by Nick Redfern
Carefully and deliberately instilling in Jones’s mind the notion that her every move was being scrutinized by all-powerful, unseen eyes of a potentially deadly nature can only be interpreted as a classic scare tactic—at which, as we have seen, the Men in Black are adept. Jones, tired and fried by the whole situation, wanted hard answers as to what was afoot and why she and Anna were being targeted: “So I started asking Anna if she knew anything about these calls. She said that yes, she had been getting similar calls with a really robotic voice. But she also said that some of the people she had seen—she’d seen them on her property late at night, and her husband would run outside with a gun—moved like robots. They were very stiff, very stilted, and stared without blinking their eyes. But they looked human.”
As the high strangeness continued, Jones became even more concerned and affected by the way in which her previously orderly world was rapidly plunging into unrelenting chaos, disorder, and stark terror: “I told my husband at the time, ‘Don’t answer the phone!’ But, looking back, it was crazy that I was even thinking like that. I mean, you have to answer the phone, but it really intimidated me. And some of the calls were late at night when my husband—who was a musician—would be gone rehearsing or playing. And this person would always know when I was alone. Always. It was very strange; I could not get rid of this feeling that there was something not right. It wasn’t just the way his voice sounded; it was the whole atmosphere. It was horrible.”
Jones has her own thoughts on the nature of the mysterious man’s agenda. Unsurprisingly, she concludes that the tone, nature, and modus operandi of the Man in Black seemed to radiate both hostility and threat. And many of those threats seemed to be directly linked to Jones’s studies of alien-abduction cases and data:
I believe that what he was trying to do was to let me know that he knew a lot about me and could hurt me if he wanted to. He never actually outright said anything like he would hurt me, but that was definitely the idea he was getting across. It was an insinuation. It was creepy. Looking back on it, the interesting thing is that he was less interested in talking about UFOs as a subject, but much more interested in talking about the group and what the group was doing with our abduction research.
And this man, instead of asking about UFOs, would say something like, “Your group is familiar with this abductee or that abductee,” or with this person or that person. He was letting me know that he knew what the group was doing. I have no idea where he was getting the information from, unless he had my phone tapped. And he was even telling me things about what I’d done back in my 20s, what book I had lying on the bed, and what I was wearing at the time. It just gave me the creeps; very creepy.
Eventually the situation began to take its toll on both Anna and Jones, to the point that there really seemed to be only one viable option left available to the pair: Somewhat reluctantly, they elected to close down their research group, and Jones moved back to Los Angeles to live. She says today of Anna and the whole experience with the Men in Black: “I have no idea of what became of her, but I can tell you that I am not someone who is easy to intimidate. I’m very confrontational; I’ll fight. But this person scared me so much that I literally walked away from my group. And I’ve never had that happen before. It was a weird kind of foreboding feeling. It made me want to back away and get this person out of my life. I even felt that something not right was going to happen; it was awful.”
Investigative author Chris O’Brien has a similar account to relate that also focuses on the MIB/alien-abduction connection. In this particular case, the female witness was referred to him by an unusual source: a sheriff’s office in Colorado, O’Brien’s state of residency. He takes up the story: “One of the things she mentioned happened right when we were having all sorts of intense waves of UFO activity, in the spring of ’94 and through the fall of ’95, in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. She kept a very extensive journal, and I cross-referenced some of her claims with our reports and, sure enough, there was a definite correlation. When she would claim to have these UFO experiences, these abductions, we would get UFO sightings reported to us on the exact same nights, but from other people—which I thought was very intriguing and gave some credence to her story, in my mind.”
And then there came a deeply worrying development: The woman’s mail failed to arrive on a disturbingly regular basis, and she ended up having to file claims with the post office. Then, on one particular day the woman noticed a large black car that looked like it had just been driven out of a 1960s showroom parked at the end of her driveway. Something sinister was going on, she felt. And, given that this involved the Men in Black, could it really have been anything but sinister?
O’Brien says of this development, “It looked like a brand-new, old car—which is kind of an oxymoron, but that’s what she said. And there were these two guys outside the car whom she said looked like the Blues Brothers, going through her mail—getting it out of the mailbox, opening it, and so on. She was watching all this through a spotting scope and was able to catch some details, but as soon as she started heading down there—she got on her ATV and hauled ass—they took off. This happened a number of times before she had to get a Post Office box in town. But she still had problems—not as bad, though—and this went on for about a year before it finally finished.”
Fortunately, the woman had been able to get a very good look at the strange pair on one occasion when they raided her mailbox. Based on O’Brien’s words, they might very well have stepped straight out of the shadowy confines of poor old Albert Bender’s attic: “They had the Fedoras, the wrap-around shades, the skinny ties; it was the whole Men in Black deal. I tried to get her to come up with another description, something a bit more credible-sounding than ‘like the Blues Brothers.’ But, that’s all she would say: They looked like Jake and Elwood!”
