Men in Black

Figures in UFO lore said to scare witnesses into silence. The idea traces to Albert K. Bender of Bridgeport and to Gray Barker's 1956 book about him.

The Bridgeport History Center says Albert K. Bender founded the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB) in 1952 and ran it from his Bridgeport home. It says the bureau had 600 members worldwide, with Bender as president. Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I ace who headed Eastern Airlines, was an honorary member; Albert Einstein turned down an invitation.

According to Wikipedia's article on Gray Barker, Bender suddenly shut the bureau down, saying instructions from higher up stopped him writing about UFOs. Barker pressed him for details and wrote They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, published by University Books in 1956. Brian Dunning, on the Skeptoid podcast in 2013, says that book is the earliest known use of the phrase Men in Black, and that it presents as true the story of a UFO researcher threatened by government agents. HISTORY quotes ufologist Nick Redfern crediting Bender with starting the idea, and says it was Barker's book that carried it to a wide audience.

John C. Sherwood, in an article titled Gray Barker: My Friend, the Myth-Maker, says that as a teenager he went along when Barker urged him to invent a hoax about three UFO beings that silenced Sherwood's pen name, Dr. Richard H. Pratt. Sherwood says Barker then published it. The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology says some investigators took the men to be government officials, possibly from the CIA, while for most people in ufology the myth became an outlet for paranoid fears.