The Real Men in Black Read online

  By the time of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in the summer of 1947, Bender was living in one of several modified sections on the top floor of an old three-story house with only his stepfather for company. As his fascination with flying saucers began to grow, Bender spent more and more time locked inside the upper room—an offshoot of the attic, in other words—where he carefully perused paranormal books, journals, and newspaper clippings, and made good use of a newly acquired telescope to, on nearly a nightly basis, excitedly scan the heavens for anything saucer-shaped.

  UFOs weren’t the only strange things that had gotten their hooks into Bender’s mind, however. His life was steeped in the literary gothic horrors of Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allen Poe. He also had a tremendous fascination with the occult; séances, black magic, Ouija boards, and witchcraft were all part and parcel of what it was to be Albert Bender in the late 1940s. Unsurprisingly, living a solitary existence in a dark attic (complete with the requisite creaking floorboards), Bender’s character and life began to subtly change, bit by bit and piece by piece, and not in a particularly positive fashion.

  One day, out of the blue, Bender took it upon himself to paint the walls of the attic with the faces of grotesque, nightmarish creatures (as you do). It was a curious task that kept him toiling busily for no less than eight months. Bender’s Chamber of Horrors, as he increasingly (and justifiably) began to refer to it, was starting to take its wretched, malevolent shape. For a while at least, Bender even mused upon the idea of turning the entire upper floor into something resembling a haunted house that he planned to charge thrill-seekers to excitedly explore. Nothing ultimately came of such a venture, however, and, at a local level, Bender was beginning to develop a bit of a reputation as someone who was a tad off-kilter: By Bender’s own admission, there were superstitious folk in town that had heard of his activities and viewed him as a full-blown menace.

  The strange life and times of Albert Bender were blighted by psychological issues as well. He displayed clear symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): He had a specific, set place for everything in his cherished attic, and he could immediately tell if anything was moved, even slightly, outside of its strict, rigid confines, and would become highly irritated. He was accused by friends of being overly fussy, as a result of his need to have total control over just about everything within his personal environment. Bender may also have been a fully paid-up hypochondriac: Although only a young man at the time his UFO interests began to develop, he lived in absolute, illogical dread of developing some form of cancer.

  It should also be noted that “high strangeness” had significantly afflicted the Bender family for years prior to Albert’s own experiences: A cousin of his had, as a child, undergone a nightmarish bedroom visitation from a Woman in Black—a curious (and perhaps not entirely unrelated) precursor to the nightmare in which Bender eventually found himself immersed. Another relative, in northern Pennsylvania, died of a brain hemorrhage that certain members of the family came to believe was due to the actions of a supernatural entity that haunted the shadowy corners of a nearby cemetery. In other words, for much of the Bender clan, ghosts, specters, horrific beasts, and creepy situations were central facets of everyday life. Nice.

  It was in December 1950 that flying saucers took center-stage for Bender. He began to more seriously collate and cross-reference the many reports and stories that came his way, he hooked up with like-minded devotees of the space people, and he embarked upon the first, tentative steps of an ambitious project: namely, to establish a worldwide network of UFO investigators to be called the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), which ultimately came to fruition in April 1952, and led Bender to publish his very own magazine, Space Review.

  Incredibly, Bender, dwelling in the heart of a dark and shadowy occult-dominated attic in the home of his stepfather, achieved something that, I am strongly inclined to suspect, went far beyond his wildest dreams. The IFSB did not only blossom and bloom; it also caught the attention of flying saucer disciples all across the planet. UFO reports poured in to the IFSB, people eagerly clamored to become members of the group, and Bender spend night after night faithfully answering letters of the cosmic sort that reached him by the sack-load.

