The Dreams We Race

The Aliens

"The inner face of outer space is where you meet the dreams you race."
     - Rimbaud

"As our dreams show very clearly, UFOs come from the unconscious background, which always expresses itself in numinous ideas and images...Civilized man, like primitive man, is mindful of the gods, of the spirits, and of fate and the magical qualities of time and place."
     - Carl Jung, Flying Saucers, a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies

"Without doubt, there are significant surface differences between UFO encounters, angelic visitations, shamanic journeys, and near-death experiences. Yet in all of these realms we find archetypal images of initiation involving otherworldly journeys amid extraordinary - and apparently autonomous - beings. "
     - Keith Thompson, Aliens and Angels

Regarding tithes of corn and milk to fairies in ninth-century France:

"We have seen and heard many men plunged in such great stupidity, sunk in such depths of folly, as to believe that there is a certain region, which they call Magonia, whence ships sail in the clouds, in order to carry back to that region those fruits of the earth which are destroyed by hail and tempests; the sailors paying rewards to the storm wizards and themselves receiving corn and other produce."
     - Archbishop Agobard

"'Waves' of stange phenomena seem to occur when there is a wide expectation of them. The same thing happened in Europe between 1700 and 1740, when there were suddenly thousands of reports of vampires. The epidemic started in Central Europe, probably Transylvania (the word vampir is of Slavok origin), and within a few years had spread across Europe, from Greece to Scandinavia. Many of the reports sound too circumstantial to be dismissed as hysteria; and, as with UFO sightings, the sheer number is impressive."
     - Colin Wilson, Mysteries

"...Students of the paranormal have often seen that UFO reports are known to have occurred during periods of other extemely unusual events that include poltergeist-like phenomena, reports of spontaneous human combustion, an upsurge in popular religious fervor and even - quite controversially - anomalous animal mutilations and disappearances."
     - Ed Conroy, Report on Communion

"The real UFO story must encompass all of the many manifestations being observed. It is a story of ghosts and phantoms and strange mental aberrations, of an invisible world which surrounds us and occasionally engulphs us; of prophets and prophesies, and gods and demons. It is a world of illusion and hallucination where the unreal seems very real, and where reality itself is distorted by strange forces which can seemingly manipulate space, time, and physical matter - forces which are almost entirely beyond our powers of comprehension."
     - John Keel, The Cosmic Question

"The phenomena witnessed by a crowd of over 70,000 people at the Catholic miracle of Fatima in 1917 strongly resemble descriptions of modern UFO sightings. As Jacques Vallee points out in The Invisible College, published by E.P. Dutton in 1976: 'Not only was a flying disk or globe consistently involved, but it's motion, it's falling-leaf trajectory, it's light effects, the thunderclaps, the buzzing sounds, the strange fragrance, the fall of 'angel hair' that dissolves upon reaching the ground, the heat wave associated with the close approach of the disk, all of these are constant parameters of UFO sightings everywhere. And so are the paralysis, the amnesia, the conversions, and the healings'."
     - George Andrews, Extra-Terrestrials Among Us

(2) Similarities to Occult Initiation Rituals

"...The structure of abduction stories (is) identical to that of occult initiation rituals.... Contact with ufonauts (is) only a modern extension of the age-old tradition of contact with non human consciousness in the form of angels, demons, elves, and sylphs. Such contact includes abduction, ordeal (including surgical operations), and sexual intercourse with the aliens. It often leaves marks and scars on the body and the mind, as do UFO abductions."
     - Jacques Valleé, Passport to Magonia

"The experience of the underworld is typically described in mythologies throughout the world as gloomy, confined, dark, doleful, and humid. Abductees speak of being confined in quarters usually termed dank, oppressive, humid, and dimly lit. Many report that a spaceship of relatively small dimensions seemed curiously spacious inside, with dark mazelike corridors apparently leading to the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, reminiscent of Alice's adventures in Wonderland. The landed saucer becomes a scene of traditional underworld torments, a prison of suffering inflicted by primeval demons."
     - Keith Thompson, Aliens and Angels

