by Nick Redfern
Perks had the presence of mind not to stop. In fact, he did precisely the opposite: He floored the accelerator and headed right for the beast. But like a chain-rattling spook from some 19th-century Gothic novel, it vanished in an instant. A shaken Perks made his way home and to the safety of his bed. For a week all was normal. But during the early hours of November 14, 2000, he was violently jolted from his slumber by the sight of the devilish beast again, this time looming right over his frozen-with-fear form. It suddenly lunged forward, grabbed his wrists, and boomed in words that Perks assured me were 100-percent accurate: “You were told that I would come.”
Perks realized, in a terrifying instant, that this was the follow-up visit that Sarah Key had carefully and specifically warned him about. As Perks stared at the beast in stark terror, a telepathic message bellowed around his head. It was much the same as that of the Woman in Black: Stay away from all things Arthurian. And with that, the beast was suddenly gone. And, for a while at least, so was Perks’s research.
Not long after meeting with Perks in 2001, I moved to the United States to live, and never again had the opportunity to speak with him in person. Perks did, however, in the summer of 2008, quietly share some additional thoughts on the matter with several former members of the now-defunct British-based Staffordshire UFO Group.
By then, some seven years after I had met him, Perks had come to a most unusual conclusion: that Sarah Key and the horrific monster were, incredibly, one and the same. Key, in Perks’s mind, was an unholy shape-shifter who had ingeniously adopted the guise of a sleek and sultry representative of the British government as a means to silence Perks via a potent cocktail of intimidation and fear. But, when that approach failed, she let her feminine façade drop and presented herself in all her terrible glory. Like a junkie in search of the next fix, however, Perks just could not keep away from the quest to find the truth behind the tales of King Arthur for long, and he finally returned to the thrill of the chase. Until, that is, his life was tragically cut short by a massive heart attack on England’s Salisbury Plain in the early spring of 2009.
Whether Perks’s death was due to years of bad living, stress, and cigarettes, which he chain-smoked throughout my meeting with him, or the malevolent hand of the supernatural Sarah Key, the definitive Woman in Black, we will never know. But this is not the only occasion upon which cold, black beauty and a terrible winged beast have crossed paths. In a celebrated case from decades earlier, and from the other side of the world, they were actually fused into one.
It was a warm summer’s evening in 1969, and Earl Morrison, a private with the U.S. Marine Corps, was stationed in Vietnam, sitting with two friends atop a bunker situated near Da Nang, a port city on the coast of the South China Sea at the mouth of the Han River. For reasons that Morrison and his friends could never really fathom, they all looked up, nearly simultaneously, and, to their astonishment, saw a strange figure crossing the night sky—and it was slowly coming in their direction.
“We saw what looked like wings, like a bat’s; only it was gigantic compared to what a regular bat would be. After it got close enough so we could see what it was, it looked like a woman, a naked woman” (Worley 1972).
The winged woman, added Morrison, was entirely jet-black in color, but seemed to have a greenish glow about her. As she closed in on the dumbstruck trio and passed over them at a height of barely 6 feet, they could hear the distinct flapping of wings. Too astonished to do anything but sit in silence and awe, Morrison and his comrades simply stared for three or four minutes until the flying woman finally vanished into the darkness of the Vietnamese skies.
Could this strange, winged life form perhaps have been the diabolical Sarah Key, heading off on an earlier mission, on the other side of the world, to silence someone who was getting perilously close to a dark, ancient truth that had to remain hidden at all costs? Unfortunately, in the case of Sarah Key and the Vietnamese Woman in Black, we have far more questions than we do satisfactory answers. Maybe that’s precisely how the Men in Black, and the Women in Black, want it.
There is yet another case involving a flying monster and a Woman in Black, and, on this occasion, a Man in Black as well. As with the terrifying experience of Colin Perks, it also dates from 2000.
