Those Dapper Men in Black

Those Dapper Men in Black

Black. This color—often described as the absence of color—connotes authority, competence, and sophistication. But over the centuries, black has also been the color of criminality, evil, fright, and death. Black mass. Black widow. Black plague and black lung. Crime’s Black Hand society. Blackmail. The driver’s hazard called black ice. Blacklist and black market. Black ops.

The last refers to military/intelligence operations built around secrecy. Anyone caught in the crosshairs of a black ops mission—as designated target or as someone who has revealed the operation’s workings—can expect dire consequences. To many in the UFO community, black designates Men in Black —intimidating, anonymous figures that appear, seemingly from nowhere, to warn UFO witnesses to keep quiet about what they have seen. Usually, Men in Black (MiB) are variously thought to be representatives of

1. the American government and/or its intelligence agencies,
2. a secret hybrid government controlled by Washington and extraterrestrials,
3. a secret society of humans, antipathetic to Washington and other governments, that pursues world domination, or
4. aliens (probably malevolent) that wish to squelch chatter about their activities on Earth.

An early documented encounter with MiB occurred in Wales in 1905, when a young woman who saw a strange flying craft was shortly visited by a mysterious, dark-clad man. Sightings of peculiar aircraft (many were airships) had been common in Europe since the late 1800s, but the Wales story had the added fillip of the mysterious emissary. A local newspaper, the Barmouth Advertiser, reported, “In the neighborhood dwells an exceptionally intelligent young woman of the peasant stock, whose bedroom has been visited three nights in succession by a man dressed in black. This figure has delivered a message to the girl which she is too frightened to relate.” Little more than that is known of the encounter, although it is a certainty that other men in black were in Wales in 1905: the members of New Zealand’s touring All Blacks rugby team. Named for their black uniforms, the All Blacks were informally called the men in black. Whether this spurred the young woman’s imagination or is a simple coincidence is unknown.

MiB accounts more typically belong to the postwar era, when futurism and public awareness of the destructive abilities of science inspired people to be more aware than before of what was in the skies. Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 saucer sighting, and news reports from Roswell the same year, further pushed peoples’ gaze skyward. UFO sightings multiplied.