"After interviewing 50 UFO abductees who say they have been whisked off some 275 times, [Temple University historian David] Jacobs has pieced together a picture of what's under the dome....Abductees are there for a physical exam, he says, and they only see as much of the craft as is neccessary to get the job done. That's why they invariably describe spartan, efficient, and sterile surroundings with virtually no luxury features at all.
"These are clinical-looking rooms with domed ceilings, skylightlike windows,and gray or white walls, Jacobs explains. And the aliens are good housekeepers. 'It is clean and neat. We have had some cases where people vomited and it was cleaned up immediately'."
"Accidental tourists find themselves in a hallway with metallic walls that are usually bare but sometimes contain a floor-to-ceiling window. Usually they are ushered along a curved corrider, which gives them the feeling that they are walking around the perimeter of the ship, although no one makes a complete loop, says Jacobs. Eventually they are led to the vessel's center, the 'medical arena', where unpleasant physical examinations occur.
"Virtually all medical zones are illuminated by a mysterious light source that abductees cannot locate, Jacobs says. But they have pinpointed the position of voluminous medical equipment --attached to walls and ceilings, in drawers, or on rolling carts. As for the examination table, Jacobs says, it's generally 'hard with very little give', and contains lighted, armlike devices snaking up from its sides.
"In many cases, Jacobs notes, the examination room resembles the hub of a wheel. The spokes, or hallways, lead from the hub to other chambers, revealed only to some abductees after the exam. Also circular, with domed ceilings, white or gray walls, and built-in benches, some of these seem to be 'visiting rooms' in which human-alien hybrid babies are touched, held, or viewed.
"Finally, abductees may pass through a control room that sounds nothing like the bridge of the starship Enterprise. There is a console with lights, an unpadded seat, and no windows."
     - Paul McCarthy, "Tour of a UFO", Omni, December 1990

"Tommy Bland, Lewisville, Texas, told the conference he has been studying UFO activities for twenty-two years and mutilations for twelve years. He explained that animal mutilations date back to the early 1800's in England and Scotland. He also pointed out that the mutilations are not confined to cattle, but cited incidents of mutilation of horses, dogs, sheep, and rabbits. He also said that the mutilations are not only nationwide, but international in scope."
     - FBI document summarizing a conference on cattle mutilations held at the Albuquerque Public Library, New Mexico on 20 April 1979

"The piercing instruments used by aliens in their examination bear a similarity, albeit genteel, to the piercing tortures which devils inflict on sinners in Christian art and fundamentalist belief. In accounts of the afterlife we find not the scientific examination of curious aliens but the close parallel of highly formalized, sometimes mechanistic and potentially unpleasant moral inquisition."
     - Thomas Bullard

"All the institutions of mythological times are founded on and illuminated, that is, hallowed, by a mythologem of orgination, the common divine origin of life whose forms they are."
     - Karl Kerenyi

"This grounding and founding is maintained through the elaboration of particular ceremonies and rituals, especially the repetition of the content of the myth; the creation story. Each repetition of the foundational myth recreates those primary distinctions (such as 'flying saucer' or 'alien abduction') that bring a particular world into view; each successive re-creation holds the world in place.
     - Keith Thompson, Aliens and Angels

"Perhaps the otherworld journey motif is 'camouflaged' in the modern lore of space travel which, like the fantastic voyage legends of the past, exemplifies what might be called the lure of the edge."
     - Holger Kalweit

"The disciple has been blessed with a vision transcending the scope of normal human destiny, and amounting to a glimpse of the essential nature of the cosmos. Not his personal fate, but the fate of mankind, of life as a whole, the atom and all the solar system, has been opened to him; and this in terms befitting his human understanding, that is to say, in terms of an anthropomorphic vision: the Cosmic Man."
     - Joseph Campbell

(3) In Popular Culture

"...Perception is to some unspecifiable degree an instrument of the world as we have structured it by our expectancies. Moreover, it is characteristic of complex perceptual processes that they tend where possible to assimilate whatever is seen or heard to what is expected."
     - Jerome Bruner

