Men in Black
February 8, 2018 • Los Angeles
In 1953, Albert K. Bender, head of the International Flying Saucer Bureau and publisher of Space Review, got so freaked out by harassment he was receiving that he shut down the magazine and stopped talking about saucers. These were the early heady days of the saucer phenomenon in this country, and it sent shockwaves through the network of researchers and witnesses.
Bender had been told by “a higher source” to stop writing about UFOs. The harassers he encountered, which he called the “silencers,” would later came to be known as the men in black, after Gray Barker’s 1956 book They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers. Bender said the men in black were supernatural, sometimes hovering above the floor, and Barker said they were extraterrestrial. Despite Bender dropping out of the research field, Barker continued to write about it.
Mason runs across “silencer” figures a couple of times, most recently in Penstock Canyon, when they show up at his door. To paraphrase the great Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, sage of late-night History Channel documentaries, “I’m not sure if it’s aliens … but it’s aliens.”
