MiB Evolution
Relatively few American claims of MiB surfaced between 1970 and 1990, though the ’70s saw increased MiB activity in Mexico, Brazil, and Spain. Alien visitors may have been intrigued (or troubled) by the Mexican government’s brutal war against leftist students in the early ’70s. As the conflict cooled later in the decade, and the Mexican government legalized progressive political parties, UFO and MiB activity there diminished. In a similar vein, Brazil’s military dictatorship, and the fascist government in Spain during that country’s often- violent transition to democracy, could have encouraged increased UFO and MiB activity in those countries, particularly during 1970–75, when tensions were at their highest.
By 1967, Men in Black had captured the attention of the USAF and Project Blue Book. The military’s concern was the impersonation of government officials (black suits) or Air Force officers (uniforms the imposters were not entitled to wear). Col. George Freeman, Blue Book spokesman in 1967, acknowledged that the Air Force was eager to get its hands on any of these imposters. On March 1 of the same year, USAF Lt. General Hewitt T. Wheless sent a memo to numerous agencies in the Department of Defense. He seemed even more concerned about MiB than the people at Blue Book, expressing dismay that people passing themselves off as civilian agents of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) “demanded and received” UFO photographs belonging to private citizens.
The memo went on to cite an even more brazen act of impersonation, in which a man wearing a USAF uniform “approached local police and other citizens who had sighted a UFO, assembled them in a school room and told them that they did not see what they thought they saw and that they should not talk to anyone about the sighting.” Wheless closed the memo with instruction to civilian and military DoD personnel to be alert to such impersonations, and to report instances to the nearest office of the OSI (USAF Office of Special Investigations).