The Men in Black: Fact or Fiction?

hello everyone welcome back to another episode of dcoding the unknown as always hello there I'm your host Sim one of my writers in this case Katie thank you Katie as R me an episode here come the Men in Black the Galaxy Defenders anyone seen that movie God damn I haven't watched Men In Black in a long time didn't they make like new Men In Black movies didn't they make a new Men In Black movie recently which I absolutely didn't see I remember enjoying that as a kid though that was great [Music] Simon I know you're

not renowned as a huge film buff but can you guess the highest grossing film of domestic box office in 1997 um I'm going to go ahead and even though it seems insane I'm going to say it's the Men in Black because that's what today's episode is about I mean it's not about the movie it's about the the Men in Black as an actual thing if you're stu it wasn't actually Titanic which did obviously go on to become one of the highest grossing movies of all time if you need even more of a clue just look

at the title of this episode for yes it was none other than men in black wait in the first year Men In Black outgross Titanic are you joking starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones incidentally when I checked this fact there was a link on the IMDb page saying that 1997 was the second greatest year for films after 1939 and yes there were some bangers including princess monoke LA Confidential The Fifth Element wow face off yes and Mr Bean the movie and Batman and Robin but we digress wow Face Off is a Absolut I love

that movie and fifth element's also great I don't think I've seen LA Confidential and I've never heard of Princess monoke monoke I've course seen the Mr beat movie who hasn't is that the one where he like draws on the uh the Mona Lisa just before we continue with today's episode I want to tell you about one of my favorite sponsors and that is absolutely vessie and this is their new shoe just arrived at my door this morning smells like new shoe smells like new vessie excited to wear these this is the Courtside classic it's a

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I like it a lot look you've heard me talk about vessies for a long time whenever they bring out new sh I get excited if you want to pick them up I you just won't regret it you just won't it's uh they're just great shoes simple as that so check out some vessis atv.com unnown and you can get 15% off your first order so thank you to vessie for the sponsorship as always appreciate you guys and uh back to today's episode what are the ingredients of a conspiracy you obviously need some strange or seemingly inexplicable

event to have taken place you need to find some other people who believe you or have experienced set events so so that the news starts to trickle out because it's not a conspiracy if nobody else knows about it you then need some sort of push back from assumed authority figures to let you know that you're on the right track and something weird is indeed a foot and they don't want you to know about it and then if you decide to tell your truth anyway you're usually perceived as a crack part yelling into the void it

sounds like Katie read the like how to start a conspiracy theory 101 it does seem like pretty it's like Cults it's like yeah you just got to take these steps here's the culty steps that you take a book I would a while ago and it's going excellent to most people the words conspiracy theory do not a slightly wacky idea someone come up with usually involving secret government sectors or groups of very powerful shadowy figures maybe there's a smattering of aliens along the way of course there is the fact that we all kind of roll our

eyes the thought that something might be a conspiracy theory could actually mean that the shadowy figures behind the scenes are doing their jobs are they successfully sidelining anyone who Havens b a greater truth than the popul as a whole should be privy to what if there are groups of people clamping down on things before the news gets spread far and wide maybe this has been going on for decades without us realizing leaving the hups chling away at how much they can get away with as an example stories of small groups of men dressed in black

suits turning up in the wake of strange occurrences to warn Witnesses against spreading news of the event have been reported since at least the 1940s so I mean come on let me see you take a walk with me into the somewhat murky story of the Men in Black I mean I mean this Prima fasy isn't that ridiculous it's like okay so something happens that the government don't want you to know about like I don't know a spy plane crashes in your backyard of course someone's going to show up and be like hi uh you're going

to need to not talk about this National Security blah blah blah blah blah don't think this means there's aliens or anything like it's probably just the FBI or whoever's responsible for like shutting people up walk in Shadow move in silence while things like strange lights in the sky been recorded for centuries it wasn't until the mid 20th century that extraterrestrial spacecraft started to be spotted with some regularity in the US at least with the time flying sorcer making an appearance in newspapers in 1947 even though this wasn't an accurate description from the first witness Kenneth

Arnold who described what he saw as crescent-shaped at the time I guess flying sorcerer has a catri a ring to it than flying Crescent it's like bro fly Crescent you mean the Moon oh which makes it sound like you could have got him mixed up and just seen the moon KT and I same page anyway once Arnold had made this early sighting the number of reports of unidentified flying objects exploded with Project Blue Book which was tasked with compiling and categorizing these reports recording over 12,000 events or sightings between 1952 and 1969 only about 6%

of these reports couldn't easily be explained away although they also included examples with not enough information to make any kind of conclusion so the real number was even smaller yeah 6,000 still quite a lot though isn't it I mean I don't believe that they're alien spacecraft but it's still quite a lot an easy explanation doesn't mean no explanation so UFO people relax I haven't been converted yet do I think aliens are real yes UFOs on Earth no a further panel looked at the results and also concluded that while some reports could not be immediately explained

they were not of any particular security concerns and were also not proof of extraterrestrial visitations obviously any findings published from this sort of government inquiry just scream of coverups and we convince anybody who believes the what they saw was extraterrestrial but it was in fact a military aircraft a cloud All That Old Chestnut of a weather balloon and extra things like somber strangers turning up to warn you of spreading your story will hardly change your mind either I mean but the go of course the government has things to hide like they're testing new all the

time and if it crashes in your garden they're going to want you to shut up you know you're just telling your friend about the weird string of light you saw over the water and like boom black suits fill up the room so when did these dudes enter the chat for yes even though Hollywood has succumbed to wokeness gone mad and added a female agent in recent movie franchise entries we all know women did not develop brains or independent thought into at least the 1970s so there were no women in black that's debatable gat see you

think women have developed independent [Music] thoughts they're just extension they're just an extension of their men come on wow I can't believe every single one of them kicked you in the dick that means that for the purposes of making everyone's life at Tad easier we can handily refer to these people as Men In Black without fear of being sexist we could also refer to them as black men like gray Barker did of whom more later but you know let's not let's go back to 1947 and Kenneth arnard again because it seems that the early UFO

sightings also came with the early versions of the Men in Black shortly after Arnold's encounter where he saw nine shiny shapes flying at incredible speeds he was contacted to interview another UFO winners called Harold d d and a few other people on the boat he had been on had witnessed six very large donut-shaped aircraft in the sky over Mory Islands in Washington's pit sound this had apparently taken place just a few days before Arnold had seen his flying Crescent St had then seen what he described as being like newspapers but were actually pieces of metal

spewing from the craft and something akin to Lava that landed on their boat killing his dog what are you talking about how's that akin to a newspaper his boss Fred Chrisman also witnessed the UFO when he went to check on the area later and picked up on some of the and picked up some some of the Fallen debris Kenneth Arnold asked some pilot Pals to investigate so Army aircore Intelligence Officers Captain William L Davidson and first lieutenant Frank M Brown flew to Washington interviewed D and took some samples with them when they left tragically or

