I’m going to start off by saying that I believe most of the popular theories about the Men in Black and their purpose are wrong. I’ll discuss them, because my open mindedness is legendary, but they’re still all wrong.
Whether the Men in Black are aliens themselves, or agents of the government, or aliens working in concert with the government are all up for grabs in terms of theories and those are the least interesting of the bunch.
As I said in the article that probably brought you here, I was introduced to the MiB by my inspiration, John Keel. Initially his idea of the Men in Black was generally what most people have come to believe about them. In other words they’re mysterious, devious and sometimes dangerous agents of the government whose sole purpose was to stop UFO enthusiasts from getting to “The Truth”.
However his thinking changed with his experiences. During and after his time investigating the Mothman in West Virginia he began to infer that the MiB were themselves actually representative of the very phenomena they were trying to keep under wraps. He described their olive complexion, almond shaped eyes and behaviors that seemed to indicate discomfort with our atmosphere.
Eventually he began referring to them as “Demonic Supernaturals”…
As far back as 1947, UFO pioneer Harold Dahl described a visit from a man in a dark suit who warned him not to talk about his well-known sighting at Maury Island, and throughout the 1950’s Albert K. Bender claimed to have been visited numerous times by men in black suits who told him it would be in his best interests to stop his research into UFO’s.
Those stories are common by UFO standards and make as much sense as anything else in this context, but what I find fascinating is that some fairly well known ufologists make it pretty clear they don’t believe the Men in Black exist.
Nobody comes right out and calls anyone else crazy, but historian Aaron Gulyas wrote, "during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, UFO conspiracy theorists would incorporate the Men in Black into their increasingly complex and paranoid visions" and going just a touch farther, ufologist Jerome Clark describes reports of Men in Black as "experiences" that "don’t seem to have occurred in the world of conscious reality".
But enough fooling around. Here’s the truth behind the Men in Black;
When Edward Snowden did his infamous data dump, in the mass of data was a classified GCHQ document (the Government Communications Headquarters is British intelligence) titled “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations”.
I won’t bother to describe the document, you can feel free to check out the link if you like, but strangely, buried in the middle of pictures of inflatable tanks and women in burkas are three classic fake UFO photographs. A hubcap, a bunch of balloons, and a bird.
Many ufologists took this to be proof that our (and other) governments are continuing to cover up the existence of visitors from other worlds, but in my humble opinion, the reality is exactly the opposite.
Let’s be honest, if in fact there is a “UFO Conspiracy” it’s the worst kept secret in the frigging world.
I mean I’d challenge you to find someone in any cave in any jungle on the planet who hasn’t heard of Roswell, Area 51 and doesn’t know that aliens are little green men. Ask the average person who’s supposed to keep the whole thing under wraps and they’ll tell you they know all about it because they saw it in the movies.
But the true believers, the devout of the devout, know Rip Torn doesn’t run the MiB (Also of course Boston Brides Magazine voted Men in Black the best wedding band in New England).
Basically Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones may have let the cat out of the bag, but it was Mark Pilkington who explained what the cat was up to. For UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy buffs Pilkington’s 2013 documentary “Mirage Men” answers a lot of questions.
Please allow me to introduce one Richard Doty.
THIS faithful readers, is a Man in Black…
Mr. Doty is a retired Air Force Special Investigations Officer who spent years infiltrating UFO circles, and doing so by never hiding his identity. His line was that he was with the government, and he was sick of keeping all the real secrets down deep in those vaults. Sick of it I tell you!
Doty and his colleagues fermented relationships with many ufologists who were desperate for inside information. He didn’t necessarily lie, but gave them just enough misinformation to send them and their paranoias careening off into all kinds of directions. What they got in return was the inside dope on who was looking into what, and who may have been accidentally stumbling onto to actual secret technology. At the same time (Bonus!), if foreign governments were watching all this and beginning to believe the US government really was communicating with aliens, it was just a happy byproduct.
In 1988, a successful electronics entrepreneur/distributor and amateur pilot named Paul Bennewitz was checked into a New Mexico psychiatric facility by his family.
In 1979 Bennewitz began seeing lights in the sky and despite the fact that the land just across the road from his home was part of Kirtland Air Force Base he believed those lights were of extraterrestrial origin.
Bennewitz contacted the Air Force, who realized immediately that it wasn’t ET he was watching. Rather than dissuading him the Air Force decided it was in their best interest to encourage him to continue his investigations and in fact step up the effort. Before long Bennewitz was interpreting alien languages and spotting crashed spacecraft in the hills from his plane.
What he apparently never considered was that the Air Force was surveilling him surveilling them. It was software provided by the Air Force that allowed him to do the language interpretations, and they were planting props for him to find on his flights.
Eventually Bennewitz began calling out the alarm about a full scale alien invasion, which lead to his family deciding enough was enough.
Paul Bennewitz was an extreme case, but there are plenty of others that are just as interesting.
