March 21, 2019 • 49 mins
Belief in UFOs is very much like a religion. It can fulfill the same purpose in an individual's life, give them a community of believers and provide grander framework for mundane life. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick consider the similarities between the so-called “men in black” and the devil.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
You know, we've covered a lot of UFO beliefs on
the show over the years, talk about alien abduction experiences,
(00:24):
strange lights in the sky, ancient aliens, speculation, and we've
covered it all with our usual level of skeptical enthusiasm.
I would say, not coming at it in order to
prove all the stories true and believe, but also appreciating
that fantastical beliefs and experiences and even delusions are interesting
phenomena that are worth studying and paying attention to. Yeah,
(00:47):
why are people reporting these stories? What what is actually
occurring that might be interpreted as such? And and then
why do we tell the stories that we tell? Like,
all these questions are sort of bound up in the
same riddle. But to refresh, this is the basic truth
of the matter. Humans have always seen things they couldn't explain,
and some of these things were actual phenomena, such as
(01:09):
shooting stars or unusual weather effects. Other times these were
hallucinations which can occur can occur for a variety of reasons, only,
some of which entail the ingestion of psychedelics or symptoms
of mental illness, and in either case, things seen became
become things remembered. And memory is a tricky thing all
(01:29):
in its own, highly susceptible to error, to manipulation, and
change due to personal desires, interpretations, cultural priming, and a
host of other factors. Yeah, that's exactly right. And one
of the things that I often think about doesn't get
enough attention when when people discuss fantastical experiences like say,
(01:49):
you know, UFO abduction experiences and sightings and things like that,
is is all of these in between categories that create
memory experiences for people or create you know, at least
in some way or another, lead a person to relate
and experience that are not exactly one of three clear options.
(02:12):
The three clear options usually presented are somebody actually physically
had this UFO abduction experience, they really were taken up,
or they're lying and they're just making up a story
they know to be false. Or they hallucinated it like
they had a vision where they imagine that they really
believed all this stuff was happening to them at the time,
(02:35):
and that you know, and then they remember that hallucination
as if it was a real physical event. I think
those are actually not the only three options. They usually
treated as like the main three things that could have happened.
I think what gets underappreciated or these sort of like
weird middle categories where you know, where like imagination and
fancy and retelling and embellishment and all these different kinds
(02:58):
of things sort of interact in a stew within the mind.
And there's so many ways this can happen. One piece
of research that I always just think it's such an
interesting little example of demonstrating how contagious imagery and ideation
can be between one brain subsystem and another is a
two thousand six study called do you Remember Proposing Marriage
(03:21):
to the Pepsi Machine? False recollection? False recollections from a
campus walk And this was in the Psychonomic Bulletin and
Review two thousand and six by by Semen, Philbin, and Harrison.
And basically the gist here is that students were asked
to perform, and too so somewhere asked to perform, and
some were asked to merely imagine themselves performing or imagine
(03:43):
seeing somebody perform activities, both normal like checking a pepsi
machine for change or lying down on a couch to relax,
and also actions that were bizarre, like proposing marriage to
a pepsi machine or lying down on a couch to
have a chat with Sigmund Freud. And it turned out
in this study at least that even just imagining performing
(04:04):
these activities caused many subjects to later recall having actually
performed them. Of course, this doesn't always happen, like sometimes
you remember the difference, but sometimes you don't remember the difference.
Sometimes the contents of our minds I are contagious in
a way that can spread into memory. Things that we
think about happening, can in some cases become things that
(04:25):
we believe happened. And this is possible in people who
have not been diagnosed with any conditions that cause psychosis
or hallucinations. It's just one of the many interesting ways
that you can see uh memories being meddled with in
in this kind of contagious way within the brain. And
of course we do outright invent things, sometimes in full things.
(04:47):
We have terrifying visions, and certainly there are hoaxes in
the world. But still even with hoaxes. There's there's still
this element of the human imagination that ultimately helped the
dream of every god, demon, fairy and an extraterrestrial that
we've ever considered. And once these things are created, they're
essentially available as food, uh for our meaning hungry minds.
(05:11):
And so the version of all of this that emerged
in the post War War two period and continues on
to this day, though with decreased energy, is that of
the alien UFO, the unidentified flying object, the the the
alien visitation. And uh. Today we're zeroing in on one
particular aspect of UFO folk belief, one with some insightful
(05:35):
connections potentially to older religious ideas. We're gonna be talking
about m I B. Men in Black. Should I sing
the song from the movie. No, I don't think we
should do that. I don't want to get night Cheese done.
Here's right. Uh. So, to be clear, where the Men
in Black franchise, I don't even aggressively pursues. I p
(05:59):
that is a big franchise that we're still going strong.
There's the first one came out, but yeah, there's there's
a new one coming out like in the next year.
I don't think I ever saw past the first one.
I think I too, have only seen the first one.
Uh they maybe the other ones may be great. I
don't know, but we're not really talking about those movies today. However,
(06:20):
those movies are based on I believe they were based
on a comic book. But but the whole franchise is
based on this concept of Men in Black. Uh, the
end result doesn't really do the original idea justice in
my opinion. Um, even though many of us me included, well,
you know, we learned about Men in Black for the
first time through watching this n sci fi action comedy.
(06:46):
You know, I can't be positive, but I know I
watched a lot of terrible like BS fringe documentaries when
I was a kid, you know, all the stuff about
how I think I've said this on the show before.
When I was in like second or third grade, I
was big into like cockness, monster UFOs. I was convinced
all that was real, and I think I I had
watched like, I don't know what it was, it whatever
(07:08):
masqueraded as like educational programming on television that was just
like propaganda for conspiracy theories and beliefs about the paranormal. Oh,
I too was very confused by episodes of specifically in
Search Off hosted by Leonard Nimoi and Unsolved Mysteries hosted
by Robert Stack. However, I don't I don't remember. There
(07:29):
may have been episodes of Unsolved Mysteries that Involvement in Black,
but if there were, I don't remember seeing. Well, I
I'm pretty sure I saw something at some point that
made me aware of the concept. But even if I
wasn't aware, then yeah, definitely the movie came along. I
think maybe I don't know if it was before or
after the Men in Black movie. There was the episode
of The X Files Jose Chunks from Outer Space, which
(07:52):
is one of the best episodes of all time. It
still holds up today. It's so good, it's so funny,
and it has classic Men in Black cameos in It
isn't the idea here that the Men in Black take
on the guys of famous individuals, of celebrities so that
you can't report it to the police without sounding ridiculous,
which is funny because in in the episode you can
tell they kind of did their research. This sort of
(08:14):
mirrors real things that people reported about Men in Black experiences.
Sometimes people said that the experience would be, you know,
ridiculous or absurd, as in the implication is, oh, it's
because they wanted to keep everything hush hush, and so
they knew if they acted absurd, I wouldn't be able
to tell people without them laughing at me. Now, some
(08:36):
of you out there, you might have heard about Men
in Black through at least a couple of different films
that came out. One came out in nine same year
as Men in Black, titled The Shadow Men, and I
have not seen this yet, but I saw the trailer.
It looks fabulous in a n way, featuring Eric Roberts,
Dean Stockwell, and Andrew Pine, and uh, it's more of
(09:00):
it seems to be more of a traditional Men in
Black movie with with these like weird, tall suited individuals
with dark glasses that are messing with their protagonists trying
to keep them from sharing some sort of information with
the world about UFOs, and then upon closer inspection they
don't seem to be quite human. And then there's a
(09:22):
there's a much earlier actually Men in Black plot line
in a movie from nineteen eight titled titled Hanger eighteen,
but certainly by the time that the Men in Black
came out by the time, you know, the X Files,
that had ample opportunity uh to uh to educate everyone
about the idea. We saw all sorts of other echoes
in various bits of media. For instance, the Thin Men
(09:45):
and the X Calm Games are classic men in black
characters like uh, thin thin guys in suits with weird
um facial features that are not quite human. Uh. They're
a doctor who I believe has a species called the
Silence that show up. They're very men in black esque,
and even a couple of ultimately you know, rather different
(10:09):
bits of cinema, But the the Agents from the Matrix
are essentially men in black. The Strangers of Dark City
are in many ways men in black. That's interesting. I
hadn't thought about that with the with the Strangers, I
definitely see it with the agents. Um. Well, before we
get into the particulars, let's just try to sketch out
the broad kind of version of the men in Black folklore.
(10:30):
What what would you say is that the broadest possible
interpretation of it. It's that most commonly somebody becomes in
some way involved with UFO lore. They either have a
UFO experience, they see a UFO, or they have an
abduction experience, or they begin researching UFO phenomena, that's right,
(10:52):
And then suddenly men wearing black show up, weird possibly
government law enforcement types who are who suddenly show and
want to suppress you, want to silence you, either after
you have shared your claim of of UFO sightings or
what have you, or in many cases before you share it. Yeah,
so they tend to often be fond of like blacks,
(11:13):
large black sedans, cadillacs. They come and they approach you,
the person who is interested in UFOs for some reason
or doing UFO research or how do UFO experience. They
tell you either you didn't see what you think you saw,
or they tell you to stop researching, or they tell
you to stop spreading the word about UFOs, or occasionally,
in some reports it's exactly the opposite. Sometimes people in
(11:36):
black suits, men in black suits or black hats or
whatever show up to say, actually, keep going and keep digging,
there's more to see, there's more to learn. Yeah, they
take out more of like a like a deep throat
persona and stories and throwing their lots of variegated weirdness,
you know, just sort of like strange flourishes on the story. Right,
(11:56):
So let's put all this in context. I start talking
about the time for aim here because I think the
more we talk about it, the more obvious it becomes.
Like where these elements, like even the deep throat element
and the element of like like government corruption, uh, spies
and espionage and what have you, where it all comes from.