maybe suspiciously the B25 bomber they were piloting crashed on the way back to California and both men died what a coincidence this whole thing became known as the Mory island incident D also told Kenneth Arnold that the day after his sighting he had a strange visitor come to his door according to Grey Barker's book they knew too much about flying sorces it says quote the man who wore a black suit invited him to breakfast as soon as they sat down to eat the man began telling D everything that happened to him the day before down

to the most minute detail doll was speechless it was as if the man had actually been there with him witnessing every action of the donut-shaped objects a star sat there shaken and speechless the visitor began to threaten him in a strange manner what I have said is proof to you that I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe if Dar loved his family and didn't want anything bad to happen he would not discuss the experience with anyone Dar related the happenings on the island to Arnold only

after much persuasion chronologically then uh we've got what's generally recognized as the first official UFO sighting and it's already got creepy weird men attached to it so let's carry on shall we in 1952 possible future armor influence albu Bender contacted gray Barker of whom more later to ask about an organization that had set up called the international flying sorcer Bureau or ifsb flying sorcer Bureau sounds very official but it's just his Club basically like calling something a bureau makes it sound so serious bender and a group of other friends were busy investigating all kinds of

flying sourer sightings and delving deep into possible physical evidence as well as embroiling themselves all kinds of theories about where the flying sources were coming from and why and then in 1953 Bender's attitude abruptly shifted and the whole thing came to a grinding halt he had a visit from Three Men In Black as per they knew too much about flying sources quoting here three men in black suits with threatening Expressions on their faces three men who walk in on you and make certain demands three men who know that you know what the sources really are

they don't want you to tell anyone else what you know after they got through with you you wished you'd never have heard the word sorcer you turned pale and got awfully sick you couldn't get anything to stare in your stomach for three long days now Bender was supposedly so spooked by this encounter that he didn't write about it himself until several years later in his own book flying sources and the three men which was written in conjunction with gray Barker of whom more later I get the feeling this great Barker is going to be an

important figure in today's episode you're correct Barker goes on to say in the the next chapter of his own book if benza was closed down by the United States government the three men probably had good reasons but benza never told us who the three men were or who sent them only that they showed credentials but government men do not dress so conspicuously especially if they are on a secret mission all the three men were dressed similarly in Black I'm not certain they were government men who frightened Bender almost out of reason that unusual day in

September 1953 though I believe Bender steered our conjectures in that direction the quote ends hm intriguing this 1953 encounter in subsequent publishing of Barker's book in 1956 was when the term Men In Black was coined and when the idea of them was spread to the public at large or at least the public who read Barker's book let's pass forward to 1975 now and a book by John Keel called The Mothman Prophecies oh i' I think I've seen this movie isn't that the one where it's like if you see The Moth Man it means like something

bad's going to happen I handily wrote the script for The Moth Man episode already covered on DTU so yeah there's something about a bridge people seeing some Moth Man on a bridge and then the bridge collapses or something it struck me as nonsense so I feel perfectly valid in plagiarizing my own work the whole Mothman thing happens in the mid 1960s oh and there were tons of reports of a large winged flying creature with glowing red eyes terrorizing the inhabitants of Point Pleasant West Virginia this crypted also became linked to a few disasters so people

were debating whether it was causing these events or warning people about them any mention of the Mothman always reminds me to check the moth cam live stream which records a big moth man statue Outside The Moth Man Museum and yes sure enough a mother and daughter are walking by taking selfies they probably don't realize I'm spying on them though so let's leave them to it I bet that camera's caught some interesting incidents over the years anyway back to John Keel I completely forgot about that the moth Mad Camera as a UFO investigator he was alerted

to the strange sightings in Point Pleasant and headed over there in December 1966 to see what he could see as well as taking many witness accounts of encounters with a strange creature he and a few companions went to the area and it had popped up the most while in the first instance Keel had no personal experiences others in the group were variously freaking out hearing strange metallic noises and one started bleeding from the ear K went back to the area by himself later that night and mapped out a small zone of fear which was an

area where he felt an inexplicable surge of dread when he walked through it and put down to some sort of ultrasonic UFO activity when he returned the next morning the zonea was no longer there K had interviewed practically everyone in town it seems from isolated Farmers to police officers so his name was familiar around Point Pleasant and that's when the Men in Black Came Calling according to K's book The Mothman Prophecies these new strangers in town became quite prevalent after they apparently found out they had been poking around into the strangeness surrounding the Mothman sightings

and also UFOs that have been seen in the area people in town later told him of numerous instances of these men turning up and questioning them specifically about Keel or even saying that they were working with him which he assures the reader they were not most of these visitors were dressed weirdly or just had General odd demeanor about them after the silverbridge collapse the following year in 1967 there we go there's that bridge collapsed many people linked this with the increased Mothman sightings and the creature became tied to the disaster Mary high was a reporter

and office manager of the Athens Messenger and saw two men in black shortly after the bridge collapsed when they came to a Point Pleasant office inquiring about flying sorcerer activity this took her off guard as the bridge had been the biggest news for days seeing as how 46 people had died right before Christmas she describes the men as quote almost like twins both were short and wore black overcoats their complexions were dark somewhat Oriental she did in fact have a large FP of purported UFO sightings and when the men asked what she would do if

she was told not to publish them she said I'd tell them to go to hell the men left I mean it's a bit conv that the woman who is like oh yeah I'm getting questioned about my UFO things is also mad into UFOs if she wasn't I I just don't at first I'm like well this story seems like legitimate but then go oh no she was massively into UFOs and they like okay okay well credibility dashed later that day like if someone if I come in one day and was like oh my God I got

a visit from the UFO people I feel people would take it a lot more seriously because I constantly over this idea whereas if I was super into to UFOs people will be like oh come on Simon you're just trying to like enforce your own arguments here later that day another strange man walked in here's how he's described in the Mothman Prophecies he was slightly built about 5' 7 in tall with black piercing eyes and unruly black hair as if he had had a brush cut and was just growing it back in his complexion was even

darker than those of the two previous visitors and he looked like a Korean or Oriental of some kind his hands were especially unusual she thought with unduly long tapering fingers he wore a cheap looking ill-fitting black suit slightly out of fashion and his tire was knotted in an odd oldfashioned way strangely he was not wearing an Overcoat despite the fierce cold outside are you kind of like vaguely implying that he's an alien like with his long spindly fingers and is like not knowing what a good suit looks like not sure that dark skin is necessarily

linked with so-called oriental people but there you go yeah it's the past people be like just you know everything's a little bit fakey racist I guess they just had darker skin than the general makeup of people in 1960s West Virginia also I was kind of surprised by the vast Geographic and demographic area covered by Oriental josed with the specificity of Korean but the Korean War hadn't been that long ago so maybe Americans were just more comfortable throwing that nationality around this man who called himself Jack Brown asked har the same question the other men had

