The Man Who First Saw "The Men in Black" Dies

The man who brought the ufo silencers, the men in dark clothing, into modern consciousness, Albert K. Bender, 94, died on March 29, 2016, in California.

"Men in Black" (MIBs) are what appear to be male humans dressed in black suits who claim to be government or paramilitary (or even alien) agents and who harass or threaten UFO witnesses to keep them quiet about what they have seen.

From portrayals in The X-Files, appearances in movies, references in popular culture and points of debate in UFO conspiracy theories, the MIBs have become part of our 21st Century culture.

In April 1952, Albert K. Bender, a factory worker from Bridgeport, Connecticut, announced the formation of International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), whose purpose was to "gather flying saucer information" and to "get all Flying Saucer minded people acquainted with each other...."
At the time he established the IFSB, Bender was a 31-year-old bachelor who lived with his stepfather. He was obsessed not only with UFOs but with occultism, horror movies, and science fiction. Bender transformed his part of the house into what he called a "chamber of horrors." Jerome Clark, The Emergence of a Phenomenon: UFOs from the Beginning through 1959 ~ The UFO Encyclopedia - Volume 2 (Chicago: Omnigraphics, 1992: 73) 

Ufology historian Jerry Clark told of how Bender took "out-of-body trips into deep space," but also worked hard on the IFSB's publication, Space Review. Bender built up the 1952-1953 membership to 1500 people from around the world. "One of the most active was a West Virginia man named Gray Barker."

In early September 1953, Bender, who is acknowledged as one of the first pioneers of UFO research, was visited at his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut, by three men dressed in black who warned him in threatening terms to cease his investigations or else. 

The "silencers," as he called them, scared Bender to the point where he did not publish a report he said was going to answer all the mysteries of the UFO question. Instead, Bender left a warning: "We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious." Bender's organization - the IFSB - closed down.

After pressing Bender for more details about the "whys" behind the shutdown, Barker wrote his first book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, which was published by University Books in 1956. The book was the first to describe the Men in Black (MIBs). Barker recounted Bender's own alleged encounters with the MIBs, who were said to travel in groups of three, wear black suits, and drive large black automobiles. In 1962, Barker and Bender collaborated on a second book on the topic, called Flying Saucers and the Three Men. Published under Barker's own imprint, Saucerian Books, this book proposed that the MIBs were, themselves, extraterrestrials.

These "ufo silencer" experiences of this one individual, Albert K. Bender, promoted in later years by Gray Barker (May 2, 1925–December 6, 1984), created an enduring legacy beginning over 60 years ago - the MIBs. 

Besides Bender and Barker, Men in Black researchers and writers have included the late John A. Keel, Jerome Clark, the late Jim Keith, and Nick Redfern.  Nick Redfern, who passed on the news of Bender's passing to me, has written many books on MIBs, including his 2006 book, On the Trail of the Saucer Spies: UFOs and Government Surveillance (which contains information on Bender).

Now Albert K. Bender has passed away.  

Bender was born on June 16, 1921, and served in the United States Air Force during World War II.  In Bridgeport, Connecticut, he was a supervisor at the Acme shear factory. 

After Bender's 1962 book was published, and before Bender moved to Los Angeles, in 1965, while in Bridgeport, Bender started the Max Steiner Music Society, which was later renamed the Max Steiner Memorial Society, dedicated to the famed music composer of theater and film hits.

Steiner (May 10, 1888 – December 28, 1971) composed over 300 film scores, and was nominated for 24 Academy Awards, winning three: The Informer (1935), Now, Voyager (1942), and Since You Went Away (1944). Steiner's popular works include King Kong (1933), Little Women (1933), Jezebel (1938), Casablanca (1942), The Searchers (1956), A Summer Place (1959), and Gone with the Wind (1939), the film score for which Steiner is best known.