The experiences of Marie Jones and Chris O’Brien’s source may have come to an end, but there are others that still merit our attention. Oregon-based anomalies researcher and writer Regan Lee says of an alien-abductee with whom she had contact in the 1990s, “I’ll call her Jane. She had a UFO encounter in the early 1990s in the Gold Hill area campground in Oregon. She recalled through hypnosis and flashbacks that she had been abducted by aliens; given a medical examination. She had several more encounters and UFO sightings, some witnessed by others who were with her.”
And, yet again, our old friends were just itching to come looming out of the darkness. “It was while she was experiencing these sightings, encounters, and telepathic communications with entities,” Lee says, “she had a strange thing happen with Men in Black, which occurred in the month of July, at the institution at which she was then working.”
It was a blistering-hot day when Jane’s attention was drawn to three tall, golden-skinned, bearded men. They were dressed in black suits, black hats, black shoes, and very heavy, woolen, full-length coats that—surely at this stage of the game I scarcely need to say—were also black in color. Jane pondered the undeniable strangeness of three men in black wool coats in July, and mused upon the possibility that they might be nothing stranger than visiting rabbis, although they seemed far more Asian than Jewish. Jane told Lee that even though the three men were deep in conversation with one another, she was unnerved to see that their eyes were focused intently upon her, and even appeared to be assessing her in some fashion.
Lee elaborates on the nature of the entities that Jane encountered: “They seemed eerily aware of, and interested in Jane. There was no warning or other interaction, or references to UFOs, yet their very presence could be construed as a warning. It served to startle Jane; she associated the encounter with her abductions and sightings. The bearded men suggest, to me, a religious aspect. Jane was a religious person. I don’t know for sure but I think she was a Mormon. Were the beards connected with that somehow? Maybe they used Jane’s religious frame of reference to get her attention.”
A few weeks later, says Lee, Jane was listening to a radio talk-sho
w in her car, when one particular caller related over the airwaves her very own UFO experience in Colorado. The caller’s encounter was followed by a visit from three men dressed completely in black clothing. Not surprisingly, Lee reveals, “This story gave Jane a jolt, wondering if the three Men in Black she saw weren’t the same phenomena. Jane wondered if she hadn’t been ‘marked or implanted’ by the aliens and if she was being followed.”
In other words, a typical side effect of the MIB experience—paranoia—had infected yet another unfortunate soul.
Then there is the 1996 experience of Greg Bishop, a prolific author and researcher on a wide range of topics, including UFOs, psychedelics, and conspiracy theories. Bishop’s account is a fascinating one, as it also contains an integral ingredient of Chris O’Brien’s revelations— namely, the involvement of MIB-style characters rummaging through the mail of individuals intimately linked to the alien-abduction controversy. Significantly, Bishop’s story is steeped in distressing paranoia.
Bishop begins thus with his unsettling tale: “Mail tampering is the darling of the clinical paranoids, but nearly every piece of mail that the late researcher and alien-abductee Karla Turner sent to my P.O. box looked like it had been tampered with or opened. Since this is easy to do without having to be obvious, we figured someone was interested in her work enough to make it clear that she was being monitored. She took to putting a piece of transparent tape over the flap and writing ‘sealed by sender’ on it. Karla pretty much took it for granted after awhile, and suggested I do likewise.”
It was unnerving experiences such as those with Karla Turner that had a profoundly negative psychological effect on Bishop and his state of mind at the time. In a frank and open fashion, Bishop states today, “During my extremely horrible paranoid period, when I had a year or two of ridiculous paranoia, which would have been about 1996 or ‘97, I thought there were people taking pictures of the house—which there really were. I actually did see somebody once take a picture and quickly drive away. Today, I wonder if it could very well have been real-estate people, but back then, I was like: It’s the Men in Black.”
And as Bishop saw more and more demons hiding under every rock—or, perhaps, more and more Men in Black lurking within the heart of every black shadow and dark recess—things began to get progressively worse. Bishop was on a terrifying downward spiral that showed no signs of ending:
I thought people were reading my computer screen from outside the house. I thought my landlord upstairs was following me through the house. It was really weird: one night I was up at 2 in the morning and I walked into the bedroom, and I could hear somebody walk into the bedroom upstairs. It was the same apartment floor-plan upstairs as mine. For about five minutes, the person walked everywhere I did, right after me. I could hear the floor creaking right above me in every room I went into. Things like this, I built into this framework of paranoia. I was stressed, paranoid, and thinking there were these MIB-types outside the house. Maybe there were. But, you know, whether I was being watched or not, if you’ve got a vast, paranoid conspiracy made up in your mind—as I did at the time—then everything fits into it; and it did fit with the thing with Karla [Turner] and the mail getting opened.
Thankfully, Bishop was eventually able to take significant steps back from the darkness that was beckoning with bony fingers. The negativity and the cold fear in which he had been enveloped for so long began to ease, and eventually faded away. Today, Bishop—who still plays a significant role in ufological research and writing, but for whom paranoia no longer has any place in his life—says of his year or two of personal hell, “I got out of that state of mind for one simple reason: I was just so tired of being paranoid. It wears on you; it makes you physically and mentally tired. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t being watched, or that there weren’t mail problems. There were. But, I couldn’t live like that, in fear, any longer.”