"Aliens have become a fixture in popular culture, described and depicted countless time in pulp literature, comic books, cartoons, television series, and movies. The image of the alien has only occasionally squared with the humanoids of abduction reports, but [H.G.] Wells [in The War of the Worlds (1897)] made a pertinent contribution when he added an evolutionary perspective to his Martians and enlarged their brains at the expense of their bodies. A large head, browless eyes, and hairless skin combined with a small frail body match the aliens of abduction stories with the evolutionarily advanced alens of imaginative fiction. Wells also speculated that the Martians' digestive sytems had so atrophied that they took nutrients directly from the blood of lower animals, recalling the more lurid rumors of what abductions are really all about."
     - Eddie Bullard

"UFO abductions only became popular after a decade of alien invasion movies. There is a visible borrowing of conventions including fogs, one-piece foil suits, macrocephaly, dying worlds, and mind control."
     - Martin Kottmeyer

In the most celebrated UFO abduction case, Betty and Barney Hill were "driving to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from Canada on the night of September 19, 1961. They were on an isolated stretch of road when they spotted what they thought was a flying saucer abouve them. Then followed two completely blank hours in their lives. They could remember nothing from the time they saw the UFO until a time two hours later when they found themselves in their car several miles down the road from where they had seen the UFO. For months after this experience both of the Hills suffered from severe psychological distress. Finally they consulted a psychiatrist, who hypnotized them, and under hypnosis the Hills revealed a strange story of being kidnapped and taken aboard a flying saucer."
"Barney Hill described one of his captors as looking like 'a red-headed Irishman'...But another wore 'a shiny black coat', with a black scarf thrown about his neck. Under hypnosis Hill drew a picture of 'the leader' of his abductors. It is a strange insect like face with a wide, thin mouth and huge slanting eyes that seem to go halfway around the creatures' head. The eyes were the most frightening part of the saucer inhabitant's strange physiognomy."
     - Linda Murphy, "A Review of MIB (Men in Black) - A History, Astronet Review No. 1 February 1992.

"Clear 'borrowings' from popular science fiction stories can be traced in certain major 'UFO abductions.' Barney Hill's description of his supposed abductors' 'wraparound eyes' (an extreme rarity in science fiction films), first described and drawn during a hypnosis session on Feb. 22, 1964, comes just twelve days after the first broadcast of an episode of 'The Outer Limits' featuring an alien of this quite unique description. Many other elements of the Hill story can be traced to the 1953 film 'Invaders from Mars', including aliens having 'Jimmy Durante' noses, an alien medical examination, something done to her eyes to relax her, being probed with a needle, a star map hanging on a wall, a notebook offered as a remembrance, even the imagery of a needle in the navel. Other 'abductees' borrowed other ideas from 'Invaders From Mars', including brain implants, aliens drilling into a human skull, and aliens seeking to revitalize a dying world."
     - sci.skeptic FAQ:

"One abductee of my acquaintance claims to have had beneficial experiences with...'blond' aliens -- who, he believes, came originally from the Pleiades. Interestingly, in the late 1960s, the psychopathically anti-Semitic Rev. Wesley Swift predicted this odd twist in the abduction tale. In a broadcast 'sermon', he spoke at length about UFOs, claiming that there were 'good' aliens and 'bad' aliens. The good ones, he insisted, were tall, blond Aryans - who hailed from the Pleides. He made this pronouncement long before the current trends in abduction lore."
     - Martin Cannon, The Controllers: A New Hypothesis of Alien Abduction

"According to a very recent article by J. F. Augereau, published in Le Monde ('Les chemins detournes de la science', 17 February 1993) and based on a CNRS survey, a substantial number, and in some cases a majority, of educated French people are convinced of the truth of various parascientific beliefs in which topics dear to science fiction are mixed up with and enhanced by contrived and distorted interpretations of the facts. UFO sightings are a prime example. The findings of the CNRS survey could plausibly be extended to the EC as a whole and indeed to the entire industrialized world."
     - Mr. Di Rupo, motion before the European Parliament (25 January 1991)

