Regular Episode
#164 – HERE COME THE PERSONS IN BLACK
Blake traces the lore back through its primary sources, making the case that the pop-culture MIB has drifted so far from the source material that going back to the original books is almost like encountering a different legend entirely.
🗂️ Albert Bender and the International Flying Saucer Bureau
The story begins in 1951 with Albert Bender, a timekeeper at a shears manufacturing company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who also happened to keep a horror-themed haunted attic and harbored a deep interest in flying saucers. Bender founded the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB) and its accompanying fanzine, eventually growing it to roughly 600 subscribers — impressive for a pre-internet mail newsletter.
In 1952, Bender published a teaser claiming he had uncovered the full secret behind flying saucers — and then went silent. No follow-up issue ever appeared. He shuttered the IFSB, refused to explain himself to friends and correspondents, and wouldn’t elaborate beyond saying he simply couldn’t. The information vacuum he created became the seed of the entire Men in Black legend.
Saucer Smear publisher James Moseley — a colorful figure who counted James Randi among his friends — even spoofed the whole affair in his own newsletter, making an identical “I know the secret” announcement and then quietly backing away from it in the next issue.
📖 Gray Barker and the Book That Named the Phenomenon
Gray Barker, an early IFSB member and founder of Saucerian Publishing, was fascinated by the Bender mystery. In 1956 he published 📚 They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers 💵, cataloguing cases of UFO researchers who had been approached by mysterious strangers and warned into silence. The shadowy visitors had no name yet — “Men in Black” wasn’t the label at this stage — but the template was being laid down: dark-suited strangers, vague threats, unexplained silencing of investigators.
Barker also publicly pressured Bender to write his own account. Bender eventually obliged, publishing 📚 Flying Saucers and the Three Men 💵 in 1963. It was not what anyone expected.
👁️ What Bender Actually Claimed
Bender’s account reads less like a government-suppression thriller and more like a sleep paralysis episode crossed with a contactee narrative. Three beings with glowing eyes materialized in his bedroom, communicated telepathically, and gave him a metal disk he could use to receive their transmissions. They appeared human at first glance, but Bender glimpsed their true form — something he likened to the Flatwoods Monster. They smelled of sulfur. They were accompanied by striking-looking women who administered full-body treatments Bender described in clinically detached terms. They had a secret base in Antarctica (echoing Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness). They were harvesting minerals from the ocean, reducing them to cubes for their propulsion systems, and would leave Earth once they were done.
The deal: Bender would keep their secret, enforced by crippling headaches whenever he even considered breaking it. By 1963, the aliens had departed, releasing him to tell the story — though too late for it to matter much, and strange enough that few believed it. Blake notes, diplomatically, that “everything about Bender’s story sounds like he was having some kind of psychotic or seizure episode.”
🌀 The Lore Evolves: Keel, Ultra-Terrestrials, and the Shift Toward Demonic
John Keel‘s 1975 book 📚 The Mothman Prophecies 💵 features similar figures appearing around Point Pleasant, West Virginia: individuals who seem almost-but-not-quite human, ask bizarrely robotic questions (“Do you know the UFO investigator John Keel?”), and appear to be unfamiliar with basic facts of earthly existence — how doors work, how to eat food, what to do with a glass of water.
As planetary science advanced and it became clear the solar system’s other planets couldn’t support life as we know it, the ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis) gave way to stranger frameworks. Multiple authors, including prolific British paranormal writer Nick Redfern, have proposed that the MIB might be ultra-terrestrial, trans-dimensional, or outright demonic entities — a framing that conveniently extends the archetype backwards into pre-modern folklore: dark figures arriving unexpectedly, enforcing a deal the witness cannot break, smelling of sulfur. Blake observes the parallel to Slender Man and the Black Eyed Kids as modern legend-cycles that follow the same generative pattern: one seed story, community amplification, and a folklore that takes on a life of its own.
🎬 From Fanzine to Comic Book to Will Smith
In the early 1990s, Lowell Cunningham wrote the Men in Black comic book series (later acquired by Marvel), which codified many of the visual signifiers — black suits, black cars, sunglasses — while transforming the MIB from sinister suppressors into heroic secret agents. The 1997 film franchise cemented the pop-culture version so thoroughly that it now largely overwrites the source lore for most audiences.
Blake notes the key tonal difference: in the original anecdotes, the MIB are at best unsettling and at worst malevolent. There’s nothing heroic about them. The neuralyzer concept from the films probably derives from the folklore’s recurring motif of witnesses feeling oddly compliant during encounters — not resisting behavior they would never normally tolerate — with the weirdness only registering clearly in retrospect.
📺 Dan Aykroyd, the X-Files, and the Most Authentic Screen MIB
Karen brings up a reported MIB encounter involving Dan Aykroyd, who has long been public about his interest in UFOs and the paranormal. While filming a documentary, Aykroyd reportedly encountered a black car and occupants matching MIB descriptions; shortly afterward, the production was shut down by the show’s producers. Aykroyd has also reported seeing a UFO from his home and grew up in a spiritualist household — his father wrote a book on the history of the spiritualist movement, for which Aykroyd contributed an introduction.
For the most faithful screen depiction of MIB encounters as they actually appear in the folklore, Blake recommends the X-Files episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” (Season 3, Episode 20). Structured like Rashomon — multiple unreliable perspectives on the same events — the episode features a brief MIB segment that Blake considers the most authentic-feeling portrayal ever put to screen. Recommended viewing before listening to this episode, or immediately after.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Flying Saucers and the Three Men 💵 by Albert K. Bender
– 📚 They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers 💵 by Gray Barker
– 📚 The Mothman Prophecies 💵 by John Keel
– 📚 Women in Black 💵 by Nick Redfern
🔗 Related Links
– Men in Black (folklore) — Wikipedia
– Albert K. Bender — Wikipedia
– Gray Barker — Wikipedia
– John Keel — Wikipedia
– Flatwoods Monster — Wikipedia
– Black-Eyed Children — Wikipedia
– X-Files: “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” — Wikipedia
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
Karen and Blake discuss the early history of Men in Black lore going back to some primary sources. Stories of mysterious strangers questioning and intimidating (and confounding) UFO investigators have a strange, continuously evolving history.
Early books featuring the Men In Black
- Flying Saucers and the Three Men (I recommend the audio book over paper)
- They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers
Additional Items Discussed
- 10 Creepy MIB stories
- A compendium of many MIB stories
- X-Files—Jose Chung’s From Outer Space
- Dan Aykroyd’s UFO experiences
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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