asked her earlier about what she'd do if someone ordered her to stop printing stories about UFOs when she asked if he was with the people who had stopped by the this morning he said no no I'm alone I'm a friend of gray gray Barker it's that man again of whom more later who is gray Parker who am I Jag Brown left after hire basically told him to get lost but popped up again sometime later at her niece's house to ask the same questions yet again and get the same answers there are numerous other examples of

these men in black questioning or following people in Point Pleasant they were usually described as smart dressed sometimes they were also wearing wraparound sunglasses and they were usually driving around in Black Cadillacs another witness experiened the following is described by John K quoting a large black car was parked outside her house she said and two men completely dressed in black with broad brimmed black hats and turtleneck sweaters were setting up a camera At first she thought they were priests in Arnold Bender's flying sources and the three men he similarly describes his men in black as

follows quoting again their cloes thing was made of a black material which reminded me of cloth used in the attire of clergyman it was well pressed appeared almost new all the other aparel such as ties shirts stockings and shoes were also black they wore hats of Hamburg style also black at the quote ends okay I think I'm finally getting to see why these guys had dubbed the Men in Black no names no fingerprints oh yeah this in the movie Men in Black where they burn the fingerprints off doesn't work like that they grow back while

this does seem intrinsically tied to American UFO law there have been examples of Men In Black popping up in other countries too let's take the example of what became known as the soulway basan in 1964 Jim Templeton and his wife Annie and young daughter went for a nice day out on Berg Marsh which overlooks the soul wave birth in Cumbria if this sounds like a lot of gibberish they were basically near a piece of water that forms a border between Scotland and England it was a lovely day in Templeton fancying himself quite the Shutterbug snapped

a few photos of his young daughter with his pentacon fslr camera isn't it nice that nowadays you can just take your own photos without random film developer employees nosing about in your business it is it's so weird that you used to take films it's just like some random dudes just looking through your holiday pictures do you guys see that Robin Williams movie The 1 hour photo that's a creepy movie apparently when he went to pick his photos up the employee said that's a marvelous Color Film but who's the big fan hello templon was astonished to

see the figure of what looked to be an astronaut in a white spacit directly behind his daughter oh I've seen this photo another similar photograph showed no such strange Apparition there had been no one else in the area apart from a couple of old ladies at the other end of the marsh who were sitting in their car during the time the family was taking pictures Kodak who had developed the photo apparently checked the camera with the and the original negatives and couldn't find any evidence of tampering or another explanation for the brief appearance of what

was soon dubbed the soulway spaceman the picture spread through local newspapers and quickly went National and even worldwide yeah it's a picture of it here we'll put it on the screen it is pretty creepy is pretty creepy it's pretty darn creepy oh I don't like it according to the rational Wiki article on the topic quote templon also claimed a technician from the Blue Streak missile project in wera Australia contacted him and told him that a missile launch had to be aborted because similar looking Spacemen were seen wandering around the Launchpad okie dokie shortly after the

story broke templon also claimed he was visited by two Sinister Men In Black who were driving a jaguar and claimed to be British government officials they produced a business card with nothing but a fancy Crest and the word Security on it which is maybe what Jason Statham can Flash around in his next guy Richie Adventure they also only refer to themselves as nine and 11 they drove him around the burg Marsh area and variously threatened and kuled him to publicly confess the whole thing had been a hoax which he never did at the spot the

photo was taken they asked him if that was where he had seen the alien but he replied that he hadn't actually seen anything unusual at the time had had only seen it later in the photograph at this point they drove off leaving poor Jim to go back home on his own guys it's a really long walk what the man it's cold another potential Cameo from these monochromatically Cloud fellows comes to us courtesy of an 80s video game called polar bias oh we've covered this I believe Kevin Jennings covered this in the latest installment of his

excellent internet's deepest mystery series but that hasn't been published at the time of writing so apologies if I repeat him too much and it's probably I've read about it I have no idea I I don't remember what it is but I'm sure I'm about to find out and it's probably too late to stop s for saying everything he remembers about this but if you haven't noticed yet I'm saving all the explanations for the end so don't worry it will all be resolved if Simon's already given the game away or you remember this story from Kevin's

video let's just pretend you didn't and carry on with this segment luckily for you Katie I have the memory of a Civ back in the early 1980s a video game appeared in an arcade in Portland Oregon it was fast moving the graphics were quite Advanced for its time which probably isn't saying much and it had puzzle elements mixed in with traditional arcade style gameplay people who played were said to have vomited had severe migraines even suffered from nightmares and seizures and they all had Vivid memories turn to fantasies Men In Black were witness checking the

machine periodically although notably not to collect money or tokens fromers in just a few weeks after it arrived the polar machine disappeared it's not too much of a stretch to connect government organizations with spying on young people in the 1980s however some trains of thought have gone down the track that the polar bias machine was actually a CIA or similar threel acronymed Group performing some kind of mind control experiment on the poor saps who inserted their hard-earned quarters hoping for a brief rest fite from being told they were Square by their hippie parents project multra

and it scary psychological torture experiments have been made public just a few years previously it's having some weird game show up with out of place men checking on it definitely raised alarm Bells which may be why the whole thing apparently only lasted a month or so all right so we've given some examples of these so-called Men In Black showing up in relation to purported extraterrestrial events so were they actually a part of a secretive task force or what if and bear with us here what if the Men in Black were extraterrestrials themselves I told you

like with the spindly weird fingers I mean uh look I can believe maybe the Men in Black as like an organization that go around and hush things up not aliens um and no they are they're not aliens that they're hushing up and they are not aliens themselves I don't believe that I believe they're just hushing up about spy planes or whatever Galaxy Defenders all right let's start with the obvious are these men in black that everyone seems to automatically link to whatever government actually working for government agencies were they genuine people from the CIA or

smaller secret groups tasked with intimidating Witnesses of extraterrestrial activity into silence and would this be because they didn't want the wider World finding out about those extraterrestrial things because they wanted to keep all of the knowledge about it within their secret group you see on the face of it it seems likely that if these men did show up then yes they probably were working for some Department that had an interest in whatever people had seen But if we drill down deeper into this idea it stops making sense pretty quickly if literally one person with no

other Witnesses saw something weird and started talking about it then they were visited by some government goons who told them to shut up because it was none of their business that's one thing but to have pairs or teams of Men In Black turn up at a town where hundreds of people would apparently witness something unexplainable well that's another word get around quickly when multiple people see things and even if intimidation is the name of the game not all of them are going to play ball with what they might assume is their government trying to silence

them for their own ends yeah especially in America they're like ah freedom of speech I see what I want and let's look at this from a higher level now if these men in black were supposed to be silencing Witnesses they didn't do a very good job because we know all about them to the extent that they've now become a parody of themselves in a popular movie franchise as Benjamin Radford in a piece on livescience.com puts it if the Men in Black were real and effective at suppressing encounters with extraterrestrials oh we shouldn't know about them

