THE DARK SIDE
While contactees offer a rosy picture of the UFO phenomenon, other, darker visions have obsessed some saucer enthusiasts. In fact, even contactees agree that all is not well. Sinister forces oppose the Space Brothers’ benevolent mission. Some of these are extraterrestrial and others terrestrial, and they work together to thwart the emergence of the truth.
Among the early victims of this evil “Silence Group” was Albert K. Bender of Bridgeport, Connecticut. In 1952 Bender formed the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), which met with immediate success, but he shut it down the next year under mysterious circumstances. In due course Bender confided that three men in black had imparted to him the terrifying answer to the UFO mystery and turned his life into a nightmare. He would say no more.
Three years later an IFSB associate, Gray Barker, wrote a book about the episode; the title perfectly captured the paranoia abroad in UFO-land: They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.
Through the “Bender mystery” the legend of the “men in black” (MIB) came into the world—even though, as Barker observed, a man in black had played a villainous role in the Maury Island incident. According to Barker, the MIB were ranging as far afield as Australia and New Zealand, scaring still more UFO buffs into silence.
By the late 1980s MIB tales had become sufficiently ubiquitous that the august Journal of American Folklore took note of them in a long article. Just who the MIB were remained unclear. To saucerians enamored with conspiracy theories, they were enforcers for the Silence Group, associated with international banking interests that sought to stifle the technological advances and moral reforms the Space Brothers wanted to bestow on Earthlings.
To others, they were alien beings—perhaps, some speculated, Shaver’s deros. In 1962 Bender came down on the side of the alien school. Breaking his nine-year silence in Flying Saucers and the Three Men, which he insisted was not a science-fiction novel, Bender revealed that the men in black who drove him out of ufology were monsters from the planet Kazik. Even Barker, the book’s publisher and a relentless Bender promoter, remarked privately and out of customers’ hearing, that maybe it had all been a “dream.” Fear of the MIB was generated in part by worries about the possibly hostile motives of UFOs.
A popular early book, Flying Saucers on the Attack by Flarold T. Wilkins (1954), fretted that a “Cosmic General Staff’ could even now be plotting a real-life war of the worlds. But next to demonologist-ufologist John A. Keel, author of UFOs: Operation Frojan Horse (1970) and other writings, Wilkins sounded like an optimist. In Keel’s repdering UFO intelligences are not simply extraterrestrials but “ultraterres¬ trials”—entities from unimaginable other dimensions of reality.
Worse, they definitely do not like us at all. Fluman beings, Keel thunders, are “like ants, trying to view reality with very limited perceptive equipment. . . . We are biochemical robots helplessly controlled by forces that can scramble our brains, destroy our memories and use us in any way they see fit. They have been doing it to us forever.”
In recent years new and even wilder strains of paranoia have sprouted along ufology’s fringes. Inspiration comes not just from UFO rumors but from conspiracy theories associated with the far right end of the political spectrum. The two major figures in what has been called the “dark side movement” are John Lear, a pilot who once flew aircraft for a CIA-linked company, and Milton William Cooper, a retired Navy petty officer.
According to dark siders, a ruthless secret government” controls the world. Among other nefarious activities, it runs the international drug trade and has unleashed AIDS and other deadly diseases as population-reducing measures. Its ultimate goal is to turn the Earth and sui rounding planets into slave-labor camps, for some time this secret government has been in contact with alien races, allowing the aliens to abduct human beings in exchange for advanced alien technology.
The aliens, known as the “grays” (because of their gray skin color), do more than abduct human beings. They mutilate and eat them as well, using the body parts to rejuvenate them¬ selves. The secret government and the aliens labor together in vast underground bases in New Mexico and Nevada, where they collect human and animal organs, drop them into a chemical soup, and manufacture soulless android creatures. These androids, who are then unleashed to do dirty work for the government/alien conspiracy, are best known to the rest of us as the men in black.
With each retelling, with the appearance of each new and expensive book, video, or tape, the dark-side story gets crazier. In one version the conspirators travel into the future to observe the emergence of the anti-Christ in the 1990s, World War III in 1999, and the Second Coming of Christ in 2011. George Bush oversees the world’s drug traffic. The secret government has maintained bases on Mars since the early 1960s.
The conspirators employ drugs and hypnosis to turn mentally unstable individuals into mass murderers of schoolchildren and other innocents; the purpose is to spur anti-gun sentiment, resulting in gun-control legislation. Thus, Americans will be disarmed and defenseless when the secret government’s storm troopers round them up and herd them into concentration camps.
A small army of fervent believers all around the world has embraced these monstrous yarns, for which—no rational reader will be surprised to learn—not a shred of supporting evidence exists. The true sources of these lurid tales are not hard to find: They are a hodgepodge of elements patched together from saucer folklore, extremist political literature, and a 1977 British mock-documentary, Alternative 3. The purpose of this show was to satirize popular credulity and paranoia. Unfortunately, some remain convinced the show was sober fact, ironically serving only to give rise to fresh varieties of mass gullibility and fear.
SPACE ANIMALS?
In the late 1940s and 1950s some theorists thought flying saucers might be space animals. The first to suggest this idea, however, was Charles Fort, in his 1931 book Lo! where he speculated that unknown objects in the sky could be “living things that occasionally come from somewhere else.” A few days after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting on June 24, 1947, John Philip Bessor wrote the Air Force to tell it what the flying discs were: A “form of space animal” propelled by “telekinetic energy.”
These creatures might be carnivorous. “Many falls of flesh and blood from the sky in times past,” he declared, could be the leftover remains of unfortunate persons eaten by hungry UFOs. In 1955 Countess Zoe Wassilko-Serecki theorized that UFOs were “vast, luminous bladders of colloidal silicones” that feed on electrical energy. Californian Trevor James Constable claimed to have photographed these “critters,” as he called them, on infrared film.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDERS?
According to a 1972 paper by two psychiatrists associated with the Harvard Medical School, flying saucers are almost certainly misperceptions of sex organs. Lester Grinspoon and Alan D. Persky wrote that most UFO witnesses are persons suffering from untreated psychological disorders. They have reverted to “primal modes of thinking” and lapsed back into childhood.
This includes dreams and hallucinations that are mistaken for reality. In this state of ambulatory schizophrenia, victims recall their “earliest infantile perceptions.” They may see an approaching flying saucer—in fact an hallucination of a mother’s breast. Or conversely, they may see a cigar-shaped object—a phallic symbol if ever there was one. “The flying objects,” Grinspoon and Persky pronounced, “are representations, symbols, of highly libidinized primary objects in the development of the individual. They are symbols of extremes of gratification and of omnipotence.”
A MAM IN BLACK
In 1987, writing in the respected Journal of American Folklore, Peter M. Rojcewicz examined “folk concepts and beliefs in ‘other worlds’” as they related to “men in black” (MIB) legends. One classic tale of an MIB involved a man with the pseudonym “Michael Elliot.” One afternoon, as Elliot sat in a university library immersed in UFO literature, a thin, dark-featured man approached him.
Speaking in a slight accent, the man asked Elliot what he was reading about. Flying saucers, Elliot replied, adding that he had no particular interest in their reality or unreality, just in the stories told about them. The stranger shouted, “Flying saucers are the most important fact of the century, and you’re not interested!?” Then the man stood up “as if mechanically lifted”; spoke gently, “Go well in your purpose”; and departed. When Elliot went to follow the man, he found the library eerily deserted.
A year or two after his article appeared, Rojcewicz confessed that he was “Michael Elliot.”