Possibly the earliest known reference to the alien type known as "Greys":
"A French farmer said he was immobilised by two figures he disturbed beside a UFO in his lavender fields. It was July 1, 1965, when Monsieur M. Masse spotted a craft shaped like an egg and about the size of his car on his farm in Valensole, in the Basses Alpes region. As he approached stealthily through his vineyard, he saw two 'boys' bending over lavender plants, and stepped forward to reprimand them.
"He looked into the startled faces of two creatures unlike any he had ever seen. Both of the small 'men' had a large head, long, slanting eyes, high puffy cheeks, a slit-like mouth and a long, jutting chin. One of the creatures pointed a stick at him and he was unable to move. They watched him for a while, then floated up a beam of light into their craft. It's six legs turned, a central pivot began to throb, and the object floated upwards before vanishing.
"It left a muddy hole in the bone-dry earth, and within days all the lavender plants close to the site had withered and died. New plants would not grow there for years.
     - The World's Greatest UFO Mysteries

The Grey alien has now become a fixture of popular folklore. It is described as "small, gray, sickly looking, with a head that, because it is disporportionately large in relation to his body, suggests an almost fetus-like character...The future of the human race-symbolized by the archetype of the child is menaced as never before."
     - Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., The Omega Project

"...The visitors most commonly described often look like a fetus that has emerged at about the end of the first trimester of a human pregnancy, and been brought to maturity in just this way, with something having been done to their eyes, such as a covering of some sort placed over them."
"...We don't achnowledge them for a very simple and straightforward and practical reason, and that is because of their access, so to speak, to the groupmind or to God, or to the conscious plasma, whatever you want to call it. They are, for all practical purposes, without will. And our essence is to have will. So we preserve our isolation with a fury. This is why people don't want to remember their visitor experiences, why they're so frightened of remembering them. We preserve that isolation from the deity with absolute fury. The essence of our reason for existence is that we have extracted ourselves, as it were, from heaven and gone on the adventure in order to have experiences of chance, to face a real, genuine unknown. Opening our minds to the vistors is like raising the curtain, going too close to the cardboard backdrop."
     - Whitley Strieber

Betty Andreasson (a devout Christian) under hypnosis, "had observed the aliens remove a strange-looking premature fetus from the woman that she had been brought to help during childbirth."
Fred Max: "What happens to the fetus? Do they keep it there [i.e., on the craft] or?"
Betty: "The fetuses become them - like them. They said they're Watchers...and they keep seed from man and woman so the human form will not be lost."
"The similarity between the physical appearance of the so-called Watchers [or Grays] and a human fetus is striking. A common description by abductees is that 'They looked just like fetuses'. This curious fact coupled with the aliens' remark that they too are of the 'same substance' as Man"recalls Louis Bolk's theory that "Homo sapiens is physically a fetal ape which has become sexually mature."
     - Raymond E. Fowler, The Watchers

"What seems to be going on there, in a number of abductees ...is to produce some kind of new species to bring us together to produce a hybrid species which -- the abductees are sometimes told -- will populate the earth or will be there to carry evolution forward, after the human race has completed what it is now doing, namely the destruction of the earth as a living system. So it's a kind of later form. It's an awkward coming together of a less embodied species than we are, and us, for this evolutionary purpose."
     - John Mack, Nova On-line

The aliens "seem strangely backward in biology for all their advances in physics, if you take it seriously. Why are they doing breeding one on one at such a slow pace? Why not steal a few humans, sequence our DNA, look at variations and make whatever genetic engineering changes they want. We almost have the ability to do that. It seems naive in terms of molecular biology."
     - Carl Sagan, Nova On-line

Men in Black

"Men In Black (MIB)...are a group of individuals who are said to wear black suits and drive and fly around in unmarked black cars and helicopters. They go about threatening people who have claimed to have seen UFOs into not talking about what they witnessed.
"The very first occurrence of MIB was traced to a man named Albert K. Bender. He was the editor of a flying saucer publication called the Space Review. In the October 1953 issue he placed an announcement stating that he had come across information that would solve the flying saucer mystery but they could not print it because they were ordered not to. They then ended the announcement warning others in saucer work to be 'very cautious'. They then stopped their publications. Later in an interview Bender stated that 'three men wearing dark suits' had ordered him to stop publishing flying saucer material, and that he had complied with the order because he had been 'scared to death' of them. He later published a book called Flying Saucers and the Three Men in Black."
     - fxdlk@batman.acf-lab.alaska.edu