Pilkington claims that cattle mutilations in the 1980’s Midwest were actually a result of the government testing the animal’s radiation levels due to some experiments with an underground process known as “Nuclear Fracking”. There are numerous interviews with former Army pilots who claim to have flown experimental silent helicopters with flashing lights attached to mislead anyone who might see them.
While Doty sometimes has plenty to say along these lines, he stops just short of admission in a number of fairly well known scenarios.
He discusses but not quite admits to taking part in leaking the so-called “Majestic 12” documents, which detail a committee formed by President Truman for the specific purpose of being the US government’s interface with alien intelligences, and flat out denied a role in “Project Serpo” (which involved 12 US military officers secretly visiting a planet in the Zeta Reticuli System) even though it later turned out that he was likely the sole architect.
Project Serpo is similar in plot to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and while that doesn’t out Steven Spielberg as an agent of the government, it does raise some interesting questions.
Mirage Men also shines a light on Robert Emenegger. He’s a longtime movie studio executive who insists that in 1973 the Pentagon approached him to make a movie that would reveal what the government actually knew about extraterrestrials, and their carrot was that he could use some top secret footage of an alien craft landing at Holloman Air Force Base.
How much truth there is to Emenegger’s story is up for debate, but in 1974 he DID make a documentary called “UFO's: Past, Present and Future” (narrated by Rod Serling), which allegedly included several seconds of the Holloman footage, with the rest of the landing illustrated using a re-enactment. Furthermore, in 1988 a former Air Force officer named Paul Shartle announced that the Holloman footage was real and that he had seen the entire film several times.
This article could stretch on and go very far afield, so I’m going to wrap up, but the links I’ve included will take you to some pretty incredible places that deserved their own limelight.
Suffice it to say that at this point, between Edward Snowden and Wikileaks it seems as though some pretty startling UFO stories should have come to light, but it’s beginning to look like where there was smoke there’s merely more smoke.
In 2010 Julian Assange was quoted as saying that "many weirdos email us about UFOs" but no hard evidence has turned up, and that the majority of UFO references he’s found were related to UFO cults rather than the crafts or sightings themselves.
And so I’ll leave you with this; Like everything else there are two sides to the MiB coin.
One of course is that Mirage Men is accurate.
But on the other hand, would there be a better way for the government to cover up their UFO secrets than by having a Richard Doty admit to deception by design? Could Mirage Men simply be more smoke and mirrors behind which to hide the smoke and mirrors?
At the end of the day we have no idea if the truth is out there, but we know Richard Doty is.
Whether the Men in Black are aliens themselves, or agents of the government, or aliens working in concert with the government are all up for grabs in terms of theories and those are the least interesting of the bunch.
As I said in the article that probably brought you here, I was introduced to the MiB by my inspiration, John Keel. Initially his idea of the Men in Black was generally what most people have come to believe about them. In other words they’re mysterious, devious and sometimes dangerous agents of the government whose sole purpose was to stop UFO enthusiasts from getting to “The Truth”.
However his thinking changed with his experiences. During and after his time investigating the Mothman in West Virginia he began to infer that the MiB were themselves actually representative of the very phenomena they were trying to keep under wraps. He described their olive complexion, almond shaped eyes and behaviors that seemed to indicate discomfort with our atmosphere.
Eventually he began referring to them as “Demonic Supernaturals”…
As far back as 1947, UFO pioneer Harold Dahl described a visit from a man in a dark suit who warned him not to talk about his well-known sighting at Maury Island, and throughout the 1950’s Albert K. Bender claimed to have been visited numerous times by men in black suits who told him it would be in his best interests to stop his research into UFO’s.
Those stories are common by UFO standards and make as much sense as anything else in this context, but what I find fascinating is that some fairly well known ufologists make it pretty clear they don’t believe the Men in Black exist.
Nobody comes right out and calls anyone else crazy, but historian Aaron Gulyas wrote, "during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, UFO conspiracy theorists would incorporate the Men in Black into their increasingly complex and paranoid visions" and going just a touch farther, ufologist Jerome Clark describes reports of Men in Black as "experiences" that "don’t seem to have occurred in the world of conscious reality".
But enough fooling around. Here’s the truth behind the Men in Black;
When Edward Snowden did his infamous data dump, in the mass of data was a classified GCHQ document (the Government Communications Headquarters is British intelligence) titled “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations”.
I won’t bother to describe the document, you can feel free to check out the link if you like, but strangely, buried in the middle of pictures of inflatable tanks and women in burkas are three classic fake UFO photographs. A hubcap, a bunch of balloons, and a bird.
Many ufologists took this to be proof that our (and other) governments are continuing to cover up the existence of visitors from other worlds, but in my humble opinion, the reality is exactly the opposite.
Let’s be honest, if in fact there is a “UFO Conspiracy” it’s the worst kept secret in the frigging world.
