A Skeptical Narrative of the UFO Cult as a Legacy Government Disinformation Project
A Skeptical Narrative of the UFO Cult as a Legacy Government Disinformation Project
Explaining the 'men in black' explains everything
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.
Journalist Annie Jacobsen had a similar experience with an informant for her book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base. Claiming to be among the original ‘Sigma Four’ (S-4) program engineers working for EG&G, a national defense contractor that has reportedly operated at Area 51 since 1951, Jacobsen’s source always intimated that ‘the real story’ was just out of reach, and ultimately refused to say what was true. Instead, her source said “that soon he would die. That, really, it was best I did not learn any more because I didn’t have a need-to-know.”
“But it was not just me who needs to know,” Jacobsen writes. “We need to be able to keep secrets, but this kind of secret-keeping — of this kind of secret — is the work of totalitarian states, like the one fought against during the five decades of the Cold War.” Again, the government is the devil and the MIB are the demons, while the aliens are the flying saucer angels (or demons, stories vary) that the government knows all about and that the MIB are concealing from the public.
Except no, not really, because the MIB invariably harden belief in the flying saucer angels or demons, whichever, depending on the story someone tells themselves, later, as their opinion of the experience forms and congeals. Jacobsen was being strung along by a MIB. Perhaps he did not wear a costume or appear otherworldly, but his conversational style had the same end: he was inspiring a species of belief. It worked.
As with any religious conversion, coincidence and correlation can inspire the convert to attach random events, and even other people’s experiences, to their own experience as they form their memory of conversion. Keel, the journalist who encountered so much organized trolling in 1967, was “plagued by impossible coincidences, and some of my closest friends in New York, none of whom were conversant with the phenomenon, began to report strange experiences of their own — poltergeists erupted in their apartments, ugly smells of hydrogen sulfide haunted them. One girl suffered an inexplicable two-hour mental blackout while she was sitting under a hair dryer.”
Health can suffer under stress, and those new health problems can assume roles in the conversion story. Many a holy roller has witnessed to the way Jesus cured their cancer; random remissions happen, and so the believer calls them miraculous. “More than once I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself unable to move, with a dark apparition standing over me,” Keel writes.
This refers to sleep paralysis, a common condition known to past generations of Europeans as ‘being hagged,’ since it was said to be the curse of an Old Hag that visited people in the night. Sleep paralysis is in fact terrifying. I have experienced that condition so I know. Keel’s experience of being ‘hagged’ also turns out to be the most viable explanation for the wave of ‘alien abduction’ hysteria in the 1980s, just as it explains why so many medieval corespondents recorded unpleasant visions by their bedsides.
Indeed, almost no one makes abduction claims anymore because we have effective treatments for sleep apnea. Today I use a CPAP machine and I no longer have episodes of ‘night terrors.’ Medical science has dispelled the Old Hag’s curse. It was never supernatural. Neither are the MIB.
Since Peter Rojcewicz published his essay in 1987, historical research has relocated the first MIB experience with Harold Dahl, a resident of Maury Island, Washington, in 1947. (Appropriately enough, the History Channel has an explainer.) Dahl claimed that after a sighting of mysterious craft that killed his dog, he had been approached by a MIB who recounted the entire experience to him in detail.
“What I have said is proof to you that I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe,” Dahl quotes the alleged MIB in Flying Saucers and the Three Men. Dahl later recanted the story as a fabrication. Nevertheless, his account in Gray Barker’s books was the literary birth of the MIB in popular culture.
Yet Dahl was hardly the only example of the phenomenon. “The story begins with a Bridgeport, Connecticut factory clerk, Albert K. Bender,” Rojcewicz writes in 1987. “Bender sent a letter to a friend who was likewise interested in UFOs, stating that he had learned the origin and ultimate goal of extraterrestrial visitation of the Earth.”