at all yeah theyve they're so good at suppressing information about extraterrestrials that they've got a Will Smith movie about them there are also a couple of ways that we could go with this if they were actually turning up to threaten people in the 50s and 60s one is that they were indeed trying to stop information about UFOs getting out the other is that they were even playing into the UFO or extraterrestrial angle to to fudge what the sightings had really been which was experimental military aircraft or whatever by turning up pretty conspicuously for supposed secret

agents and warning people to nod nod wink wink stop talking about the aliens it would make these people believe even more that what they' seen was in fact extraterrestrial and not some new death fighter that the government was playing with exactly like leaning into this is good for them because people are irrational this layer of veracity given to the sightings ironically by the people supposedly trying to cover it up would then actually downgrade the interest in it from any foreign enemies who might be spying on what the US military was doing they might be like

oh we thought there was some interesting testing going on but the locals were saying it was a UFO and they saw little green men with red eyes and these little green men then attacked a cow and the crafted three Loop to Loops before Vanishing in a bizarre flash of white light so even if anyone did see something there's really no getting any useful information out of this now yeah it's just deflection it's pretty good it's good deflection it's effective apparently basically painting any witnesses as Cooks Deval them and takes the focus of whatever real aircraft

might have been about that night I covered this in an episode on the Battle of Los Angeles but the same point stands here the US government was concerned that civilians staking out military bases looking for proof of extraterrestrials in post Roswell incident America might unwittingly leak classified Military Intelligence to Soviet spies so as I so eloquently put it and Simon probably eloquently read in that episode discrediting The apologists was the name of the game so forget that Roswell crap or maybe don't because now we're veering into weirder territory that could point to the Men in

Black actually being non-humans in Black so hold on to your hurs the worst scum of the universe oh I'm so sneaky I deliberately held back the slightly weirder descriptions given by people like the population of Point Pleasant and Albert Bender because to be honest it undermined the whole angle that the Men in Black might actually be real government agents after all so here we go let's dive a little deeper into these oddballs that came ACC calling after strange events had occurred we'll start with Bender because it happened in 1953 a good decade and a half

before the Point Pleasant stuff Bender's initial experiences were originally published in grey Barker's book remember but then he wrote his own story which was published in 1962 as flying sources and the three men this presented Bender's account of the Three Men In Black in much more detail than it originally told gray Barker in his book they knew too much about flying sources although they did actually work on this one together here's some extra info on those visitors in Black which follows on directly from the description I gave earlier about them wearing black stockings and stuff

quoting their faces were unpleasant to Lookout their eyes Shawn like tiny flashlight bulbs and the teeth were pearly white set in a dark complexion I could not see their hands covered by black gloves a bluish Radiance enveloped their entire bodies and I wondered if this was giving off the sulfuric odor it's like yeah yeah they're covering up their alien hand hands fine but they're also glowing blue why would you cover up the alien hands if you're literally glowing blue and look like this the hands are not what's giving it away maybe it's just me but

wouldn't you maybe lead with the fact that they were glowing blue not that they were wearing black shoes Bender later gets transported to a UFO where he meets three beautiful women dressed in tight white uniforms yeah yeah of course you do look finally some chicks enter the picture they then take off his clothes and rub some kind of oil into every part of his body without exception dude what is going on in your life this was a dream you had blimy these are also non-human Ladies as they have glowing eyes and their hair is silver

Bender has a great time being pampered in the spaceship which apparently renders him immune to the dreaded disease although we're not explicitly told what this is Bender lived until he was 94 though so maybe it worked the Men in Black are aliens hypothesis is also strongly carried on through John Kel's Mothman Prophecies book with multiple Witnesses noticing strange things about the people asking after their UFOs Jack Brown or whoever he was was described by Mary hire as follows his hands were especially unusual she thought with unduly long tapering fingers her niece also noticed this when

he paid her a visit in the book it says she quote not only noticed his long-fingered hands but there were also something very peculiar about about his ears they couldn't say exactly what but there was something one of the first witnesses to report on the Mothman in 1966 was Linda scarbury who had been in a car with three others when they saw the creature in the woods and they drove straight to the police station in town to report it in a later interview scarbury said that she hadd been visited by strange men in black and

they quote wore black suits black hats and sunglasses they drove black cars Cadillacs I think they looked like human beings but their skin was somewhat transparent you could see the veins in their hats very clearly their fingers were longer than a normal person's fingers as well Daddy shook hands with them and he said they were awkward in shaking hands they seemed to not know what to do or how to shake hands another local told Mary hire of an encounter she' had in 1966 he looked like a normal man and was grinning broadly he wore a

black coat and kept his arms folded with his hands out of sight under his armpits maybe he was hiding those long fingers Jane barro had this weird encounter as related by Keel quoting again a large black Cadillac came down the street and stopped next to them the rear door opened and a man climbed out with a big grin on his face he was about 5' 8 in tall with dark skin and Oriental eyes Jane thought he looked like a Hawaiian he had an air of someone very important and was dressed in a well-cut expensive looking

suit of the same gray material that was shiny like Silk but was not silk okay it's not some alien material then is it it's probably like polyester or some the mysterious Jag Brown was described as being about 5' 7 in tall and a Mrs Ralph Butler who apparently doesn't have her own first name op the door oh yeah in the past like Mr and Mrs Ralph Butler opened the door to a man claiming to be major Richard French of the US Air Force quoting his neat gray suit and everything else he was wearing appeared to

be brand new even the soles of his shoes were UNS scuffed and walked upon he was about 5' 9 in tall with an olive complexion and a pointed face his hair was dark and very long too long for an Air Force officer Mrs Butler thought there are frequent references to Oriental features and Dusky complexions but while we never find out what was so weird about their ears I think we're getting the picture they also behaved oddly for example grabbing a pen from Mary hire's office and rushing off with it cackling maniacally major Richard French didn't

know he was supposed to eat Jello with a spoon and tried drinking and out of the bowl that silly so and so another sighting by a man from Ohio says when I opened the door I saw this man standing in my living room he was dressed in all black I couldn't see his face but he was about 5T n it was probably just a burglar mate thanks mad from Ohio that really didn't add anything useful to this story oh I mean yeah but is it's anything it's just like random Witnesses who say they saw alien

uh like weird alien men come to the door come on come on I need some evidence okay before we get into the debunking section let's Circle back to the are they real question we mentioned that governments might have a vested interest in stoking UFO rumors to discredit potential Witnesses and mask details of real military experiments so let's spend a few minutes on this Men In Black did exist although probably not exactly as we've described them so far they also probably didn't wear black suits but just calling them men would be a bit confusing so I'm