For years, sinister and sensational stories have surfaced from the forests and lowlands of Puerto Rico that tell of a strange and lethal creature roaming the landscape by night and day, striking terror into the hearts of the populace. It has a pair of glowing red eyes, powerful, claw-like hands, razor-sharp teeth, a body not unlike that of a monkey, a row of vicious spikes running down the length of its back, and, occasionally, a pair of large and leathery bat-like wings. The beast is said to feed on the blood of the local animal—predominantly goat—population, after puncturing their jugular veins with two sharp teeth. That’s correct: Puerto Rico has a monstrous vampire in its midst. Its name is the Chupacabra, a Latin term meaning “goat sucker.”
Theories abound with respect to the nature of the beast, with some researchers and witnesses suggesting that the monster is some form of giant bat; others prefer the theory that it has extraterrestrial origins; the most bizarre idea postulated is that the Chupacabra is the creation of a top-secret genetic research laboratory hidden deep within Puerto Rico’s El Yunque rainforest, located in the Sierra de Luquillo, approximately 25 miles southeast of the city of San Juan.
On several occasions, I have traveled to the island of Puerto Rico to seek out the vampire-like Chupacabra for myself, and perhaps one day determine its true nature. On one particular occasion, while roaming around Puerto Rico in 2005 with Canadian filmmaker Paul Kimball (we were there to make a documentary titled Fields of Fear), I had the very good fortune to meet and interview a man named Antonio, a pig farmer who had an unusual experience in 2000 that led to a decidedly strange visit from a Woman in Black/Man in Black duo. As Antonio told me, one of his animals had been killed, after darkness had fallen, by the now-familiar puncture marks to the neck. In this case, however, the animal exhibited three such marks, rather than the usual two. In addition, a number of rabbits kept on the property had been slaughtered in an identical fashion.
At the time all of the carnage was taking place, a considerable commotion was being made by the rest of Antonio’s animals. Upon hearing this, he rushed wildly out of his house with a machete in his hand, and flung it hard in the direction of the marauding predator. Strangely, he told me, the weapon seemed to bounce off something that seemed metallic in nature. In fact, Antonio suggested that what the machete had made contact with seemed armor-plated. Due to the overwhelming darkness, however, he had no idea what the creature may have been. But something deadly was most certainly prowling around the property. The most confounding aspect of the affair was still to come, however. That’s right: Antonio was about to get a visit of the type we have encountered time and again in these pages.
Shortly after the killing of the pig and the rabbits, a man and a woman dressed in typical, official-looking black regalia (on a stifling-hot day, no less), who announced they worked for NASA, arrived at the farm and quickly proceeded to ask Antonio a wealth of questions about what had occurred, what he had seen, and the way in which his animals had met their grisly fates. When the conversation was over, the pair thanked the bemused farmer, in a fashion befitting both the Women in Black and the Men in Black—wholly unemotionally, in other words—and left without uttering another word. How the dark duo even knew that the attacks had taken place, and why on earth NASA would be dispatching personnel to his farm to investigate them, Antonio had no idea at all.
One thing that Antonio told me he had held back from informing his two mysterious visitors was this: On the morning after the attack he found strange footprints on his property that were spread quite a distance from each other. He formed the opinion that whatever had made them had the ability to leap considerable distances, in a fashion similar to that of a kangaroo—or, perhaps, he mused, it had the ability to fly.
> Leaping or flying monsters, Men and Women in Black, and mutilated animals collectively suggested that something highly strange was, and perhaps still is, afoot in Puerto Rico.
PART II:
The Theories
13
Hallucinations
Having now studied an abundance of data on encounters of the MIB kind, surely the most important questions of all are: Who—or what— are the Men in Black? And what is the true nature of their dark and unearthly agenda? Trying to answer those questions is a formidable task indeed; however, the veil of secrecy, darkness, and elusiveness that surrounds the MIB can be successfully penetrated and interpreted—if, that is, one possesses an understanding of the strange realms into which one should go snooping.
