The Real Men in Black

by Nick Redfern

  As earnest as Nick Pope’s words are, they are way off target, as the British Freedom of Information Act has now acutely demonstrated. Pope never left the confines of the MoD to investigate even a single a UFO case, but others, attached to different official departments with their own secret agendas, most certainly did. On the night of August 30, 1962, a teenage girl named Anne Henson had her life turned upside down when both a UFO and a Man in Black entered her otherwise-normal life.

  At the time, Henson was 16, still at school, and living on a dairy farm in the county of Somerset with her parents. One day she woke up—or, perhaps, was woken up—during the early hours of the morning. She sat up in bed and could see through the window what looked like a round ball of light in the sky. It appeared to change color from red to green to yellow, and seemed to contain at its center “a circle with rays of light coming from it....

  At first I thought it was a star, but it wasn’t static. Then I thought that it must be a helicopter or something like that, but there was absolutely no sound from it. Well, it then began moving backwards and forwards and went from left to right. I was very intrigued by it because it was making fairly rapid movements. But it was the colors of the lights that attracted me first; they were nice bright colors. It would come towards me quite quickly and appeared to increase in size, and then reversed and moved sideways at a middle speed. But it always returned to its original position just above the hills.

  Over an hour or so, the light gradually receded until it was just like a pin-prick of light. Well, I went to sleep, but the next night I wondered if it might be there again—and it was. This happened on a few occasions and I got quite used to seeing it when it was a clear night. To be honest, I got quite friendly with it, really. I didn’t feel threatened by it, because although it came close to our farm, it didn’t come that close. Now, when I’d seen it a few times, I decided that I would get a compass and graph paper and try to track where it was coming from because this was intriguing me. I thought: this is a bit different.

  Understandably unsure of what the mysterious object was, Henson decided to write a letter to a nearby Royal Air Force base to see if they might be able to shed some meaningful light on her mystifying late-night encounters: “After I saw the light for a few times and tracked the movements of it, I contacted [Royal Air Force base] Chivenor. I told them what I’d seen and then I got a letter saying that my sighting was being looked at. Then this chap turned up at the house.”

  That’s right, a Man in Black was about to put in an appearance: “It was an evening when he arrived for the first time, and he pulled up in this old black car, and when he came in the house he was wearing a black suit and tie. I would imagine that he was in his late 30s and I was most disappointed that he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He announced himself as a Royal Air Force official, and, of course, I took it as such. To me, he was an authority, put it like that. He actually came to visit me on several occasions. I assumed he was from RAF Chivenor; he didn’t actually say so. I was a bit over-awed that somebody was actually coming to see me.”

  “Altogether,” Henson says of her dark-suited visitor, “he came on three nights. On the first night he came up to my bedroom and we sat there waiting for the clouds to clear. Unfortunately, that night and the next night he came, we couldn’t see anything. So, he said that he would have to come back again. Now, on the third night, he saw it.” Henson’s Man in Black was not about to reveal to Henson his own thoughts on the nature of the aerial phenomenon, however: “He was very cagey. He wasn’t very friendly, but he wasn’t nasty either. But on this night he took some photos of the light. He didn’t seem very surprised by what he saw. It was all very, very low-key, which I suppose is the way to play it if it was something unusual. If he’d have got excited, I’d have got excited. He then left and he took his camera and took my compass drawings and notes—and I never got them back. But before going he said that nobody else would believe what I’d seen and there was no point in me talking about it at school. At that age, you don’t want to be laughed at—and my family had laughed at me anyway.”

  Henson’s account, though containing all the elements of a classic MIB visitation, differs in one striking aspect: The official files on her experience have now been declassified by the British government, and they identify her mysterious visitor as Sergeant J.W. Scott, at the time an employee of the British Royal Air Force’s elite Provost and Security Services—the equivalent of the United States’s Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), and whose work revolves around espionage, counter-espionage, and disinformation- and deception-based programs that have a bearing upon national security and the defense of the realm. Here, then, is yet another example of a story that may very well have forever languished in anomalous Men in Black territory, had it not been for the fact that the files on Henson’s experience were, decades later, quietly declassified into the public domain by the British Ministry of Defense.

  UFO researcher and author William L. Moore has uncovered evidence further suggesting that at least some MIB are nothing more than the tools of officialdom. His research has suggested that such individuals are, in reality, government people in disguise, who originate with a unit of U.S. Air Force Intelligence known currently as the Air Force Special Activities Center (AFSAC). Moore’s research suggested that the history of the AFSAC can be traced back to the 1127th Field Activities Group— an oddball unit whose job was to get people to talk. Recruited into the group, Moore elaborated, were just the type of people that might make perfect Men in Black: safe-crackers, cat burglars, lock-pickers, impersonators, assorted masters of deception, and useful flakes of numerous types.

  Researcher Chris O’Brien has an interesting take on this angle: “I think the more mundane element—that’s the intelligence guys, the military guys—knows about the high-strangeness element: the real Men in Black. And they play with that: wearing the wigs and make-up and taking the lead from the weirder stories to cover their tracks. So, there are probably at least two things going on: there’s the definite high-strangeness Men in Black, and then there’s the people in the intelligence community using that same image to their own advantage.”