using the term to mean government agents interacting somewhat untruthfully with members of the public a 2013 documentary called Mir man highlights former Air Force Special investigations officer Richard Doty as someone who infiltrated the UFO Community as per an article by Steve Rose in the guardian Doty and his colleagues fed credulous ufologists lies and half truths knowing their fertile imagination would do the rest in return they were apprised of chatter from the community thus alerting the military when anyone was getting close to their top secret technology and if the Soviets thought the US really was communicating

with aliens well all the better Doty was also apparent involved in the Majestic 12 document leak which was also covered in the Battle of Los Angeles episode we can't take his word 100% as genuine though as the original writer of the mirag men book Mark Pilkington says some of what he says was true and a lot of it wasn't or was a version of the truth I have no doubt Rick was at the bottom of a ladder that stretches all the way to Washington it's unclear to what extent he was following orders and to what

extent he was taking matters into his own hands of course if Doty really was a government agent task with basically lying for a profession can we trust anything he says Rose says at the end of the piece as always in the conspiracy theory Hall of Mirrors it's possible to flip the hypothesis on its head what if the lies and hoaxes Mirage Men reveals are simply a smoke screen for the fact that authorities really don't know do know secrets about extraterrestrials all right well yeah but that doesn't mean there's any any extra proof does it well

we have to pick aide at some point so let's get to the debunking shall we yes please oh I'm so skeptical I think I made my position pretty clear does the Men in Black going around telling people to be quiet about stuff exist yes is that stuff aliens no are they aliens definitely not inlude Shades of Gray but first it's time for our section on Gray Barker yes more of him now yes gray who are you who are you this is a character who sits exactly between the witness accounts of Men In Black and the

debunking part of this episode we've mentioned him several times already and indeed he popped up in other things as I carried on researching so who was this man born in 1925 Barker was a writer with a long-standing interest in stories about extraterrestrials he primarily published books relating to UFO experiences and other paranormal activities with other titles including the Silver Bridge which drew a link between the Mothman and the Silver Bridge collapse and and MIB the secret Terror Among Us he became friends with Albert Bender through their collaborative work with the international flying sourcer Bureau or

ifsb and indeed it was through Barker recounting Bender's experiences in they knew too much about flying sources that propelled the Men in Black Trope into the Zeitgeist of the 1950s and 60s but was this gray Barker a True Believer like Albert bener and John Keel seemed to be somewhat delightfully it seems not what Barker seemed to coton onto pretty early on in his writing career was that this stuff sells and we know this because it wasn't just him cashing in on other people's creativity John C Sherwood wrote a piece called gray Barker my friend the

mythmaker which was published in the skeptical inquir in 1998 the article basically says that Barker presented his writings as factual while knowingly making most of it up as we've said before if you're not a very good writer and you want to sell a fiction book just call it non-fiction boom Sherwood says that the intelligence agencies did indeed try and cover up or spread disinformation about purported UFOs as we've already talked about so while Barker might have used that as a jumping off point Sherwood writes but that doesn't contradict what I'm about to disclose about Barker's

participation in and encouragement of actual fraud to perpetuate the sale of his UFO books and magazines yeah is is this fraud I mean I get is this it doesn't seem like it's illegal you're just kind of being like yeah yeah no I'm telling some stories they may be happened to me it's like is is Dan Brown like you know he's like all of this is factual or whatever that doesn't that I don't know I don't think Dan Brown's a fraud I just think he's an author shwood kept all the correspondence he had with Barker and

there are several pretty damning pieces of evidence about how the latter viewed people who really believed in flying sources in June 1968 Barker wrote this to showood strictly off the Record uhoh it's clearly on the record isn't it cuz we know about it unusual interest in fixation upon UFOs represents in my opinion a definite symptom of neurosis I cannot again off the Record bear for very long most of the people and the fans of sorcer them mainly because most of them are oral aggresses IE they talk all the time about sourcers and make you listen

I do genuinely like a few Sorcerers and former Sorcerers like yourself who along with their interest in sources seem to be pretty sane and can have a sense of humor about it it the quote ends I've never heard of UFO fans being referred to as Sorcerers before what a great word it gives the whole thing a bit of a magical twist it does doesn't it just as much nonsense Barker is blatantly open about presenting madeup things as true in or in other correspondence with Sherwood for example when Sherwood disbanded a small UFO group he had

created Barker wrote to him urging him to keep up the story that the Men in Black had pressured the group to shut down quoting again I'll always be glad to print an article by you you if you tell the real or madeup story of how these strange forces made you quit you might as well go out of sources in the usual syndrome I mean I'm in the wrong business I should just be like I saw a light flying sorcer last night in the sky it wasn't the Moon it wasn't Crescent at all it was real

and that would get more views than actually making uh factual content just I'm in the wrong I'm in the wrong business Sherwood hadn't disbanded his group because of Men in Black by the way it was because he was too busy with college work to keep it running Barker also God Sherwood to adapt a science fiction story he had written called Flying sources time machines to present as a factual piece under the pseudonym Dr Richard H Pratt he wrote try to make it as technical as possible to make it look like a real scientific report the

real scientists who read our Zine will see the hoax and High Hope take it as a joke later on following publication of the piece he wrote evidently the fans swallowed this with one gulp so I think it's clear that gray Barker knew knew what his audience wanted and was happy to dish it out for them never mind whether it was all fiction or not yeah he's just trying to sell a magazine I respect the hustle dude he was also involved in another hoax played on George adamsky who was a notorious sorcerer I guess we can

call him who had photos and stories Galore of alien encounters his photos were easily explained as close-ups of various normal bits of equipment such as lamps and his check out this V A it's like mate that's a picture of a lamp you just took real close we can see it's a lamp and his stories of meeting and flying around with aliens have left people unsure if everything was a hoax or whether it was just a bit of an attention-seeking oddball anyway in 1957 adamsky received a letter from RE e strai of the US state department

saying things like while certainly the department cannot publicly confirm your experiences it can I believe with propriety encourage your work is that something that they actually sent him I mean it's also funny because they're like carry on with the work it's doing wonders for covering up our mysterious plane program adamsky obviously took this as an official endorsement of his claims and kept using it as proof of government support in his talks and appearances over the years much to the annoyance of the FBI this led to special agents repeatedly asking adamsky to stop using the letter

which only gave him more fuel to say that the FBI were trying to silence him in 1967 Barker published book of adamsky detailing adamsky story and calling the strai letter quote one of the great unsolved iies of the UFO field I already solved it they want to encourage this stuff George ad damsky had died two years previously in 1965 but it wasn't until 1984 just after gray Barker died that his friend James Mosley confessed although it had been long suspected that he and Barker created the letter together as a prank or that or he just

made that up now before we all Embrace him as our new best friend it does seem that Barker had a Mean Streak that helped him exploit his main audience writing to Sherwood in 1970 Barker said the Kookie books are about all that I can sell these days I lost the sensible subscribers to sourer news long ago so I get a Ki kick out of letting it reflect the utter mental illness of the field cynical much Mr Barker no like it I love him I love this dude that's because I'm I am like him I'm such

a cynical that I'm just like yes Barker yes you and me what we've learned in this section is the early mentions of the Men in Black were practically all concocted by gray Barker probably with a big smile on his face the whole time let's wrap this up what you think you saw you did not see we mentioned more examples than those just directly from the typewriter of gray Barker in this episode so let's see if we can explain any of the other men in black sightings the first reported alleged UFO sighting in modern times that

kicked off the whole phenomena was Kenneth Arnold a pilot who saw a chain of unidentified objects flying at incredible speed while no mysterious Men In Black came to visit him he was contacted to interview Harold Dar who had also seen unidentified flying objects over Mari Islands just a few days before Arnold had gone public do was invited to breakfast with a man in a black suit if you recall who threatened him and his family if D told anyone about what had seen I remember great job the threat was obviously not that bad as here was

