A Skeptical Narrative of the UFO Cult as a Legacy Government Disinformation Project

Explaining the 'men in black' explains everything

Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek were an iconic pair of sinister cover-up agents in the single greatest X-Files episode ever, S3:E20 “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”

So-called ‘Men in Black’ (MIB) have been described as ‘out of this world’ since the first reports of their existence during the first wave of flying saucer hysteria. This was always by design. “The cryptic nature of the MIB indicates something of the complexity of the UFO question, as it involves a continuum of related but discrete phenomena and beliefs,” Peter M. Rojcewicz wrote in The Journal of American Folklore in 1987. His essay, “The ‘Men in Black’ Experience and Tradition: Analogues with the Traditional Devil Hypothesis,” was a galvanizing moment in the history of UFOlogy. Fifteen at the time, and gifted a subscription to Omni magazine by an indulgent grandfather, I could appreciate just from the controversy that Rojcewicz was making some UFOlogists mad by refusing to decide the truth or falsity of the unidentified flying objects of their belief.

He was instead identifying deep symbolic relationships between the MIB and the supernatural creatures and beings of the narrative past. “There is good evidence today to suggest that the enigmatic ‘Men in Black’ visit not only witnesses to UFOs, but also witnesses to ‘monsters,’ Bigfoot-like creatures, and a variety of nonordinary entities. This observation is a most important one, since it points to the interrelationships between UFOs and various folklore belief traditions,” he wrote. A folklorist, he did not analyze the politics of UFOlogy, but placed the MIB in a narrative triangulation with the (symbolic) devil and the (symbolic?) aliens from outer space, an unholy sort of trinity of entities that are “separate but not separated.”

The devil, of course, is the government, meaning federal, meaning Washington DC, meaning dark offices where sinister conspirators suppress the dangerous and daring work of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. The government wants to cover up the existence of aliens and the magic-box technologies they bring from wherever they are. MIBs are the agents who silence the witnesses who saw the flying objects or met the aliens.

Typically “dressed in black clothing that may appear soiled and generally unkempt or unrealistically neat and wrinkle-free,” Rojcewicz compares the MIB to the Tibetan tulpa, a materialized thought-form projected into existence by human consciousness, like a hologram. The reader may recall David Lynch’s recent Twin Peaks sequel series, which concluded the story and centered on tulpas.

However, Rojcewicz had a caution for folklorists working with UFOlogy narratives about the MIB. “First-person accounts of MIB often reveal phenomenological traits different in degree or even in kind from the tradition,” he observed. “Individuals who possess an experiential relationship with MIB may be completely independent of the existing body of lore.” In other words, while there was a general pattern to reported appearances of MIB, they all seemed different. At times there would be one, other times two, other times three.

MIB have been reported to arrive unannounced … at the homes or places of employment of selected UFO witnesses and investigators or their research assistants, usually before the witness or researcher has reported the UFO experience to anyone; or in the case of some investigators, before they have even undergone a UFO experience of any kind. People have reported that MIB know more about them than the average stranger could possibly know, and thus MIB can possess an omniscient air.

Godlike or magical qualities, so to speak, are memorable. Furthermore, “it seems equally important for scholars to be aware of the conventions of form, content, and style of investigative reporting, or what is sometimes called ‘journalistic fiction,’ in order to scrape away the personality of the investigator and get to the experience.”

In other words, the folklorist must read about Batboy in the Weekly World News with an eye for the patterns of the reported experience of Batboy, or encounters with Elvis in that publication with an eye for the reported experience of Elvis, rather than get lost in the weeds trying to tease out the truth or falsity of such dubious content, since it has passed through a sensationalistic lens.

People have experiences, and then they form the memories of those experiences over a period of time. Changing opinions can affect the memory. For example, “MIB, some felt, functioned as a means of discouraging the dissemination of UFO lore” (emphasis mine). The mysterious MIB accomplish this by appearing and disappearing mysteriously, by appearing and acting mysteriously, by exhibiting mysterious racial origins, by mysterious statements and mysterious motivations.

That air of unreality is the whole entire point of the MIB. Rojcewicz suggested a relationship to Tricksters, gods and characters of myth who import moral lessons on human beings through trickery. (See the Hedley Koo, for example.) Personally, I have always seen the sinister MIB as stage hypnotists who were hardly on a mission to discourage belief in alien visitations.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

Consider the recorded experience of Michael Elliot, dated 13 May 1982 as oral history. He was in a college library when a mysterious man appeared at his side. “Now the man asked me if I had ever seen a flying saucer,” Elliot reports. The MIB wanted to know what Elliot thought about aliens. “I curtly told him that at the moment I wasn't particularly interested in whether flying saucers were physical, extraterrestrial craft,” Elliot said. “I found the stories about them interesting.” The mystery man did not react by dampening Elliot’s belief. Emphases mine:

Well, I thought the guy was going to come unglued! He became highly agitated and said in a voice much too loud for use in a library: "Flying saucers are the most important fact of the century, and you're not interested!?" . . . I couldn't believe it was happening to me, and I was getting a bit fearful. I was beginning to think that he was more than just a nut. I felt that he might be dangerous. I tried to calm him. Finally he said nothing ... He stood up, not like you or I would, but as if he were mechanically lifted. He looked real awkward ... Placing his hand on my shoulder he said something like "Go well in your purpose." It sounded religious and I remember thinking that he was going to leave some proselytizing religious tracts with me. I didn't look up to see him go.

Elliot began to reappraise his experience after a moment. “Within, say, ten seconds, great fear overwhelmed me and for the first time I entertained the idea that this man was otherworldly. Really, I was very frightened.” Also, he was more convinced than ever that something terrible must be hidden inside the enigma of the unidentified flying object.

Or consider the experience of UFO investigator and author John A. Keel, a journalist who decided to tackle the flying saucer phenomenon and began to experience bizarre events. “My telephone ran amok first, with mysterious strangers calling day and night to deliver bizarre messages from ‘the space people,’” he wrote, again quoted by Rojcewicz. “Then I catapulted into the dream-like fantasy of demonology.” Emphases mine:

I kept rendevous with black Cadillacs on Long Island, and when I tried to pursue them they would disappear impossibly on dead-end roads. Throughout 1967, I was called out in the middle of the night to go on silly wild-goose chases and try to affect "rescues" (emphasis in original) of troubled contactees. Luminous aerial objects seemed to know where I was going and where I had been. I would check into a motel at random only to find that someone had made a reservation in my name and had even left a string of nonsense messages for me.

Start by accepting that this experience was real, from Keel’s perspective. Still: nothing about this seems remotely aimed at discouraging belief in either a vast conspiracy or aliens visiting earth in flying saucers. To the contrary, this level of drama trolling requires a deliberate effort by a whole team of people using a fair amount of resources, and only makes sense as an elaborate scheme to convince Keel, the journalist(!), that something important is being hidden from him.