  Allen Greenfield shares this conclusion: “I’ve entertained the notion that whatever governmental agency might have been trying to frighten UFO witnesses and UFO organizations may have been imitating whatever this paranormal phenomena is; and that’s what I regard it as: a paranormal phenomena. My general feeling is that some of the cases that are lumped in with the Men in Black probably are governmental investigations of cases, and maybe even government efforts to confuse the issue of who the Men in Black are.”

  It’s also worth noting Greg Bishop’s words on this facet of the MIB controversy: “The intelligence guys really might have worn the make-up and wigs that the witnesses report, just to spook them out, and to help confiscate any evidence the person has; it covers their tracks. That seems more likely, to me, than strange beings running around with wigs and make-up. But, it admittedly doesn’t explain all the cases, so maybe it’s not just a mythos that was created by the intelligence community. Maybe the intelligence people just expanded on real stories, and maybe there really are MIB out there, other MIB, real MIB—the weirder ones, I mean.”

  And speaking of those weirder Men in Black, it’s high time for us to revisit them once again....

  19

  Time Travelers

  Certainly one of the most controversial theories on the true nature of the Men in Black is that, rather than space-faring entities, government agents, Tricksters, or Tulpas, they are actually time travelers from our own distant future!

  Is our present day really playing host to clandestine time-surfers from a future that is as far ahead of us as it is incomprehensible? Or is such a scenario just too fantastic and absurd for words? Maybe not: John Keel came across numerous cases that focused upon the unknown visitors’ odd obsession with time. Indeed, he noted that their often-reported ultra-fast mode of conversation “could
be caused by their failure to adjust to our time cycle when they enter our space-time continuum. They are talking at a faster rate because their time is different from ours” (Keel 1975).

  And of course there is the curious fact that in countless reports on record, the Men in Black are seen driving old-style cars that seem to be incomprehensibly brand-new. And what of those Homburg and Fedora hats with which the Men in Black seem so enamored? They were certainly all the rage in the 1940s and 1950s, but they are most definitely less so now. Indeed, practically everything about the MIB seems strangely out of time. If the time-travel scenario does have some validity, then perhaps these anomalies are due to the Men in Black occasionally screwing up when trying to gauge the fashions and modes of transport of the many eras to which they are constantly traveling.

  Beyond the Men in Black, some researchers and witnesses to UFO activity believe that the pilots of the elusive saucer-shaped craft themselves may not be extraterrestrials, but instead time travelers from our own distant future. Dr. Bruce Goldberg, who holds a BA degree in biology and chemistry, and who has penned more than 20 books, including Past Lives, Future Lives, is an adherent of this particular theory. He says that the entities piloting the UFOs “...originate from between 1,000 to 3,000 years in our future and from earth.... These time travelers have mastered the art of entering the fifth dimension and traveling back in time to our century.... The purpose... is to facilitate our spiritual growth. They are us in the future” (Goldberg 2010).

  Jim Penniston, formerly of the U.S. Air Force, also believes UFOs are piloted by future humans. He was one of the key military players in a famous UFO encounter at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England—an atmospheric, densely treed area adjacent to the now-closed joint British Royal Air Force/U.S. Air Force military complex of Bentwaters-Woodbridge—on December 26 and 28, 1980. Essentially, what many UFO researchers believe took place deep in the dark woods throughout the course of several nights was the landing of a craft—or, perhaps, multiple crafts—from another world, from which small, humanoid entities reportedly emerged and engaged senior U.S. military personnel in face-to-face communication. The craft was allegedly tracked on radar, deposited elevated traces of radiation within the depths of the forest, avoided capture, and made good its escape—and in so doing created a controversy that rages to this day.

  Penniston underwent hypnotic regression in 1994 as part of an attempt to recall deeply buried data relative to what occurred during one of Britain’s closest encounters. While under hypnosis, Penniston stated that our presumed aliens are, in reality, visitors from a far-flung future. That future, Penniston added, is very dark, and in deep trouble: polluted, deathly cold, and blighted by reproductive problems. The answer to their problems is to travel into the distant past—to our present day, in other words—to secure sperm, eggs, and chromosomes, all as part of an effort to ensure the continuation of the dwindling human race.

  The skeptics ask, Where is the hard evidence to support such a scenario? And, on the matter of the revelations of Jim Penniston, the skeptic may suggest that data secured from someone placed into a radically altered state of mind may not be entirely reliable, even if the character of the person relating the story is unblemished. In other words, hypnosis may be just as likely to bring forth fantasies borne out of the murky depths of the subconscious and the imagination as it is to produce real data.

  But what does any of this have to do with the Men in Black? A fascinating theory has been put forward that portrays the MIB as time travelers from a future that is millennia ahead of our present. It is the theory of Joshua P. Warren, one of the world’s premier investigative researchers and authors on all things supernatural and mysterious. Warren’s theory begins with one important question: “Why do they wear black?” While deeply pondering this important point, Warren developed a hypothesis that “combines the very complex with the very mundane,” and that provides us with a potential explanation as to who the MIB really may be.