Soon after Bender mailed this letter, three men dressed in black suits approached him; one of the three men carried Bender's letter. The MIB delivered a message to Bender that troubled him profoundly. He immediately discontinued all his UFO-related activities. Gyroscope technician Dominick Lucchesi and publisher Gray Barker, friends of Bender, believed that the MIB had revealed to him the secret of UFOs and had prevented him from telling the world what he knew. In any event, Bender appeared frightened. Gray Barker wrote a book about the Bender case, entitled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956). Several years later Bender published his own account of his MIB experience, which he called Flying Saucers and the Three Men (1962). This account of Bender's alleged abduction to the South Pole by grizzly monsterlike UFO occupants from the planet "Kazik" was dubiously received by even Bender's closest friend.
Roky Crikenson, the character portrayed by the late William Lucking in the classic X-Files episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” is in his garage writing in a journal about his UFO sighting when the garage door opens, as if on its own, and a car swerves into his garage with unnatural motion. Jesse Ventura steps out of the vehicle and immediately begins to undermine Crikenson’s reality. A second MIB approaches from behind and uses the sort of magic trick that ‘mentalists’ like Derren Brown perform. At the end of the episode, Crikenson’s journal is a lunatic’s manifesto and he is last seen teaching adherents of his new cult how to dodge the lava-men at the center of the earth as their souls reach afterlife perfection. Being in love with this episode, I call this spiralling effect after MIB contact “the Roky Crikenson effect.”
In the episode, Fox Mulder verbalizes the suspicion that MIB have always been a charade aimed at distracting from real answers. In other words, they are Tricksters, tricking us into believing in UFOs and aliens and Bigfoot and even maybe lava-men. In the eyes of the government, this theory goes, it is preferable that Americans believe in silly stories and obsess about aliens than figure out something that is really going on, damaging national security in the process.
This has always been my own view. I have reasons for this suspicion that are borne of a short career in the intelligence world, but more specifically in the world of electronic warfare (EW). A historiography of UFOlogy and EW, side by side, using declassified and open information, would be an incredible project, but it would explain so very many things.
Rojcewicz’s article was also a snapshot of the state of the MIB in 1987 as well as a history of his appearances up to that point. “In the mid-1960s, MIB often identified themselves as military intelligence personnel, usually representing the Air Force,” Rojcewicz writes. Every sighting of MIB had taken on a filmic quality, as though the subjects of this strange mental torture were being encouraged to conflate the most popular imagery and themes with their pre-existing or nascent belief in alien visitation.
On 15 February 1967, a confidential correspondence from the Pentagon went out to all intelligence command centers informing them to immediately notify the Office of Special Investigations if persons masquerading as military officers were apprehended intimidating UFO witnesses. Sometimes referred to as "strong-arm agents," MIB reportedly appeared during this time like gangsters or international terrorists and spies, the same time James Bond 007 was matching wits with his nemesis SMERSH in movie theaters across America.
This pattern has recurred across the UFOlogy world for decades. Whenever people supposedly met aliens before 1977, they reported a variety of forms, animal, mineral, and vegetable. After Steven Spielberg’s film Close Enounters of the Third Kind hit the screen, however, the vast majority of alien encounter tales closely resembled the friendly, sexless ghosts who emerge from the ramp of his musical ship in the film. By the time The X-Files premiered on television in 1993, ‘the grays’ were the single most popular and recognizable avatar of the extraterrestrial being.
They remain the most popular image of aliens, although alternative species, presumably from different worlds, provide a substantial mythopoeia — a Monster Manual, if you are into tabletop gaming — from which the alien-believer can draw inspiration. Thus David Grusch, ‘UAP whistleblower,’ has a great wealth of accumulated cultural material from which to draw, or from which government agents determined to troll him are able to draw.
The MIB can watch the 2014 film Interstellar or the 2015 film Tomorrowland or the 2016 film Arrival and come up with a new story that the alleged aliens are interdimensional, not interstellar, travelers, after all. A whole new permutation of the story is born. Pumped into the UFOlogy community through interlocutors inside it, this new story could even end up being congressional testimony.
Oh. Wait. Is that how this thing happened, right here? I think maybe so.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the Pentagon’s ‘UFO chief’ — he directs the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) at the United States Department of Defense — is on his way out of the position. “While the precise reasons for his alleged departure remain murky,” The Daily Mail reports, the AARO director “has faced vehement public criticism in recent weeks, from UFO enthusiasts and so-called 'disclosure' advocates seeking government transparency on UFOs and aliens.” Grusch has become a new hero to UFOlogists. He accuses Kirkpatrick of lying about the UAPs. Grusch and his fellow ‘UAP whistleblowers’ are convinced beyond doubt that Kirkpatrick is covering up the truth about the secret government flying saucer-and-aliens complex. They call it “gatekeeping,” which is the language of social justice woo.