Unfortunately, as we have seen, not everyone has proven to be quite as lucky as Greg Bishop: The dark and winding highway incessantly traveled by the Men in Black is one littered with disaster, misfortune, and mental collapse.
11
MIB in the New Millennium (2000s)
Raven Meindel, a cryptozoologist, writer, radio host, and Wiccan priestess who resides in Michigan and, in 2010, was featured on the History Channel’s Monster Quest series pursuing blood-thirsty werewolves, says, “I’ve been interested in paranormal things and UFOs for years, but when I got involved in doing it more seriously, with research and writing, and in a career-like manner, that’s when really strange things started to happen, including a Men in Black experience in April 2008.”
Meindel’s experience was preceded by a decidedly unusual occurrence in the family home: A week before she had her Men in Black confrontation, her husband, Adam, felt a rush of wind go past him inside the apartment, while the pair was standing there, talking. Meindel is sure that the air-conditioning was not on, and no windows were open. It felt, said Adam, just like someone had brushed by, walking briskly past him. Whatever the cause of the odd event, it was an uncanny precursor to the mayhem that was soon to follow, as Meindel makes graphically clear: “On April 16, about 5:30 p.m., two men, dressed all in black, came out of the apartment across from where we were living at the time. The odd thing about this is that no one was living in that apartment then. They walked away and got into a black Lincoln. And when they walked past, I was outside playing with a Frisbee with a neighborhood kid. The Frisbee was called an Alien Flyer, which had an alien face on it, which I thought was a very odd synchronicity.”
Researcher Raven Meindel, who found herself plagued by the MIB.
Feeling somewhat unsettled by the off-putting presence of the pair, Meindel tried her best to lighten the situation. Her efforts were to no avail, however. Indeed, no one, I am sure, needs to be told that the Men in Black are hardly known for their fine sense of humor or jollity: “We smiled at the guys, and made a joke about something, but they were like totally stone-cold, chiseled, hard features, no emotion, nothing. One of them looked like he was in his late 20s or early 30s, and the other one was probably late 40s, early 50s. They were all in black and they were both carrying briefcases.”
At first, says Meindel, she wondered if the two men were Mormons, or perhaps representatives of some other religious group. As there was nothing to indicate that, however, Meindel attempted to move closer to see the license plate of the pair’s car as they got inside their black vehicle. Meindel developed a deep suspicion that the pair knew exactly what she was doing, and “they backed out real quick and took off. You could tell it was a deliberate maneuver.”
It was in the immediate wake of this chilling MIB experience that a reign of paranormal terror descended upon the Meindel family: The telephone would ring, but—surprise, surprise—no one was there. On the night of April 19th, only three days after her encounter with the MIB, and while trying valiantly to fall asleep (which was hardly easy, given the nature of the odd activity in the family home), Meindel developed an overwhelming feeling that she should not be undertaking any type of UFO research whatsoever. In her own words, “It was like a terrifying feeling that came on from nowhere. I even felt kind of shaken by it. And I actually said, out loud: ‘Okay, I won’t do it.’”
Despite her reluctance to dig further into the complexities of the UFO jigsaw, the Men in Black were far from finished toying with, and terrifying, Meindel and her family. Two days later, while Meindel was out walking her dog, something even stranger and scarier happened: a black, luxury-type car, maybe a Cadillac, appeared on the scene and seemed to be shadowing her. She says of this new development: “There was an older man driving and a younger man in the passenger seat. I got a strange sensation. I felt something very strange. They pulled up right next to me. It was like the older man was deliberately stopping to let me know they were stopping for me, because of me—maybe only a foot from me, right at the edge of the sidewalk.”
Meindel’s fear levels rose dramatically when one
of the men took off his seatbelt and appeared ready to get out of the car. At that point, Meindel had an idea: She pulled out her cell phone, so that the pair would clearly understand she was calling someone, and began to walk away from them and toward a nearby clubhouse. “I looked over my shoulder, and finally they did leave, but they were very deliberate in their movements. There’s no doubt in my mind they were trying to scare me.”
The scare tactics were working, and they showed no signs of stopping either. A couple of weeks later, Meindel recalls, her husband, Adam, distinctly heard, on several occasions, whispered voices throughout the apartment. Most disturbing of all was the occasion when, to their horror, the family found what appeared to be very strange handprints on the bathroom mirror: “One was huge, where the fingers had kind of drawn down the mirror,” Meindel says. She adds something even more sinister: “My daughter, when she came out of the shower that day, had bruises on her arm that looked exactly like the fingerprints on the mirror.”
Meindel explained to me that she faithfully recorded all of this undeniably disturbing anomalous activity—that plagued the family for months—in the pages of a journal that she had the keen foresight and presence of mind to purchase. Shortly after 2 a.m. on February 11, 2009, Meindel penned the following passage that clearly illustrates the level of high strangeness that had descended upon them: