Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel by John A. Keel

it was a plane in trouble, they stopped their car and ran toward the object. “Their surprise was understandably great when they discovered humanoids around the craft, one of which boldly waved them off in a threatening manner,” Hynek says. The men did not report their sighting, but the next day one of them was called out from work and introduced to two strangers. “They asked to be taken to his home,” Hynek reported, “where they examined the clothing he had worn the night before, especially his boots, and left without further word.” How had the pair located the witness? And why the interest in his shoes?
    When the two men who were allegedly taken aboard a UFO near Mississippi’s Pascagoula River in 1973 were examined at a nearby Air Force base, the military doctors carefully examined their shoes and scraped samples from their soles… Betty and Barney Hill, another pair of famous contactees, threw the shoes they had been wearing at the time of their abduction into the back of a closet. Later, they found the shoes were covered with a powdery fungus…
    Some MIB incidents have been the work of mischievous UFO fans – mere hoaxes. For example, shortly before the mammoth flying saucer convention held in NYC in June 1967, many of the well-known UFO enthusiasts in the NY area received phone calls from a lady identifying herself as “Princess Moon Owl.” She claimed she had just arrived from the asteroid Ceres. The lady managed to create quite an uproar in UFO circles.
    All the speakers at the 1967 convention were taped by a young man who planned to make copies of the speeches for later sale. He lived in an exclusive apartment house in midtown Manhattan, in an apartment cluttered with expensive electronic gear and shortwave radios. Soon after the convention ended, he returned to his apartment one day and found someone had broken in. The convention tapes were scattered around the room, but none of his valuable equipment had been stolen. Whoever had broken in was obviously interested in the tapes only, and the tape of Ivan Sanderson’s speech in particular. Sanderson had studied the UFO phenomenon for years and was convinced that it was a terrestrial-based mystery, not the work of an “advanced technology” from some distant planet. Later, he published a book on that theme, risking the wrath of all those who believed in extraterrestrial intelligences.
    In my own investigations into the hundreds of MIB cases and their Watergate-style break-ins, I uneasily recognized a common factor in all of them. Our Men in Black are mainly interested in
retrieving evidence that might point to terrestrial UFO origins.
The earliest MIB incidents back in 1947 revolved around cases in which the witnesses had either recovered earthly substances at UFO sites, or had seen earthmen or normal terrestrial vehicles in conjunction with their sightings. The MIB were concerned with recovering such evidence and discrediting these eyewitnesses. (Although these cases are usually slighted by UFO investigators who believe in extraterrestrial visitants, there are many episodes – reliably witnessed – in which UFOs have descended and discharged passengers, who then entered ordinary automobiles and drove off. In some cases, the automobiles themselves were dropped by the UFOs.)
    One of the first UFO investigators to be harassed by the MIB had figured out – correctly – that UFOs seemed to originate from some point near the North and South poles. Other investigators who have discarded the extra-terrestrial hypothesis and studied the earthly links with the phenomenon have experienced more harassment, mail, and phone problems, etc., than their colleagues who believe in outer space vehicles. If you collect a piece of unidentifiable metal from a UFO witness, you will have no problems. But if a witness hands you a piece of aluminum, magnesium, or silicon – all common earthly substances – you are very apt to receive a visit from the Men in Black. Some