"...Even before the publication of Bender's book in 1963, the Men in Black had already been reported to be visiting others besides Albert Bender. By now they have been reported so often that they have become an established part of the UFO history. The Men in Black, naturally enough, wear black suits. They also usually wear sunglasses, presumably to disguise their 'glowing eyes'. Most of them are reported to be short and delicately built with olive complexions and dark, straight hair. They are often described as 'Gypsies' or 'Orientals'. Most MIBs are reported to travel in groups of three and usually ride around in shiny new black cars -- often Cadillacs. These cars are even supposed to 'smell new'. Sometimes the MIBs pose as investigators from the CIA or some other government agency. They may flash official-looking credentials, but these can never be checked out. Occasionally the MIBs display badges with strange emblems on them, or have unrecognizable symbols painted on their cars. The purpose of the visits seems to be to get people who have seen UFOs to stop talking about them, or somehow to confuse and frighten the witnesses."
     - Daniel Cohen, MONSTERS: Giants and Little Men From Mars

"However, a comparative examination of reports indicates that such 'perfect' MIB visits seldom occur in practice. Study of 32 of the more reliable cases on file reveals that many details diverge quite markedly from the archetypal story: there were, for instance, no visitors at all in four cases, only subsequent telephone calls; and, of the remainder, only five involved three men, two involved four, five involved two, while in the rest there was mention only of a single visitor.
"Although the appearance and behavior of the visitors does seem generally to conform to the prototype, it ranges from the entirely natural to the totally bizarre. The car, despite the fact that in America it is by far the commonest means of transportation, is in fact mentioned in only one-third of the reports; and as for the picturesque details - the Cadillac, the antiquated model, the immaculate condition - these are, in practice, very much the exception. Of 22 American reports, only nine even include mention of a car; and of these, only three were Cadillacs, while only two were specified as black and only two as out-of-date models."

"In September 1976, Dr Herbert Hopkins, a 58 year-old doctor and hypnotist, was acting as consultant on an alleged UFO teleportation case in Maine, USA. One evening, when his wife and children had gone out leaving him alone, the telephone rang and a man identifying himself as vice-president of the New Jersey UFO Research Organisation asked if he might visit Dr Hopkins that evening to discuss certain details of the case. Dr Hopkins agreed; at the time, it seemed the natural thing to do. He went to the back door to switch on the light so that his visitor would be able to find his way from the parking lot, but while he was there, he noticed the man already climbing the porch steps. 'I saw no car, and even if he did have a car, he could not have possibly gotten to my house that quickly from any phone,' Hopkins later commented in delayed astonishment.
"At the time, Dr Hopkins felt no particular surprise as he admitted his visitor, The man was dressed in a black suit, with black hat, tie and shoes, and a white shirt, 'I thought, he looks like an undertaker,' Hopkins later said. His clothes were immaculate - suit unwrinkled, trousers sharply creased. When he took off his hat, he revealed himself as completely hairless, not only bald but without eyebrows or eyelashes. His skin was dead white, his lips bright red. In the course of their conversation, he happened to brush his lips with his grey suede gloves, and the doctor was astonished to see that his lips were smeared and that the gloves were stained with lipstick!
"It was only afterwards, however, that Dr Hopkins reflected further on the strangeness of his visitor's appearance and behaviour. Particularly odd was the fact that his visitor stated that his host had two coins in his pocket. It was indeed the case. He then asked the doctor to put one of the coins in his hand and to watch the coin, not himself. As Hopkins watched, the coin seemed to go out of focus, and then gradually vanished. 'Neither you nor anyone else on this plane will ever see that coin again,' the visitor told him. After talking a little while longer on general UFO topics, Dr Hopkins suddenly noticed that the visitor's speech was slowing down. The man then rose unsteadily to his feet and said, very slowly; 'My energy is running low - must go now - goodbye.' He walked falteringly to the door and descended the outside steps uncertainly, one at a time. Dr Hopkins saw a bright light shining in the driveway, bluish-white and distinctly brighter than a normal car lamp. At the time, however, he assumed it must be the stranger's car, although he neither saw nor heard it."
     - "Agents of the Dark", The Unexplained No. 39.

