Watching the Skies with Hillary By the 1990s, serious UFOlogists struggled to distance themselves from the conspiracy contingent, but the fact is that voluble fringe players inevitably attract media attention. In April 2015, shortly before Hillary Clinton announced her second run for the presidency, Mother Jones magazine blogger A. J. Vicens wrote a piece called … Read more
Manifestations of Folklore On one occasion, an MiB encounter occurred because of the direction of scholarly research. It was November 1980, and University of Pennsylvania PhD candidate Peter Rojcewicz was investigating the folkloric aspects of UFOs (much in the manner of Carl Jung). Rojcewicz had a late-afternoon encounter in a library with a man in … Read more
The Man with the Red Mouth Activities of MiB in the USA did not shrivel to nothing in the ’70s. Although frequency began to diminish, the decade produced one of the most detailed of all MiB encounter stories. In 1976, a sixtyish physician named Herbert Hopkins worked as a general practitioner in Old Orchard Beach, … Read more
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 … Read more
Intimidation and the “Weird” Factor UFOlogist Albert K. Bender established the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB) in the spring of 1952. He used the October 1953 issue of his magazine Space Review to warn his readers that they would place themselves in danger if they reported sightings of UFOs. (Magazines are advancedated, so this issue … Read more
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 … Read more
Did JFK Die for UFOs? No other recent event has encouraged as robust a conspiracy industry as Lee Harvey Oswald’s 1963 shooting of John Kennedy. Books alleging conspiracies of various motivations and complexities are almost literally numberless. Standard suspects encompass Lyndon Johnson, Fidel Castro, racist crackers, the John Birch Society, the international Jewish conspiracy, the … Read more
The Binary Code Besides drawings, Sergeant Penniston later filled sixteen pages of a palm-sized, six-ring notebook with strings of zeros and ones—binary code. The sergeant wasn’t “aware” of his pencil scribbles’ meaning; he simply felt compelled to write down specific patterns of zeros and ones. Images of zeros and ones entered his mind, Penniston said, … Read more
The Halt Tape, and a Conversation USAF Lt. Col. Charles Halt, deputy base commander at RAF Woodbridge, felt skeptical about the December 26 sightings. On December 27, he entered Rendlesham Forest with an audio recorder, expecting to discover nothing at all, or something easily explainable. Instead, he was dazzled by a display of bright lights … Read more
The Encounter The United States Air Force established a tactical air wing at Royal Air Force Woodbridge (located in Suffolk County, England) in 1952. During 1952–80, the British-American venture brought various fighter-bomber wings and support aircraft to the base at a time when NATO was consolidating its activities in Western Europe. Besides hosting squadrons of … Read more
