From the Vault: M.I.B. or N.I.B.?

to apply to it? Like is it one of of demon possession or is it one of aliens? And how are these different concepts connected? Right? If you have a paranormal experience, what type of template can you can you lay over top it? Yeah, So it's a fun little discussion. So if you're in the mood for men in Black and perhaps the devil uh, then this is the episode for you. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff

to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. You know, we've covered a lot of UFO beliefs on the show over the years to talk about alien abduction experiences, strange lights in the sky, ancient aliens, speculation, and we've covered it all with our usual level of skeptical enthusiasm. I would say, not coming at it in order to prove all the stories true and believe, but also appreciating that fantastical beliefs and experiences and even delusions

are interesting phenomena that are worth studying and paying attention to. Yeah, why are people reporting these stories? What? What is actually occurring that might be interpreted as such? And and then why do we tell the stories that we tell? Like, all these questions are sort of bound up in the same riddle. But to read fresh, this is the basic truth of the matter. Humans have always seen things they couldn't explain, and some of these things were actual phenomena,

such as shooting stars or unusual weather effects. Other times these were hallucinations, which can occur can occur for a variety of reasons, only some of which entail the ingestion of psychedelics or symptoms of mental illness, And in either case, things seen became become things remembered, and memory is a tricky thing all in its own, highly susceptible, to error, to manipulation and change due to personal desires, interpretations, cultural priming,

and a host of other factors. Yeah, that's exactly right. And one of the things that I often think about doesn't get enough attention when when people discuss fantastical experiences like say, you know, UFO abduction experiences and sightings and things like that, is is all of these in between categories that cre eight memory experiences for people or create, you know, at least in some way or another, lead a person to relate and experience that are not exactly

one of three clear options. The three clear options usually presented are somebody actually physically had this UFO abduction experience, they really were taken up, or they're lying and they're just making up a story they know to be false. Or they hallucinated it like they had a vision where they imagine that they've really believed all this stuff was happening to them at the time and that you know, and then they remember that hallucination as if it was

a real physical event. I think those are actually not the only three options. They usually treated as like the main three things that could have happened. I think what gets underappreciated or these sort of like weird middle categories where you know where like imagination and fancy and retelling and embellishment and all these different kinds of things sort of in act in a stew within the mind. And

there's so many ways this can happen. One piece of research that I always just think it's such an interesting little example of demonstrating how contagious imagery and ideation can be between one brain subsystem and another is a two thousand six study called do you Remember proposing marriage to the Pepsi machine? False recollection? False Recollections from a campus walk, And this was in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review two

thousand and six by by Semen, Philbin, and Harrison. And basically the gist here is that students were asked to perform, and too so somewhere asked to perform, and somewhere asked to merely imagine themselves performing or imagine seeing somebody perform activities both normal like checking a pepsi machine for change or lying down on a couch to relax, and also actions that were bizarre, like proposing marriage to a pepsi machine or lying down on a couch to have a

chat with Sigmund Freud, and it turned out in this study at least that even just imagining performing these activities caused many subjects to later recall having actually performed them. Of course, this doesn't always happen, like sometimes you remember the difference, but sometimes you don't remember the difference. Sometimes the contents of our mind's eye are contagious in a way that can spread into memory. Things that we think about happening can in some cases become things that we

believe happened. And this is possible in people who have not been diagnosed with any conditions that cause psychosis or hallucinations. It's just one of the many interesting ways that you can see uh memories being meddled with in in this kind of contagious way within the brain. And of course we do outright invent things, sometimes inful things. We have had terrifying visions, and certainly there are hoaxes in the world.

