If You Go Looking

Men in Black

UN/4/E+C

The silencers

Visitors who warn witnesses to stay quiet, and seem not quite to know how to be human.

The story starts in 1953, when Albert Bender closed his flying saucer club in Connecticut, saying that men in dark suits had warned him off. It became a legend through Gray Barker's book of 1956, though Barker was also a known hoaxer. In the late 1960s Keel gathered stranger versions: visitors with odd skin and stiff manners who seemed unfamiliar with ordinary objects, closer to the uncanny strangers of old folklore than to government agents. The figure answers the question every witness is eventually asked, why there is no proof, with a ready reply: someone took it.

If you go looking

No practice attached

There is nothing here to seek out. If you feel you are being watched or followed and it is distressing you, that is worth raising with your GP or someone you trust.

Who should be careful

Reading the code

UN/4/E+C

Origin uncertain · embodiment 4 of 5, physical but manifests oddly · source: recurring reports + contactee tradition · key

Dates

Bender's account: 1953

Barker's book: 1956

Keel's versions: late 1960s

Related

Keel met the stranger versions during Point Pleasant. Read as agents, they belong to the crash-retrieval story; read as uncanny visitors, to Keel's umbrella.

Cryptid-adjacent entities →Ultraterrestrials →Crash-retrieval occupants →

Terms used on this page

UN: origin uncertain

Origin code

Reported with some consistency but carrying no origin claim in the encounters themselves. Filing these as alien is an assumption the listener adds.

Degree of embodiment: 4, physical but manifests oddly

Scale, 1 to 5

5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.

E: recurring reports

Source code

Described by many apparently unconnected witnesses. The strongest category in the guide, and the smallest.

C: contactee tradition

Source code

Traceable to one named person's claimed meetings. Detailed, often internally consistent, and rarely corroborated by anyone who did not read the first account.

Gray Barker

Writer and publisher, 1956

West Virginian author whose They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) introduced the Men in Black. In 1957 he helped forge the “Straith letter” to George Adamski on State Department paper, so his own accounts need care.

John Keel

1966–1975

Point Pleasant convinced him the phenomenon was neither extraterrestrial nor consistent. He proposed ultraterrestrials: intelligences that are local, deceptive about their own nature, and not reliably material.

No practice attached

Tradition-side

There is nothing to do here: no inherited method of engagement, whether the tradition is a text, an argument or a set of reports. Anyone offering you one has invented it.

Deliberate contact work

Read this first

The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.

Who should be careful

Practice-side

Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.

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