So reading around about this, it seems like the sort
(12:17):
of the patient zero for all of this was a
man by the name of Harold Doll. This when all
of this took place. So claims were made by Fred
Krismin and Harold Doll about threats by men in Black
following sightings of UFOs and the skies over Mari Island
in the Puget Sound. Uh. And this was related in
(12:38):
Gray Barker's six book that they knew too much about
flying saucers, which this book helped popularize stories of men
in Black. Um, you know a lot of this is like,
you know, this is the people who are into UFOs,
like this is these are the texts they were reading
and sharing and and then um basing some of their
experiences on. So another brief thing about timeline is while
(13:02):
various forms of paranormal abduction experiences seemed to go way
back in time. The UFO thing really seemed to pick
up around and after World War Two. And you can
offer all kinds of reasons for this. I mean, some
would have to do with, like say, alleged sightings of
UFO by Allied you know, pilots and Air Air Force
(13:22):
personnel during the war. Um. But other things might be
might have to do with certain trends in science fiction
movies and things like that. Now another case, and this
one was related by Peter M. Roycewitz, who wrote a
really important paper that we're going to come back to
because I don't want to spoil what we're talking about
bye bye by saying the title just yet, we will
come back to it. I mentioned in nineteen fifty two
(13:44):
in Connecticut, you had this guy by the name of
Albert K. Binder. So Binder lived with his stepfather in
the top floor of a house described by a local
newspaper as a quote chamber of horrors. But I mean
this seems like but basically they had a bunch of
Halloween decorations up in his room. That sounds fun, Yeah,
I mean that's like my room growing up. So you know,
(14:06):
nobody ever said it was a chamber of hars anyway,
uh Binder was a big sci fi fan, and he
wrote a letter to a friend state quote stating that
he had learned the origin and ultimate goal of extraterrestrial
visitation on the Earth unquote. But then he claims that
what happened is suddenly Men in Black came up and
they confronted him telepathically with the intercept about the intercepted letter,
(14:29):
and then forced him to shut down his various UFO
interest projects. I mean at least for a while, because
he later writes a book about all of it and
claims that the Men in Black were from another planet,
among a whole host of other wild claims. Was this
the one about going to Antarctica? I believe? And yeah, yeah,
so it's it's wild in a way that like, like
you you kind of want to tell him, like stop,
(14:51):
you stopped there because you had like a compelling story,
just the right number of fantastic elements. But then you
just you kept going with it. Uh So, Roy so
at See points out that the Men in Black stories
they really flourished for a very brief time in between
nineteen sixty six and nineteen sixty seven, with multiple UFO
researchers claiming that they had m IB encounters they either
(15:14):
encountered them alone or impairs, though mostly in threes. And
they claim that these individuals, you know, they showed up
and they know way too much about them. They know about,
you know, what their UFO experience might have been, what
the details are, and and no, you know, and they
know about it before you you even had a chance
to go and tell other people about it. And a
(15:35):
lot of these tales seem to be inspired or colored
by Cold War espionage fiction. Uh, you know, they often
claimed the men in black often claim to be military
intelligence offers, officers or so the stories go, well, yeah,
with the you know, sixty six sixty seven, it's hard
not to miss the timing with like the James Bond
franchise there and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and
(15:56):
just the idea of like shadowy government figures, you know,
at large. So interestingly enough, during the height of all
of this, according to m royce Witz, a confidential correspondence
from the Pentagon went out to intelligence command centers telling
them to notify the Office of Special Investigations if anyone
pretending to be a military officer attempted to strong arm
(16:18):
UFO witnesses, which which is interesting because I guess it's
the The idea here is that if enough people were
claiming it, they probably said, look, be alert, just in
case there's anybody going around pretending to be uh law
enforcement or a federal law enforcement and messing with UFO people.
I think the most common allegation was that that they
(16:39):
were somehow associated with the Air Force, right, because they're
the Air Force, they should know, right. Yeah, well, I
think back then the Air Force might have had a stranger,
more futuristic connotation than it does today. Now the Air
Force just seems like a more mundane branch of the
armed services. That's a good point. I hadn't thought about
that now. There's also there's a lot of stuff in
them in Men in Black Lore that doesn't necessarily, in
(17:00):
many cases thankfully does not survive into our science fiction.
For instance, Roy Switz points out that there's this whole
anti Semitic strain of Men in Black lore from that
time period that entailed to just a bunch of anti
Semitic nonsense, which isn't surprised, and given the long history
of blood libel and conspiracy theories about the Jewish people,
(17:21):
and and how easily modern conspiracy theories fall back into
this same down the same well as as well. Um
And if you if you want to see this for yourself,
just spend fifteen minutes on the internet, Like you, just
go go to YouTube and start looking around conspiracy theories
and see how long it takes you to hit something
just overtly anti Semitic. Unfortunately, the conspiracy theory spaces uh
(17:45):
often just run through with this stuff, right, and then
it goes beyond um anti semitism. There's also a trend
to describe men and black agents as Asian or ethnically
ambiguous in some way, shape or form generally embodies a
kind of like white American chauvinism. Uh and and just
general idea. I mean it almost just suggests that what
(18:07):
could you do to make somebody weirder while you just
generally make them not a white American? Right? So royce
Witz shares the two account by one Michael Elliott, and
I'm just going to read a passage from it here. Quote.
He had a dark complexion, but not Oriental or Indian,
but dark. He had black hair with something of the
greasy looks something looking somewhat punk by today's standards. He
(18:31):
was very thin, with a chiseled nose and chin and
had shrunk and it had sunken eyes. The man wore
a black suit that needed ironing and possibly cleaning. He
had on a white shirt and a black Texan like
string tie. Later, when he rose to leave, I remember
noting that the suit was much too large for him,
despite his being over six ft as I estimated it.
(18:53):
So there's a lot to unpack their like just so
much of the like the racial other so many like
just racist ideas about like uncleanliness and and so forth.
But also though something that's strange and kind of different
there is that I feel like later on the men
in black phenomena came to be much more associated with
(19:14):
like the black suits, meaning a kind of government associated
authority and power. I think about like the cigarette smoking
man in um in the X Files and stuff, as
opposed to the kind of like weird rumple, like the
suit needed cleaning and it was too big for him.
That that doesn't seem like it really fits with the
what would end up as the later standard idea of
(19:35):
men in black. Yeah, because certainly by the time you
get to you know, the more X files version of it,
and these these variations that you see in the matrix.
For instance, it's very much an idea of men in
black as a symbols and or at least foot soldiers
of top down government conspiracy, anonymous faceless authorities that they
(19:57):
sort of like represent anonymized power. And yet in these
earlier stories there were also some other additional weird factors.
We already mentioned that the Air Force Association. But then
there are these additional dimensions to the lore in which say,
for instance, they have exaggerated characteristics that are almost comical,
(20:18):
like they walk with a crazy gait, almost drunken lye uh.
There's one account that Royce Wits shared whether it's you know,
just talking about them just walking like in a weird way,
with like as if their hips were swivel joints, gliding
and rocking effect. I mean, one gets the image of
the Ministry of Funny walks in your head when you
(20:39):
when you read these, uh, these stories. But he stresses that,
you know, one has to to again consider this from
the vantage point of both tradition and experience. So tradition
bears keep the lore of something like men in black
alive through everything from weird fiction and movies to oral
accounts and uh, you know, like UF all of publications, um,
(21:02):
and even though they haven't necessarily experienced and the experienced
it themselves. And then you have passive tradition bearers who
know about it but don't actually pass it along. And
then there are those who claim to have definite experiences
with men in black and they tell their stories, which
of course may may vary wildly. So it's it's I
think it's a great way to look at something like
this and the interplay between these different categories interpretation of
(21:25):
paranormal experience via established lore and then accounts giving selective
credence to that lore and inspiring new details as well,
but again very selectively. So you know, it's like someone's saying, oh,
you know, I read this story there are men in
black going around and they're they're suppressing the truth about
aliens visiting our world. And then someone's like, yeah, I
(21:47):
had this this really weird thing that happened the other
day where these people in black suits showed up and
you're like, yeah, yeah, this is lining up. And then
they took me to ant Arctica and then they and
then we were in ant and Arctica, I'm Jesus and
you know, like and then they'll say, well, okay, Well,
still the basic principle lines up, and that supports my
my story right there, Like you can discard the stuff
(22:09):
about Antarctica but still say, well, like, well, meeting men
in black suits is not implausible exactly. Alright, Well, I
think on that note, we're going to take a break,
and when we come back, we're gonna get into the
more of the meat of the episode. We're going to
get into the reason that we chose the title for
today's episode. Uh m, I b or n ib men
(22:31):
in black or Nativity and black than all right, we're
back now, Robert. It seems correct me if I'm wrong,
that you were inspired to to want to talk about
this topic today because of this paper. It's an older paper.
It seems to be sort of a classic in the
ufology uh area. It was published in the Journal of
American Folklore in nineteen eight seven by Peter M. Roycewitz
(22:55):
about the men in black tradition. Is Is this what
got you into the subject? Yeah, I've never really looked
into men and black before. Aside from you know, seeing
some of these films that we've discussed, like as a
folklore tradition, as a folklore tradition, I haven't really read
anything about it, and then ran across this paper. Yeah,
the men in black experience and tradition analogs with the
traditional devil hypothesis. So obviously I'm instantly captivated. Um And
(23:19):
in case you didn't pick up on it, the title
of this episode the n ib Nativity and Black. That
is the Black Sabbath Song, one of the grades. So
in this paper he suggests that there's a lot of
room to compare the men in black figure with that
of the Christian devil. Okay, we can take a look
at this. Specifically, he points to the tradition of the
(23:39):
devil as this kind of a comic trickster in the
eleventh through nineteen centuries, a shadow figure that serves as
a kind of counterpoint to that of a saint. And
I also have to add he didn't really get into this,
but it made me think back to um our discussions
in the past about witchcraft theorists and succubi and incubi.
(24:02):
The idea here was that while demons could take on
alluring forms, to tempt sinners to greater sin. Their guys
could not be complete because otherwise it wouldn't be fair
to the faithful. You needed there to be a tell.