But still even with hoaxes, there's there's still this element of the human imagination that ultimately helped the dream of every god, demon, fairy and an extraterrestrial that we've ever considered. And once these things are created, they're essentially available as food for our meaning hungry minds. And so the version of all of this that emerged in the post War War two period and continues on to this day, though with decreased energy, is that of the alien UFO, the

unidentified flying object, the the the alien visitation. And Uh, today we're zeroing in on one particular aspect of Ufo folk belief, one with some insightful connections potentially to older religious ideas. We're gonna be talking about m I B. Men in Black? Should I sing the song from the movie now? I don't think we should do that. I don't want to get night cheese done. He's right, Uh, so clear where the Men in Black franchise, I don't even aggressively pursues. I p that is a big chise.

And we're still going strong. There's the first one came out seven, but yeah, there's there's a new one coming out like in the next year. I don't think I ever saw past the first one. I think I too have only seen the first one. Uh that they maybe the other ones may be great, I don't know, but we're not really talking about those movies today. However, those movies are based on it believe they were based on a comic book. But but the whole franchise is based

on this concept of men in Black. Uh, the end result doesn't really do the original idea justice in my opinion. Um, even though many of us me included, well, you know, we learned about men in Black for the first time through watching this nine seven sci fi action comedy. You know, I can't be positive, but I know I watched a lot of terrible like BS fringe documentaries when I was a kid, you know, all the stuff about how I

think I've said this on the show before. When I was in like second or third grade, I was big into like lock S, Monster UFOs. I was convinced all that was real, and I think I I had watched like I don't know what it was and whatever masqueraded as like educational programming on television that was just like propaganda for conspiracy theories and beliefs about the paranormal. Oh, I too was very confused by episodes of specifically in Search Off hosted by Leonard Nimoi and Unsolved Mysteries hosted

by Robert Stack. However, I don't I don't remember. There may have been episodes of Unsolved Mysteries that involvement in Black, But if there were, I don't remember seeing well, I I'm pretty sure I saw something at some point that made me aware of the concept. But even if I wasn't aware, then yeah, definitely the movie came along. I think maybe I don't know if it was before or after the Men in Black movie. There was the episode of The X Files Jose Chunks from Outer Space, which

is one of the best episodes of all time. It still holds up today. It's so good, it's so funny, and it has classic Men in Black cameos in It isn't the idea here that the Men in Black take on the guys of famous individuals, of celebrities so that you can't report it to the police without sounding ridiculous, Which is funny because in in the episode you can tell they kind of did their research. This sort of mirrors real things that people reported about Men in Black experiences.

Sometimes people said that the experience would be, you know, ridiculous or absurd, as in the implication is, oh, it's because they wanted to keep everything hush hush, and so they knew if they acted absurd, I wouldn't be able to tell people without them laughing at me. Now, some of you out there, you might have heard about Men in Black through at least a couple of different films

that came out. One came out in nine same year as Men in Black, titled The Shadow Men, and I have not seen this yet, but I saw the trailer. It looks fabulous in a n way, featuring Eric Roberts, Dean Stockwell, and Andrew Pine, and uh, it's four of us.

Seems to be more of a traditional Men in Black movie with with these like weird, tall suited individuals with dark glasses that are messing with their protagonists trying to keep them from sharing some sort of information with the world about UFOs, and then upon closer inspection they don't seem to be quite human. And then there's a there's a much earlier actually men in Black plot line in

a movie from nineteen eight titled titled Hangar eighteen. But certainly by the time that The Men in Black came out, by the time you know the X Files, that had ample opportunity, uh to uh to educate everyone about the idea. We saw all sorts of other echoes in various bits of media. For instance, the thin men in the x Calm Games are classic men in black characters like uh, thin thin guys in suits with weird um facial features

that are not quite human. Uh. They're a doctor who I believe has a species called the Silence that show up. They are very men in black esque, and even a couple of ultimately you know, rather different bits of cinema. But the the agents from the Matrix are essentially men in black. The Strangers of Dark City are in many ways men in black. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that with the with the strangers, I definitely see it