  Everything seemed to be going well: A solid network of saucer devotees had been created, the IFSB appointed representatives in a number of countries, including Britain and Australia, and, in no time at all, Bender’s little group became a fairly significant force on the UFO research scene. However, in one of those classic “live fast, die young” scenarios, the IFSB—the James Dean of ufology, perhaps—was not destined to last long. It was stark fear, rather than the pompous, ego-driven bureaucracy that blights so many UFO research groups, that brought the IFSB to a grinding halt.

  The beginning of the end began on the night of July 30, 1952, only a few months after the IFSB was established, when an anonymous telephone call was made to the Bender residence. With his stepfather not around, Albert was the one fate destined to answer it. When he picked up the phone, no one spoke, but Bender was instinctively certain that someone was at the other end of the line, listening intently in eerie silence. Bender’s head suddenly spun and throbbed alarmingly, and he was forced to retire to his bed.

  A few days later, fully recovered, Bender went along to his local movie theater; a new sci-fi flick was due to be screened and he was eagerly awaiting its appearance. The movie proved to be uneventful, but the walk home, shortly before the arrival of the witching hour, was most definitely not uneventful. As he negotiated the dark sidewalks, an increasingly concerned Bender was sure that some hostile figure was pursuing him. He made it home without incident, however, and, as his stepfather was already sleeping, he made his quiet and careful way to the attic. On approaching the door, a fearful Bender could not fail to see that an eerie glow emanated from the thin gap directly beneath the doorframe. He flung open the door and was confronted by a strong smell of burning sulfur, and a bright, shimmering object hovering in the room. Suddenly, Bender’s eyes felt severely irritated, at which point he turned on the light, and the strange object vanished into oblivion. With his OCD no doubt kicking in big-time, Bender could see that certain IFSB files were not quite where they should be; someone—or something—had been rifling through his precious flying saucer material.

  Bender tried valiantly to put this unsettling experience behind him, and focused on other matters, such as the day-to-day activities of the IFSB, methodically affixing large, plastic spiders to the ceiling of the attic with which to terrify visiting friends—an entirely normal action for a 30-something, of course—and hanging out at the local cinema. The latter would, yet again, prove to be a costly action. On a dark night in November 1952, Bender was happily watching the latest science-fiction release when he was overwhelmed by a strange and unsettling feeling. It was a mixture of dread and trepidation, and a sense of being intently stared at from the darkened recesses of the old cinema.

  Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Bender was horrified to see a human-like form materialize in a nearby seat: A well-dressed man in dark clothes had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. The shadowy figure could hardly be considered a local, however; for one thing, his eyes glowed like flashlight bulbs. Bender was once again afflicted by sudden dizziness, his head swirled, and he was forced to close his eyes as he sought to lessen the nausea that quickly threatened to engulf him. On opening them, a relieved Bender could see that the spectral being had vanished. He tried, in vain, to focus his attention on the movie again, but it was all to no avail. Minutes later, he had yet another distinct and uneasy feeling of being watched by unknown forces. Bender, slowly and apprehensively, turned around. There, yet again, was the glowing-eyed, well-dressed fiend of the night, staring coldly and harshly at Bender, who wasted no time at all in hightailing it back to the comfort of his attic.

  Throughout the next few months Bender’s dizzy spells continued, brief manifestations of dark-suited entities plagued his days
and nights, alarming outbreaks of poltergeist activity occurred in the attic, brimstone-like odors proliferated—sometimes for days—and he began to develop intense, migraine-like headaches. It was at the height of this mental and physical torment, midway through 1953, that three men dressed in dark clothes treated Bender to the worst of all his varied visitations.

  According to the initial story that quickly did the rounds in flying saucer research circles, the trio of mysterious characters revealed to a panic-stricken Bender the dark truth behind the UFO presence on our world, but warned him, in hushed but stern tones, never to reveal what he had been told—under any circumstances whatsoever. That is, unless, Bender had some sadistic wish to incur their immediate and deadly wrath, which he most certainly did not. In fact, so terrified was Bender by the whole experience that, in October 1953, he announced to his shocked followers, in the pages of his Space Review magazine, that he was closing the doors on the IFSB, and leaving the flying saucer arena for good.