So you might have a dude who's being seduced by
a demonic succubus. But unfortunately, while she mostly looks like
(24:23):
a beautiful woman, she's got I don't know, like bare
hands or something right or duck feet is specifically one
that shows up in some of these old woodcuts, Like like,
if you're if you're a sinner, you're probably gonna either
not look at the feet, or you're gonna see the
feet and continue didn't see them and go on with
your sinning. But if you're faithful, then at the very
least you'll notice that there's some demonic pintages going on here,
(24:43):
and then you should really cut and run. You'll be
more observant, exactly. So I'm reminded of that. It feels
like there's a certain like level of that with the
uncanny um behavior and appearance that is often described in
these um Also going back to author Walter Stevens take
on witchcraft persecution that we've talked about in the past,
(25:05):
his idea was that it was in large part an
effort to prop up failing faith in the supernatural during
the early modern period. That's interesting. Yeah, we so we've
talked about this on the show before. But the idea
that people often have wrong is that they believe that
like witchcraft, persecution piqued in the Middle Ages and like
you know, the Medieval period. But that's not true, which
(25:28):
during an age of reason of everything seemed to be
on the uptick. Yeah, and that's when it really came about.
And so what the idea here is that if people
start having threats to the idea of their theology, of
their religious beliefs, they'll counter those threats with attempts to
prove it. And if you could prove that demons are real,
then you can prove that God is real. That's right. Heaven,
(25:50):
you know, it tends to be a little stingy and
dishing out proof of its existence. But if Hell can
provide us with physical proof and or and specifically carnal
exp orians by which to prove its reality, then that,
by extension, proves the reality of Heaven and really had
the reality of God. Now we don't know if Stephen's
interpretation here is correct, but I do think that's a
really interesting way of reading that historical fact, right, Yeah,
(26:14):
I think you know, and I think he would probably
agree that you have all these other factors involved as well,
certainly um an age of of of misogyny as well.
But but but I do wonder about all of that
in relation to men in black and UFOs because if
there is any doubt to the reality of UFOs and
alien abductions in your mind, and you would prefer to believe,
(26:38):
if you, like the poster want to believe, then if
you have strange men showing up and pressuring you to
be silent, well then that's even more evidence, right that
there's something here, there's some truth, because otherwise no one
would care if you shared the truth with the world,
right Yeah, the devils wouldn't be seducing all these people
if there if there weren't a god to fight against exactly. Yeah.
(26:58):
So again, Royce, it didn't really get into that idea,
but it's kind of my own ponderings. Now. He did
bring up the idea of tulpas in Tibetan mysticism. So
this is the notion that intense thought can materialize a
form a thought being and in this Men in Black.
They're they're kind of a tulpa of fear and anxiety
(27:19):
surrounding big brother. Tulpas or an interesting subject that we
can maybe return to. In fact, the listeners in the
past have asked us to do episodes on tulpas. Yeah,
we probably should. Then it would be a lot of fun.
Maybe we get to read with an excerpt from from
a Boges short story. Well, I do think there's something
interesting to talk about with the idea of tulpas as
(27:39):
materialized thought forms, sort of like you know, imagination manifested
as reality when it comes especially to like virtual worlds
and technology. You know, one of the things that the
technology philosopher, I don't know if he'd call himself that,
but i'd call him that Jared Lanier used to talk
about with like the possibilities afforded to us by things
(28:00):
like virtual reality, is the idea to not just play
games in virtual environments, but to be more manifestly and
directly creative than we could ever be in any other
kind of environment, to have methods through which we we
just continually refine our abilities to translate thoughts and creativity
(28:20):
directly into forms that can be sensed interesting. So you could, like,
you know, under this kind of ideal virtual reality environment,
you could have something like a tulpa. You could, you know,
just imagine something and then have it brought into being
in front of you and then interact with it. So,
as far as Roycewitz is um used the term here,
(28:42):
I think what we're talking about here is a kind
of subconscious projection of both the fear of mainstream rejection
by authority concerning UFO sightings, as well as a fear
of retribution. And I think this is interesting because we
do see this a lot, uh these days, you know,
in messaging against political and cultural others. You know, like
in a political adversary is at once both the thing
(29:05):
that doesn't take us seriously and is also actively working
against us in a dangerous way. So the enemy is
both inept and insidious at the same time. Is funny
umberto Echo, you know, pointed out that one of his
characteristics of fascism, as he described it, was that fascism
perceives its enemies as both impossibly powerful and extremely weak,
(29:28):
like at the same time, you know that that its
enemies constitute this overwhelmingly threatening plot against the power of
the you know, the fascist contingent in the state and
at the same time constantly talking about the weakness of
their enemies and denigrating what they can do in contrast
with the fascist's own strength is the minute. So I
wonder to what extent then, in black are kind of
(29:50):
a fear of and a desire for fascism, you know,
like like the fear of these these government enemies showing
up at your doorstep to suppress you, and also the
desire for it, like the validation that would come with it. Oh. Absolutely,
that's a really good point. I mean, that's something that's
always going on in like conspiracy theory psychology is you know,
(30:11):
if you not to say that there aren't real you know,
there are real conspiracies and real abuses of power and
all that, but in the ones that are more fanciful
and imaginary and based on you know, poor evidence and
all that, uh, where people just build these architectures of
shadowy organizations out there pulling the strings on all the
puppets everywhere. You can absolutely see this tension between of course,
(30:34):
like the fact that the conspiracy is a terrible thing
and you think it's a terrible thing, and you wouldn't
really want it to exist. But at the same time,
the fact that you believe in it kind of does
make you want it to exist, because because other people
don't believe you, and you want to be proven right,
and so evidence of this horrible, unimaginably bad thing actually
is kind of pleasurable and exciting to you. Yeah, and
(30:56):
this gets This is something you see with UFO citing
experiences and alien abduction experiences as well, is that no
matter no matter to what degree the individual believes the
experience happened. And and I certainly want to drive that
home that there are there do soon to be cases
where people believe something happened and and and it may
(31:18):
be traumatic. Uh And and I don't want to dismiss
that trauma. But at the same time, like being a
part of it is to be a part of something important,
like the the the aliens came to me, So there
is something, if not important about me, then at least
my experience is important now. And and that that can
(31:39):
be empowering. And when we see that in in you know,
religion all the time too, uh, the idea that that
that's something out there in the universe takes interest in us.
Like that that is a value. So you know, sometimes
it's just nice that the Men in Black care. They
showed up and they can bake up cookies. Now, Rosso,
It's also connects the men in Black idea to that
(32:00):
of the Brothers of Shadow in Eastern mysticism, and this
is something I wasn't familiar with this previously either, though
I guess I might have seen some echoes of it
in various nineties television chefs. Yeah, I feel like this
link might be kind of tenuous, um, but I tried
to go dig deeper into this to figure out what's
going on here. So it seems to me that the
(32:20):
idea of the Brothers of Shadow is sort of an
appellation by Western occultists, like like say the Theosophus or
Madame Bolovatsky and all that sort of unfairly applied or
associated with a sect or suborder of Tibetan Buddhism known
as the dug Puzz or drug Puss, the drug lineage.
(32:41):
Now I'll come back to that in a second. But
so I was thinking about the concept of paranormal agents
in black suits, and like, why why is that right
there in their name, The fact that they wear black suits. Um,
it's so interesting in what it reveals about about culture
and psychology and archetypes. Like the blacks and tie is
(33:01):
clearly a very meaningful part of the folklore architecture here.
It says something about power, says something about anonymity, it
says something about formality and professionalism and maybe some other qualities.
But the black suit more traditionally, I mean, now that's
this is very becoming very global, But it used to
be a more like Western kind of European and American
(33:21):
model of you know, how you demonstrate professionalism and culture, right,
and it was sort of spread to other areas as
a part of spreading Western culture. Yeah, And so I
was wondering, Okay, what would men in black look like
at other times and in other cultures with different ideas
about the meanings of colored clothing and different types of clothing.
(33:42):
I was trying to imagine, Okay, if you have men
in black in Chinese UFO experiences, would they dressed the same,
would they wear black suits, or would they tend to
more often wear something different. So I tried to see
if I could find any men in black type reports
from for example, China, and I didn't really come up
with any thing. I was reading an article from in
(34:03):
the South China Morning Post about the UFO society of China. UH.
This article reported quote, over the past ten years, there
have been five thousand reports of UFOs in China, and
it told the story of a man who claimed to
have been abducted by an alien woman from Jupiter who
had sex with him during his absence from Earth, and
there were no men in black anywhere in these stories. Now,
(34:24):
there may be some type of analogous men in black
experiences in Chinese UFO encounters, but if if so, I
couldn't come across any evidence of it. So that's interesting. Yeah.
I haven't done any any reading on really Chinese UFO accounts.
I've done a little bit on the like sasquatch cryptid
reporting in China, but not the UFOs. But that's interesting. Well, yeah,
(34:47):
I mean, it's just interesting that clearly UFOs are a
somewhat global experience phenomena. UH. People claim to have had
these experiences in different parts of the world, but not
everybody's going to have the exact same. Like kind of
feeling is about men in black suits with ties, or
maybe they will, I don't know, maybe that's a more
universal kind of signifier at this point. Yeah, well, I mean,
(35:09):
I guess the the UFO theorist would argue that, of
course the men in black are gonna wear black suits
if suits are the standard of dress, and they're just
gonna they're gonna wear whatever is appropriate given the culture
at the time. But what would that be, I mean
that that would help help us get a better idea
of what the men in black exactly are supposed to represent. Well, well,
(35:29):
let's see if they landed in say Victorian England, what
would they have worn where they would be dressed up
like uh, like like the the the police. They definitely
wear bowler hats. They look like Scotland yard. Yeah, I guess. So,
you know, whatever the standard is, right Edwardian men in
black like that should be the sequel. That's what I
(35:52):
want to see. Well, I'm sorry, I got side tracked.