with the agents. Um. Well, before we get into the particulars, let's just try to sketch out the broad kind of version of the men in black folklore. What what would you say is the broadest possible interpretation of it. It's that most commonly somebody becomes in some way involved with UFO lore. They either have a UFO experience, they see a UFO, or they have an abduction experience, or they

begin researching UFO phenomena. That's right, and then suddenly men wearing black show up, weird possibly government law enforcement types who are who suddenly show up in want to suppress you want to silence you, either after you have shared your claim of of UFO sightings or what have you, or in many cases before you share it. Yeah, so they tend to often be fond of like blacks, large

black sedans, cadillacs. They come and they approach you, the person who is interested in UFOs for some reason or doing UFO research or how do UFO experience. They tell you either you didn't see what you think you saw, or they tell you to stop researching, or they tell you to stop spreading the word about UFOs, or occasionally,

in some reports it's exactly the opposite. Sometimes people in black suits, men in black suits or black hats or whatever show up to say, actually keep going and keep digging. There's more to see, there's more to learn. Yeah. They take on more of like a like a deep throat persona and stories and throw in their lots of variegated weirdness, you know, just sort of like strange flourishes on the story. Right,

So let's put all this in context. I start talking about the time frame here because I think the more we talk about it, the more obvious it becomes. Like where these elements, like even the deep throat element, the element of like like government corruption, UH, spies and espionage and what have you where it all comes from. So reading around about this, it seems like the sort of the patient zero for all of this was a man by the name of Harold Doll when all of this

took place. So claims were made by Fred Krisman and Harold All about threats by men in Black following sightings of UFOs and the skies over Mari Island in the Puget Sound. And this was related in Gray Barker's book that they knew too much about flying saucers, which this book helped popularize stories of men in Black. Um, you know, a lot of this is like you know, this is the people who are into UFOs, like this is these are the texts they were reading and sharing and and

then um basing some of their experiences on. So another brief thing about timeline is while various forms of paranormal abduction experiences seemed to go way back in time, the UFO thing really seemed to pick up around and after World War Two. And you can offer all kinds of reasons for this. I mean, some would have to do with, like say, alleged sightings of UFO by Allied you know,

pilots and Air Air Force personnel during the war. Um. But other things might be might have to do with certain trends in science fiction movies and things like that. Now in another case, and this one was related by Peter M. Roycewitz who wrote a really important paper that we're going to come back to because I don't want to spoil what we're talking about bye bye by saying the title just yet. We will come back to it. I mentioned in nineteen two in Connecticut, you had this

guy by the name of Albert K. Binder. So Binder lived with his stepfather in the top floor of a house described by a local newspaper as a quote chamber of horrors. But I mean this seems like yeah, but basically they just had bunch of Halloween decorations up in his room. That sounds fun. Yeah, I mean that's like my room growing up. So you know, nobody ever said

it was a chamber of hars anyway. Uh Vender was a big sci fi fan, and he wrote a letter to a friend state quote stating that he had learned the origin and ultimate goal of extraterrestrial visitation on the Earth unquote, but then he claims that what happened is suddenly Men in Black came up and they confronted him telepathically with the intercept about the intercepted letter, and then forced him to shut down his various UFO interest projects, I mean at least for a while, because he later

writes a book about all of it and claims that the Men in Black were from another planet, among a whole host of other wild claims. Was this the one about going to Antarctica? I believe? And yeah, yeah, so it's it's wild in a way that like, like you kind of want to tell him, like stop, you stop there, because you had like a compelling story, just the right number of fantastic elements, but then you just you kept

going with it. Uh So. Royce at See points out that the Men in Black stories they really flourished for a very brief time in between nineteen sixty six and nineteen sixty seven, with multiple UFO researchers claiming that they had m IB encounters. They either encountered them alone or impairs, though mostly in threes, and they claim that these individuals, you know, they showed up and they know way too

much about them. They know about you know, what their UFO experience might have been, what the details are, and and no, you know, and they know about it before you you even had a chance to go and tell other people about it. And a lot of these tales seemed to be inspired or colored by Cold War espionage fiction.