For his part, Kirkpatrick denies wrongdoing. His new Pentagon AARO website “strongly encourage(s) any current or former U.S. government employees, military or civilian, or contractors who believe that they have firsthand knowledge of a U.S. government UAP program or activity” to come forward. By his own telling, the office is hard at work determining which earthbound explanations fit various reports.
Kirkpatrick said the AARO had been busy sorting through images and determining what’s valuable to investigate and what has a simple explanation. As part of that project, they’re collecting data about what simple objects look like in the various sensors of military aircraft. “So, we're running a campaign and have been for the last year or so on, here's what a weather balloon looks like in an F-35 when you fly it at Mach 1 in all of the sensors. Here's what it looks like from Aegis, and then take all that data and turn it into models that we can then put back into the trainers so that the operators can understand what they're looking at,” he said. “The idea being we want to reduce the number of UAP reports that are actually just balloons or actually just drones. Right? I need to get those off of our plate because those aren't UAP.”
If that sounds scientific rather than conspiratorial, then you are not paranoid enough to be David Grusch. So far, AARO has not found an alien spaceship. “Most reported sightings of UAPs continue to center around military bases and restricted airspace, a phenomenon the report attributes to a ‘collection bias,’” one reporter explained in October when AARO published eight months’ worth of analysis involving 270 sightings. This ‘collection bias’ around military bases should hardly surprise anyone. They are exactly the places where secret aircraft, and more importantly secret EW technologies, would be tested out, and people trained in their uses. Given the amount of EW and drone development taking place these days, an upward trend in sightings and recordings should be expected.
So should countermeasures against threats to these projects. Two types of people might then come into contact with UFOs or UAPs around military bases that are in fact US government project sites, making themselves interesting to the government in the process. Moreover, this will have always been the case, and is even more the case today than it was decades ago. Agents of foreign governments or corporate entities spying on US military developments are the first targets of US counterintelligence activity. The second group are regular American citizens who, either by naked eye or some technical means, observe those covert development activities. This latter group has always represented a security risk by way of alerting the first group to the presence of something interesting. That is, an ordinary American who detects strange radio signals and sees strange things in the sky, and lets it be known what they detected and saw, is liable to get a visit from MIB.
This visit may involve threats. The threats are not serious. They are psychological warfare intended to push people into sounding insane. Ventura’s MIB tells Crikenson that he is “a dead man” should he tell anyone what he has seen, that it was only the planet Venus. This is gaslighting, supercharged. Grusch, for example, has reported “threatening phone calls” that made him “worried about his safety.” He may be the tip of an iceberg. A recent article at Public “compiled 75 years’ worth of testimony from UAP witnesses, civilians, and military personnel who say they have been threatened with death, or other forms of punishment, for speaking out publicly about what they have seen.” These same people are screaming mad at Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick and AARO for covering up the flying saucers and alien corpses. See? It works.
Not that I am excusing the MIB. “It is illegal, not just unethical, to threaten someone with death,” the authors, including Michael Shellenberger, write. True enough, but the MIB are not concerned about those ethics. They have a different ethic borne of the Cold War and tended in the never-ending spy war. More than thirty people are now whistleblowers along with Grusch, all alleging that something is being covered up, and that threats were part of the cover-up. You know what? I believe them.
In April, a former Marine named Michael Herrera gave testimony to U.S. Senate investigators. He said unidentified American military forces threatened to kill him after he and his squad stumbled upon a UAP in Indonesia in 2009. Herrera said that his squad was ambushed by eight men, all speaking with American accents, wearing all-black, unmarked camouflage, and wielding M4 rifles.
“They had their weapons drawn on us,” Herrera said. “We could audibly hear their weapon safety levers flipping off [the] safe… They said we weren't supposed to be there, and that they could kill us.” The camouflaged men took their guns, Herrera said, and escorted them away from the site, all while “telling us how they could kill us.”