I want to come back to the idea of the
Brothers of Shadow. So I think that from what I
can tell, this is a term applied by like these
Western occultists, uh to a sect or suborder of Tibetan Buddhism,
as I was saying, called the dug Pas with the
drug push the drug pill lineage, and and I think
this association seems to be unfair, as they obviously do
(36:16):
not see themselves as like sorcerers or shadowy nefarious figures
like the Western occultists characterize them. Uh. Though for what
it's worth, older Western taxonomy is sometimes referred to the
monks of this order as red hats, and they do
dress in red robes and hats on some occasions, though
this is true of many orders of Tibetan Buddhist monks,
(36:37):
not just the drug tradition. So obviously the cultural associations
are getting lost across history and translation here with this
whole relation to the Brothers of Shadow. I don't think
this means that Tibetan experiences with UFOs and men in
Black wouldn't necessarily involve people dressing in red, though it
doesn't make you have to consider this like what parts
of the men in Black belief are cote icture, are contingent,
(37:01):
and what parts would be universal. Alright, on that note,
we're going to take a quick break, but when we
come back, we're going to discuss the men in Black
just a little bit more than thank Alright, we're back.
You know. Another comparison between the men in black experience
tradition and other types of paranormal experiences people tend to
(37:21):
have is experiences that are commonly associated with with sleep
related episodes. Yes, like the shadow people. Yeah, this is
a This is an interesting topic that I think I
discussed in a much older episode of Stuff to Blow
your Mind, but it seemed appropriate to bring it back
up here. Um, you know, basically, it all hinges on
(37:44):
a two thousand six study Swiss study that was published
in the journal Nature about a possible connection between various
shadow people um experiences and something actually going on inside
the brain. Now, what exactly are these shadow people experiences? Like?
So basically it's the it's it's not so much a
(38:07):
full on men in black scenario, like I saw a
weird man in a black suit standing you know, you've
knocked on my door and we talked and he told
me not to tell anyone about flying saucers. Nothing like that.
But it's more of a u a symptom that's been
reported for a while by a psychiatric and neurological patients
where there is a feeling there's a sense of a
(38:28):
dark figure, say in the room with you like looming
over your bed maybe or something. Uh, and in fact
that that's there in the men in black tradition. Some
some of these reports mentioned that like people who had
encounters with them, sometimes they'd be standing there over their bed. Yeah,
looming over your like a ring wraith. Right. Um. So
the researchers in the study then they made the discovery
(38:48):
while evaluating a psychologically normal twenty two year old woman
for surgical treatment of epilepsy, and when they electrically stimulated
her brains left temporo parietal junction or TPG day they
repeatedly gave she repeatedly had the sensation of a lurking
shadow in her presence, like a shadow man, and she
(39:10):
perceived this shadow person just behind her, interfering with her
attempts to read a book. And when the researchers stimulated
her in a seated position, she perceived herself to be
seated in the entities lap um quote. He was clasping
her in his arms, which she described as an unpleasant feeling.
So essentially what seemed to have been taking places. She
(39:32):
was observing her own body the whole time, but as
the t PJ concerned self processing self, other distinction and
multisensory body integration info. The electrical stimulation caused her to
attribute her own actions to an alien other, and a
similar distortion maybe at work in various other uh you know,
(39:53):
psychiatric manifestations of alien entities, you know, anything that involves
here being a some other being in your room, being
an alien, a demon, a man in black, a spirit,
a fairy, etcetera. So the researchers proposed that electrical stimulation
of this area in the patient disturbed multisensory and and
uh sinso motor integration of information with respect to her body,
(40:17):
leading to the appearance of a first rank symptom of
schizophrenia in a person with no psychiatric history. And it's
notable here that the hyperactivity in the temporo parietal cortex
of patients with schizophrenia may lead to the misattribution of
their own actions to other people. So we see, you know,
a related UM situation there. Well that seems like another
(40:39):
I mean, this is a more clinical type of condition,
but UM related to the milder version I've talked about earlier.
How you know, there appears to be sometimes just contagion
between what's going on in one brain subsystem and another
brand subsystem that the actions that you see other people do.
Maybe you attribute your own thought to your imagination of
(41:01):
someone else's mind, you think they're thinking whatever you're thinking,
or you you you blur the lines between imagination and memory. Absolutely,
so I don't present this as as the answer for
shadow people. Experiences are certainly for Men in Black, because
there are various reasons that one might hallucinate Misremember we're
(41:23):
engaging in any of these these situations we've discussed um.
Oliver Sacks in his book Hallucinations specifically calls out hypnopompic hallucinations,
the hallucinations that we have coming out of sleep. Um.
He describes these as a source of malevolent entity perception.
So you know, it could certainly be one of the
(41:44):
reasons at play. But then again, to go back to
what we were talking about earlier, something like men and Black,
it's not just people having having an experience and then
reporting it. It's also other people interpreting bits of that
experience and other people yating things, creating fantasy and sci fi, etcetera.
That gets up becoming a part of other people's hallucinations
(42:07):
and other people's interpretation of hallucinations, so you know, it's
it's not happening in a vacuum. Yeah. Interesting. I was
reading an article, uh from because so I was wondering, Okay,
do men in black encounters still really happen? Yeah? You
read about them from the twentieth century, from the nineteen
fifties and sixties and on through the eighties and nineties,
(42:30):
and I was like, I haven't really encountered a claim
of the men in black encounter or experience that that
happened in recent decades. What's going on there? So I
looked this up and I did find an article. I
found an article in Slate by Aesha Harris FROMLVE about
whether men in Black sidings still happen because most of
(42:52):
the stories you run into tend to be older. And
so the author in this article asked you fologist Jerome Clark,
who has mentioned in Royce Wooz article whether people still
report men in black encounters these days. Apparently the reports
have quote tapered off significantly in the fifteen years since
the original Men in Black movie was released. Um, but
(43:14):
Clark consists he does not think that the film had
anything to do with that. Instead, he attributes it to
a lack of investigation into the issue in recent years,
especially since the passing of the ufologist John A. Keel,
who apparently cataloged a lot of these experiences. Uh, did
a lot of this kind of research made by research
and investigation. We're talking about continually writing about it and
(43:36):
keeping the idea alive in UFO enthusiast communities and publications.
But I think also, like, you know, collecting other people's experiences. Yeah,
um so. On the other hand, the British upologist Nick
Redfern insists that Men in Black encounters do still happen,
as chronicled in his book The Real Men in Black
(43:56):
in two thousand eleven. I don't know if that's trying
to cash in on a movie tie in, but personally,
I would say, despite what Clark says, I would tend
to wonder if the movie Men in Black does have
something to do with the decline in Men in Black reports.
I think this could be sort of inverse to what
often happens where UFO sightings seem correlated with like Flying
(44:18):
Saucer science fiction, and elements of these alien encounters sometimes
seem to correlate with elements that show up in fiction.
Over time, And I wonder if this inverse correlation, if
if it is actually there, I mean, I don't know,
but I wonder if this inverse correlation is there, if
it might have to do with the fact that the
men in Black movies are comedies like that they make
(44:41):
the idea funny and more and more so than that,
because certainly we've have funny UFO and funny alien movies
that have come out over the years. Certainly it wasn't
a case where um Earth girls are easy killed off
the idea of alien abductions. But you still have a mix, right,
You have serious films and scary films and films that
(45:02):
clearly are made by people who want to believe. Whereas
the men in Black films are really outside of those
other those earlier men and Black films that I mentioned
in the X Files episode, it's in various sprinklings of
men in Black lore and other UH pictures and shows.
I can't think of anything that's really served as a
counterbalance to the men in Black comedy movies, you know,
(45:25):
like if we had just had one like deadly serious
Fire in the Sky esque men in Black film like
like that would have done a lot, perhaps to keep
it going. Boy, what about the Eric Roberts movie, Well
that was what though? Yeah, yeah, so it came out
out of the wrong time, so you might have had
balance initially, But then what happened when Men in Black
(45:45):
two came out and three or the in the upcoming one.
I think the next one is the fourth one. I
could be wrong, but really there's the whole I think
I'm asking you for the second time in this episode.
They're on there at least four, so I only saw
the first one of the movies. But I remember being
gross in that way, like especially late nineties movies were
(46:06):
gross where there was a time of h like c
G I snot and slime, a lot of mucus. Am
I wrong? Now? There was a There was a lot
of gross stuff in it because there was the villain
was it was a roach like essentially a large roach
in a human costume, like wearing a human skin, and
(46:27):
there were a lot of gross side gags involving that character.
Did I send you a link? I think I did
send you a link to where I found the Men
in Black feature film novelization. Oh yeah, well, I guess
there would have been one of those, given the timeframe
and and the you know, the scale of the film. Man,
(46:48):
that's got to be like the ultimate movie novelization. You
would not have imagined it could happen, and yet it did.
You know. I would love to hear from anyone out there.
First of all, if you've seen any of these other
are Men in Black film, not I mean not the
comedy sequels, but like the film or the the the
earlier film, and you have any insight on them. I'd
(47:08):
also love to hear from anybody who read the original
comic books, like what were they? Like, are the fans?
Are there are there fans of the original Men in
Black comics? And if they are, do they how do
they feel about the films? I'm always interested in the
you know, how a particular franchise evolves like that. For
that matter, if anyone out there has had experiences with
(47:29):
you know, with Men in Black or UFOs, you know,
we would we would love to hear from you. You know,
we promise that if you be right in with your accounts,
we will not uh make fun of you. We will
you know, skeptically uh and enthusiastically approach it as we
always do. Yeah, all right, well that's it for this episode.
If you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, some of the various other, uh
(47:49):
sort of paranormal episodes that we've recorded over the years,
you can find them. It's Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. That's the mothership. That's where we find them all.
That's where we find links out to various social media accounts.
That's where we'll find a tab for our door where
you can buy shirts and stickers and other things with
our logo on it, with various episodes specific designs on them.
You can get those, you can wear them, you can
(48:10):
deface public property with them. Um, it's all available to you.
Another great way to support the show, however, it is
just rate and review us wherever you have the power
to do so. You don't have to, you know, piss
off the authority figures. Just go and rate and review
us wherever you get this podcast. It helps us out
tremendously huge things. As always to our excellent audio producers
(48:30):
Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
just to say hello, you can email us at blow
the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
(48:53):
on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how
stuff works dot Com? Yeah, cuttle Cat's cuttlefish to the
(49:22):
second oil age and he's kingdom with burl of darkness.
I don't dispute the Eurostata, but if he's down here,
we've know not blood but darkness, the Earth's black riches.