Uh you know, they often claimed the men in black often claim to be military intelligence offers officers, or so the stories go, well, yeah, with the you know, sixty six sixty seven, it's hard not to miss the timing with like the James Bond franchise there and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and just the idea of like

shadowy government figures, you know, at large. So interestingly enough, during the height of all of this, according to m royce Witz, a confidential correspondence from the Pentagon went out to intelligence the command centers, telling them to notify the Office of Special Investigations if anyone pretending to be a military officer attempted to strong arm UFO witnesses, which which is interesting because I guess it's the The idea here

is that if enough people were claiming it, they probably said, look, be alert, just in case there's anybody going around pretending to be law enforcement or a federal law enforcement uh, and messing with UFO people. I think the most common allegation was that that they were somehow associated with the Air Force, right, because they're the Air Force, they should know, right. Yeah, Well, I think back then the Air Force might have had

a stranger, more futuristic connotation than it does today. Now the Air Force just seems like a more mundane branch of the armed services. That's a good point. I hadn't thought about that now. There's also there's a lot of stuff in them in Men in Black Lore that doesn't necessarily or in many cases thankfully does not survive into

our science fiction. For instance, Roy Switz points out that there's this whole anti Semitic strain of Men in Black lore from that time period that entailed to just a bunch of anti Semitic nonsense, which isn't surprised, and given the long history of blood libel and conspiracy theories about the Jewish people, and and how easily modern conspiracy theories fall back into this same down the same well as

as well. Um, and if you if you want to see this for yourself, just spend fifteen minutes on the internet, Like you just go go to YouTube and start looking around conspiracy theories and see how long it takes you to hit something just overtly anti semitic. Unfortunately, the conspiracy theory spaces uh often just run through with this stuff, right,

and then it goes beyond um anti semitism. There's also a trend to describe men and black agents as Asian or ethnically ambiguous in some way, shape or form generally embodies a kind of like like white American chauvinism. Uh and and just general idea. I mean it almost just suggests that what could you do to make somebody weirder while you just generally make them not a white American? Right? So royce Witz shares a two account by one Michael Elliott,

and I'm just going to read a passage from it here. Quote. He had a dark complexion, but not Oriental or Indian, but dark. He had black hair with something of the greasy looks, something looking somewhat punk by today's standards. He was very thin, with a chiseled nose and chin, and had and it had sunken eyes. The man wore a black suit that needed ironing and possibly cleaning. He had on a white shirt and a black Texan like string tie.

Later when he rose to leave, I remember noting that the suit was much too large for him, despite his being over six ft as I estimated it. So there's a lot to unpack their like just so much of the like the racial other so many like just just

racist ideas about like uncleanliness and and so forth. But also though something the strange and kind of different there is that I feel like later on the men in black phenomena came to be much more associated with like the black suits, meaning a kind of government associated authority

and power. I think about like the cigarette smoking man in Um in the X Files, and as opposed to the kind of like weird Rumple, like the suit needed cleaning and it was too big for him, that that doesn't seem like it really fits with the what would

end up as the later standard idea of men in black. Yeah, because certainly by the time you get to you know, the more X Files version of it, and these these variations that you see in the Matrix, for instance, it's very much an idea of men in black as a like the symbols and or at least foot soldiers of top down government conspiracy anonymous, faceless authorities that they sort of like represent anonymized power. And yet in these earlier

stories there were also some other additional weird factors. We already mentioned that the Air Force Association. But then there are these additional dimensions to the lore in which say, for instance, they have exaggerated characteristics that are almost comical, and they walk with a crazy gait, almost drunken lye uh. There's one account that Royce Woods shared whether it's you know, just talking about them just walking like in a weird way, with like as if their hips were swivel joints gliding

