Beyond the Beyond: Agents of the Unknown
A Closer Look at the Men in Black
Beyond the Beyond: Agents of the Unknown –
A Closer Look at the Men in Black
Come with me on a journey across time and space. To the far corner of everything you knew to be reality, where dark craft dip their wing across a cold, starlit sky. Where strange winged beings crouch high up in dead trees, peering down at the even stranger creatures—us—they see below. Where shrouded men who don’t quite seem to belong visit UFO contactees in the dead of night, and they look nothing like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.
We’ve seen these stories in pop culture: tales of people seeings aliens, only to be visited minutes later by well-dressed government agents who blind them with devices that erase their memories of any such incident occurring. These suit-wearing superheroes, tasked to regulate alien activity on Earth, seem to save the world from intergalactic threats on an almost daily basis. The true, or what some say to be true, story is a much darker one. This is the story of the Men in Black.
The first incidence seems to have happened in June of 1947. A man named Harold Dahl was on a conservation mission on the Puget Sound near Maury Island in Washington. He looked up from gathering logs and saw six saucer-shaped craft hovering silently above his boat. The craft all dropped down and started raining metallic debris onto the water. Some of that debris hit his son in the arm, while more hit his dog, killing it. Astonished, Harold was able to take some pictures of the craft before rowing back to shore, which he then took into town and showed his supervisor, Fred Crispin. A skeptical Crispin drove out to the lake, and to his surprise he saw the same crafts floating in the sky above the lake.
The next day, Dahl was visited by a man in a black suit who was able to tell him extraordinary details about what he had seen the previous day. The man warned him not to tell anyone of his experience, and that if he did… bad things would happen.
The Maury Island UFO incident has long been debated as being real or not. The FBI deemed it a hoax, and in their files they noted “if questioned by the authorities he (Dahl) was going to say it was a hoax because he did not want any further trouble over the matter.” Did Harold Dahl and Fred Crispin make the whole thing up as some bid for attention? Or did they really see something out there, and felt too much pressure to continue their plight to tell what really happened? What is interesting to note is that the event is said to take place on June 21, 1947, three days before pilot Kenneth Arnold would see his own strange craft in the sky and essentially start what would become the modern UFO phenomenon.
In the mid 1950s in the town of Bridgeport, Pennsylvania, a man named Albert K. Bender had recently become president of one of America’s newly-formed UFO organizations, The International Flying Saucer Bureau. Several famous people were members of its ranks, and with over 600 members it was growing rapidly. The group was dedicated to studying the growing phenomenon of flying saucers, and shortly after its inception began to publish a quarterly journal called “Flying Saucer Review.” Albert became a man obsessed, dedicating his life to getting to the truth of what UFOs really were.
Not long after he had taken the position, however, he began to have some strange experiences. His health declined, he received strange phone calls, and began to receive what he could only describe as telepathic messages. See our previous BTB for more on this.
The messages continued and became more frequent, and the room he stayed in began to smell like sulfur and a yellow mist would sometimes appear in it. One night, he was visited in his home by three men dressed in dark suits. He said “All of them were dressed in black clothes. They looked like clergymen but wore hats similar to [the] Homburg style.” They told him to cease his UFO work. When he questioned them, one looked and him and sent a telepathic message: “STOP PUBLISHING.” As they left, a trail of yellow mist followed behind them and the smell of burnt sulfur hung in the air.
These MIBs, as they would come to be known, visited Bender several more times until he would finally listen to them. Headaches and health problems plagued him, and the telepathic messages continued until he finally stopped publication on Space Review all together. After stating previously that he had a revelation he needed to share, he instead ended the magazine by simply printing “The mystery of the flying saucers 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 would like to print the full story in Space Review but because of the nature of the information we have been advised in the negative. We advise those engaged in saucer work to be very cautious.”
The writer Gray Barker wrote a book called They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers in 1956, which detailed alleged encounters with the Men in Black. Without a doubt, it helped solidify the concept in various ufology circles. It is important to note that Barker was quite known at the time for fictionalizing some of his writings.
John Keel, of Mothman fame, also wrote quite a bit about the Men in Black as well. He wrote of individuals who had experiences where they were visited by men in dark suits who would seem very uncomfortable in their own skin. They would sometimes ask the date, and in one instance asked for a glass of water so he could take a pill. Mrs. Ralph Butler of Owatonna, Minnesota was visited by one with a pointed face, long dark hair, and olive complexion. When Mrs. Butler offered him some Jell-O, the man tried to drink it like soup. Are these extra dimensional entities only able to visit our reality for a short amount of time? Is this 3D space uncomfortable to them, and maybe even deadly? Keel would later joke about this esoteric corner of the UFO mythology, claiming that even he had once been misidentified as a Man in Black, after a night out wearing a trench coat and hat.
Stories of the Men in Black don’t circulate as often now. They seem to be, like Mothman or crafts with tripods, relegated to the strange and surreptitious folklore of the UFO. That mythology changes as our culture changes, which may in fact give any keen watcher some type of insight into its actual origins. Are these government agents, interested in keeping quiet the people who have close encounters with extraterrestrial or secret military craft? Or are they themselves the ones from other worlds? Or maybe they’re simply mythology. Little pieces of pop culture propagated by people like John Keel and Gray Barker. Perhaps we’ll never know.
Have you had a sighting? Message @beyondthebeyond1 on Instagram.
Tanner Rush
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Eastern Sierra Now. Readers are encouraged to conduct further research and consult with relevant experts or professionals before making any decisions or taking any actions based on the information provided in this article.
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