No I could taste it on my lips. Today, I
(49:43):
want to talk to you about the science of transgenesis
TAM's Genesis Dotch Show,
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
You know, we've covered a lot of UFO beliefs on
the show over the years, talk about alien abduction experiences,
(00:24):
strange lights in the sky, ancient aliens, speculation, and we've
covered it all with our usual level of skeptical enthusiasm.
I would say, not coming at it in order to
prove all the stories true and believe, but also appreciating
that fantastical beliefs and experiences and even delusions are interesting
phenomena that are worth studying and paying attention to. Yeah,
(00:47):
why are people reporting these stories? What what is actually
occurring that might be interpreted as such? And and then
why do we tell the stories that we tell? Like,
all these questions are sort of bound up in the
same riddle. But to refresh, this is the basic truth
of the matter. Humans have always seen things they couldn't explain,
and some of these things were actual phenomena, such as
(01:09):
shooting stars or unusual weather effects. Other times these were
hallucinations which can occur can occur for a variety of reasons, only,
some of which entail the ingestion of psychedelics or symptoms
of mental illness, and in either case, things seen became
become things remembered. And memory is a tricky thing all
(01:29):
in its own, highly susceptible to error, to manipulation, and
change due to personal desires, interpretations, cultural priming, and a
host of other factors. Yeah, that's exactly right. And one
of the things that I often think about doesn't get
enough attention when when people discuss fantastical experiences like say,
(01:49):
you know, UFO abduction experiences and sightings and things like that,
is is all of these in between categories that create
memory experiences for people or create you know, at least
in some way or another, lead a person to relate
and experience that are not exactly one of three clear options.
(02:12):
The three clear options usually presented are somebody actually physically
had this UFO abduction experience, they really were taken up,
or they're lying and they're just making up a story
they know to be false. Or they hallucinated it like
they had a vision where they imagine that they really
believed all this stuff was happening to them at the time,
(02:35):
and that you know, and then they remember that hallucination
as if it was a real physical event. I think
those are actually not the only three options. They usually
treated as like the main three things that could have happened.
I think what gets underappreciated or these sort of like
weird middle categories where you know, where like imagination and
fancy and retelling and embellishment and all these different kinds
(02:58):
of things sort of interact in a stew within the mind.
And there's so many ways this can happen. One piece
of research that I always just think it's such an
interesting little example of demonstrating how contagious imagery and ideation
can be between one brain subsystem and another is a
two thousand six study called do you Remember Proposing Marriage
(03:21):
to the Pepsi Machine? False recollection? False recollections from a
campus walk And this was in the Psychonomic Bulletin and
Review two thousand and six by by Semen, Philbin, and Harrison.
And basically the gist here is that students were asked
to perform, and too so somewhere asked to perform, and
some were asked to merely imagine themselves performing or imagine
(03:43):
seeing somebody perform activities, both normal like checking a pepsi
machine for change or lying down on a couch to relax,
and also actions that were bizarre, like proposing marriage to
a pepsi machine or lying down on a couch to
have a chat with Sigmund Freud. And it turned out
in this study at least that even just imagining performing
(04:04):
these activities caused many subjects to later recall having actually
performed them. Of course, this doesn't always happen, like sometimes
you remember the difference, but sometimes you don't remember the difference.
Sometimes the contents of our minds I are contagious in
a way that can spread into memory. Things that we
think about happening, can in some cases become things that
(04:25):
we believe happened. And this is possible in people who
have not been diagnosed with any conditions that cause psychosis
or hallucinations. It's just one of the many interesting ways
that you can see uh memories being meddled with in
in this kind of contagious way within the brain. And
of course we do outright invent things, sometimes in full things.
(04:47):
We have terrifying visions, and certainly there are hoaxes in
the world. But still even with hoaxes. There's there's still
this element of the human imagination that ultimately helped the
dream of every god, demon, fairy and an extraterrestrial that
we've ever considered. And once these things are created, they're
essentially available as food, uh for our meaning hungry minds.
(05:11):
And so the version of all of this that emerged
in the post War War two period and continues on
to this day, though with decreased energy, is that of
the alien UFO, the unidentified flying object, the the the
alien visitation. And uh. Today we're zeroing in on one
particular aspect of UFO folk belief, one with some insightful
(05:35):
connections potentially to older religious ideas. We're gonna be talking
about m I B. Men in Black. Should I sing
the song from the movie. No, I don't think we
should do that. I don't want to get night Cheese done.
Here's right. Uh. So, to be clear, where the Men
in Black franchise, I don't even aggressively pursues. I p
(05:59):
that is a big franchise that we're still going strong.
There's the first one came out, but yeah, there's there's
a new one coming out like in the next year.
I don't think I ever saw past the first one.
I think I too, have only seen the first one.
Uh they maybe the other ones may be great. I
don't know, but we're not really talking about those movies today. However,
(06:20):
those movies are based on I believe they were based
on a comic book. But but the whole franchise is
based on this concept of Men in Black. Uh, the
end result doesn't really do the original idea justice in
my opinion. Um, even though many of us me included, well,
you know, we learned about Men in Black for the
first time through watching this n sci fi action comedy.
(06:46):
You know, I can't be positive, but I know I
watched a lot of terrible like BS fringe documentaries when
I was a kid, you know, all the stuff about
how I think I've said this on the show before.
When I was in like second or third grade, I
was big into like cockness, monster UFOs. I was convinced
all that was real, and I think I I had
watched like, I don't know what it was, it whatever
(07:08):
masqueraded as like educational programming on television that was just
like propaganda for conspiracy theories and beliefs about the paranormal. Oh,
I too was very confused by episodes of specifically in
Search Off hosted by Leonard Nimoi and Unsolved Mysteries hosted
by Robert Stack. However, I don't I don't remember. There
(07:29):
may have been episodes of Unsolved Mysteries that Involvement in Black,
but if there were, I don't remember seeing. Well, I
I'm pretty sure I saw something at some point that
made me aware of the concept. But even if I
wasn't aware, then yeah, definitely the movie came along. I
think maybe I don't know if it was before or
after the Men in Black movie. There was the episode
of The X Files Jose Chunks from Outer Space, which
(07:52):
is one of the best episodes of all time. It
still holds up today. It's so good, it's so funny,
and it has classic Men in Black cameos in It
isn't the idea here that the Men in Black take
on the guys of famous individuals, of celebrities so that
you can't report it to the police without sounding ridiculous,
which is funny because in in the episode you can
tell they kind of did their research. This sort of
(08:14):
mirrors real things that people reported about Men in Black experiences.
Sometimes people said that the experience would be, you know,
ridiculous or absurd, as in the implication is, oh, it's
because they wanted to keep everything hush hush, and so
they knew if they acted absurd, I wouldn't be able
to tell people without them laughing at me. Now, some
(08:36):
of you out there, you might have heard about Men
in Black through at least a couple of different films
that came out. One came out in nine same year
as Men in Black, titled The Shadow Men, and I
have not seen this yet, but I saw the trailer.
It looks fabulous in a n way, featuring Eric Roberts,
Dean Stockwell, and Andrew Pine, and uh, it's more of
(09:00):
it seems to be more of a traditional Men in
Black movie with with these like weird, tall suited individuals
with dark glasses that are messing with their protagonists trying
to keep them from sharing some sort of information with
the world about UFOs, and then upon closer inspection they
don't seem to be quite human. And then there's a
(09:22):
there's a much earlier actually Men in Black plot line
in a movie from nineteen eight titled titled Hanger eighteen,
but certainly by the time that the Men in Black
came out by the time, you know, the X Files,
that had ample opportunity uh to uh to educate everyone
about the idea. We saw all sorts of other echoes
in various bits of media. For instance, the Thin Men
(09:45):
and the X Calm Games are classic men in black
characters like uh, thin thin guys in suits with weird
um facial features that are not quite human. Uh. They're
a doctor who I believe has a species called the
Silence that show up. They're very men in black esque,
and even a couple of ultimately you know, rather different
(10:09):
bits of cinema, But the the Agents from the Matrix
are essentially men in black. The Strangers of Dark City
are in many ways men in black. That's interesting. I
hadn't thought about that with the with the Strangers, I
definitely see it with the agents. Um. Well, before we
get into the particulars, let's just try to sketch out
the broad kind of version of the men in Black folklore.
(10:30):
What what would you say is that the broadest possible
interpretation of it. It's that most commonly somebody becomes in
some way involved with UFO lore. They either have a
UFO experience, they see a UFO, or they have an
abduction experience, or they begin researching UFO phenomena, that's right,
(10:52):
And then suddenly men wearing black show up, weird possibly
government law enforcement types who are who suddenly show and
want to suppress you, want to silence you, either after
you have shared your claim of of UFO sightings or
what have you, or in many cases before you share it. Yeah,
so they tend to often be fond of like blacks,
(11:13):
large black sedans, cadillacs. They come and they approach you,
the person who is interested in UFOs for some reason
or doing UFO research or how do UFO experience. They
tell you either you didn't see what you think you saw,
or they tell you to stop researching, or they tell
you to stop spreading the word about UFOs, or occasionally,
in some reports it's exactly the opposite. Sometimes people in
(11:36):
black suits, men in black suits or black hats or
whatever show up to say, actually, keep going and keep digging,
there's more to see, there's more to learn. Yeah, they
take out more of like a like a deep throat
persona and stories and throwing their lots of variegated weirdness,
you know, just sort of like strange flourishes on the story. Right,
(11:56):
So let's put all this in context. I start talking
about the time for aim here because I think the
more we talk about it, the more obvious it becomes.
Like where these elements, like even the deep throat element
and the element of like like government corruption, uh, spies
and espionage and what have you, where it all comes from.