and rocking effect. I mean, one gets the image of the Ministry of Funny walks in your head when you when you read these, uh these stories. But he stresses that, you know, one has to to again consider this from

the vantage point of both tradition and experience. So tradition bears keep the lore of something like Men in Black alive through everything from weird fiction and movies to oral accounts and uh, you know like ufology publications, um, and even though they haven't necessarily experienced and them experienced it themselves. And then you have passive tradition bearers who know about

it but don't actually pass it along. And then there are those who claim to have definite experiences with men in black and they tell their stories, which of course may may vary wildly. So it's it's I think it's a great way to look at something like this and the interplay between these different categories interpretation of paranormal experience via established lore and then accounts giving selective credence to that lore and inspiring new details as well, but again

very selectively. So you know, it's like someone's saying, oh, you know, I read this story there are men in black going around and they're they're suppressing the truth about aliens visiting our world. And then someone's like, yeah, I had this this really weird thing that happened the other day where these people in black suits showed up and

you're like, yeah, yeah, this is line up. And then they took me to add Arctica and then they and then we were in end and Arctica I meant Jesus, and you know, like and then they'll say, well, okay, well it's still the basic principle lines up and that supports my my story, right, They like, you can discard the stuff about Antarctica, but still say, well, like, well,

meeting men in black suits is not implausible exactly. Alright, Well, I think on that note, we're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're gonna get into the more of the meat of the episode. We're going to get into the reason that we chose the title for today's episode. Uh M I B or n I B M men in Black or Nativity and Black. All Right, we're back now, Robert. It seems correct me if I'm wrong, that you were inspired to want to talk about this

topic today because of this paper. It's an older paper, it seems to be sort of a classic in the uphology uh area. It was published in the Journal of American Folklore in nineteen eight seven by Peter M. Roycewitz about the men in Black tradition. Is Is this what got you into the subject? Yeah, I've never really looked into men and black before, aside from you know, seeing some of these films that we've discussed, like as a fulclore tradition, as a folklore tradition, I haven't really read

anything about it, and then ran across this paper. Yeah, the men in black experience in tradition analogs with the traditional devil hypothesis. So obviously I'm instantly captivated. Um And in case you didn't pick up on it, the title of this episode the n ib Nativity and Black. That is the Black Sabbath Song, one of the grades. So in this paper he suggests that there's a lot of room to compare the men in black figure with that of the Christian devil. Okay, we can take a look

at this. Specifically, he points to the tradition of the devil as this kind of a comic trickster in the eleventh through nineteen centuries, a shadow figure that serves as a kind of counterpoint to that of a saint. And I also have to add he didn't really get into this, but it made me think back to our discussions in the past about witchcraft theorists and suck cubi and incubie.

The idea here was that while demons could take on alluring forms to tempt sinners to greater sin, their guys could not be complete, because otherwise it wouldn't be fair to the faithful. You needed there to be a tell. So you might have a dude who's being seduced by a demonic succubus. But unfortunately, while she mostly looks like a beautiful woman, she's got i don't know, like bare hands or something right or duck feet is specifically one

that shows up in some of these old woodcuts. Like like, if you're if you're a sinner, you're probably gonna either not look at the feet, or you're gonna see the feet and pretin you didn't see them and go on with your sinning. But if you're faithful, then at the very least you'll notice that there's some demonic pantages going on here, and then you should really cut and run. You'll be more observant exactly. So I'm reminded of that.