Harold D relating the entire thing to Kenneth Arnold not long after so what do we make of this number one was Kenneth Arnold a a journalist or a professional interviewer of some sort no he was a pilot and a businessman so what was he even doing there one hypothesis is that as he had been a credible seemingly genuine and well-known witness to a recent UFO sighting he would add a layer of credibility to this story too in fact Arnold had been asked to do the interview by Raymond Palmer who had been publishing sci-fi stories for

several years already and who seemed to be a Proto gray Barker by presenting as fact what was clearly fiction it seems that he correctly assumed that Arnold would here Dar out and not question a supposed fellow UFO witness to closely but what about the Men in Black aspect number two I got much of the information about dar's encounter with the Men in Black from grey barkers they knew too much about flying sourcers so I think given what we now know about him we can add more than a liberal pinch of salt to that account yeah

we can fairly say just write it off as just being nonsense number three is that the whole Mory island incident has been debunked as a hoax well there we go nailing that coffin isn't it maybe darl and his colleague Chrisman were trying to get notoriety and a bit of money off their supposed UFO fragments but when the plane that picked them up crashed and two more people died do I need you to survive it didn't seem so funny anymore if the sighting had been genuine you would have expected more people to come forward and corroborate

the event as large donut-shaped craft spewing metal and lava chunks from the sky would surely have been visible for miles around in this case I think we can dismiss the encounter with a man in Black as either made up whole cloth as per the rest of the story or it was just based on a real government official visiting Dar to try and get him to admit that the entire thing was a prank gone wrong Albert Bender's encounters with the Men in Black as reported in they know too much about flying sources and later in his

own flying sources and three men started off as the threatening variety then morphed into an extraterrestrial encounter in his later book it's worth saying that his original account to gray Barker came out in 1956 whereas his more detailed personal account was published 9 years later which gives plenty of time for things to blur and details to emerge that might not have been there originally yeah even if he's not straight up making it up remembering stuff like over and over again you're going to add all sorts of details that weren't really there and you might believe

them to be true but human memory is a very poor is generally very poor for at remembering what I'm saying is that the two accounts are very different with Bender's story Barker took the Men in Black idea and ran with it but we can also thank him for pointing out something that we hadn't really mentioned so far Barker writes that the three men in black who visited Bender were assumed to be government agents but government men do not dress so conspicuously especially if they're on a secret mission exactly if people were tasked with silencing Witnesses

I suppose the black suits Could Be an Effective intimidation to all giving an official air to the encounter but people people in black suits in big black cars would definitely draw attention to themselves just tar up in a Prius wearing jeans and a t-shirt and no one would bat an eye Barker also says that we only attached the government to these men as that's what Bender had assumed without actual verification but we can't really trust anything greay Barker says so I mean whatever Bender's later claims of alien travels and sexy times massage the three beautiful

women lifted me up oh my God to their spaceship and oiled me in all my crevices what the man has either been discounted as a dream or a migraine induced hallucination given that he mentions throbbing headaches bright flashes of light and also sulfurous smells at the start of many of his experiences and if they silenced him in 1953 what did they make of him publishing a tellall in 1962 to be honest I don't really know what to make of all of this as reading it now in 2024 it sounds just like a load of madeup

GFF it does doesn't it Katie and I think that's why we can assume that it is indeed a load of madeup GFF all right let's move on to all those weird people wondering about Point Pleasant West Virginia in the wake of the Mothman and UFO sightings over there in the mid 1960s what I think we can immediately say is that if there were in fact strangers asking questions all over town they were definitely not aliens and how could I prove this well I mean oh come on now come on now KY and I same page

while there were lots of corroborating statements about these men from a variety of different Witnesses they were all published by John Keel who may or may not have recorded them 100% accurately he was a prominent ethologist although his thoughts on paranormal events varied over the course of his life from deciding that extraterrestrial visitors could not in fact be confirmed to the possibility of ultraterrestrials which were visitors from other dimensions in a kind of Multiverse theory that we're not going to get into here he might also shock horror have been less than truthful about the whole

Mothman thing what no you out so shocking his book was published nearly a decade after the events if you recall and at least one man in Black referred to our Mischief maker in Chief gray Barker why would he Chu Barker's name into a book while it's runs return to John C sherard correspondent and sometime accomplice of gray Barker in another skeptical inquire article published in 2002 called gray Barker's book of bunk Mothman sourcers and MIB Sherwood once again proves that the perpetuation of the Men in Black storyline was almost totally orchestrated by Barker you don't

even really need to read the whole piece as the introduction says those who seek The elusive truth behind the Men in Black and Mothman myths should know that material touched by gray Barker's enterprising hand is Tainted by self-serving deceit he launches hoaxes joins others deceptions and manipulated people's beliefs and I says our author was one of those who helped John C Shard there freezing up all the flag so what's the connection between Barker's Men In Black and what K referred to as mibbs a name that's stuck well first as we just said the Mothman Prophecy

book wasn't published until 1975 gray Barker had written the Silver Bridge which touted the idea that the Mothman sightings and the bridge collapse Were Somehow Linked In 197 5 years earlier originally it seemed that they were going to collapse aborate on the book together but when ke got wins of how made up Barker's version was he decided to write his own however showood describes it as having a feeling of a misremembered diary in later years he tried contacting Keel to ask about contradictions between the book and other things that is said in correspondence with Barker

and whether he still held the same beliefs about secret organizations as he did then but Keel never replied gry Barker who Sherwood States had done little firstand research which seems true to form totally admits stuffing the silverbridge with fiction in a letter to sh he writes I've deliberately stuck in fictional chapters based roughly on cases I heard about throughout the fiction or chapters is an undertone which explains the sightings from a psychological Viewpoint though this is never stated gray Barker is an absolute Legend he reminds me of um the the famous skeptic guy uh who

recently James Randy James Randy ripped to The Goat in The Moth Man prophecies kill refers to Barker as a p a ethologist gray has made many outstanding contributions to the subject this towering bear of man was very hard to read but his investigations were always thorough and uncompromising in real life however according to Sherwood anyway Kil newarker was a hoaxer I wasn't particularly impressed by him he actually tells him off in a letter from March 1969 saying it is absolutely inexcusable that none of you bothered to interview a single witness you went down there and