Thanks to Albert Bender's Max Steiner Memorial Society, collections of Steiner's music have been preserved, discussed, and disseminated. Bender's Society was responsible for obtaining a Hollywood Walk of Fame Star for Max Steiner, as well as Steiner's name being written in the Golden Book of the State of Israel. Bender's Steiner collection was donated to the Brigham Young University manuscript collection.

This little known part of Albert K. Bender's life, beginning in 1965, is noted in Max Steiner: Composing, Casablanca, and the Golden Age of Film Music by Peter Wegele (2014):

Albert K. Bender and Max Steiner.

Albert K. Bender at the announcement of the Max Steiner commemorative stamp, 1999.

At the time of his death, Bender was residing in Los Angeles, and his funeral was held in Manhattan Beach, California, on April 9, 2016. His known sibling survivors are Fred Bender, Shirley Audugar, and Joseph Kevlin.

Albert K. Bender and his wife.

The only known recording of Albert K. Bender can be found here. He also wrote a volume of recollections, Five Slices of Life: A Collection of Short Stories.

(Confirmation: Besides the Wikipedia page that was apparently written by a source close to Bender, the death is verified by the page on his funeral arrangements.)

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See also: 

Synchromystic Men In Black

Nick Redfern has posted his comments on the
death of Albert K. Bender at Mysterious Universe. 

Saucer Smear's James W. Moseley Dies

Fortean friend, ufology humorist, and writer James W. Moseley, 81, died Friday night, November 16, 2012. He passed away at a Key West, Florida, hospital, several months after being diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus.

Upon hearing of the death of Moseley, Anomalist Books publisher and editor Patrick Huyghe said: "He was one of the last remaining old timers from the golden age of flying saucers. Goodbye, Jim."

I, Loren Coleman, first met James W. Moseley ("Jim" to his friends) when he, John Keel, and I were speaking at a Fortfest in the D.C. area, in 1973. The most vivid memory I have of that time is sitting with these two gentlemen in the dark and shabby lobby of a motel, listening to the foremost scholars of ufology decide what they would do that evening. I recall politely excusing myself to finetune my next day's presentation, as they skipped off, by foot, across the multilane highway, to visit a nearby striptease joint. And thus I was introduced to the braintrust of ufology, and knew what the end would look like - some sort of cosmic mix of humor and nudity galore!

For years, according to only a few readers, Moseley too frequently posted photographs of large-breasted women in his humorous ufology newsletter, Saucer Smear, confusing people who wished to claim that Moseley was gay, even though he said he was not (for he came from a generation of individuals who might remain closeted for years).

Did it matter what people thought? Ufology historian and Moseley friend Jerome Clark wrote me: "Well, it did matter. It mattered to Jim, who said he was not gay and who did not like it when people spread such speculation."

But it went beyond breasts: In the May 10, 2004, issue of Saucer Smear, Moseley highlighted the republishing of a book on three alien monsters raping a woman named Barbara Turner in her bedroom. 

Actually, it was quite obvious. Moseley was a comic, extremely interested sex, and loved to be the center-of-attention. Certainly, his lifestyle was secretive to some. For almost thirty years, Moseley lived in Florida. 

Moseley with a large poster of marine treasure hunter Mel Fisher.

In 1984, Moseley established an antiques store in Key West, Florida. He also made money in real estate. In 1992, Moseley donated his Peruvian material to the Graves Museum of Archaeology and Natural History, located in Dania, Florida, where it is on permanent display.

James Moseley was a pivotal chronicler of a now-famed mystery that issued from his interest in ancient Peruvian artifacts. It is to be recalled that the Nazca Lines were first discovered by the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejia Xesspe, who spotted them when hiking through the foothills in 1927. He discussed them at a conference in Lima in 1939. Maria Reiche, a German-born mathematician and archaeologist, first studied and set out to preserve the Nazca Lines in 1940. Paul Kosok, a historian from Long Island University, is credited as the first scholar to seriously study the Nazca Lines in the USA, on site in Peru, in 1940-41. But it was Moseley who first wrote about the Nazca Lines as an intriguing Fortean phenomena in Fate Magazine, in October 1955, suggesting a mysterious origin, long before they interested alternative writers such as Erich von Däniken (1968), Henri Stierlin (1983) and Gerald Hawkins (1990).