"The case that comes closest to the archetype is that of Robert Richardson, of Toledo, Ohio, who in July 1967 informed the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) that he had collided with a UFO while driving at night. Coming round a bend, he had been confronted by a strange object blocking the road. Unable to halt in time, he had hit it, though not very hard. Immediately on impact, the UFO vanished. Police who accompanied Richardson to the scene could find only his own skid marks as evidence; but on a later visit, Richardson himself found a small lump of metal which might have come from the UFO.
"Three days later, at 11 PM, two men in their twenties appeared at Richardson's home and questioned him for about 10 minutes. They did not identify themselves, and Richardson - to his own subsequent surprise - did not ask who they were. They were not unfriendly, gave no warnings, and just asked questions. He noted that they left in a black 1953 Cadillac. The number, when checked, was found not yet to have been issued.
"A week later, Richardson received a second visit, from two different men, who arrived in a current model Dodge. They wore black suits and were dark-complexioned. Although one spoke perfect English, the second had an accent, and Richardson felt there was something vaguely foreign about them. At first, they seemed to be trying to persuade him that he had not hit anything at all; but then they asked for the piece of metal. When he told them it had gone for analysis, they threatened him: 'If you want your wife to stay as pretty as she is, then you'd better get the metal back'.
"The existence of the metal was known only to Richardson and his wife, and to two senior members of APRO. Seemingly, the only way the strangers could have learned of its existence would be by tapping either his or APRO's telephone. There was no clear connection between the two pairs of visitors; but what both had in common was access to information that was not freely and publicly available. Perhaps it is this that is the key to the MIB mystery."
     - "Who Are the Men in Black, The Unexplained No. 10. Orbis Publishing. 1991

"The Men in Black were actually an Air Force special-ops unit. They are currently known as AFSAC (Air Force Special Activities Center). They are devoted primarily to the collection of HUMINT (Human Intelligence). As of 1991 AFSAC is headquartered at Fort Belvior, Virginia and is under the operation authority of the Air Force Intelligence Command centered at Kelly AFB in Texas."

"AFCIN Policy Letter 205-13, dated 12 April 1960 clearly states that the 1127th 'participates in Project Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) in accordance with AFCIN-P1 Policy Letter 205-10, dated 19 January 1960' and-page 20 of the History of the 1127th Field Activities Group for 1 January 1960 through 30 June 1960. 'ten three man teams (five airborne, five ground) are maintained on an alert roster in the 1127th's Project 'Moon Dust', [recovery of space vehicles].'"
"In addition to that is the mid 1960 USAF/OSI (Office of Special Investigations) memorandum on the subject of 'Donald E Keyhoe/ Mercury Enterprises, Inc.' states unequivocally that 'files relating to the UFO are maintained in principally two places: A[ir] T[echnical] I[ntelligence] C[enter] Headquarters at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio and at the 1127th Field Activity Group at Fort Belvior, VA'. AFOSI is an organization whose operations have always been closely tied with those of the 1127th/AFSAC, and it is not uncommon for OSI personnel to be assigned to special duty within that unit."
     - Lesley E. Cluff

"M.I.B.'s seem likely to be associated with a (in the past, very much so!) SECRET (of late, less so, but still of compartmentalized SECRECY levels) USAF organization known as Air Force Technical Applications Center. With current headquarters at Patrick Air Force Base Florida (near Cape Canaveral/Kennedy), this agency hand-selects/recruits top-notch academic specialties from the Pure Sciences, e.g. Chemistry, Physics, Atmospheric Science, Nuclear Physics, and Optical Engineering technologies, etc. in order to perform their 'de-classified' mission of monitoring all types of 'NUCLEAR' events, i.e. explosions, accidents, weapons movements, rocket booster 'signatures', etc. This mission is performed by many 'field investigatory sites' located around the world, and often NOT co-located with any 'mainstream' military base or post, e.g. Sonseca, Spain, Ascension Island, remote Alaska, Santiago/Chile, (formerly in Iran), northern Japan, Gander/Goosebay Newfoundland, interior of China (even before 1972 Nixon trip that 'normalized' relations), Thailand, Israel, remote Turkey, etc. etc. etc.
"Of note is that personnel assigned to 'remote' locations do not wear uniforms. These remote locations feed information from vast antennae fields, sensors, balloons, satellites, and HUMINT to AFTAC HQ and it's main overseas locations: Yokota AB Japan, Wiesbaden Germany (may be at other location now?) and it's training installations: McClellan AFB, California, Lowry AFB, CO (electronics trng), and to HQ at Patrick AFB, FL. (Former HQ was located in a red-brick building on Telegraph Road in Alexandria, VA)

