to counteract the effects.
Enter one Albert K. Bender from Bridgeport, Connecticut, a 30-year-old eccentric with a passion for the occult. In April of 1952, acting on the ever-growing amount of public interest in UFOs instigated by Arnold’s report and the 1950 publication of retired U. S. Marine Donald Keyhoe’s, ‘Flying Saucers Are Real,’ Bender set up the world’s first UFO investigation groups.
He immediately announced to his group, the International Flying Saucer Bureau, or IFSB, that aliens should be welcomed, not treated as hostile. This was a wildly popular notion and his membership blossomed quickly during the summer and autumn of that year. So much so that splinter groups bearing the IFSB call letters soon sprang up in various places around the world.
The public largely distrusted the government because of the way they were blatantly mismanaging the massive amount of UFO evidence it was receiving. Public opinion was very low then, as it is now nearly 60 years later. In any event, that Bender would be considered ‘a person of interest’ to the intelligence community was to be expected and in no time at all the IFSB and its members were prime targets for CIA ‘surveillance.’
Despite his newfound popularity and notoriety, Bender shocked the UFO community in September 1953 by announcing that he was quitting the field and disbanding the IFSB. Three darkly dressed men had threatened his life if he did not do so, he wrote. Their visit had been so frightening, he claimed, that he was physically ill for several days afterwards. The following month Bender wrote in the final issue of his ISBF magazine:
“The mystery of the flying saucer is no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by orders from a higher source. We advise those engaged in saucer work to be very cautious.”
With that bit of good advice, Albert Bender left the UFO scene. Rumors flew of course, mostly centered around the mysterious three men who allegedly visited Bender. Were they secret government agents as they seemed to be, or something far more frightening? Bender wasn’t saying, at least not publicly. One month after Bender’s departure, Edgar Jarrold, a close friend and one of the leaders of the Australian Bureau, wrote that either the UFOs were from Mars or they were something far more sinister which he wasn’t allowed to discuss, and hinted at the latter.
Jarrold would later admit that, soon after he’d made those comments, his life had been made a “complete misery.” A dark-colored car had started showing up at his office and he could see sinister figures watching him from inside the vehicle. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He’d received threatening phone calls as well and, unbelievably, even began experiencing poltergeist-like activity at his home. He finally left the study of UFOs after allegedly being pushed down an escalator, by “unseen forces” in a Sydney department store.
It was long thought that Bender had told Jarrold and several other close friends all about the three ‘Men In Black,’ but it wasn’t until 1956 that public disclosure of the Bender events became known. That year, Gray Barker, another close friend and former associate of Bender’s, published in graphic detail all that Bender had allegedly told him in, ‘They knew too Much About Flying Saucers.’ According to Barker, Bender was told the answer to the UFO riddle by secret government confidants and sworn to secrecy.
In spite of this, Bender had written down what was told to him in a letter which he then mailed to another member of his team. A few days later, in August of 1953, three men showed up at his doorstep. They were somber, middle-aged men, all dressed in black and wearing homburg-style hats. He saw that they had driven up in a dark-colored vehicle and, disturbingly, one of the men was holding in his hand the letter he’d just mailed. Immediately taking the strangers to be intelligence agents of the US Government, Bender let them in.
He felt very threatened by these visitors, he later told Barker. During the ensuing interrogation only two of the men had spoken to him. The other one had sat strangely silent, staring at Bender in an uncomfortable manner, throughout the entire affair, almost as if he was attempting some sort of subliminal hypnosis on the man. They advised him that the pentagon had known the truth about flying saucers for a couple of years, but the solution was so disturbing, and would cause such widespread public panic, that it simply was not possible to reveal the answer to the world.
They also told him that, when the time was right, all the facts would be released, and they led Bender to believe that this would happen “within four years.” He was told that he should give up his interest in the UFO subject. “In our government,” one MIB said, “we have the smartest men in the country. They cannot find a defense for (UFOs). So how can you do anything?” He was told that it was his duty as an American to forget the subject and speak of it to no one. When this tactic didn’t work, they warned that he “could be sent to prison for treason.”
They seemed impressed with Bender’s intelligence gathering skills, and informed him that they were confiscating his entire membership list of names and addresses. Strangely, they even wrote down all the serial numbers from his tape recorders. Before they left they informed the UFO buff that his ‘inside’ sources had been “moved out of the way,” and would no longer be confiding information to him.
After Barker’s book, Albert K. Bender (shown above with a drawing of a MIB) was hounded by former IFSB members and ufologists, all desperate to know the “real truth” behind the UFOs. The four year deadline came and went with no forthcoming ‘revelation’ from the government.
Albert K. Bender’s sketch of a ‘Man In Black.’