Going back to alleged threats that followed the supposed crash of a flying saucer at Roswell, New Mexico, the Public piece never mentions the MIB phenomenon. Ponder the reason why that might be, dear reader. I do not suggest the authors at Public are deliberately avoiding the cultural implications of what MIB have become, namely Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones doing sad but lucrative sequels that suck the life and joy out of a formerly-fun premise. Rather, these writers are not historians, let alone historians of the UFO cult.
They do not understand it as a cult, qua cult, nor do they understand these alleged threats to be part of the MIB tradition of stirring up that same cult. They might take the time to read about Paul Bennewitz, the subject of the best-documented MIB experience of all time, or watch the documentary interview with the actual MIB who messed with Bennewitz’s head.
Yes. That’s right. We have an MIB on camera discussing his activities. Richard Doty is the real deal. You can watch Mirage Men, a 2013 documentary by John Lundberg, at YouTube by clicking the picture below. The film is named for, but only loosely based upon, the 2010 book by Mark Pilkington (click here to visit the Amazon link). I recommend the reader watch the documentary before reading the book — unless you are actually interested in UFOlogy culture and the cult of the flying saucer.
If that’s you, then prepare for the hall of mirrors in which Pilkington has spent much of his life, even working as a professional organizer. Pilkington and Lundberg have both interviewed Richard Doty at length about his career in applied surrealism. Watch the convention of UFO/UAP enthusiasts unfold in paranoid whispering and cliquish mistrust over Doty. These people know that the government is messing with them. They still believe, despite decades of disappointment, that people like Doty are communicating some sort of hidden truth disguised in lies. They still listen. They still hear him whisper, despite themselves, despite — or because of — their doubts. Behold the MIB, and behold his magical spell over them. See how he does it.
“Rick Doty liked John and me, and we liked him. Over the course of our week at Laughlin he became our almost constant companion, a state of affairs that occasionally caused us anxiety,” Pilkington writes of the interview process. He experienced spells of paranoia. Doty did “some strange things,” Pilkington writes. “One afternoon, Rick approached me with his laptop while I sat working at my own in the conference foyer.”
‘Hi Mark!’ There was a furtive air to Rick’s voice that instantly set me on edge. ‘I have something I want to show you.’
He put the laptop down on the table and opened the screen to reveal a series of photographs and drawings of extraterrestrials, all in the ‘grey’ variety — grey skin, bald bulbous heads, large black almond-shaped eyes, slits for mouths, holes for noses and pencil-thin necks.
‘What do you think of these?’ he asked.
I’d seen almost all these photos before and said as much to Rick. I also told him that I thought they were all fakes; some were models, some were special-effects creations from films. A couple were very well done.
‘Why are you showing me these?’ I asked, making no attempt to hide my suspicion.
‘One of them is real. Which one do you think it is?’
‘I think they’re all fake, I’ve told you.’
‘I’ve seen a living Eben and one of these is a photograph of it.’
He pointed out one of the creatures, a side-on profile of a grey with a longer-than-usual face and a noble, determined look, at least inasmuch as you could read emotion into its alien visage. Its arms were down by its sides and the whole image was cut off above the elbow. I expressed my doubts.
‘This one is real,’ insisted Rick. ‘We called it EBE 2. It lived as a guest of the US government froim 1964 until 1984. I saw it being interviewed at Los Alamos.’
John Lundberg then enters the scene to burst the momentary bubble by identifying the photo as “a bust” and “a model. A ufologist I know has it on his mantelpiece.” Still, Pilkington continues to talk to Doty. For some reason, he cannot help but continue to engage a liar, as if he is the mental thrall of a devil.
Like Michael Elliot, who countenanced a MIB at his college library, Pilkington is not committed to a view on whether UAPs/UFOs are actually alien technology. In fact Pilkington’s agnosticism led to his split with the membership of NUFOS, the organization he once led. Doty behaved exactly as a MIB does, historically speaking, in the presence of an agnostic: he tried pushing the subject towards belief. Even when he is exposed an instant later — being one against two instead of one-on-one, or even three against one, as MIB prefer to operate — Doty remains too fascinating for his victims to ignore.
