The True Story Behind The REAL Men In Black | Unveiled

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The True Story Behind the Real Men in Black</h4>

For as long as we’ve believed in flying saucers, we’ve believed in covert, government operations to cover them up. As well as burying paperwork and keeping evidence of UFOs locked up in top-secret bases, another tool the government supposedly has at its disposal is the elusive “Men in Black”. But who are these mysterious people, and do they really exist at all?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: what’s the true story behind the REAL men in black?

Though there have been sightings of strange lights in the skies since ancient times, the modern idea of the UFO dates back only to the 1940s. During World War II, pilots on both sides noticed unidentified lights, nicknamed ‘foo fighters’. In June 1947, civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine unidentified objects approaching Mount Rainier in Washington state, traveling at a speed that he estimated to be well over 1,000 mph. His story received significant media coverage and became the origin of the term “flying saucer”.  It seemed to open the floodgates; suddenly, hundreds of other people reported sightings. That same month, a strange object crash-landed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico. The Army identified it as a weather balloon, although years later, in 1994, the Air Force would admit it was a top secret nuclear test surveillance balloon. In the decades since the incident, Roswell has become synonymous with government cover-ups, men in black, UFO crash landings, and Area 51. That’s despite the fact that Area 51 is almost 800 miles away from the crash site, so not the easiest place to go if you’re transporting the giant wreckage of a spacecraft. Interestingly though, one of the earliest claimed “men in black” encounters also comes from 1947, but not from Roswell.

The Maury Island incident was yet another UFO incident in Washington, much like the Kenneth Arnold sighting. In fact, it was a LOT like the Kenneth Arnold sighting, suspiciously so. Though it allegedly occurred on June 21st of 1947, it wasn’t until July 29th that Kenneth Arnold himself interviewed a man named Harold Dahl, who along with another, Fred Crisman, said they saw a UFO off the coast of Maury Island in western Washington. Crucially, this was all weeks after Arnold’s story about UFOs seen over Mount Rainier had broken in the newspapers, creating a UFO craze. Everybody was eager to get a UFO story out there, but Dahl managed it. 

More important than seeing odd doughnuts in the sky, however, was the fact that - according to Dahl - a “man in a dark suit” had told him not to tell anyone else about the incident. The idea of a man in black appeared, then, just when everybody in America was trying to get in on the UFO fad, selling their stories to newspapers. Some genuine G-men did later investigate. Two Air Force officers interviewed Dahl and Crisman, but interpreted the white metal debris presented by Dahl (to back up his claim) as mundane. Those officers died, however, after their B-25 bomber crashed… and so the FBI conducted their own investigation, before also determining that the sighting was a hoax. Notably, just the year before, Crisman had written a letter to ‘Amazing Story’ claiming to have fought evil creatures underground in Burma. So, it’s perhaps little wonder the names “Harold Dahl” and “Fred Crisman” have been largely forgotten in UFO mythology.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. Nine years later, in 1956, American author Gray Barker released a book titled “They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers”, about men in black suits silencing UFO investigators. Barker was a member of one of the earliest UFO clubs for amateur ufologists. In private however, he was actually a resolute skeptic. In fact, he even went to great lengths to prank the more ‘serious’ ufologists out there. His friends and family said he saw ufology as a joke and published his books for the money. Nonetheless, Barker made the Men in Black a key part of UFO conspiracy theories. In the 1990s, the Men in Black entered pop culture fully. Mysterious government agents often appeared in “The X-Files”, and then, of course, a movie franchise was launched on the back of a popular comic strip. Today, everybody knows what the Men in Black are, though we have next to no credible sightings of them in real life.

Maybe that just means they’re good at their jobs, though! Or it could be that they’re not “Men in Black” anymore. Considering their name is an exact description of how they’re supposedly dressed, in sinister black suits, it might be in their best interest to drop the suits entirely and look just like ordinary people. OR maybe the movie franchise hit upon the truth, and the Men in Black are able to wipe people’s memories. But that wouldn’t correlate with UFO sightings, which have been steadily increasing for years. So, either the Men in Black are so awful at their jobs that everybody reports their UFO encounters anyway, or they don’t exist at all. Then again, perhaps the vast majority of UFO sightings are false, and the Men in Black just don’t bother with cases that are deemed unlikely. 

But it’s not like the US government has been all that good at hiding supposedly ‘alien’ incidents in the past. Everybody in the world has heard about Area 51, and the idea that there’s alien technology hidden inside. If the Men in Black were really effective, we wouldn’t know about that (or them) in the first place. So where might this idea of frightening government agents actually come from? Well, the US military in particular is deeply secretive. Indeed, it’s this high level of secrecy that has fuelled the Area 51 conspiracy theories for years, as its existence wasn’t acknowledged until 2013. Guarding it are the “camo guys”, the colloquial nickname for the many soldiers that patrol the perimeter of Area 51 and warn tourists that they’re authorized to use lethal force if anybody gets too close.

There have been times in United States history when people have lived in fear of sinister government operatives. In the 1940s and 50s, the United States was in the grip of the Second Red Scare, right around the same time that UFOs entered the public consciousness. In an effort to fight against left-wing ideas in the US, many people were arrested on suspicion of being Soviet spies by the FBI and the CIA, often with little to no evidence. And across the ocean in the Soviet Union itself, the KGB used horrific tactics to clamp down on people it decided were enemies of the state. Plenty of other countries out there have had in the past “secret police” too, including Germany when it was under control of the Nazis, who set up the notorious Gestapo, and later the Stasi in East Germany, which built one of the biggest and most relentless surveillance networks in history. All of them employed ominous government agents to carry out secret orders, be that kidnapping people, making arrests, making threats, or even committing assassinations. The idea of governments working in opposition to public interest by suppressing information, much like the Men in Black do, is then based on real phenomena and public anxiety about whether their government can be trusted to do what’s best for them.

Of course, you could argue that keeping UFOs a secret IS what’s best for the public. There’s been a lot of sociological research done into how people might react to proof of intelligent life. If it would cause mass hysteria, as many fear, then you can see a case for keeping things on the down low. Since most people who claim UFO sightings and believe UFO conspiracy theories are rarely seen as credible by skeptics, you could argue that the Men in Black ARE doing their job well. By letting so many apparently questionable sources publicly talk about their vague UFO sightings, it could make the genuine sightings blend in with the rest. When the government DID investigate UFOs through the famous Project Blue Book, they concluded that sightings did not equal “extraterrestrial vehicles”, but nor could they explain all of them.

So, what’s your verdict here? Are the Men in Black really out there covering up evidence of aliens? Or is the entire thing a Hollywood hoax?

Again, what can be said is that if they are real, they’re either doing their job extremely poorly or extremely well. Either way, there’s no credible evidence that clandestine government agents are keeping people from revealing the truth about UFOs. Maybe that’s how they want it; maybe that’s just how it is. And that was the true story behind the real Men in Black.