To even have a hope of understanding the complexities of the Men in Black phenomenon, we have to first take a deep look at the “three men” of MIB legend. Based on what you have read thus far, you may be forgiven for assuming that the trio I refer to are those sinister souls that have so often manifested out of places unknown to threaten, intimidate, and silence those who, by accident or design, dare to enter the ufological playpen. The three men I have in mind are not our mysterious visitors, however. No; they are a trio of other, very different characters. And in many ways they are even more mysterious and legendary than the Men in Black themselves. Indeed, without these particular three men, the phenomena of the MIB would simply not exist—or, at least, it would not exist in the form and motif in which it is today most readily recognized. The three men to whom I refer are—if you have not yet fully surmised—Albert Bender, Gray Barker, and John Keel.
It is only by trying to understand the inner workings of this band of story-weavers extraordinaire that we can make at least some sense of the Men in Black. And to do so, it is essential that we examine the thoughts, ideas, conclusions, and memories of various key figures in ufology who met, knew, or corresponded with the three, who have studied their lives, experiences, and careers deeply. We start, as we surely must, with Albert Bender.
Many students of ufology are content to dismiss Bender’s story without even a second thought, particularly the admittedly hard-to-believe tales of his wild trip to Antarctica, and his clams of having been entrusted with the alleged truth behind the UFO phenomenon. Jerome Clark, one of the most learned and clear-headed thinkers in ufology, says, “Flying Saucers and the Three Men is, obviously, a mediocre science fiction novel. Bender, I’m sure, wrote it to get saucer buffs off his back. Even Barker was privately disappointed with the manuscript, as he told me a few years after its publication.”
Nevertheless, Clark does not totally write off Bender as a fantasy-prone character of no consequence. As was noted earlier in the pages of this book, Clark gives credence to the possibility that Bender was visited, in 1953, by agents of the FBI. He continues, on a related line of thinking
There is some substance, however much it got exaggerated, to They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. Something frightened Bender, and to some degree that something intrigued Gray Barker, who wasn’t quite so cynical in the early 1950s as he was to become. Barker, however, blew hot and cold in his private thoughts, some preserved in correspondence. He knew that Bender was of a frightened, paranoid nature and—beyond that—liked people to pay attention him. These considerations led Barker to wonder if Bender hadn’t expanded some small, genuine incident into something extraordinary and melodramatic. At other times Barker wondered if maybe something truly unusual had occurred. Of course, the doubts he entertained were not mentioned in his entertaining book.
Jim Moseley, Gray Barker’s closest friend up until Barker’s death, says of Bender: “I think his story was just silly and naïve, and don’t know why anyone would have believed it. I never did. I think Gray Barker did for a while, and then he eventually realized that it was nonsense. I think Bender wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, which is better than to go quietly or slowly. There was nothing original or detailed about anything he said. This story about the Antarctic was just ridiculous. I think he quickly got bored or discouraged with flying saucers and wanted to go out with a bang instead of a whimper. He just decided to quit.”
But is that really all there is to it? Maybe not. Here’s where things get murky—and controversial.
Jerome Clark may be on-target in his suspicion that Bender really was interviewed by FBI agents back in the early 1950s—possibly as a result of the 1953 recommendations of the CIA’s Robertson Panel—and then subsequently turned what might have been a fairly traumatic encounter with a trio of G-men into a complex tale of visitation by three far more disturbing alien-like Men in Black. But there are other aspects of Bender’s story that cry out for scrutiny, and suggest that far more may have been afoot in that dark attic all those years ago.
We have to start with Bender’s state of health—physical and psychological. As I have noted, the man was a character of near-infinite complexities. An obsessive-compulsive who was deathly afraid of cancer, deeply involved in occult matters, and spent the majority of his time hanging out in his stepfather’s dimly lit attic, Bender was hardly what many people might describe as normal. That does not mean, however, that Bender was incapable of existing in the real world; he certainly was. He held down a regular job with the Acme Shear Company, today known as Acme United Corporation. He established a phenomenally successful UFO research group—albeit one that was not fated to last for long—and he even penned a book: Flying Saucers and the Three Men. And really, who among us is worthy of defining what it means to be normal?