  Joshua P. Warren in his paranomal HQ.

  “I have thought, for a long time, about what I call the para-temporal loop hypothesis. At first glance it may not seem all that original, as it deals with the complexities that derive from potential time travel. The hypothesis is based upon one particular testable element. And that is, if ever, in all of the infinite future, any advanced species discovers how to travel back in time, will they do it?” Warren notes that if time travel is truly impossible to achieve, then the hypothesis crumbles and it becomes something to simply muse upon instead. But, he stresses, if it is indeed feasible to travel into the past, and then back to the future again, then not only will someone, someday, attempt it, but they will very likely keep such a fantastic discovery cloaked in secrecy, too. “It’s just about the most powerful secret anyone could have: the ability to change the course of time,” he says.

  Here is how Warren sees the mind-bending scenario playing out:

  Let’s say, hypothetically, that one million years from now—long after humans are gone, perhaps—there is a humanoid creature that dominates this planet that has evolved from the oceans. We’ll call him Fish-Man. And Fish-Man is a great scientist and has discovered how to travel back in time. And so he does this. And let’s say he goes back to the year 1920. Of course, he has to do his best to disguise his appearance, or else everyone will know what he is. And while he’s back in 1920, he might be thinking how he could help, or even hurt, his own future existence. And in doing so, he wants to be careful that he doesn’t harm himself in the future. On the contrary, he might even try and enhance his future life by changing something in the past that will benefit him down the road; or even something that will harm his enemies.

  Such an action would not be without its hazards, however, as Warren readily admits:

  Now, of course, Fish-Man will never know for certain if it’s going to turn out right. If he screws up, then maybe he starts to vanish like the kid in Back to the Future. But if he does a good job, then he returns to his future and he finds that he has a better life. But, by traveling back in time, he has caused a para-temporal loop. It’s a separate timeline that he continues to exist on. So, continuing with this thought experiment, let’s say he gets back to his future, and things are better and brighter for him. And he doesn’t want to jeopardize that by stating what he has done. But, he wakes up one day and everything is back the way it was before he tweaked it by going into the past. And he can’t figure out what’s happened.

  Unbeknownst to Fish-Man, about a billion years after he’s alive, Bear-Man becomes the next scientist who figures how to travel in time, long after the Fish-People are gone. Bear-Man is a humanoid who has evolved from the forests. He travels back to 1915, and makes a number of changes from which he will profit, but that will affect, or even completely cancel out, the time line carefully altered and nurtured by Fish-Man. And, at that complicated point, all hell inevitably breaks loose, as Warren details:

  Fish-Man has to then go back to 1910 to correct Bear-Man’s adjustments, and so on, and so on. So, now, we have what seems like the plot of some bad sci-fi movie, where we have all these figures from different futures that are going back into the past and trying to tweak things to their own benefit. But, if you look at this in a broader scale, and consider that the future apparently has some infinity about it, then there may be thousands and thousands of these different types of beings that are each traveling back, tweaking the timelines in some way. And what makes it an even bigger mess is that they’re not necessarily aware of each other. They’re all just as confused about what’s happening as everybody else is.

  As first-class evidence of such chaotic meddling with the time lines, Warren refers to the strange story of what has become known as The Thunderbird Photograph. As the tale goes, back in the 1960s, a photograph, said to date from the late 1800s, appeared in the pages of a newsstand magazine of the day—possibly True, Saga, or Argosy—displaying the deceased remains of a monstrous bird pinned to a pair of barn doors somewhere in rural
North America (the exact location is, just like the picture itself, a matter of some debate). Numerous researchers, investigators, and authors of a whole range of anomalies claim that they personally saw the priceless picture when it was published. The big problem today, however, is that, despite the fact that the pages of the three magazines (and many others besides) have been carefully and dutifully scoured—even to the point of obsession—the picture cannot be found anywhere. It’s almost as if it never existed in the first place. And, in a curious way, maybe it didn’t. Or, if Joshua P. Warren’s theories are correct, maybe it did exist—but only for a short while.

  How can we explain such a strange situation? A specific photograph cannot simply disappear from every publication that it ever appeared in—can it? Maybe, if we follow Warren’s lead, it can: “I get the impression,” he says, “that there might be a shifting timeline that we are passing through on a day-by-day basis. One day UFOs might be real, and the next they’re not. The next day Bigfoot is running around your backyard, and the next day he doesn’t exist. One day the Thunderbird photo is in a magazine, and then when the timeline is played with again, it’s no longer in the magazine. And it may be that, day by day, hour by hour, or even minute by minute, small changes to the timeline are being made by these entities, or beings, coming back and constantly playing around with the past and the future. So, things we remember in the past, like the Thunderbird photo, suddenly no longer exist in the present.”

  And it’s with respect to this particular aspect of time travel, Warren opines, that the Men in Black may play some form of critical role: “If we accept it might be possible that something similar to what I’ve just described might be happening, or potentially happening, then somewhere along the line we can imagine that there might be policemen—time-cops, so to speak—who step in here and there, and who try to really get the scoop on all these para-temporal loops and control the entire situation.”