It feels like there's a certain like level of that with the uncanny um behavior and appearance that is often described in these um Also going back to the author Walter Stevens take on witchcraft persecution that we've talked about in the past, his idea was that it was in large part an effort to prop up failing faith in

the supernatural during the early modern period. That's interesting, Yeah, we so we've talked about this on the show before, but the idea that people often have wrong is that they believe that like witchcraft, persecution piqued in the Middle Ages, and like the you know, the medieval period. But that's not true, which during an age of of reason, of everything seemed to be on the uptick. Yeah, and that's

when it really came about. And so what the idea here is that if people start having threats to the idea of their theology, of their religious beliefs, they'll counter those threats with attempts to prove it. And if you could prove that demons are real, then you can prove that God is real. That's right. Heaven, you know, it tends to be a little stingy and dishing out proof

of its existence. But if Hell can provide us with physical proof and or and specifically carnal experience ants by which to prove its reality, then that, by extension, proves the reality of Heaven and really had the reality of God. Now we don't know if Steven's interpretation here is correct, but I do think that's a really interesting way of reading that historical fact. Right, Yeah, I think you know, and I think he would probably agree that you have

all these other factors involved as well. Certainly, um an

age of of of misogyny as well. But but but I do wonder about all of that in relation to Men in Black and UFOs because if there is any doubt to the reality of UFOs and alien abductions in your mind and you would prefer to believe, if you, like the poster, want to believe, then if you have strange men showing up and pressuring you to be silent, well then that's even more evidence, right, that there's something here, there's some truth, because otherwise no one would care if

you shared the truth with the world, right. Yeah, the devils wouldn't be seducing all these people if there if there weren't a god to fight against exactly. Yeah. So again Royce was to really get into that idea, but it's kind of my own ponderings. Now. He did bring up the idea of tulpas into Betan mysticism. So this is the notion that intense thought can materialize a form

a thought being. And in this men in Black they're they're kind of a tulpa of fear and anxiety surrounding Big Brother Tulpas or an interesting subject that we can maybe return to. In fact, the listeners in the past have asked us to do episodes on tulpas. Yeah, we probably should. Then it would be a lot of fun. Maybe we get to read with an excerpt from from

a Boges short story. Well, I do think there's something interesting to talk about with the idea of tupas as materialized thought forms sort of like you know, imagination manifested as reality when it comes especially to like virtual worlds

and technology. You know, one of the things that the technology philosopher, I don't know if he'd call himself that, but i'd call him that Jared Lannier used to talk about with like the possibilities afforded to us by things like virtual reality, is the idea to not just play games in virtual environments, but to be more manifestly and directly creative than we could ever be in any other kind of environment, to have methods through which we we

just continually refine our abilities to translate thoughts and creativity directly into forms that can be sensed interesting. So you could, like, you know, under this kind of ideal virtual reality environment, you could have something like a tulpa. You could you know, just imagine something and then have it brought into being

in front of you, and then interact with it. So as far as Roycewitz is um used the term here, I think what we're talking about here is a kind of subconscious projection of both the fear of mainstream rejection by authority concerning UFO sidings, as well as a fear of retribution. And I think this is interesting because we do see this a lot, uh these days, you know,

in messaging against political and co for all others. You know, like in a political adversary is at once both the thing that doesn't take us seriously and is also actively working against us in a dangerous way. So the enemy

is both inept and insidious at the same time. It's funny umberto Echo, you know, pointed out that one of his characteristics of fascism, as he described it, was that fascism perceives its enemies as both impossibly powerful and extremely weak, Like at the same time, you know that that its enemies constitute this overwhelmingly threatening plot against the power of the you know, the fascist contingent in the state, and at the same time constantly talking about the weakness of

their enemies and denigrating what they can do in contrast with the fascist's own strength. Is the minute so I wonder to what extent then, in black are kind of a fear of and a desire for fascism, you know, like like the fear of these these government enemies showing up at your door or step to suppress you, and also the desire for it, like the validation that would come with it. Oh. Absolutely, that's a really good point.