Moseley co-wrote a memoir with Karl T. Pflock, entitled Shockingly Close to the Truth! (2002), telling many of his own "secrets." He decided to reveal much about himself, but for the decade after its publication, few were able to decipher which of his "facts" were jokes and which were reality.

James W. Moseley, who was born on August 4, 1931 in New York City, was more than merely an American ufologist, that's for certain.

General biographical details about Moseley include the following:

Over his career, he has exposed UFO hoaxers and has engineered hoaxes of his own. He is known for the newsletter Saucer Smear.
Moseley was the son of U.S. Army Major General George Van Horn Moseley. Moseley attended Princeton University for two years before dropping out. He became interested in UFOs following the 1947 claims of pilot Kenneth Arnold, but his interest deepened following the 1948 death of U.S. Air Force pilot Thomas Mantell, in pursuit of a UFO.
In July, 1954, Moseley co-founded Saucer News, a periodical known for its unorthodox, "freewheeling" (Clark, 2002) style. Saucer News only occasionally featured serious UFO research; Moseley was among the first to publicize evidence against the claims of leading "contactee" George Adamski. In 1953 he investigated the Ralph Horton flying saucer crash.
Saucer News was sold to Gray Barker in 1968. Moseley became a regular lecturer on UFOs for several years and organized an annual convention. In 1970, he founded a newsletter that went by several titles until Moseley settled on Saucer Smear in 1981. He produce[d] the newsletter irregularly, and [sold] pdf issues and subscriptions from his site. Saucer Smear typically ha[d] a joking, gossipy tone.

Moseley report[ed] (Story, 1980; Clark, 2002) that he has accepted, then rejected, a number of explanations for UFOs. In roughly chronological order, he considered the extraterrestrial hypothesis; a secret weapon/aircraft hypothesis, psychic/supernatural/interdimensional hypotheses in the vein of John Keel or Jacques Vallee; deep skepticism; and agnosticism. According to Jerome Clark, he ha[d] "entertained just about every view it is possible to hold about UFOs, without ever managing to say anything especially interesting or memorable about any of them." (Clark 2005). Source.

Of course, parts of Moseley's life were often ignored in online mainstream bio profiles. One hoax that he did acknowledge was the Adamski-involved Straith hoax letter. Moseley was quoted by Jerome Clark as stating that he committed multiple UFO "hoaxes." But which ones and how many?

Moseley often appeared on the old Long John Nebel radio program.

Moseley had a close relationship with many founding figures in ufology. For example, Moseley often called early "flying saucer author" Gray Barker, his closest friend. Moseley noted in his Shockingly Close to the Truth, that Barker died on December 6, 1984, "after a long series of illnesses" in a Charleston, West Virginia, hospital. But the cause was somewhat mysterious and the diagnosis was always unclear. Moseley wrote that "the more or less simultaneous failure of various organs, due most probably to AIDS (though it was not diagnosed as such in those days)" killed Barker. In filmmaker Ralph Coon's documentary about Barker, Whispers from Space, the Clarksburg investigator is depicted as a closeted gay man. Barker was only 59 when he died. Moseley appeared in the documentary, discussing their friendship. The fact that Moseley was straight, and he could have a gay friend, of course, is understood today, but less so in their generation.

Moseley's Saucer Smear was full of news, as well as humor. He showed loyalty to his associates, and included notices to help his friends. For instance, in 2007 and 2008, Moseley carried a call for donations to be given for the continued development of the International Cryptozoology Museum.

Goodbye, indeed. There goes another old friend many of us shall miss.

James W. Moseley, 2007.

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Thanks to Gene Steinberg, Larry W. Bryant, and especially Patrick Huyghe for the sad news.