After continued pressure from Barker to write his own book about the affair and tell what happened in his own words, Bender finally relented. His 1962 book; ‘Flying Saucers and the Three Men,’ was largely a disappointment, especially to Barker, as it described the 1953 encounter very differently than he reported in his own book. Bender wrote, in essence, that the three men were not government agents at all, but shape-shifting aliens in disguise. They had even ‘turned into monstrous beings with hairy skin and glowing eyes’ as they stood in his apartment. He even claimed that one of the creatures had materialized right next to him as he sat in a cinema one evening, and that terrible poltergeist attacks had begun to plague his home. Objects moved about on their own and mysterious fires had broken out; these were the real reasons that he had quit the field.
In addition, Bender then claimed that he was abducted by these beings and taken to a base in Antarctica, where he was told that the aliens were on a secret mission extracting a certain element from sea water and shipping it home. No one must know, they told him, until their mission ended in 1960. The response of Bender’s many admirers to his last revelation was shock, disappointment and dismay. Some thought that he was lying, others that he was deluded or just plain crazy. Still others insisted that he was still being “forced” to cover up the real truth.
Although hardly anyone believed a single word of Bender’s book, the MIB were far from done. In fact, they had only just begun their campaign of disinformation, threats and terror against witnesses of UFO activity and were very active both during and after the nine year gap between Bender’s MIB encounter and his book. Although the vast majority of MIB reports come from the United States, the MIB phenomenon is not, nor has it ever been, strictly an American enigma. In fact, one year before Bender abandoned the UFO community,
in September 1952, a strangely similar entity appeared to a UFO witness in Italy.
Carlo Rossi had witnessed a very strange craft hovering low over the River Serchio near San Pietro a Vico while fishing there back in late July. A tube had descended into the water and began sucking it up into the flashing, oddly-shaped craft. Rossi climbed up an embankment for a better view, and he certainly got one. So did the human-like figure which appeared in an opening atop the craft. It spotted the fisherman and, much to his dismay, was pointing him out to other unseen occupants of the UFO.
At this point Rossi decided to run. He scrambled down the embankment as a green beam of light shot out from the object and over his head, causing an electric tingling sensation like strong pins and needles all over his body. He threw himself to the ground and, with much relief, saw the UFO rise up and vanish into the sky.
Even though he had lost an arm in a railway accident years earlier, Rossi still enjoyed his fishing outings, but the incident had shaken him and nearly two months of prime fishing weather had gone by before he could gather enough courage to try the spot again. When he got there someone was waiting on the river bank for him. A strange looking man dressed in dark blue with angular features and very penetrating eyes greeted him. Speaking Italian with a heavy Scandinavian accent the man asked Rossi if he had ever seen “an aircraft or other flying object over the river.”
The odd looking fellow had a menacing air about him, prompting Rossi to deny that he had. Then the stranger offered him a cigarette with a gold mark on the side. The fisherman had never seen a smoke like this one before, yet strangely, he took it from the man and lit it up, whereupon he immediately felt dizzy and nauseous. At this point the stranger snatched it away from him, tore it up, threw it into the river and walked off. Rossi went immediately to the Public Prosecutor’s office in the town of Lucca and swore out a statement.
In, ‘The Truth Behind the Men In Black,’ author Jenny Randles documented a number of British cases which also involved the appearance of similarly described characters harassing UFO witnesses. One of the earliest MIB events she recounts does much to reveal the true nature of these mysterious inhumanoid creatures which pose as men.
On November 18th, 1957, at her home on Fenham Street in the district of Aston, Birmingham, 27-year-old Cynthia Appleton received a very strange visitor. The visit was preceded when one afternoon two days before when she noticed that a curious glow had filled the room which made her feel “strange.” The next thing she knew it was an hour later and she realized that she had no memory at all of the elapsed time. Cynthia was a simple woman, a wife with a husband, one year old baby and a three year old daughter to tend to. She wasn’t psychic and had no interest whatever in the UFO subject. Nevertheless, the subject apparently had an interest in her.
At 2:00 p.m. on the 18th she went upstairs to check on the baby and noticed through the window that the sky had taken on an odd, rosy-pink color. Suddenly, the room was flooded with some type of electrical field, making the woman’s skin prickle and her hair stand on end. Then came a strange whistling sound, which rose in pitch, painfully penetrating her skull. The sound stopped when a misty shape began to form by her fireplace. Mesmerized, the frightened woman watched as the mist flickered “like a TV screen when first switched on,” then took the shape of a most peculiar ‘man.’ Her fright was fading quickly and only later did she realize that this was because the entity kept repeating the words, “Do not be afraid...Do not be afraid...” subliminally, or telepathically, in her head.