The UFO ‘community’ has known about Doty since at least 1989. That year, UFO author Bill Moore revealed to a stunned MUFON conference in Las Vegas that he had participated in “disinformation” activities against Paul Bennewitz, an electronics engineer and entrepreneur, by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). Moore, whose book about the Roswell ‘incident’ has become a Book of Genesis for UFO believers, caused outbursts from the crowd as he explained that his cooperation with Richard Doty had been aimed at gathering nuggets of “truth” from his lies. By this time Bennewitz had been hospitalized for deteriorating mental health. He died in 2003.
Assigned to AFOSI in 1980, Doty was involved in “perception management” of Bennewitz with false information. Bennewitz had become interested in UFOs during the 1970s and may have come onto AFOSI’s metaphorical radar when he got involved in cattle mutilation investigations. Project Beta: Summary and Report of Status (With Suggested Guidelines), a document that Bennewitz authored and circulated in the UFO world in 1981, is a “labyrinthine fantasy” and “as much a result of disinformation being fed to Bennewitz via AFOSI, as of his own imagining,” Pilkington writes.
“The alien is devious,” Bennewitz wrote of the strange sights in the shy around Kirtland Air Force Base. The alien “employs deception, has no intent of any apparent peace-making process and obviously does not adhere to any prior-arranged agreement” respecting boundaries or civilizational values. “The are not to be trusted,” he wrote, underlining the emphasis, for they are “death-oriented and have no moral respect for human or human life.”
Intent on domination of earthlings through mind-control technologies, this threat demanded responsive force. Bennewitz “describes a specialized beam weapon that he has developed to counteract the ETs and their craft, something that must have greatly interested his military handlers,” including Doty, Pilkington says. “One can only guess at the mindset of those at Kirtland who, faced with such clear signs of mental instability, decided to take their operation to another level rather than attempt to defuse a situation that was already out of hand.”
Bennewitz had been filming strange lights in the sky and “recording radio transmissions that he felt were associated with them” for at least a few months when he approached Kirtland Security in 1980 to warn them that extraterrestrial craft were visiting the base. “For the next few years AFOSI passed him faked government UFO documents, gave him a computer that appeared to be receiving transmissions from the malevolent ETs and created a fake UFO base in remotest New Mexico,” Pilkington writes.
Ripped from the pages of a Robert Ludlum novel, it is difficult to believe, perhaps, that this inhumane psychology experiment took place in the United States of America. “We did things I wish we had not done,” Annie Jacobsen’s S-4 source tells her. “We performed medical experiments on handicapped children and prisoners.” And: “People were killed.” How much of this is real, and how much is false, cannot be safely determined, for the word of a MIB is worthless.
Before he was reassigned to Germany by the Air Force in 1984, Doty had developed Bill Moore as an intelligence source about what was going on in the UFO community. Rather than debunk the latest theory about where aliens came from and what they were visiting earth for, “Moore’s information was then used to generate bogus government documentation that corroborated the UFO community’s suspicions of a top-level UFO cover-up and drew his fellow researchers into a rich pseudo-history of human-alien interaction that stretched back at least two thousand years.” Pilkington assesses that “Doty and Bennewitz were the conduits, if not the source, for much of the UFO mythology that had emerged since the early 1980s.” Pilkington’s book is a devastating reveal of this story.
“Within the UFO community it was assumed that the CIA, the National Security Agency and others were tools in the cover-up of the Truth, but the Bennewitz affair suggested that the opposite might be the case, that these agencies were in fact responsible for much of the UFO mythology,” Pilkington writes.
A skeptical view of the MIB phenomenon, in which we adopt the mythicist view of the flying saucer and interstellar aliens, reveals the MIB as the secret priesthood keeping the UFO cult alive. They gave it life in the first place. Even now, they are still feeding the cult hope, still pushing it to believe harder, still feeding its own fantasies back to it in a PSYOPS feedback loop. It was always them. The MIB explain everything by their existence. Unlike Bigfoot, we have an interview with this variety of psychic vampire. His existence is a matter of record, not just folklore.