I mean, that's something that's always going on in like conspiracy theory psychology is you know, if you not to say that there aren't real you know, there are real conspiracies and real abuses of power and all that, But in the ones that are more fanciful and imaginary and based on you know, poor evidence and all that, uh, where people just build these architectures of shadowy organizations out

there pulling the strings on all the puppets everywhere. You can absolutely see this tension between of course, like the fact that the conspiracy is a terrible thing, and you think it's a terrible thing and you wouldn't really want it to exist, but at the same time, the fact that you believe in it kind of does make you want it to exist because because other people don't believe you, and you want to be proven right and so evidence of this horrible, unimaginably bad thing actually is kind of

pleasurable and exciting to you. Yeah, and this gets this is something you see with UFO siding experiences and alien abduction experiences as well. Is that no matter no matter to what degree the individual believes the experience happened. And and I certainly want to drive that home that there are there do soon to be cases where people believe something happened and and and it may be traumatic, uh

And and I don't want to dismiss that trauma. But at the same time, like being a part of it is to be a part of something important, like the the the aliens came to me, So there is something if not important about me, then at least my experience is important now. And and that that can be empowering. And when we see that in in you know, religion all the time too. Uh, the idea that that that's something out there in the universe takes interest in us

like that that is a value. So you know, sometimes it's just nice that the men in black care and they showed up and they can bake up cookies. Now, Rosa, it's also connects the men in black idea to the out of the Brothers of Shadow in Eastern mysticism. And this is something I wasn't familiar with this previously either, though I guess I might have seen some echoes of it in various nineties television shows. Yeah, I feel like

this link might be kind of tenuous. Um, But I tried to go dig deeper into this to figure out what's going on here. So it seems to me that the idea of the Brothers of Shadow is sort of an appellation by Western occultists, like like say the Theosophus or Madame Bolovatsky and all that sort of unfairly applied or associated with a sect or suborder of Tibetan Buddhism known as the dug Puzz or drug puzz, the drug lineage.

Now I'll come back to that in a second. But so I was thinking about the concept of paranormal agents in black suits, and like, why why is that right there in their name, the fact that they wear black suits. Um, it's so interesting in what it reveals about about culture and psychology and archetypes, Like the black suit tie is clearly a very meaningful part of the folklore architecture here.

It says something about power, says something about anonimity, it says something about formality and professionalism and maybe some other qualities. But the black suit more traditionally, I mean, now that's this is very becoming very global, But it used to be a more like Western kind of European and American model of you know, how you demonstrate professionalism and culture, right, and it was sort of spread to other areas as

a part of spreading Western culture. Yeah, And so I was wondering, Okay, what would men in black look like at other times and in other cultures with different ideas about the meanings of colored clothing and different types of clothing. I was trying to imagine, Okay, if you have men in black in Chinese UFO experiences, what they dressed the same when they wear black suits? Or would they tend

to more often wear something different. So I tried to see if I could find any men in black type reports from for example, China, and I didn't really come up with anything. I was reading an article from in the South China Morning Post about the UFO society of China. Uh. This article reported quote, over the past ten years, there have been five thousand reports of UFOs in China, and it told the story of a man who claimed to have been abducted by an alien woman from Jupiter who

had sex with him during his absence from Earth. And there were no men in black anywhere in these stories. Now, there may be some type of analogous men in black experiences in Chinese UFO encounters, but if if so, I couldn't come across any evidence of it, though. That's interesting. Yeah, I haven't done any any reading on really Chinese UFO accounts. I've done a little bit on the like sasquatch cryptid

reporting in China, but not the UFOs. But that's interesting. Well, yeah, I mean, it's just interesting that clearly UFOs are a somewhat global experience phenomena. Uh, people claim to have had these experiences in different parts of the world, but not everybody's going to have the exact same like kind of feelings about men in black suits with ties, or maybe they will, I don't know. Maybe that's a more universal

kind of signifier at this point. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess the the UFO theorist would argue that, of course the men in black are gonna wear black suits if suits are the standard of dress and they're just gonna They're gonna wear whatever is appropriate given the culture at the time. But what would that be, I mean that that would help help us get a better idea

