It all began in late August 1971 in a town in East
Midlands, England. Jim Wilson had
observed a white light moving slowly across the sky. Just an ordinary mundane
sighting of no special interest but ufologist Derek James, a close colleague of
Jenny Randles, made a standard follow up. He was rather surprised to find that
two men in smart business suits and driving a black car har interviewed Jim
Wilson. The men claimed to be from the Ministry of Defense (MoD) and instructed
the witness to forget the sighting as it had been identified as the Russian
satellite Cosmos 408.
Why would the MoD send two men to interrogate a
witness to such an ordinary sighting? Derek James checked the satellite
information centre at Farnborough. At the time of the observation Cosmos 408
had been over Canada and had not passed over England at all. Now the witness
contacted Derek once more and was rather alarmed because several nights in
succession two unknown men in a black Jaguar car had parked outside his house
and he was sure they were watching him. Derek James had a relative who was a
high ranking police officer and a plan was hatched to check the car as they were
perhaps planning a robbery.
A police car was asked to keep a look out and on
October 19 and 20 the policemen watched the car outside Jim Wilson´s house. The
car waited for about thirty minutes and then drove off. A check of the car
registration found out that the vehicle did not exist and now the police became
really interested. On October 21 a police patrol was ordered to bring in the
occupants of the Jaguar for questioning. Following standard procedure the two
policemen walked towards the car, one on either side. They noticed two smartly
dressed men inside. They were just about to knock on the window when the car
simply disappeared into nothingness in front of the astonished policemen. The
area was examined but gave no clue to the disappearance. Neither car nor
occupants were ever seen again. For rather obvious reasons a cover story was presented
in the final police report.
Jenny Randles in 2016
This unusual Men In Black case was published by
Derek James and Jenny Randles in Flying Saucer Review, vol. 23, no. 3, October
1977. A somewhat updated version was later published in Investigating the Truth
Behind MIB the Men In Black Phenomenon (1997). These elusive gentlemen and
their mysterious black cars have been reported during the whole of the UFO era
and observed by both UFO witnesses and investigators. Gray Barker´s classic
They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) put hem on the ufological map
for ever.
When John Keel visited Sweden and my home in October
1976 we especially discussed the Men In Black, which Keel regarded as one of
the really intriguing aspects of the UFO enigma. He had investigated many MIB
encounters, personally trying to chase their strange cars many times as related
in his last book The Eighth Tower: “On
a number of occasions I actually saw the phantom Cadillacs as advertised,
complete with sinister-looking passengers in black suits. On Long Island,
following the directions given me in an anonymous phone call, I pursued one of
these cars down a dead-end road where it seemingly vanished into thin air
(there were no side roads or turn-offs).” (p. 141).
During his years of
active UFO investigations Keel presented different theories about the MIB. In
1967 he regarded them as definitely a menace, as revealed in a letter, July 18,
1967, to Jim and Coral Lorenzen of APRO: ”The MIB represent a very large
terrestrial group who are allied with a very hostile UFO group. They are not
connected with any goverment in any way… The people I am concerned with are
Androids… manifactured entities controlled by a distant and unknown master…
they are quite stupid in many respects.”
This last comment by John
Keel is very apt. In many cases these elusive figures behave like some not too
intelligent characters from a badly rehearsed amateur play. But the MIB
obviously have different origins and agendas as evidenced by the hundreds of
cases published. The men confiscating photos, films and other items from
witnesses and ufologists are probably intelligence agents. In one of his first
letters to me in 1984 Timothy Good mentioned his involvement with the MIB:
”Some of them are from various intelligence branches here on Earth, but other,
I feel, are from extraterrestrial or Earth-based advanced groups. I have had
MIB experiences myself, and have even taken a photo of a possible MIB and his
car (it was rented of course). The photo of the man (who was not actually
dressed in black) came out with a black or dark halo around his head, so that
one can´t see his face at all… I´ve had my picture taken by shady characters in
both the U.S. and U.S.S.R., and had an important notebook stolen from my motel
room during one of my many trips to the U.S. Nothing else was taken, although
cameras and lenses were in my camera bag on the bed.” (Letter, February 27,
1984).
Timothy Good
Men In Black encounters are not always threatening. Sometimes witnesses simply report odd looking salesmen or persons acting in strange ways in their vicinity. A Swedish ufologist who have reported such an incident is former chairman of UFO-Sweden, Thorvald (Bevan) Berthelsen. Some of these events
were mentioned by Thorvald when I interviewed him on October 10, 1992. In the
beginning of the 1970s he regarded UFOs as a "ridiculous, laughable"
subject. But something happened in the summer of 1972 that was to change his
life.
Interviewing Bevan Berthelsen at AFU, October 10, 1992
In the middle of one
night in the summer of 1972 Thorvald left his bed sleepwalking. He put on his
clothes, left his house and bicycled about two kilometer (1,4 miles) to an
uninhabited plateau (Slätängen) with a few deserted crofts situated between the
towns of Köping and Arboga. At this plateau he suddenly woke up, wondering what
he was doing there in the middle of the night. Rather irrationally he picked a
few flowers, found his bike and went back home where his wife naturally was
curious to know what he was doing in the middle of the night, as he had been
gone for several hours. Thorvald could give no logical answer as he was not a
sleepwalker. To this day he is still puzzled by the event.