So reading around about this, it seems like the sort
(12:17):
of the patient zero for all of this was a
man by the name of Harold Doll. This when all
of this took place. So claims were made by Fred
Krismin and Harold Doll about threats by men in Black
following sightings of UFOs and the skies over Mari Island
in the Puget Sound. Uh. And this was related in
(12:38):
Gray Barker's six book that they knew too much about
flying saucers, which this book helped popularize stories of men
in Black. Um, you know a lot of this is like,
you know, this is the people who are into UFOs,
like this is these are the texts they were reading
and sharing and and then um basing some of their
experiences on. So another brief thing about timeline is while
(13:02):
various forms of paranormal abduction experiences seemed to go way
back in time. The UFO thing really seemed to pick
up around and after World War Two. And you can
offer all kinds of reasons for this. I mean, some
would have to do with, like say, alleged sightings of
UFO by Allied you know, pilots and Air Air Force
(13:22):
personnel during the war. Um. But other things might be
might have to do with certain trends in science fiction
movies and things like that. Now another case, and this
one was related by Peter M. Roycewitz, who wrote a
really important paper that we're going to come back to
because I don't want to spoil what we're talking about
bye bye by saying the title just yet, we will
come back to it. I mentioned in nineteen fifty two
(13:44):
in Connecticut, you had this guy by the name of
Albert K. Binder. So Binder lived with his stepfather in
the top floor of a house described by a local
newspaper as a quote chamber of horrors. But I mean
this seems like but basically they had a bunch of
Halloween decorations up in his room. That sounds fun, Yeah,
I mean that's like my room growing up. So you know,
(14:06):
nobody ever said it was a chamber of hars anyway,
uh Binder was a big sci fi fan, and he
wrote a letter to a friend state quote stating that
he had learned the origin and ultimate goal of extraterrestrial
visitation on the Earth unquote. But then he claims that
what happened is suddenly Men in Black came up and
they confronted him telepathically with the intercept about the intercepted letter,
(14:29):
and then forced him to shut down his various UFO
interest projects. I mean at least for a while, because
he later writes a book about all of it and
claims that the Men in Black were from another planet,
among a whole host of other wild claims. Was this
the one about going to Antarctica? I believe? And yeah, yeah,
so it's it's wild in a way that like, like
you you kind of want to tell him, like stop,
(14:51):
you stopped there because you had like a compelling story,
just the right number of fantastic elements. But then you
just you kept going with it. Uh So, Roy so
at See points out that the Men in Black stories
they really flourished for a very brief time in between
nineteen sixty six and nineteen sixty seven, with multiple UFO
researchers claiming that they had m IB encounters they either
(15:14):
encountered them alone or impairs, though mostly in threes. And
they claim that these individuals, you know, they showed up
and they know way too much about them. They know about,
you know, what their UFO experience might have been, what
the details are, and and no, you know, and they
know about it before you you even had a chance
to go and tell other people about it. And a
(15:35):
lot of these tales seem to be inspired or colored
by Cold War espionage fiction. Uh, you know, they often
claimed the men in black often claim to be military
intelligence offers, officers or so the stories go, well, yeah,
with the you know, sixty six sixty seven, it's hard
not to miss the timing with like the James Bond
franchise there and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and
(15:56):
just the idea of like shadowy government figures, you know,
at large. So interestingly enough, during the height of all
of this, according to m royce Witz, a confidential correspondence
from the Pentagon went out to intelligence command centers telling
them to notify the Office of Special Investigations if anyone
pretending to be a military officer attempted to strong arm
(16:18):
UFO witnesses, which which is interesting because I guess it's
the The idea here is that if enough people were
claiming it, they probably said, look, be alert, just in
case there's anybody going around pretending to be uh law
enforcement or a federal law enforcement and messing with UFO people.
I think the most common allegation was that that they
(16:39):
were somehow associated with the Air Force, right, because they're
the Air Force, they should know, right. Yeah, well, I
think back then the Air Force might have had a stranger,
more futuristic connotation than it does today. Now the Air
Force just seems like a more mundane branch of the
armed services. That's a good point. I hadn't thought about
that now. There's also there's a lot of stuff in
them in Men in Black Lore that doesn't necessarily, in
(17:00):
many cases thankfully does not survive into our science fiction.
For instance, Roy Switz points out that there's this whole
anti Semitic strain of Men in Black lore from that
time period that entailed to just a bunch of anti
Semitic nonsense, which isn't surprised, and given the long history
of blood libel and conspiracy theories about the Jewish people,
(17:21):
and and how easily modern conspiracy theories fall back into
this same down the same well as as well. Um
And if you if you want to see this for yourself,
just spend fifteen minutes on the internet, Like you, just
go go to YouTube and start looking around conspiracy theories
and see how long it takes you to hit something
just overtly anti Semitic. Unfortunately, the conspiracy theory spaces uh
(17:45):
often just run through with this stuff, right, and then
it goes beyond um anti semitism. There's also a trend
to describe men and black agents as Asian or ethnically
ambiguous in some way, shape or form generally embodies a
kind of like white American chauvinism. Uh and and just
general idea. I mean it almost just suggests that what
(18:07):
could you do to make somebody weirder while you just
generally make them not a white American? Right? So royce
Witz shares the two account by one Michael Elliott, and
I'm just going to read a passage from it here. Quote.
He had a dark complexion, but not Oriental or Indian,
but dark. He had black hair with something of the
greasy looks something looking somewhat punk by today's standards. He
(18:31):
was very thin, with a chiseled nose and chin and
had shrunk and it had sunken eyes. The man wore
a black suit that needed ironing and possibly cleaning. He
had on a white shirt and a black Texan like
string tie. Later, when he rose to leave, I remember
noting that the suit was much too large for him,
despite his being over six ft as I estimated it.
(18:53):
So there's a lot to unpack their like just so
much of the like the racial other so many like
just racist ideas about like uncleanliness and and so forth.
But also though something that's strange and kind of different
there is that I feel like later on the men
in black phenomena came to be much more associated with
(19:14):
like the black suits, meaning a kind of government associated
authority and power. I think about like the cigarette smoking
man in um in the X Files and stuff, as
opposed to the kind of like weird rumple, like the
suit needed cleaning and it was too big for him.
That that doesn't seem like it really fits with the
what would end up as the later standard idea of
(19:35):
men in black. Yeah, because certainly by the time you
get to you know, the more X files version of it,
and these these variations that you see in the matrix.
For instance, it's very much an idea of men in
black as a symbols and or at least foot soldiers
of top down government conspiracy, anonymous faceless authorities that they
(19:57):
sort of like represent anonymized power. And yet in these
earlier stories there were also some other additional weird factors.
We already mentioned that the Air Force Association. But then
there are these additional dimensions to the lore in which say,
for instance, they have exaggerated characteristics that are almost comical,
(20:18):
like they walk with a crazy gait, almost drunken lye uh.
There's one account that Royce Wits shared whether it's you know,
just talking about them just walking like in a weird way,
with like as if their hips were swivel joints, gliding
and rocking effect. I mean, one gets the image of
the Ministry of Funny walks in your head when you
(20:39):
when you read these, uh, these stories. But he stresses that,
you know, one has to to again consider this from
the vantage point of both tradition and experience. So tradition
bears keep the lore of something like men in black
alive through everything from weird fiction and movies to oral
accounts and uh, you know, like UF all of publications, um,
(21:02):
and even though they haven't necessarily experienced and the experienced
it themselves. And then you have passive tradition bearers who
know about it but don't actually pass it along. And
then there are those who claim to have definite experiences
with men in black and they tell their stories, which
of course may may vary wildly. So it's it's I
think it's a great way to look at something like
this and the interplay between these different categories interpretation of
(21:25):
paranormal experience via established lore and then accounts giving selective
credence to that lore and inspiring new details as well,
but again very selectively. So you know, it's like someone's saying, oh,
you know, I read this story there are men in
black going around and they're they're suppressing the truth about
aliens visiting our world. And then someone's like, yeah, I
(21:47):
had this this really weird thing that happened the other
day where these people in black suits showed up and
you're like, yeah, yeah, this is lining up. And then
they took me to ant Arctica and then they and
then we were in ant and Arctica, I'm Jesus and
you know, like and then they'll say, well, okay, Well,
still the basic principle lines up, and that supports my
my story right there, Like you can discard the stuff
(22:09):
about Antarctica but still say, well, like, well, meeting men
in black suits is not implausible exactly. Alright, Well, I
think on that note, we're going to take a break,
and when we come back, we're gonna get into the
more of the meat of the episode. We're going to
get into the reason that we chose the title for
today's episode. Uh m, I b or n ib men
(22:31):
in black or Nativity and black than all right, we're
back now, Robert. It seems correct me if I'm wrong,
that you were inspired to to want to talk about
this topic today because of this paper. It's an older paper.
It seems to be sort of a classic in the
ufology uh area. It was published in the Journal of
American Folklore in nineteen eight seven by Peter M. Roycewitz
(22:55):
about the men in black tradition. Is Is this what
got you into the subject? Yeah, I've never really looked
into men and black before. Aside from you know, seeing
some of these films that we've discussed, like as a
folklore tradition, as a folklore tradition, I haven't really read
anything about it, and then ran across this paper. Yeah,
the men in black experience and tradition analogs with the
traditional devil hypothesis. So obviously I'm instantly captivated. Um And
(23:19):
in case you didn't pick up on it, the title
of this episode the n ib Nativity and Black. That
is the Black Sabbath Song, one of the grades. So
in this paper he suggests that there's a lot of
room to compare the men in black figure with that
of the Christian devil. Okay, we can take a look
at this. Specifically, he points to the tradition of the
(23:39):
devil as this kind of a comic trickster in the
eleventh through nineteen centuries, a shadow figure that serves as
a kind of counterpoint to that of a saint. And
I also have to add he didn't really get into this,
but it made me think back to um our discussions
in the past about witchcraft theorists and succubi and incubi.
(24:02):
The idea here was that while demons could take on
alluring forms, to tempt sinners to greater sin. Their guys
could not be complete because otherwise it wouldn't be fair
to the faithful. You needed there to be a tell.