  Bender’s own words on this matter, published in the final issue of the magazine, only added to the controversy: “We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but because of the nature of the information we are sorry that we have been advised in the negative. We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious” (Bender October 1953). And for Bender, that was that. The legend of the Men in Black, and their attendant threats, was duly born, and they had successfully claimed their first victim.

  2

  Gray Barker Joins the IFSB (1953)

  One of those individuals whom Albert Bender warmly and enthusiastically invited into the IFSB fold in early 1953 was a man named Gray Barker. A resident of Clarksburg, West Virginia, Barker ran a motion-picture-booking business at the time, handling both indoor and outdoor theaters throughout his home state. Barker proved to be a highly skilled and truly atmospheric writer on all manner of flying saucer–related events and tales, and was also someone who never allowed the facts to get in the way of a good yarn—for entertainment purposes alone this was perhaps fine, but is unfortunate when it comes to unraveling the complexities of the Bender affair, as will soon be appreciated.

  Jim Moseley, a close friend of Barker’s—who shuffled off this mortal coil in 1984—explains why Barker may have been so captivated by Albert Bender and the IFSB: “Barker’s background was quite like Bender’s. As a child, as an adolescent, Barker was drawn to horror movies, horror masks, and things like that, just like Bender was. That may have had something to do with Gray wanting to get involved with the IFSB.”

  Longtime UFO investigator Jim Moseley.

  Barker did far more than just get involved with Bender, however. In 1956, Barker wrote and published a captivating page-turner titled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, which devoted a considerable amount of space to the Bender controversy. Within his book, which has now achieved nearly cult-like status, Barker avoided explicitly stating that Bender’s MIB were agents of the U.S. government, possibly from the FBI. That was certainly the implication that Barker made for his eager readers, however, and one that is not by any means an impossible scenario. UFO authority Jerome Clark says that it is likely that FBI agents visited Bender. In those dark Cold War days, Clark suggests, when nearly anybody and everybody that harbored nonconformist ideas with national-security implications— even if distant ones—found themselves under J. Edgar Hoover’s bureau’s gaze, “One doesn’t have to speculate too hard to conclude that an active head of an early UFO organization would warrant a visit and interview. In my opinion agents may well have visited, and they may well have said something he took as threatening. From there, [Bender’s] own imagination and Barker’s freewheeling exploitation together generated the ‘Bender mystery.’”

  Clark’s opinion is a valid one: In the very same year that Bender was visited by the three strange men (1953), the CIA brought together a select group called the Robertson Panel that focused much of its time and attention on the national security implications of the UFO issue. One of the more notable recommendations of the panel was that a number of the new, public UFO investigative groups in the United States at the time, such as the Civilian Saucer Investigation (CSI), and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), should be clandestinely watched very carefully due to “the apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes” (Durant 1953).

  Clearly, Bender’s IFSB, which quickly became a fairly significant player on the UFO scene, would also have been ripe for careful scrutiny by certain concerned elements of the U.S. intelligence community. Allen Greenfield—a ceremonial magician and a Gnostic bishop—strongly agrees. He offers his views on this issue by beginning thus: “Back in 1975, I had a meeting with Dewey Fournet, who was involved at the time of the July 1952 UFO flap over Washington, D.C. and the White House.” Fournet had served in the Technical Capabilities Branch of U.S. Air Force Intelligence, until his transfer in 1952 to the Current Intelligence Branch, and became the liaison officer between the Pentagon and the Air Force’s UFO investigation, Project Blue Book. The “UFO flap” to which Greenfield refers began late on the night of July 19, 1952, and included sightings of UFOs by the military, pilots of civilian aircraft, and members of the public. It was this wave of incidents that led the FBI—after receiving a briefing on the matter from Commander Randall Boyd of the Air Force’s Current Intelligence Branch—to note that “It is not entirely impossible that the objects sighted may possibly be ships from another planet such as Mars” (Federal Bureau of Investigation 1952).

