MIBs

The UFO field is so vast, so complex, that each slice of it seems to have its own kind of synchronicity. Some facets of it seem to belong to certain eras.

For instance,  you don’t hear too much about men in black anymore – MIBs – unless it’s a reference to the movies. In a nutshell, MIBs are men dressed in black who harass or threaten UFO witnesses to keep them quiet about what they have seen or experienced. They usually claim to be government agents.

Years ago, we wrote for the UFO section of OMNI Magazine and were assigned to cover a UFO conference in Hollywood, Florida. Budd Hopkins and Betty Hill were among the speakers. Hopkins was an artist who became involved in the UFO field through a sighting he had in 1964. He went on to write several notable books that helped define certain aspects of UFOlogy – Missing Time and Intruders. Betty Hill and her husband, Barney, were abducted in New Hampshire in 1961. The book about their abduction – The Interrupted Journey – was published in 1966. 

The conference in Hollywood took place during one of the pleasant months in South Florida – nice weather, sunny, but not too hot. We were sitting outside with Hopkins, who was taking about a well-known novelist  who had had repeated abduction experiences and was writing a book about it. That was a few months before Communion was published. So we think he was referring to Whitley Strieber, although he never gave the writer’s name. Betty Hill was sitting there with us and started talking about her and Barney’s experience (but Betty is for another post!). When she finished talking, Hopkins remarked that he had done a radio show that morning and had gotten a call he wanted to check out from a couple in Lake Worth, but he didn’t have a car. We volunteered to drive him up to Lake Worth to talk to them.

The couple lived close to what was then the offices of the National Enquirer. The wife’s abduction happened around Christmas, when the newspaper used to erect a huge Christmas tree on their grounds that could be seen for miles. Under hypnosis, which Hopkins conducted, she described being levitated by two Grays from her bedroom, into the backyard, and up a clear tube to a ship. En route, she saw the Christmas tree from above and pointed at it. Hopkins asked how the Grays reacted to the glowing tree, and she replied, “They don’t seem impressed.”

Skip ahead a few weeks. We got a call from the husband, saying that he and his wife wanted to get together for dinner or drinks. So we invited them and some friends over to our place. Our friends included two psychics. We were curious about what what, if anything, they would pick up about the couple.

The couple from  Lake Worth  – let’s call them Jim and June – arrived a bit late. Jim was dressed entirely in black and wore a necklace with a gold devil’s head dangling from it. He had a gray goatee and looked, we thought, like an undertaker. During the course of the evening, it became apparent that he was a total control freak who recounted is wife’s abduction experience as though it had happened to him. She said almost nothing. He also told us that he was a former Baptist minister, who ‘changed sides,’ hence accounting for the necklace.

During the evening, we were seated on two couches in front of sliding glass doors leading to a parking lot. There was a lot of discussion about various aspects of the UFO phenomenon. Shortly after 1 AM, we started talking about men in black and suddenly, Renie – one of the psychics-  said, “Uh, guys, there’s some creep skulking around outside watching us.”

The other psychic, Tony, shot to his feet. “It’s a guy in black.”

All of us ran to the sliding glass doors and poured into the parking lot. The man in black froze, the proverbial deer in the glare of headlights. He sure didn’t look like Tommy Lee Jones or Will Smith. His face looked waxen in the parking lot lights, and he was definitely dressed in black. He even wore sunglasses. Rob shouted something at him, then he tore away from us. But he ran in an odd fashion, crouched down, moving from car to car.

Rob ran after him, but he raced into the back of the complex. At that point, one of us called 911. This complex was large, but backed up to a canal, so the only way in or out was through the guardhouse at the front. The cops arrived within minutes and searched the complex for a long time, with dogs, and never found the guy. Apparently, a man had been murdered that evening less than a mile away, and they thought our Man in Black might the killer.

We never saw Jim and June again.

So the man’s choices for escape were to enter one of the apartments, dive into the canal, or… well, who knows?