So you might have a dude who's being seduced by
a demonic succubus. But unfortunately, while she mostly looks like
(24:23):
a beautiful woman, she's got I don't know, like bare
hands or something right or duck feet is specifically one
that shows up in some of these old woodcuts, Like like,
if you're if you're a sinner, you're probably gonna either
not look at the feet, or you're gonna see the
feet and continue didn't see them and go on with
your sinning. But if you're faithful, then at the very
least you'll notice that there's some demonic pintages going on here,
(24:43):
and then you should really cut and run. You'll be
more observant, exactly. So I'm reminded of that. It feels
like there's a certain like level of that with the
uncanny um behavior and appearance that is often described in
these um Also going back to author Walter Stevens take
on witchcraft persecution that we've talked about in the past,
(25:05):
his idea was that it was in large part an
effort to prop up failing faith in the supernatural during
the early modern period. That's interesting. Yeah, we so we've
talked about this on the show before. But the idea
that people often have wrong is that they believe that
like witchcraft, persecution piqued in the Middle Ages and like
you know, the Medieval period. But that's not true, which
(25:28):
during an age of reason of everything seemed to be
on the uptick. Yeah, and that's when it really came about.
And so what the idea here is that if people
start having threats to the idea of their theology, of
their religious beliefs, they'll counter those threats with attempts to
prove it. And if you could prove that demons are real,
then you can prove that God is real. That's right. Heaven,
(25:50):
you know, it tends to be a little stingy and
dishing out proof of its existence. But if Hell can
provide us with physical proof and or and specifically carnal
exp orians by which to prove its reality, then that,
by extension, proves the reality of Heaven and really had
the reality of God. Now we don't know if Stephen's
interpretation here is correct, but I do think that's a
really interesting way of reading that historical fact, right, Yeah,
(26:14):
I think you know, and I think he would probably
agree that you have all these other factors involved as well,
certainly um an age of of of misogyny as well.
But but but I do wonder about all of that
in relation to men in black and UFOs because if
there is any doubt to the reality of UFOs and
alien abductions in your mind, and you would prefer to believe,
(26:38):
if you, like the poster want to believe, then if
you have strange men showing up and pressuring you to
be silent, well then that's even more evidence, right that
there's something here, there's some truth, because otherwise no one
would care if you shared the truth with the world,
right Yeah, the devils wouldn't be seducing all these people
if there if there weren't a god to fight against exactly. Yeah.
(26:58):
So again, Royce, it didn't really get into that idea,
but it's kind of my own ponderings. Now. He did
bring up the idea of tulpas in Tibetan mysticism. So
this is the notion that intense thought can materialize a
form a thought being and in this Men in Black.
They're they're kind of a tulpa of fear and anxiety
(27:19):
surrounding big brother. Tulpas or an interesting subject that we
can maybe return to. In fact, the listeners in the
past have asked us to do episodes on tulpas. Yeah,
we probably should. Then it would be a lot of fun.
Maybe we get to read with an excerpt from from
a Boges short story. Well, I do think there's something
interesting to talk about with the idea of tulpas as
(27:39):
materialized thought forms, sort of like you know, imagination manifested
as reality when it comes especially to like virtual worlds
and technology. You know, one of the things that the
technology philosopher, I don't know if he'd call himself that,
but i'd call him that Jared Lanier used to talk
about with like the possibilities afforded to us by things
(28:00):
like virtual reality, is the idea to not just play
games in virtual environments, but to be more manifestly and
directly creative than we could ever be in any other
kind of environment, to have methods through which we we
just continually refine our abilities to translate thoughts and creativity
(28:20):
directly into forms that can be sensed interesting. So you could, like,
you know, under this kind of ideal virtual reality environment,
you could have something like a tulpa. You could, you know,
just imagine something and then have it brought into being
in front of you and then interact with it. So,
as far as Roycewitz is um used the term here,
(28:42):
I think what we're talking about here is a kind
of subconscious projection of both the fear of mainstream rejection
by authority concerning UFO sightings, as well as a fear
of retribution. And I think this is interesting because we
do see this a lot, uh these days, you know,
in messaging against political and cultural others. You know, like
in a political adversary is at once both the thing
(29:05):
that doesn't take us seriously and is also actively working
against us in a dangerous way. So the enemy is
both inept and insidious at the same time. Is funny
umberto Echo, you know, pointed out that one of his
characteristics of fascism, as he described it, was that fascism
perceives its enemies as both impossibly powerful and extremely weak,
(29:28):
like at the same time, you know that that its
enemies constitute this overwhelmingly threatening plot against the power of
the you know, the fascist contingent in the state and
at the same time constantly talking about the weakness of
their enemies and denigrating what they can do in contrast
with the fascist's own strength is the minute. So I
wonder to what extent then, in black are kind of
(29:50):
a fear of and a desire for fascism, you know,
like like the fear of these these government enemies showing
up at your doorstep to suppress you, and also the
desire for it, like the validation that would come with it. Oh. Absolutely,
that's a really good point. I mean, that's something that's
always going on in like conspiracy theory psychology is you know,
(30:11):
if you not to say that there aren't real you know,
there are real conspiracies and real abuses of power and
all that, but in the ones that are more fanciful
and imaginary and based on you know, poor evidence and
all that, uh, where people just build these architectures of
shadowy organizations out there pulling the strings on all the
puppets everywhere. You can absolutely see this tension between of course,
(30:34):
like the fact that the conspiracy is a terrible thing
and you think it's a terrible thing, and you wouldn't
really want it to exist. But at the same time,
the fact that you believe in it kind of does
make you want it to exist, because because other people
don't believe you, and you want to be proven right,
and so evidence of this horrible, unimaginably bad thing actually
is kind of pleasurable and exciting to you. Yeah, and
(30:56):
this gets This is something you see with UFO citing
experiences and alien abduction experiences as well, is that no
matter no matter to what degree the individual believes the
experience happened. And and I certainly want to drive that
home that there are there do soon to be cases
where people believe something happened and and and it may
(31:18):
be traumatic. Uh And and I don't want to dismiss
that trauma. But at the same time, like being a
part of it is to be a part of something important,
like the the the aliens came to me, So there
is something, if not important about me, then at least
my experience is important now. And and that that can
(31:39):
be empowering. And when we see that in in you know,
religion all the time too, uh, the idea that that
that's something out there in the universe takes interest in us.
Like that that is a value. So you know, sometimes
it's just nice that the Men in Black care. They
showed up and they can bake up cookies. Now, Rosso,
It's also connects the men in Black idea to that
(32:00):
of the Brothers of Shadow in Eastern mysticism, and this
is something I wasn't familiar with this previously either, though
I guess I might have seen some echoes of it
in various nineties television chefs. Yeah, I feel like this
link might be kind of tenuous, um, but I tried
to go dig deeper into this to figure out what's
going on here. So it seems to me that the
(32:20):
idea of the Brothers of Shadow is sort of an
appellation by Western occultists, like like say the Theosophus or
Madame Bolovatsky and all that sort of unfairly applied or
associated with a sect or suborder of Tibetan Buddhism known
as the dug Puzz or drug Puss, the drug lineage.
(32:41):
Now I'll come back to that in a second. But
so I was thinking about the concept of paranormal agents
in black suits, and like, why why is that right
there in their name, The fact that they wear black suits. Um,
it's so interesting in what it reveals about about culture
and psychology and archetypes. Like the blacks and tie is
(33:01):
clearly a very meaningful part of the folklore architecture here.
It says something about power, says something about anonymity, it
says something about formality and professionalism and maybe some other qualities.
But the black suit more traditionally, I mean, now that's
this is very becoming very global, But it used to
be a more like Western kind of European and American
(33:21):
model of you know, how you demonstrate professionalism and culture, right,
and it was sort of spread to other areas as
a part of spreading Western culture. Yeah, And so I
was wondering, Okay, what would men in black look like
at other times and in other cultures with different ideas
about the meanings of colored clothing and different types of clothing.
(33:42):
I was trying to imagine, Okay, if you have men
in black in Chinese UFO experiences, would they dressed the same,
would they wear black suits, or would they tend to
more often wear something different. So I tried to see
if I could find any men in black type reports
from for example, China, and I didn't really come up
with any thing. I was reading an article from in
(34:03):
the South China Morning Post about the UFO society of China. UH.
This article reported quote, over the past ten years, there
have been five thousand reports of UFOs in China, and
it told the story of a man who claimed to
have been abducted by an alien woman from Jupiter who
had sex with him during his absence from Earth, and
there were no men in black anywhere in these stories. Now,
(34:24):
there may be some type of analogous men in black
experiences in Chinese UFO encounters, but if if so, I
couldn't come across any evidence of it. So that's interesting. Yeah.
I haven't done any any reading on really Chinese UFO accounts.
I've done a little bit on the like sasquatch cryptid
reporting in China, but not the UFOs. But that's interesting. Well, yeah,
(34:47):
I mean, it's just interesting that clearly UFOs are a
somewhat global experience phenomena. UH. People claim to have had
these experiences in different parts of the world, but not
everybody's going to have the exact same. Like kind of
feeling is about men in black suits with ties, or
maybe they will, I don't know, maybe that's a more
universal kind of signifier at this point. Yeah, well, I mean,
(35:09):
I guess the the UFO theorist would argue that, of
course the men in black are gonna wear black suits
if suits are the standard of dress, and they're just
gonna they're gonna wear whatever is appropriate given the culture
at the time. But what would that be, I mean
that that would help help us get a better idea
of what the men in black exactly are supposed to represent. Well, well,
(35:29):
let's see if they landed in say Victorian England, what
would they have worn where they would be dressed up
like uh, like like the the the police. They definitely
wear bowler hats. They look like Scotland yard. Yeah, I guess. So,
you know, whatever the standard is, right Edwardian men in
black like that should be the sequel. That's what I
(35:52):
want to see. Well, I'm sorry, I got side tracked.
I want to come back to the idea of the
Brothers of Shadow. So I think that from what I
can tell, this is a term applied by like these
Western occultists, uh to a sect or suborder of Tibetan Buddhism,
as I was saying, called the dug Pas with the
drug push the drug pill lineage, and and I think
this association seems to be unfair, as they obviously do
(36:16):
not see themselves as like sorcerers or shadowy nefarious figures
like the Western occultists characterize them. Uh. Though for what
it's worth, older Western taxonomy is sometimes referred to the
monks of this order as red hats, and they do
dress in red robes and hats on some occasions, though
this is true of many orders of Tibetan Buddhist monks,
(36:37):
not just the drug tradition. So obviously the cultural associations
are getting lost across history and translation here with this
whole relation to the Brothers of Shadow. I don't think
this means that Tibetan experiences with UFOs and men in
Black wouldn't necessarily involve people dressing in red, though it
doesn't make you have to consider this like what parts
of the men in Black belief are cote icture, are contingent,
(37:01):
and what parts would be universal. Alright, on that note,
we're going to take a quick break, but when we
come back, we're going to discuss the men in Black
just a little bit more than thank Alright, we're back.