I mean I’d challenge you to find someone in any cave in any jungle on the planet who hasn’t heard of Roswell, Area 51 and doesn’t know that aliens are little green men. Ask the average person who’s supposed to keep the whole thing under wraps and they’ll tell you they know all about it because they saw it in the movies.
But the true believers, the devout of the devout, know Rip Torn doesn’t run the MiB (Also of course Boston Brides Magazine voted Men in Black the best wedding band in New England).
Basically Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones may have let the cat out of the bag, but it was Mark Pilkington who explained what the cat was up to. For UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy buffs Pilkington’s 2013 documentary “Mirage Men” answers a lot of questions.
Please allow me to introduce one Richard Doty.
THIS faithful readers, is a Man in Black…
Mr. Doty is a retired Air Force Special Investigations Officer who spent years infiltrating UFO circles, and doing so by never hiding his identity. His line was that he was with the government, and he was sick of keeping all the real secrets down deep in those vaults. Sick of it I tell you!
Doty and his colleagues fermented relationships with many ufologists who were desperate for inside information. He didn’t necessarily lie, but gave them just enough misinformation to send them and their paranoias careening off into all kinds of directions. What they got in return was the inside dope on who was looking into what, and who may have been accidentally stumbling onto to actual secret technology. At the same time (Bonus!), if foreign governments were watching all this and beginning to believe the US government really was communicating with aliens, it was just a happy byproduct.
In 1988, a successful electronics entrepreneur/distributor and amateur pilot named Paul Bennewitz was checked into a New Mexico psychiatric facility by his family.
In 1979 Bennewitz began seeing lights in the sky and despite the fact that the land just across the road from his home was part of Kirtland Air Force Base he believed those lights were of extraterrestrial origin.
Bennewitz contacted the Air Force, who realized immediately that it wasn’t ET he was watching. Rather than dissuading him the Air Force decided it was in their best interest to encourage him to continue his investigations and in fact step up the effort. Before long Bennewitz was interpreting alien languages and spotting crashed spacecraft in the hills from his plane.
What he apparently never considered was that the Air Force was surveilling him surveilling them. It was software provided by the Air Force that allowed him to do the language interpretations, and they were planting props for him to find on his flights.
Eventually Bennewitz began calling out the alarm about a full scale alien invasion, which lead to his family deciding enough was enough.
Paul Bennewitz was an extreme case, but there are plenty of others that are just as interesting.
Pilkington claims that cattle mutilations in the 1980’s Midwest were actually a result of the government testing the animal’s radiation levels due to some experiments with an underground process known as “Nuclear Fracking”. There are numerous interviews with former Army pilots who claim to have flown experimental silent helicopters with flashing lights attached to mislead anyone who might see them.
While Doty sometimes has plenty to say along these lines, he stops just short of admission in a number of fairly well known scenarios.
He discusses but not quite admits to taking part in leaking the so-called “Majestic 12” documents, which detail a committee formed by President Truman for the specific purpose of being the US government’s interface with alien intelligences, and flat out denied a role in “Project Serpo” (which involved 12 US military officers secretly visiting a planet in the Zeta Reticuli System) even though it later turned out that he was likely the sole architect.
Project Serpo is similar in plot to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and while that doesn’t out Steven Spielberg as an agent of the government, it does raise some interesting questions.
Mirage Men also shines a light on Robert Emenegger. He’s a longtime movie studio executive who insists that in 1973 the Pentagon approached him to make a movie that would reveal what the government actually knew about extraterrestrials, and their carrot was that he could use some top secret footage of an alien craft landing at Holloman Air Force Base.
How much truth there is to Emenegger’s story is up for debate, but in 1974 he DID make a documentary called “UFO's: Past, Present and Future” (narrated by Rod Serling), which allegedly included several seconds of the Holloman footage, with the rest of the landing illustrated using a re-enactment. Furthermore, in 1988 a former Air Force officer named Paul Shartle announced that the Holloman footage was real and that he had seen the entire film several times.
This article could stretch on and go very far afield, so I’m going to wrap up, but the links I’ve included will take you to some pretty incredible places that deserved their own limelight.
Suffice it to say that at this point, between Edward Snowden and Wikileaks it seems as though some pretty startling UFO stories should have come to light, but it’s beginning to look like where there was smoke there’s merely more smoke.
In 2010 Julian Assange was quoted as saying that "many weirdos email us about UFOs" but no hard evidence has turned up, and that the majority of UFO references he’s found were related to UFO cults rather than the crafts or sightings themselves.
And so I’ll leave you with this; Like everything else there are two sides to the MiB coin.
One of course is that Mirage Men is accurate.
But on the other hand, would there be a better way for the government to cover up their UFO secrets than by having a Richard Doty admit to deception by design? Could Mirage Men simply be more smoke and mirrors behind which to hide the smoke and mirrors?
At the end of the day we have no idea if the truth is out there, but we know Richard Doty is.