- On my review of her first captivating volume - "Ufology:
A Primer in Audio 1939 - 1959," I wrote that it's not the beginning
of the end, or even the end of the beginning -- It's the beginning of the
beginning! '... and you are there...,' reader! There was precious little
hyperbole in that statement or its parent review.
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- Ms. Connors Does it again with Volume II and provides
some indication (...a very exciting Volume III is already available!) that
the end is not even in sight! In this second disc in the series she provides,
again, nothing less than the unvarnished aural history of a subject that
won't be remotely treated as well anywhere else.
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- This time, while performing the same service in the same
fascinating and convenient way, she gives voice to one of the most unsettlingly
dodgy facets of the UFO conundrum -- those cloyingly ubiquitous Men In
Black. Why?
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- Men In Black ARE dodgy and unsettling. They are dodgy
because their historical roots are suspect, abstruse, and dominated by
the unflattering stories regarding the 'suspected' hoaxes of Gray Barker
and Albert K. Bender ...and the 'admitted' ones of CSICOPian John Sherwood
(practicing his 'Robertsian' duplicity as one Dr. Richard H. Pratt)...
and that all too well known ufological curmudgeon and conflicted commentator,
hizzoner James W. Moseley. Even John A. Keel (of "Mothman Prophesies"
fame) is listed heavily in this divergent research as a purveyor of alleged
MIB hoopla.
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- The debunking of the MIB is thorough and convincing and
might even put an end to the matter, but that the debunking effort is plied
by persons of CSICOPian persuasion and so then worthy of, at least, a second
look for that reason alone. CSICOPia, as I've argued before, has its axe
to grind.
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- More convincing, regarding these MIB issues, is one UFO
researcher decidedly bereft of axes, Jerry Clark, who writes: "First-generation
American ufologists' experiences of men in black - as opposed to the MIB
who came along later - were the extremely dubious cases of Maury Island
and Al Bender, along with the even more questionable Edgar Jarrold "mystery"
and Stuart/Wilkinson affair (in both senses of the word "affair").
In retrospect, the bulk of what Gray Barker wrote in the one men-in-black
book of the 1950s (They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, 1956) has been
discredited. Beyond that, contactee writers such as Adamski and Williamson
were using men in black to weave conspiracy theories, based in anti-Semitic
literature, about the so-called Silence Group. No wonder sensible ufologists
were sensibly suspicious of men-in-black notions."
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- Why, then, pay attention to MIB stories at all? We pay
attention because rational ufology doesn't close the book on them altogether,
they may be a device to screen other activity, and (as mentioned before
but worth repeating) anything discounted stridently by the CSICOP cult
of obdurate personalities deserves a re-look as a matter of standard operating
procedure!
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- Moreover, the history of the phenomena may predate all
recent (post 1950) accounting of them and easy dismissal of same! Examples...
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- In the March 30, 1905, edition of the Barmouth Advertiser,
a Welsh newspaper, it was reported that over a period of three nights a
"man dressed in black" appeared in the bedroom of an "exceptionally
intelligent young woman of the peasant stock.... This figure has delivered
a message to the girl which she is frightened to relate..." whatever
one may make of that...
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- In 1864 a gaunt and weirdly accented man, dressed all
in black, tried to purchase unusual metal parts dropped from a mysterious
flying machine that were only on display and not for sale. He departed,
and then the building the 'parts' were stored in subsequently burned to
the ground. Ashes, sifted for the parts, failed to turn up them up. The
man in black was never seen or heard from again.
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- In 1730 a 13-year-old Norwegian girl told priestly Inquisitors
an astonishing tale. Six years earlier she and her grandmother had flown
on the back of a huge pig (?) to attend a meeting with 'Satan'. On the
way, the clerics wrote in their report, "they met three men dressed
in black whom the grandmother referred to as 'grandfather's boys'. Once
arrived at the meeting place, they all went in and sat down at table next
to the 'devil'. Her grandmother addressed the demon as 'grandfather'.
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- These "Three men dressed in black" would be
a recurring theme, echoing down to present day. Additionally, prior to
the modern automobile, these men in black were sometimes seen to arrive
and depart in silent black carriages, an antique precursor to quiet black
Cadillacs, perhaps...
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- John A. Keel has written that MIBs had interacted with
such historical figures as Julius Caesar, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, and
Malcolm X. Ominously, Keel has written that "the general descriptions
of vampires ... are identical to the 'men in black'." The danger of
MIB visitation to those interested in UFOs especially "the neurotic,
the gullible, and the immature" he writes, is such, Keel warns, that
parents might "forbid their children from becoming involved [with
UFOs], and that teachers and other responsible adults should not encourage
teenagers to take an interest in the subject." Mr. Keel can't be discounted
out of hand. Jerry Clark seems to believe he has a degree of respectable
seriousness to him, whatever the debated quality of Mr. Keel's scholarship,
on the one hand, and that this writer lost a teaching job for indulging
those interests on the other...
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- MIBs, as previously mentioned, are also... unsettling.
Men in black portray an association with the shadow government (?), are
the government extant (?), are a black agency of government (?), are ETs
who mimic the government (?), or are of a 'larger' government, and 'so',
in fact (?), then, a government of some indeterminate and unsuspected kind!
