Were the Men in Black Real?

The Men in Black are described as men who wear black suits. They sometimes have glowing eyes or other characteristics that are strange and unusual. The Men in Black claim to be government agents and they harass or threaten UFO witnesses in order to silence them about UFOs. Usually due to the witnesses making the information on what they have seen public.

I have been doing some research on this subject - mainly because they related in some way to the events that occurred with the Mothman in the 1960s. Going through several sites, I came across an article that gave some very interesting information.

The article was written by a man named John C. Sherwood. It is entitled "My Friend, The Mythmaker." John Sherwood tells about his work with another man named Gray Barker and his experiences with developing false stories.

Here's an excerpt:

I pulled Gray's letters out of my files after my wife and I saw the trailer for the 1997 summer movie hit Men in Black, the Tommy Lee Jones/Will Smith megamillion-dollar movie spectacle that owes a fair share of its style to Gray's 1956 book They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers. The fact that I had kept the letters might bother Gray now, considering what I'm about to confess. In fact, Gray (and some others deceived by what he and I concocted) may meet me in hell with fangs at the ready. To those who were fooled, I certainly owe an apology for the role I played. But it's time that this material was made public.

Barker's day job was as a theatrical film booker in Clarksburg, West Virginia. He also was a talented writer, an early lover of flying-saucer lore, and a man who could make a good story better. He was hyperimaginative and could have written science fiction.

A lot of what he wrote probably was just that. But he always offered his accounts as fact.

They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers made the Men in Black (M.I.B.) feared within UFO circles during the late 1950s and 1960s. The book now is hard to find, and my hardcover copy -- the third printing -- has crispy pages. In it, Gray told about alleged brushes between the sinister M.I.B. and a Connecticut man, Al K. Bender, who set the pace for what is now the stereotypical M.I.B. story: Someone sees a UFO and tries to tell the world about it. Without warning, three men in black suits and driving a big black car confront the witness. Afterwards, the witness appears too frightened to talk further about the UFO -- or anything else. Woo-WOOO-oo!

In account after account within the pages of They Knew Too Much and subsequent writings by others (including John Keel, who began using the shorthand "M.I.B." in his writings), the mysterious trio -- who at times seem to have uncanny mental powers and weird, otherworldly faces -- squelch all discussion about supposedly true UFO encounters. The whole notion smacked of a huge, pre-Watergate conspiracy.

He does also say in his article:

As I began to write this apologetic revelation in July 1997, the news came that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency indeed may have participated in a coverup not unlike that supposedly initiated by the fabled M.I.B. U.S. intelligence historian Gerald K. Haines wrote an unclassified article for Studies of Intelligence, a CIA journal, revealing that during the 1950s the U.S. Air Force and other agencies actually did conspire to suppress the UFO issue and to concoct false cover stories to explain sightings of such super-secret U.S. spy planes as the U-2 and later the SR-71 Blackbird.

View the full article here (CSICOP.org)

Obviously, this may make one wonder: Were the MIB real? What about recent sightings? Could we have somehow created the phenomena by believing it was real? Or is there mystery to it, as the CIA may have actually conspired as described in the article.

Feel free to leave your comments, ideas and information. As a side note, I'd like to mention I am doing research on various topics and decided that as I research, I'll post up things I feel are interesting and you can obviously take them however you choose to.