looked at the sky 2 years after the main incidents occurred this was tourism not investigation Gray yes and grey would reply and this is made up not journalism K shots fired hardly a thorough and uncompromising investigation after all quite the opposite in fact why would K describe Barker in this way though it seemed that he valued Barker's reputation amongst Sorcerers enough to keep the Mystique going in prce anyway probably because it made his book easier to sell it all comes back to money doesn't it there are so many weird descriptions in the Mothman Prophecies the

you can't help feeling that it's one long hallucinogenic trip here's another example with a stranger described as having quote an unusual head large and round white face his face seemed angular pointed he had black hair which was closely cropped to his head as if his head had been shaved and the hair was just growing in again there was a perfectly round spot on the back of his head as if that area had been recently shaved his nose and mouth seemed relatively normal but his eyes were large protruding like thyroid eyes and set wide apart one

eye appeared to have a cast like a glass eye and did not move in unison with its companion quote ends I will say that the description thyroid eyes appears three times in the book always as a direct quote and in quotation marks if you're not familiar people with thyroid issues can have slightly bulging or puding eyes due to inflammation of the tissues behind them but it seems to have theuring somewhat of a derogatory term especially coming from the 1960s yeah like calling it thyroid eyes or whatever seems really weird anyway as already stated kill's investigation

and the publication of the book at a gap of many years and he was at some point sharing notes with gray Barker so maybe some of Barker's fiction crept in it could also be that people of the Town were telling him these things but they were all getting carried away in the excitement of the event because it was a big deal at the time and there's still an annual Moth Man festival to this day yeah we already mentioned there's a camera on that weird Moth Man statue like all the time it's the third weekend in

September if this comes out in time and in case you're thinking of going just in case maybe you're off to the bad Festival woo could there have been government officials sniffing around to see why all these paranormal reports were coming out of Point Pleasant in 1966 sure were they acting in non-human likee manner to freak out the locals well probably not there are descriptions that really irk me such as even the soles of his shoes were uncuffed unw walked upon how are you ever in a position to see The Souls of someone's shoes and if

you do see them and they are UNS scuffed wouldn't you just think that they were new or just not think about it at all yeah you just be like oh new shoes that's it that's all You' think there are also discrepancies between witness statements we've mentioned several times how the appearance of the Men in Black was given as dark or Dusky but another quote from kill's book States quote this odd man shared the characteristics of Mary H's tiny visitor of only a few days earlier Mrs H said that the little man had unusually pale skin

almost a sickly White the quote ends that wasn't what she said about Jack Brown whose complexion she said was even darker than that of the two previous visitors it doesn't mention which other characteristics may or may not have been shared so were there light and dark versions of these men or were people just unable to keep their story straight maybe there were a few differentl looking people around for any number of reasons and when I say different looking I mean of a different nationality to the white majority in West Virginia maybe they were exchange students

Travelers tourist a religious group I mean anything slightly outside the run-of-the-mill population everyone was used to seeing maybe they arrived at the same time her The Moth Man by coincidence or turned up in the wake of the sightings because they were interested in finding out more in genuine curiosity as you can see any of these suggestions off the top of my head far more likely than that they were aliens masquerading as weird humans for no factual given reason yes aams Razer according to Robert bull who wrote Men In Black a preliminary report in 19 97

he presents three hypotheses as to who the Men in Black could be but actually this turns out to be four points number one they are government agents covered that one Rob number two they are projections hallucinations of the witness yes kind of mentioned something along those lines as well three they are real in a sense mhm Bull's definition of in a sense is worlds apart from mine however his third hypothesis is that the weirdness of the Men in Black can be attributed to the fact that they're actually drawn s controlled by extraterrestrials dude I mean

okay his fourth point is better though in saying that people have latched on to Men In Black as a social and cultural phenomenon in the same way that other Supernatural things have been latched on to and blamed in the past bull says quote the final hypothesis presented here and the author's money is on this one is that mibs are a modern variation of other entities that have appeared throughout recorded history such entities have been named as Angels de Jin fairies boltergeist Mothman appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary the classic adamsky type aliens and of course

the Grays the quote ends we can carry on this example even further into the modern day with characters like agent Smith in The Matrix and internet things like Slenderman also creepy figures in black suits staking their claim in our cultural tapestry these things have their moments then we move on to something else okay now let's turn our attention to the soul Spaceman thing again ah the the the spaceman in the picture behind the girl the photo itself while maybe jarring when you first see it is easily explained and actually pretty hilarious especially when you see

the other evidence unwittingly taken by the photographer Jim Templeton let's take a quick look at the original photo of the young girl plus the apparent astronaut here it is on the screen now and I'm also looking at it I mean actually look at it don't the spaceman's proportions and general attitude seem a bit odd if they're supposed to be facing the camera the presumed left arm at an unnatural angle and light shadowing seems more indicative of the shoulder blades than the front of a space suit in fact I've seen the explanation of this photo so

many times now that I'm actually having trouble seeing it as anything other than a woman with her back to the camera as yes that's what it is totally but hold on surely that would be obvious to templon if his wife was standing directly behind his daughter well maybe not you had to put the camera up to your eye back in those days so it'd only be able to see what was directly inside the small viewfinder and his wife was a bit further away so out of his immediate sight I've seen proof that the viewfinder of

the camera was uning only showed about 70% of the total picture that would be captured in the photograph thus it's quite easy to imagine that he just didn't notice his wife had wandered into the shot in the background this as he was concentrating on getting a good shot of his daughter due to weather conditions and sunlight on that day and at that angle his wife Annie who had short dark hair and was wearing a blue dress was Overexposed on the prce making her resemble a Spaceman while templon kept saying that no one else was there

she was there the whole time and was presumably free to walk around as much as she wanted without alerting her husband to her exact whereabouts every seconds nowadays it's easy to play with color saturation on photos and any fool can clearly see that it's a woman in a Blue Dress if you want further proof that it was just the girl's mother there's another photo from the same day that shows the daughter again crouching in the grass arranging some flowers in her hand to the right of the shot you can see half of Annie Templeton in

a short sleeve blue dress bending over and reaching for something in the grass it's not a flattering angle she's not posing and it does not lend anything to the main subject of the picture so he can once again assume that Jim looking through his realistic viewfinder just didn't notice his wife was in the shot tying the story back in with Rober BS Men In Black preliminary report an article on the BBC about this quotes Dr David Clark who says ever since the invent of Photography there have been pictures of angels fairies and Spirits a lot

were explained by lens Flair or been tampered with but it fed into greatest spiritualism in the 19th century if Jim had taken his photo in 1864 instead of 1964 he would have taken it to the spiritualist church and they would have said that it showed a ghost once the spaceman story was out and those more innocent people of the 1960s were intrigued however Templeton was visited by some men in black or was he there are a couple of hypotheses here one of which we haven't talked about yet but could potentially tie in with our previous