  The subtext that was considered far more important to the Pentagon than this sensational series of UFO sightings over D.C., states Greenfield, was that, had there been a Soviet attack on the night of the major wave of flying-saucer encounters—a first-strike on the United States, in other words—then it probably would have been disastrously successful. According to what Fournet told Greenfield, because the entirety of the military apparatus was so preoccupied by looking for flying saucers—with radar and scrambled jets, as well as the sheer amount of UFO-dominated radio traffic clogging the airwaves—no meaningful attention was being given to far more conventional sources of perceived danger, like the dastardly Reds.

  Greenfield spells out his personal viewpoint on this matter, which is not in accord with those of Fournet and the Air Force:

  I’m not endorsing that idea, as I think the idea of a Soviet first-attack was much more mythic than the UFOs themselves. But, if you put yourself in the position of U.S. policy-makers in 1952, that was a perfectly plausible scenario. And then, when the Robertson Panel was conceived, their conclusion was that the private UFO organizations that were coming to come into existence at that time, just like Bender’s IFSB, could be infiltrated by Communist agents and used to set off a false UFO flap, in order to preoccupy the entirety military establishment at a vulnerable moment, so that a sneak Soviet attack could be successfully launched. There was the suggestion made that it might be in the interests of national security for these private organizations to be watched closely, or even to be closed down. Now, not in an overt sense, as that may have created some civil-liberty issues. But, perhaps, send someone to the door to talk to the leading person in the organization, or to witnesses, to scare the bejesus out of them, which might well have happened with Bender.

  This theory of UFO groups as national security threats was given a further boost when, on August 28, 1953, Gray Barker himself received an ominous knock at his front door in West Virginia. It was a special agent of the FBI who had a whole list of questions concerning Bender’s IFSB. It turns out that Bender had, some weeks earlier, forwarded to Barker a number of business cards that Bender had printed, identifying Barker as Chief Investigator for the IFSB. A scared-out-of-his-wits Barker shakily admitted to the FBI agent that he had given four or five such cards to close friends, who still had them when he checked in with them. It was, therefore, something of a surprise when the FBI turned up on Barker’s doorstep with one of the business car
ds.

  The stone-faced G-man wanted to know all about the IFSB and Barker’s role within it. Evermore nervously, Barker replied that the IFSB was simply an innocent organization formed to investigate flying saucer phenomena, and that the business cards were a means by which investigators of the group could be identified. The FBI man then proceeded to ask Barker if he knew a certain individual—whose name Barker could not later recall, no doubt as a result of being emotionally frazzled by the interrogation—who lived in Florida. Barker replied that, no, he did not know the man. This prompted the agent to advise Barker that the man had suffered an epileptic fit and had been taken to the nearby St. Mary’s Hospital. Within his belongings was an IFSB card. Satisfied that Barker was not acquainted with the man, the FBI agent simply thanked him for his time and departed. Barker, meanwhile, did his very best to try and catch his breath.

  After the FBI agent departed, Barker began to wonder if there really had been an epileptic man after all, or if this had simply been a ruse to allow the FBI to covertly check out Barker, Bender, and the IFSB. Barker voiced all of these concerns, and several more too, in a hastily written missive to Bender. If Barker was not lying about having been visited by a stern-faced official of the FBI—a scenario that, given Barker’s predilection for modified tales and pranks, cannot be entirely ruled out, unfortunately—then this incident may have added much weight to Barker’s assertion that Bender’s three men were indeed attached to the secret world of governmental officialdom. On a similar path, Dominic Luchesi and August Roberts, two members of the IFSB who subsequently became close friends of Bender, stated that Bender’s visitors were possibly from the government. And the aforementioned Jim Moseley says that “Bender’s original story—and I met him—was that the shut-up had come from the government. It was never actually said, but maybe from the FBI.”