"AFTAC also gathers HUMINT through its employees and sources in 'nuclear-potential' countries around the globe via its large cohort of linguistic experts. 'employees/agents' are routinely placed into sensitive areas to gather information and then are 'extracted' for debriefing. Aircraft of the high speed/reconnaissance type are regularly deployed by AFTAC and its flying support components throughout the globe to gather electromagnetic information across the EM spectrum. Satellites are launched regularly from Vandenberg AFB, CA and the Cape in FL, in order to continuously 'monitor' for light signatures (both visible, infrared, UV, etc.); satellites also gather 'communications-bands' information for later, and real-time analysis."
     - Rory McGarity

"Mysterious men dressed in Air Force uniforms or bearing impressive credentials from government agencies have been silencing UFO witnesses. We have checked a number of these cases, and these men are not connected with the Air Force in any way. We haven't been able to find out anything about these men. By posing as Air Force officers and government agents, they are committing a federal offence. We would sure like to catch one. Unfortunately the trail is always too cold by the time we hear about these cases. But we are still trying."
     - Colonel George P. Freeman, Pentagon spokesman for the USAF's Project Blue Book
     (February 1967 interview with UFO investigator John Keel)

"One particularly curious recurrent feature of MIB reports is the ineptitude of the visitors. Time and again, they are described as incompetent; and if they are impersonating human beings, they certainly do not do it very well, arousing their victims' suspicions by improbable behavior, by the way they look or talk, and by their ignorance as much as their knowledge."
"...There is no reliable instance of such threats [from MIB] ever having been carried out, though a good many witnesses have gone ahead and defied their warnings. Indeed, sinister though the MIBs may be, they are notable for their lack of actual violence. The worst that can be said of them is that they frequently harass witnesses with untimely visits and telephone calls, or simply disturb them with their very presence.
"While, for the victim, it is just as well that the threats of violence are not followed through, this is for the investigator one more disconcerting aspect of the phenomenon - for violence, if it resulted in physical action, would at least help in establishing the reality of the phenomenon. Instead, it remains a fact that most of the evidence is purely hearsay in character and often not of the highest quality; cases as well-attested as that of Dr. Herbert Hopkins are unfortunately in the minority.
"Another problem area is the dismaying lack of precision about many of the reports. Popular American writer Brad Steiger alleged that hundreds of ufologists, contactees and chance percipients of UFOs claim to have been visited by ominous strangers - usually three, and usually dressed in black; but he cites only a few actual instances. Similarly, John Keel, an expert on unexplained phenomena, claimed that, on a number of occasions, he actually saw phantom Cadillacs, complete with rather sinister Oriental-looking passengers in black suits; but for a trained reporter, he showed a curious reluctance to pursue these sightings or to give chapter and verse in such an important matter. Such loose assertions are valueless as evidence; all they do is contribute to the myth."

"But there is one feature that is common to virtually all MIB reports, and that perhaps contains the key to the problem. This is the possession, by the MIBs, of information that they should not have been able to come by - information that was restricted, not released to the press, known perhaps to a few investigators and officials but not to the public, and sometimes not even to them. The one person who does possess that knowledge is always the person visited. In other words, the MIBs and their victims share knowledge that perhaps nobody else possesses. Add to this the fact that, in almost every case, the MIBs appear to the witness when he or she is alone - in Dr. Hopkin's case, for example, the visitor [who had no eyebrows and eyelashes, wore lipstick and dressed like an undertaker] took care to call when his wife and children were away from home, and established this fact by telephone beforehand - and the implication has to be that some kind of paranormal link connects the MIBs and the persons they visit."
     - "Agents of the Dark, The Unexplained No. 39.