Thorvald (Bevan) Berthelsen 1992
About a week after this curious episode Thorvald became
intensively fascinated by UFOs and borrowed all books he could find in the
local library. He soon contacted the UFO-Sweden organization and formed the local group Köpings UFO-förening in January
1973. On March 11, 1973 Thorvald, together with three witnesses from his
workplace, observed a cylindershaped object silently passing over Köping. No
explanation was found to this observation which was reported in local media.
Thorvald Berthelsen and
his wife lived in a country house with good views in all directions. On the
same day his UFO observation was mentioned in the local newspaper a man knocks
on their door. Bevan is met by a man in his thirties, dressed in a brown suit
and white shirt. He has dark hair, appears suntanned and his eyes are slanted
but still not Asian looking. The man ask Bevan how he is feeling and continue
asking about directions. He says thank you and leave. "I thought, who the
hell was that? I ran out and looked for him. The road was straight in both
directions. If he had come walking I would have seen him. His eyes were
slanted. That caught my attention. Afterwards I felt this experience was
weird".
In
the January-February 1973 issue of Round Robin. The Journal of Borderland
Research, I read about a rather fantastic MIB case in Canada. It was a letter
from J.L.S., Victoria, B.C. :
”… the experience of
a young man we know personally, who lived in Victoria. He had been
an UFO enthusiast for many years and had seen a number, too . Finally he caught
one on the ground near the top of a local mountain. The occupants decided to
take him into their confidence, and told him how they were getting control
of communications, finance , industry and politics. Several of them, they told
him, are living in Victoria and are married to earth women. They are interesting young people in a crusade to " take over" at some future date. Inference was that this was going on in all the big
cities. There was a U.S. submarine in port at the time and
they invited him to come aboard. This is only a small part of what
the young man told us here, but the upshot was that due to the
lad's religious scruples he suddenly decided he couldn't go along with them. The
result was a series of accidents which befell him. For several months he was in
the hospital more than he was out of
it! Finally he left town but we heard that he is still being hounded
where he went. Can't get anything more out of his parents. They were UFO fans
too, but now wont talk. A man came to the father's shop one day - in a black suit! - and
asked for Herman. When told the young man was in
the Hospital the man said , 'Well ,we warned him.' These are rather simple people, Dutch immigrants, and this development has been a severe
jolt to them.”
In
1984 I decided to try a follow up on this case and wrote to Riley Crabb, editor
of Round Robin, asking for the adress to the man in Canada. On May 27, 1984 I
received a reply from Riley including one of the letters from Canada. When
I read Riley´s answer today, I become both surprised and distressed: ”I did
find the 1973 file in the attic and am enclosing a Squance letter for you to
follow up on. All this old material is going to the dump when I sell out here,
hopefully later this year…”. Maybe much of his ”old material” did go to the
dump but we at AFU succeeded in saving a major part of the BSRF archive in
2016. To me it is almost inconceivable and a riddle why Riley Crabb would
want to dump his extremely important archive.
I
wrote to the adress in Canada, John and Dorothy Squance in Victoria, B.C. and
received a kind reply on June 21, 1984. John mentioned that he and his wife had
conducted a discussion group in their home and about 1970 the young man´s
parents started attending the group. The subject of UFOs often came up for
discussion. On one occasion the parents told of their son´s experiences so he
was invited to talk to the group. The young man attended once and spoke for
about thirty minutes of what he had become involved in. ”He spoke of them
enlisting a force of several hundred young people who would help them bring
about the new dispensation they were planning. It was all to be top secret for
a time while their leaders infiltrated finance, economics and industry… The
program they said was being initiated in all the larger cities.”
According
to John Squance the boy became disillusioned and quit having anything more to
do with the ”space people”. It was then that the harassment began. The young
man was hospitalized on at least two occasions because of rather inexplicable
accidents. The father told John some time later that a man had come into his
store asking where the boy was. When the father said ”in the hospital”, the
reply was ”Well we told him to keep his mouth shut”. In the letter to me John
said that both the young man and his father were now dead. In a follow up letter
July 19, 1984 John mentioned that the young man died of ”a mixture of alcohol
and drugs. Possibly mental harassment”. This information makes it rather likely
that the MIB story was a paranoid fantasy, the result of the young man´s drug
abuse and the black suited man who entered the father´s shop some local mafia
leader involved in illegal drug trafficking. Unless, of course, this is
evidence of covert activities of an unknown mafia group, earth-based or
extraterrestrial?
Although
the Men In Black is definitely a serious and possibly dangerous aspect of UFO
research I must relate a rather amusing story how the Men In Black became a help
to UFO-Sweden. It is told in the autobiography of Mats Nilsson, one of
UFO-Sweden´s oldboys still active as board member. In the 1970s and 80s a very
eccentric old gentleman, Karl-Gustav Porath, always attended the annual
UFO-Sweden conferences. He placed himself in the front row with a large tape recorder.
Porath always had fantastic UFO contact stories to relate, unfortunately often to
the visiting journalists, which gave UFO-Sweden unwanted publicity. One of his
stories told of how he could make ordinary flies fly in military formation.
Karl-Gustav Porath
In
1979 UFO-Sweden arranged a large UFO exhibition and lectures at the National
Museum of Science and Technology, Stockholm. When Mats Nilsson and Håkan
Ekstrand from UFO-Sweden discovered that Karl-Gustav Porath was there as usual
they came up with a brilliant idea. Mats and Håkan approached Porath, who was
deadly afraid of the Men In Black, and told him the MIB was among the public,
disguised as journalists. Porath was very glad to get this information and
didn´t talk to any reporter about his experiences. Mission accomplished!