examples the first is that Templeton was just making the whole thing up he was not a total stranger to the world of pranks and lots of people are of the mind that once the story became big he couldn't back down so he maintained his stance that an interdimensional Spaceman with a broken arm momentarily photob bonded his picture until he died he also kind of had to publicly maintain this belief as his young daughter got a lot of attention too and obviously found this quite distressing so if he came out and said oh yeah sorry it

was just your mom in the background she would have been put through the Ring of a nothing the Men in Black who referred to themselves numerically and abandoned him on the marsh were just another facet of this fabrication to justify it to himself and his family or and here's the other reason that could also apply to other men in black examples it was a hoax being perpetrated on him the hoaxer became the hoaxy people who saw this story or maybe even Bender's story or heard stories about the Mothman decided to play a trick on the

poor gullible Witnesses by cosplaying a secret government agents what would it take black suits with black rayb bands air of Menace and well that's about it the fact that many of the Men in Black from John ke's book are described as wearing ill-fitting suits doesn't have to point to them being aliens or alien puppets who don't know how to dress like a human it could just as easily point to people who wanted to play a prank but weren't so heavily invested that they were going to go out and buy bespoke tailored suits for the occasion

to his credit and it's the only credit we can really give him in this story Templeton did himself say that but he thought the Men in Black who visited him were not government agents but were in fact pranksters there's also no evidence of weird astronauts appearing at the Blue Streak missile project tests in Australia and if they had it would have been unconnected to the soulway Spaceman as that is without a shadow of a doubt Annie Templeton the weirdness of the photograph still persists for some people even though it is now clear what it actually

shows it's been a long time since I was terrorizing my University housemates with the first slipnot album but I was kind of delighted to see that they released a song called soulway f in 2019 I can't guarantee this was inspired by the soulway spaceman but it does include the lyrics I won't show you the whole story I won't show you the aftermath I won't show you my allegory Don't Look Away here's an unexplainable one sure I might be reconning this in with my neuralyzer but it fits with the narrative we've built around revolving paranormal events

turning up throughout human history so I'm leaving it in and what's next well on to poar the video game in the arcade that was visited by suspicious Men In Black was the government engaged in bugging video game arcade machines to spy on the public yes the FBI did bug games with cameras and microphones to try and catch crimes that were going on in the shadowy Alleyways of the arcades but we're talking things like pickpocketing drugs and gang members was the government manufacturing arcade games specifically for mind controlled experiments no at least not in this specific

example if you hadn't heard of it before the whole poar thing is an urban legend that started in the year 2000 in the year 2000 any references to people actually playing it at the time are either false or conflations with other real games Men In Black May well have been seen trundling games in and out of arcades but these were for the mundane purpose of reviewing the footage they had taken not to download your brain data Ryan hulahan on inverse.com wrote quote games like Tempest were selected less for their mind control abilities and more because

their cabinets featured glass bezels ideal for sticking cameras behind the program was so extensive that it briefly caused a shortage of Tempest machines in the Seattle area during the early 80s just imagine teenagers watching Men in Black Wheeling Tempest machines in and out of arcades every few days it only makes sense that they would start ascribing outlandish motives to the agents the good guys dress in Black remember that as I'm writing this I'm desperately thinking of anything else I could be doing instead and my eyes come to rest on a sticker of Shrek that my

daughter stuck to my husband's laptop you remember why ogres are like onions it's not because they stink or they make you cry it's because they have layers and here's another one to add to the urban legend of the Men in Black remember Dron Keel of Mothman Prophecy Fame in a possibly tacit foreshadowing of the content of his books he starts here with a story of a mysterious bearded blackcloud stranger visiting Homes at night in West Virginia M days before the Silver Bridge collapsed in the next chapter he reveals that the bearded black clad stranger was

actually him trying to use someone's phone as Kai's car had run off the road he posits that the time of night the unfamiliarity of his appearance and the accents and the subsequent strange happenings in Point Pleasant might have got linked together in people's minds creating a story that Basel buub had visited West Virginia on the eve of a terrible tragedy I'm not entirely sure if this black bearded beas bub was actually a story going around the town if it was just ke using this as a hypothe iCal example of how these stories are born but

either way I'm not sure why he included this especially at the start of his book he comes to the same conclusions we have out of context strangers taking on Sinister meanings in people's minds and entire false narratives can be woven from what were actually perfectly innocent and innocuous events does this mean that the entire rest of the Mothman Prophecies is one big confusion that he knew all about all along or did he just not notice that he was debunking the Men in Black and the spread of urban legends in general before had even started the

story I don't know what gray Barker had to say about this book but it probably would have made a good quote for the end of this section so feel free to insert your own what was there is now gone for a brief moment in time Men In Black turning up in the aftermath of a UFO sighting were part and parcel of the whole story but as Steve Rose put it in his Guardian piece quote in The Cold Light of the postc Cold War the evidence is starting to look pretty shaky for UFOs numbers at UFO

conventions and clubs are dwindling the UK's Ministry of Defense closed its UFO desk in 2009 and like many countries has Declassified its UFO documents if there were any Smoking Gun you'd imagine it would have been found in our current golden age of leaks and disclosures but so far there's only been mere smoke nowadays UFO fever has seriously died down since its mid 20th century Heyday and therefore so of references and new examples of Men In Black turning up to scare Witnesses into Silence of course government agents are still infiltrating things left right and center but

now it's going to be more online rather than in person and they're looking for religious extremists domestic terrorists and cyber villains rather than worrying about some guy who said sexy women rubbed oil over his body when he was in a spaceship he the movie franchise that started in 1997 as taken over the term Men In Black and you now have to scroll a long way down Google results if you want to find any anything that was anything but a Sci-Fi Action comedy luckily I'm slightly better at searching than that otherwise this episode would have been

really quite different obviously the films have taken the idea of a government agency being involved in hiding alien activity in a different direction but it's more than likely that the initial seed of this idea came from Barker Bender or ke's books I don't have cause to bring out the Danny DeVito unit of measurement in this episode but you might be interested to know that in the first Men In Black movie there's a jokey Montage of screens in the MIB headquarters showing real famous people who are actually aliens living on Earth and one of them is

our man himself he's wearing a suit and looking like he's getting ready to go to sleep on a couch but hey maybe that's what aliens do when they're alone with Men in Black now firmly relegated to the realm of entertainment though maybe it's time for the real ones to reemerge as the fiction we are all familiar with would provide a really good cover basically what I'm saying is saw something strange watch your back cuz you'll never quite known where the Mi is at God it's been a long time since I saw that movie that's the

end of today's episode thank you so much for being here if you're listening to this as a podcast do leave a review if you're on YouTube like And subscribe and I'll see you next time sorry [Music] [Music]