Make mention of the Men in Black to most people and doing so will likely provoke images of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. After all the trilogy of Men in Black movies were phenomenally successful and brought the subject to a huge, worldwide audience. Outside of Ufology, most people assume that the Men in Black were the creations of Hollywood. This, however, is very wide of the mark: in reality, the movies were based upon a short-lived comic book series that was created by Lowell Cunningham in 1990. Most important of all, the comic-books were based on real-life encounters with the MIB – which date back decades. In fact, in the movies, the characters portrayed by Jones and Smith are known as J and K. There is a good reason for that: they are the initials of the late John Keel, who wrote the acclaimed book, The Mothman Prophecies and who spent a lot of time pursuing MIB encounters, and particularly so in the 1960s and 1970s. In that sense, the producers of the Men in Black movies and comic-books were paying homage to Keel. Now let’s get to the heart of the matter, namely, the real Men in Black; not those of Hollywood. Who are they? Where do they come from? What is their agenda? If there is one thing we can say for sure when it comes to the matter of the MIB, it’s that they are the ultimate Controllers – they threaten, intimidate and terrify those into silence who they visit. Let’s see how the mystery all began.
It was in the early 1950s that a man named Albert Bender created a UFO research group called the International Flying Saucer Bureau. The group was based out of Bender’s home town of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Bender was someone who quickly became enthused by the UFO phenomenon when it kicked off in earnest in the summer of 1947, with Kenneth Arnold’s acclaimed and now-legendary sighting of a squadron of UFOs over the Cascade Mountains. The world was changed and so was Albert Bender. As a result of the establishment of the IFSB, Albert Bender found himself inundated with letters, phone calls and inquiries from people wanting information on the UFO enigma. Bender was pleased to oblige and he created his very own newsletter – Space Review. It was a publication which was regularly filled with worldwide accounts of UFO activity, alien encounters, and sightings of flying saucers. And on the worldwide issue, it’s worth noting that so popular was Bender’s group and magazine, he found himself inundated with letters from all around the planet: communications poured in from the U.K., from Australia, from South America, and even a few from Russia. Bender was on a definitive high: the little journal that he typed up from his attic room in the old house in which he lived, was suddenly a major part of Ufology. It’s most curious, then, that in the latter part of 1953, Bender quickly shot down the International Flying Saucer Bureau, and he ceased the publication of Space Review. Many of Bender’s followers suspected that something was wrong, as in very wrong. They were right on the money, as it happens.
Hellbound and Down 