Albert Bender
Albert Bender is a genuine man of mystery. He was the founder of the first major UFO investigation unit and is possibly the first significant Men In Black reportee, which is why he is so significant in these circles. Much of what little is actually known about the MIB phenomena reinforces his claims as documented in his book Flying Saucers and the Three Men, which represents the first book written on the subject.
Biographical Snapshot: Early Years
Albert was born in 1921 in Duryea, Pennsylvania. From his childhood living with his stepfather , he was a prolific writer and had a fascination with cinematic horror and the supernatural. He focused his writing in this days into corresponding with people around the world to collect trinkets like coins, sand, or stamps.
When he started coming of age, his writing matured and he became an amateur playwrite. He favored spook plays that he generally wrote for himself. Come World War 2, he joined the US Army Air Corps. He served as a dental technician at Fort Meade, but was later transferred to Langley to work as a clerk at the Dental Center. His love of writing paid off there by landing him a position as an editor for the Army newsletter.
His career with the armed forces ended there, and he moved to Bridgeport, Connecticutt where he'd spend the rest of his lengthy days (he died this year in March). He'd hold various jobs here, and be successful in most. For fourteen years he was a supervisor for a local factory called Acme Shear, which he maintained alongside his personal ventures. More importantly than his business success, was meeting his wife Betty Rose. They were married in 1954.
Snapshot: IFSB
In January 1952, backtracking slightly for emphasis sake, he founded the first major ufological investigation unit called the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB for short). This organization was an almost overnight success with global correspondences for its newsletters and periodicals including a magazine he started called Space Review which represented the first UFO related magazine. He had sponsorships and memberships across the United States, and used this to fund investigations into UFO reports thus making him the first major national sponsor of UFO investigations. The timing couldn't have been better, as 1952 was a major year for reports with the Washington, DC UFO flap that summer.
The organization would not last long, in spite of its resounding success. Throughout the course of its climax months, Bender claims to have had strange encounters warning him off from pursuing his research into ufology. Some of these were witnessed, such as mysterious phonecalls that the switchboard couldn't trace. Finally in early 1953, when the organization was in a state that it could have gone the distance as a self funding venture, he mysteriously shut it down with a cautionary note to his readership to be very careful when researching this phenomenon.
Snapshot: Latter Years
Albert Bender was on the verge of a nervous breakdown when he yanked the rug out from under his own life's work. So fanatical was his panic that he went so far as to destroy much of his own work to prevent it from seeing the light of day, however in 1962 his friend from those days of the Space Review and IFSB Gray Barker finally convinced him to write about it.
This relatively small book would be titled Flying Saucers and Three Men. The sketches that he made of the men that terrified him would later be popularized by Gray Barker in a book about his own experiences with the IFSB called They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. Gray's and Albert's experiences and writings would in the 90s become the basis and inspiration for the Men In Black comic and media franchise.
Albert's life at this point couldn't have been further away from it's starting point as between the 60s and 80s he was all about music. In 1965 he effectively divorced himself from anything publicly to do with high strangeness by founding the Max Steiner Music Society. This organization's membership included names like John Wayne, Fred Astaire, and Vincent Price, and was responsible for a great deal of historical preservation with regards to Universal Studios and Hollywood at large. Max Steiner was one of the foremost Hollywood composers in early Hollywood, having composed the scores for the 1930s King King, Jezebel, and Gone With the Wind, 1940s Casablanca, and over three hundred others. He is known as the father of film music.
The above is Mr Bender standing alongside Max Steiner himself.
The remainder of Albert's life would be quiet. The 90s and 2000s would see a renewed interest thanks to comics and movies in the life of this man, but he would generally do his best to avoid attention. In March 2016 he quietly passed away.
Gray Barker, disinformationist or researcher?
Gray Barker's early writings are generally taken with a grain of salt, as are Albert's and his few discussions about the Men In Black as he is known to have been dabbling in the occult at that point of his life and nearing a paranoid nervous breakdown. However, Gray managed run with the subject. He even gained notoriety talking about them and is generally credited with expounding on the supernatural mystique surrounding the appearance of these mysterious strangers. In addition to the earlier book by him, he also wrote MIBs: The Secret Terror Among Us.
Albert Bender and the Silencers
Silencer was the term that Albert generally used when talking or writing about these mysterious agents. The veracity of his claims has been challenged, but adherents point to his relative silence about them over the years as proof in and of itself. His book was titled Flying Saucers and the Three Men because they always seemed to show up either individually, or in groups of three.
Albert believed his first encounter with them to be fairly innocuous. A phonecall in the afternoon with no response on the other end of the line. He said he knew someone was on the other end however, because he could hear them breathing.
His claims and writings from there alternate between between Ian Fleming and Lovecraft in their descriptions and complexity. He had other phonecalls, and encounters in the streets where they would follow him. One phonecall, he claims to have gotten a severe migraine as he was being warned to stop his research. The migraine went away when he hung up the phone.
Albert initially believed them to be government agents. He felt they were spooks tasked with suppressing information about flying saucers for various reasons, not the least of which was the military having been in a near panic over them during the summer of 1952 with swarms of sightings directly over the capitol and the Pentagon. So many reports were coming in during that summer that the call centers virtually stayed overloaded. However, towards the end his suspicions changed. He began to believe they were something other than human as he took notice of waxy and seemingly elongated features. They were always short, also. Never over five and a half feet tall, but usually smaller.
An Apparent Cult
The Albert Bender saga is a difficult one to follow and research. The MIB phenomenon has a life of its own in ufology, and while its origins can be traced to long before Albert it was his story that brought it to public consciousness. Albert's story has been exaggerated out of proportions in some corners, taking on mythic qualities with third party expansions on the tales. It's difficult to doubt that he was targeted in some fashion by agencies tasked with silencing him amidst the flying saucer panic, but over the decades since the truth has become ever more difficult to discern from the legend.
Project Blue Book is an admitted disinformation campaign. The government has tacitly confirmed in the years since the flood of information made available by FOIA that its primary purpose was calming the public, not investigating. Loosely coinciding with this was Project Blue Fly, a lesser known crash retrieval operation that was allegedly for the collection and eventual back engineering of Soviet technology that operated stateside as well as around the world in allied countries. These are possible sources for many of the rumors about MIBs during those years as there are claims of suppressed UFO crash reports that surface over the years.
Women In Black?
Yes, there are reports of women in black. This is a side note to address the obvious question. They aren't very different from the classic and better known MIB, differing in that they tend to wear black women's business suits and often seem to be obviously wearing a wig. Like the MIBs, they are described as having weirdly gaunt and stretched features with pale skin.
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