I don't mean that, of course, in a good way.
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- They are indication that individuals, at best, only have
the illusion that they captain their own ships? That we can removed from
the equations of our societies by unaccountable shadows or excised, by
them, without due process of any type? Finally, MIBs are, at least, a
face to be put on the arbitrary manipulation and convenient control by
shadow agencies of non-admitted and closed institutions we suspect is otherwise
going on?
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- In these days of ever more repressive 'government' -
reproductionist, rightist, and religiously fundamentalist ... where liberty
dwindles, human rights sublimate, and due process is airily abandoned altogether
as a luxury that cannot be afforded... the MIBs are an uneasy metaphor
of our troubled times.
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- They are another kind of metaphor.
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- They are a metaphor for the hurdles encountered in coming
to grips with the ephemeral phenomenon of UFOs and all their related sister
subjects. They are of a totalitarian fabric threatening unusual individuals
compelled by their rationality (and their experience!) to search behind
suffocating curtains for the obligatory (and self serving) wizards we suspect
are there!
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- These aforementioned individuals, by the way, are unusual
only in that they have 'encountered' an "unusual"... for which
their proud culture refuses to provide an explanation, and in fact punishes
them, in some real-world way for their lawful interest! Left to our own
devices we grapple with the problem on our own and as we can.
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- At the same time, these individual persons are sisters
and brothers, wives and husbands, parents and children... IF they are not
friends and acquaintances, neighbors and fellow citizens, or others persons
we'd otherwise hold in respect and regard. They are us, and we are threatened
individually. Verily.
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- Men In Black are an obstacle of indeterminate matter
that would glue the blinding scales to our eyes and otherwise buttress
our cultural blinders... perhaps for our own good? No, not for our 'good'.
Decidedly, no.
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- Our contrived and over-manipulated corporate-driven culture
is just not set up that way, is this writer's contention. Little, if anything,
is (and has ever been) 'kept' from us for our own good. Much is kept from
us that would advantage us individually at the expense of our present manipulators,
is the suspicion. Individuality, personal autonomy, creative freedom,
and freedom of expression... these are the bane of an elite and repugnant,
reproductionist, reactionary, and intellectually uptight (...intelligence
hating, actually!) fundamentalist culture... trying to return us to the
thirties in the case of fundamentalist Christianity, or to the thirteen-fifties
as is the case with fundamentalist Islam.
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- Hell IS better.
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- Besides, if the 'aliens' were the threat of popular "head-eating"
conjecture (or otherwise complicated the elitist's game plan...?), our
culture would mobilize us against them the way they have against the (almost
as nebulous!), Islamic terrorists! They wouldn't be shy! Consider Pearl
Harbor and 9/11.
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- No. Our culture would have us bristle at THAT brand
of alien threat! Instead, our culture (and their lap-dog CSICOPian apologists!)
paints an interest in the ufological as the activity of the stupid, the
product of the duplicitous, or the production of the mentally ill - as
baseless and nonsensical! ...Ironic when the opposite seems to be true:
that the "M" cubed misrepresentation of the Misleading corrupting
the Mislead into their Mental illness is, ITSELF, baseless and nonsensical!
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- What UFOs are, really, as Richard M. Dolan has pointed
out, is the purest of pure seditions! They are an alternative, and perhaps
even better, idea (perhaps decisively so!)! Would you like to find out
if that is true? Could you be safer, freer, smarter... stronger?
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- Yes, of course. The preceding paragraphs are a justification
for reviewing Connors 'forbidden index' of forgotten ufological lore!
To gain access... to mine that history for facts those folks didn't really
know they were giving away, decades ago!
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- Listening to Wendy Connor's ardent compilation the listener
can sift the expressions of the principals on their own regarding the subjects
of MIBs and many other themes in the ufological tradition. Grains of ufological
truth may surely be gleaned in the exercise! Moreover, Ufology has always
had its share of inimitable strangeness, cultivated or otherwise, as it
has evolved, and this volume of Connors' aural history is every bit of
THAT! Her compilation amply covers the (ufologically silver?) years 1952
to 1976, when hairy anthropoids shambled out of flying saucers (?), Men
in Black silenced witnesses to UFOs (?), and other ufological monsters
prowled the unsettled countryside.
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- Something was going on... whatever the debated 'provenance'
of all this "high strangeness."
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- There are lectures, personal experiences recounted, and
the fall-out of those early reports linger and compel even today. Listen
to the accounts and presentations of Gray Barker, John Keel, Norman Oliver,
Stan Gordon, Dr. Herbert Hopkins, Hayden Hewes, Dr. Ivan T. Sanderson and
Albert K. Bender (in their own words) as they flesh out the real and imagined
activities of MIBs and other monsters found in an all too real ufological
reality. You won't be hearing it (or finding it) anywhere else.
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- Remember, also... it IS the future. Spinning up on the
primary references of the past is always a good idea, and provides scant
disservice to that future. Truth is better than fiction even if sometimes
it's the 'fiction' that IS the truth!
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- For order information, a table of contents, and brief
of same... visit: http://fadeddiscs.com/strangeness.html
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- Read on!
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- alienview@adelphia.net www.alienview.net
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