“He seemed to have some control over me,” she later told an investigator, “I should say that it was like hypnosis.” The being was human-like, blond, with “elongated features,” and stood over six-feet tall. He wore a silver “foil” suit, like cellophane, with a covered helmet. She would later describe him as looking like a Greek athlete. He communicated to her, telepathically, that he was from another planet called ‘Gharnasvarn,’ and that his people were friendly. Until the Earth stopped having wars, he told her, they would only contact people like Cynthia, who had the power to communicate with them because of her “unique brain” with the “correct tuning frequency.” He then opened his arms wide, like someone playing charades would mimic a television screen.
Incredibly, images then appeared in thin air within the space he had invisibly marked out. The ‘TV images’ showed her scenes from Gharnasvarn, then switched to Earth as she watched, displaying images of flying saucers and atomic explosions. When the ‘alien’ finally disappeared, Cynthia noticed that he’d been standing on a section of discarded newspaper, which she examined and found that it now bore a burn mark, as if it had been scorched by the presence of the man.
On January 7th, 1958, the being returned, again appearing from an odd mist; this time in her living room. He wore no helmet, had shoulder-length blond hair and was accompanied by a colleague with shorter, curlier hair. The being told Cynthia more about her “special brain waves” and even claimed that their appearance in this manner was a “projection” and not an actual physical visit. Despite this Cynthia reached out and tried to touch the being, feeling a kind of slime on her fingers which belied the entity’s words. Perhaps “projection” wasn’t the right word that he was searching for. Perhaps ‘deception’ would’ve been more accurate.
In any event, these mysterious visitors would return on six more occasions between the months of February and August 1958, but they never again appeared in such a mystical manner. On all six return visits they arrived by car and wore black business suits and old-fashioned hats! Cynthia’s daughter, now aged four, was present on the first visit in February. They walked right up and knocked on the door and, when Cynthia answered it, the blond being was alone and claimed that he was injured. His finger was burned, he said, for which he required immediate first-aid.
The woman was asked to bring a bowl of hot water and bathe his hand, which she did. After this he injected himself from a small tube, then sprayed some type of “jelly” all over his hand. Minutes later all traces of his injury had miraculously disappeared. Soon afterwards the man left and, curious, Cynthia followed him out. He walked around the corner and got into a large, black car with tinted windows, she said. The vehicle then immediately left.
When she returned to the house she noticed that a small piece of the man’s skin had been discarded in the washing bowl. She preserved the skin and later gave it to her clinical psychologist, Dr. John Dale, who had it analyzed under a micron telescope at Manchester University. The chemist who carried out the examination could not positively identify the skin. It most closely resembled animal skin, he told them; most probably a pig’s!
During the various visits which followed in 1958, much more information was revealed to the housewife. Time did not exist, they told her, regaling her with other information including detailed scientific facts about the nature of atoms and even, amazingly, a cure for cancer. Cynthia kept admonishing the strange visitors, telling them that it was pointless telling her, a simple housewife, such things as she possessed no scientific knowledge and the information was passing over her head. The aliens didn’t seem to mind, though, and kept right on.
In September, a month after what she thought had been the last visit, the blond-haired alien returned, this time carrying the news that she was pregnant, would have a baby at the end of May 1959, and that, even though her husband was the father, the child would be of the “race of the Gharnasvarn.” He would have fair hair, the entity predicted, would weigh seven pounds, three ounces and she would call him Michael.
Even though Cynthia had not missed a period, she had no reason to doubt the being, so she went to her doctor for an examination. Sure enough, she was pregnant. The birth date was almost exactly as the ‘alien’ predicted, and the birth weight was only off by one ounce. She named the fair-haired boy Michael. The visitors from Gharnasvarn never returned.
The peculiar actions and methods of the MIB are similar no matter where on earth they appear. Take, for instance, the one
s who appeared to frightened UFO witness Li Jing-Yang and his friends in China in 1963. Yang and a group of friends had observed a strange object in the sky, like two dinner plates placed on top of one another and sealed together. They had never seen anything like it before.
The next day, as Yang was walking down a crowded street, he was approached by a strange man dressed all in black. He was tall, had an odd looking face and walked with a stiff gait, almost like a robot. The curious entity attracted the attention of several onlookers, but he singled Yang out, approached him and then began to speak.
Incredibly, Yang later claimed that the man’s mouth never opened as the words came out, much like a skilled ventriloquist. He asked Yang if he had seen a disc in the sky, to which the boy said that he had. “You must not tell anyone that you saw this thing. Do you understand?” he added, grabbing Yang’s arm in a threatening manner and refusing to let go until the boy had fearfully consented. The man then let him go and walked stiffly down the street, according to Yang. He watched as the entity turned towards a nearby corner; and vanished into thin air right before his eyes.
Authentic photographs of inhumanoids are rare. Nevertheless, a British man named Jim Templeton took one on May 24th, 1964. That Sunday he’d driven with his wife and two daughters out to Burgh Marsh, near Carlisle to take photographs of five-year old Elizabeth, who was wearing a brand new pink dress.
The Inhumanoids Page 27