You know. Another comparison between the men in black experience
tradition and other types of paranormal experiences people tend to
(37:21):
have is experiences that are commonly associated with with sleep
related episodes. Yes, like the shadow people. Yeah, this is
a This is an interesting topic that I think I
discussed in a much older episode of Stuff to Blow
your Mind, but it seemed appropriate to bring it back
up here. Um, you know, basically, it all hinges on
(37:44):
a two thousand six study Swiss study that was published
in the journal Nature about a possible connection between various
shadow people um experiences and something actually going on inside
the brain. Now, what exactly are these shadow people experiences? Like?
So basically it's the it's it's not so much a
(38:07):
full on men in black scenario, like I saw a
weird man in a black suit standing you know, you've
knocked on my door and we talked and he told
me not to tell anyone about flying saucers. Nothing like that.
But it's more of a u a symptom that's been
reported for a while by a psychiatric and neurological patients
where there is a feeling there's a sense of a
(38:28):
dark figure, say in the room with you like looming
over your bed maybe or something. Uh, and in fact
that that's there in the men in black tradition. Some
some of these reports mentioned that like people who had
encounters with them, sometimes they'd be standing there over their bed. Yeah,
looming over your like a ring wraith. Right. Um. So
the researchers in the study then they made the discovery
(38:48):
while evaluating a psychologically normal twenty two year old woman
for surgical treatment of epilepsy, and when they electrically stimulated
her brains left temporo parietal junction or TPG day they
repeatedly gave she repeatedly had the sensation of a lurking
shadow in her presence, like a shadow man, and she
(39:10):
perceived this shadow person just behind her, interfering with her
attempts to read a book. And when the researchers stimulated
her in a seated position, she perceived herself to be
seated in the entities lap um quote. He was clasping
her in his arms, which she described as an unpleasant feeling.
So essentially what seemed to have been taking places. She
(39:32):
was observing her own body the whole time, but as
the t PJ concerned self processing self, other distinction and
multisensory body integration info. The electrical stimulation caused her to
attribute her own actions to an alien other, and a
similar distortion maybe at work in various other uh you know,
(39:53):
psychiatric manifestations of alien entities, you know, anything that involves
here being a some other being in your room, being
an alien, a demon, a man in black, a spirit,
a fairy, etcetera. So the researchers proposed that electrical stimulation
of this area in the patient disturbed multisensory and and
uh sinso motor integration of information with respect to her body,
(40:17):
leading to the appearance of a first rank symptom of
schizophrenia in a person with no psychiatric history. And it's
notable here that the hyperactivity in the temporo parietal cortex
of patients with schizophrenia may lead to the misattribution of
their own actions to other people. So we see, you know,
a related UM situation there. Well that seems like another
(40:39):
I mean, this is a more clinical type of condition,
but UM related to the milder version I've talked about earlier.
How you know, there appears to be sometimes just contagion
between what's going on in one brain subsystem and another
brand subsystem that the actions that you see other people do.
Maybe you attribute your own thought to your imagination of
(41:01):
someone else's mind, you think they're thinking whatever you're thinking,
or you you you blur the lines between imagination and memory. Absolutely,
so I don't present this as as the answer for
shadow people. Experiences are certainly for Men in Black, because
there are various reasons that one might hallucinate Misremember we're
(41:23):
engaging in any of these these situations we've discussed um.
Oliver Sacks in his book Hallucinations specifically calls out hypnopompic hallucinations,
the hallucinations that we have coming out of sleep. Um.
He describes these as a source of malevolent entity perception.
So you know, it could certainly be one of the
(41:44):
reasons at play. But then again, to go back to
what we were talking about earlier, something like men and Black,
it's not just people having having an experience and then
reporting it. It's also other people interpreting bits of that
experience and other people yating things, creating fantasy and sci fi, etcetera.
That gets up becoming a part of other people's hallucinations
(42:07):
and other people's interpretation of hallucinations, so you know, it's
it's not happening in a vacuum. Yeah. Interesting. I was
reading an article, uh from because so I was wondering, Okay,
do men in black encounters still really happen? Yeah? You
read about them from the twentieth century, from the nineteen
fifties and sixties and on through the eighties and nineties,
(42:30):
and I was like, I haven't really encountered a claim
of the men in black encounter or experience that that
happened in recent decades. What's going on there? So I
looked this up and I did find an article. I
found an article in Slate by Aesha Harris FROMLVE about
whether men in Black sidings still happen because most of
(42:52):
the stories you run into tend to be older. And
so the author in this article asked you fologist Jerome Clark,
who has mentioned in Royce Wooz article whether people still
report men in black encounters these days. Apparently the reports
have quote tapered off significantly in the fifteen years since
the original Men in Black movie was released. Um, but
(43:14):
Clark consists he does not think that the film had
anything to do with that. Instead, he attributes it to
a lack of investigation into the issue in recent years,
especially since the passing of the ufologist John A. Keel,
who apparently cataloged a lot of these experiences. Uh, did
a lot of this kind of research made by research
and investigation. We're talking about continually writing about it and
(43:36):
keeping the idea alive in UFO enthusiast communities and publications.
But I think also, like, you know, collecting other people's experiences. Yeah,
um so. On the other hand, the British upologist Nick
Redfern insists that Men in Black encounters do still happen,
as chronicled in his book The Real Men in Black
(43:56):
in two thousand eleven. I don't know if that's trying
to cash in on a movie tie in, but personally,
I would say, despite what Clark says, I would tend
to wonder if the movie Men in Black does have
something to do with the decline in Men in Black reports.
I think this could be sort of inverse to what
often happens where UFO sightings seem correlated with like Flying
(44:18):
Saucer science fiction, and elements of these alien encounters sometimes
seem to correlate with elements that show up in fiction.
Over time, And I wonder if this inverse correlation, if
if it is actually there, I mean, I don't know,
but I wonder if this inverse correlation is there, if
it might have to do with the fact that the
men in Black movies are comedies like that they make
(44:41):
the idea funny and more and more so than that,
because certainly we've have funny UFO and funny alien movies
that have come out over the years. Certainly it wasn't
a case where um Earth girls are easy killed off
the idea of alien abductions. But you still have a mix, right,
You have serious films and scary films and films that
(45:02):
clearly are made by people who want to believe. Whereas
the men in Black films are really outside of those
other those earlier men and Black films that I mentioned
in the X Files episode, it's in various sprinklings of
men in Black lore and other UH pictures and shows.
I can't think of anything that's really served as a
counterbalance to the men in Black comedy movies, you know,
(45:25):
like if we had just had one like deadly serious
Fire in the Sky esque men in Black film like
like that would have done a lot, perhaps to keep
it going. Boy, what about the Eric Roberts movie, Well
that was what though? Yeah, yeah, so it came out
out of the wrong time, so you might have had
balance initially, But then what happened when Men in Black
(45:45):
two came out and three or the in the upcoming one.
I think the next one is the fourth one. I
could be wrong, but really there's the whole I think
I'm asking you for the second time in this episode.
They're on there at least four, so I only saw
the first one of the movies. But I remember being
gross in that way, like especially late nineties movies were
(46:06):
gross where there was a time of h like c
G I snot and slime, a lot of mucus. Am
I wrong? Now? There was a There was a lot
of gross stuff in it because there was the villain
was it was a roach like essentially a large roach
in a human costume, like wearing a human skin, and
(46:27):
there were a lot of gross side gags involving that character.
Did I send you a link? I think I did
send you a link to where I found the Men
in Black feature film novelization. Oh yeah, well, I guess
there would have been one of those, given the timeframe
and and the you know, the scale of the film. Man,
(46:48):
that's got to be like the ultimate movie novelization. You
would not have imagined it could happen, and yet it did.
You know. I would love to hear from anyone out there.
First of all, if you've seen any of these other
are Men in Black film, not I mean not the
comedy sequels, but like the film or the the the
earlier film, and you have any insight on them. I'd
(47:08):
also love to hear from anybody who read the original
comic books, like what were they? Like, are the fans?
Are there are there fans of the original Men in
Black comics? And if they are, do they how do
they feel about the films? I'm always interested in the
you know, how a particular franchise evolves like that. For
that matter, if anyone out there has had experiences with
(47:29):
you know, with Men in Black or UFOs, you know,
we would we would love to hear from you. You know,
we promise that if you be right in with your accounts,
we will not uh make fun of you. We will
you know, skeptically uh and enthusiastically approach it as we
always do. Yeah, all right, well that's it for this episode.
If you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, some of the various other, uh
(47:49):
sort of paranormal episodes that we've recorded over the years,
you can find them. It's Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. That's the mothership. That's where we find them all.
That's where we find links out to various social media accounts.
That's where we'll find a tab for our door where
you can buy shirts and stickers and other things with
our logo on it, with various episodes specific designs on them.
You can get those, you can wear them, you can
(48:10):
deface public property with them. Um, it's all available to you.
Another great way to support the show, however, it is
just rate and review us wherever you have the power
to do so. You don't have to, you know, piss
off the authority figures. Just go and rate and review
us wherever you get this podcast. It helps us out
tremendously huge things. As always to our excellent audio producers
(48:30):
Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
just to say hello, you can email us at blow
the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
(48:53):
on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how
stuff works dot Com? Yeah, cuttle Cat's cuttlefish to the
(49:22):
second oil age and he's kingdom with burl of darkness.
I don't dispute the Eurostata, but if he's down here,
we've know not blood but darkness, the Earth's black riches.
No I could taste it on my lips. Today, I
(49:43):
want to talk to you about the science of transgenesis
TAM's Genesis Dotch Show,
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.