As I noted early on in the pages of this book, Bender was plagued by pummeling migraines, suffered from dizzy spells and acute light-headedness, was constantly bothered by sulfur-like odors in his immediate environment, and was often forced to lie down in his attic bed when the migraine attacks, odors, and dizziness overwhelmed him—at which point he would either fall asleep or enter into what was clearly an altered state of perception, and the Men in Black would then invade, and intrude upon, his privacy and slumber. For those who might doubt that Bender was prone to falling into a strange state of mind and consciousness, consider the man’s own words: “Often I would seem to drift off as if a cloud were carrying me into the inky, boundless depths of space” (Bender 1962).
Many of the symptoms that affected Bender are quite explainable as something far more down-to-earth than the Men in Black: epilepsy, a condition that causes seizures, and results from abnormal or excessive synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. Epilepsy is somewhat unique in that there are no less than 40 different types of the condition, which have varying symptoms and forms of treatment. Perhaps of relevance to the Bender saga is the phenomenon of “single partial seizures”—also known as Jacksonian Epilepsy—which can result in the sufferer experiencing mild to moderate hallucinations, confusion and fear, lightheadedness but not outright unconsciousness, and strong, imaginary odors in the immediate vicinity. Some of those affected by such seizures have reported odors resembling burning rubber and sulfur—exactly as Albert Bender reported. This latter condition is known as Phantosmia, and is defined as the presence of a smell that has no real, external point of origin. Effects of seizures can also involve the feeling of leaving one’s physical body, which may not be so different from Albert Bender’s repeated experiences of journeying into the inky, boundless depths of space, as he imaginatively worded it.
That Bender was affected to a severe degree by migraines may be an important factor in his story, too: Approximately 15 percent of epileptics report migraines. And among the most curious side effects of migraines are: the perception of floating lights in the immediate vision, strange and strong odors, and distortions in the size and shape of objects. On this latter point, recall that in one of his more significant attic-based encounters, as well as being overwhelmed by a smell of sulfur, Bender saw in the room, a “large object of indefinable outline”—which sounds very much like a migraine-induced distortion of perception (Bender 1962).
But what
of the curious poltergeist activity that Bender reported? Surely that cannot be connected to something as mundane as epilepsy, right? Perhaps it can: In 1958, a parapsychologist named William Roll introduced the term recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, or RSPK. Roll came to believe that repeated neuronal discharges resulting in epileptic symptoms might actually provoke RSPK, which in turn could lead the patient to inadvertently generate poltergeist activity in his or her immediate vicinity. Roll, commenting on his controversial research and theories, said that he had examined the cases of 92 individuals with suspected RSPK, of whom more than 20 had symptoms that seemed strongly suggestive of epilepsy.
If the overpowering sulfur-like odors, poltergeist activity, vivid hallucinations, feelings of dread and confusion, a sense of bodily separation, and dizziness and light-headedness Bender experienced were all prompted by some undiagnosed condition of the brain, then how do we explain the story of his alleged trip to Antarctica? If not simply an outright fabrication, such a convoluted and intricate tale would clearly require someone to hallucinate in a fashion far beyond what one would expect in someone with epilepsy or another disorder. Still, certain facets of this aspect of Bender’s story could have been borne out of his own highly complex subconscious. In fact, there are very good reasons for believing that this is precisely from where they were generated.
Bender—who comes across as a solitary character at the best of times—never made any mention of girlfriends in the mid- to late 1940s, or even at the dawning of the 1950s, when his 20s were by then almost behind him. All the trips to the Bridgeport cinema that Bender describes— even on carefree Saturday nights when he should surely have been letting his hair down with a girl or two—were made alone. Bender did refer, on one occasion, to holding a party in the attic for a bunch of work friends, and stated that when they saw his horror-themed room, “the girls in the party seemed to be quite shocked…and didn’t stray far from their escorts” (Bender 1962). We can, perhaps, infer a great deal indeed from the fact that nowhere in this story does Bender make any kind of reference to his escort.