of what the men in Black exactly are supposed to represent. Well, well, let's see if they landed in say Victorian England, what would they have worn where they would be dressed up like uh, like like the the the police that they definitely wear bowler hats, like it looks like Scotland yard. Yeah, I guess. So, you know, whatever the standard is, right, Edwardian men in black like that a should be the sequel. That's what I want to see. Well, I'm sorry, I got side tracked. I want to come back to the

idea of the Brothers of Shadow. So I think that from what I can tell, this is term applied by like these Western occultists, uh to a sect or suborder of Tibetan Buddhism, as I was saying, called the dugpas

with the drug push, the drug poll lineage. And and I think this association seems to be unfair as they obviously do not see themselves as like sorcerers or shadowy nefarious figures like the Western occultists characterize them uh, though for what it's worth, older Western taxonomy is sometimes referred to the monks of this order as red hats, and they do dress in red robes and hats on some occasions, though this is true of many orders of Tibetan Buddhist monks,

not just the drug tradition. So obviously the cultural associations are getting lost across history and translation here with this whole relation to the Brothers of Shadow, I don't think this means that Tibetan experiences with UFOs and men in Black wouldn't necessarily involve people dressing in red, though it doesn't make you have to consider this like what parts of the men in Black belief architecture are contingent and

what parts would be universal. All right, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to discuss the Men in Black just a little bit more than all right, we're back. You know, another comparison between the men in Black experience tradition and other types of paranormal experiences people tend to have is experiences that are commonly associated with with sleep

related episodes, like the shadow people. Yeah, this is a this is an interesting topic that I think I discussed a much older episode of stuff to blow your mind, but it seemed appropriate to bring it back up here. Um. Basically, it all hinges on a two thousand six study Swiss study that was published in the journal Nature about a possible connection between various shadow people um experiences and something actually going on inside the brain. Now, what exactly are

these shadow people experiences? Like? So basically it's the it's it's not so much a full on men in black scenario, like I saw a weird man in a black suit standing you know, you knocked on my door and we talked, and he told me not to tell anyone about flying saucers. Nothing like that. But it's more of a a symptom that's been reported for a while by a psychiatric and neurological patients where there is a feeling there's a sense of a dark figure, say in the room with you,

like looming over your bed maybe or something. Uh, and in fact that that's there in the men in black tradition. Some some of these reports mentioned that like people who had encounters with them, sometimes they'd be standing there over their bed, Yeah, looming over your like a ring wraith

right um, so the researchers in the study. Then they made the discovery while evaluating a psychologically normal twenty two year old woman for surgical treatment of epilepsy, and when they electrically stimulated her brains left temporo parietal junction or TPJ, they repeatedly gave she repeatedly had the sensation of a lurking shadow in her presence, like a shadow man, And she perceived this shadow person just behind her, interfering with

her attempts to read a book. And when the researchers stimulated her in a seated position, she perceived herself to be seated in the entity's lap um quote he was clasping her in his arms, which she described as an unpleasant feeling. So essentially what seemed to have been taking places.

She was observing her own body the whole time, but as the t PJ concerned self processing, self other distinction and multisensory body integration info, the electrical stimulation caused her to attribute her own actions to an alien other, and a similar distortion maybe at work in various other uh, you know, psychiatric manifestations of alien entities. You know anything, that involves her being a nus other being in your room, being an alien, a demon, a man in black, a spirit,

a fairy, etcetera. So the researchers proposed that electrical stimulation of this area in the patient disturbed multisensory and and uh sinso motor integration of information with respect to her body, leading to the appearance of a first rank symptom of schizophrenia in a person with no psychiatric history. And it's notable here that the hyperactivity in the temporo parietal cortex of patients with schizophrenia may lead to the misattribution of

their own actions to other people. So we see, you know, a related um situation there. Well, that seems like another I mean, this is a more clinical type of condition, but UM related to the milder version I talked about earlier. How you know, there appears to be sometimes just contagion between what's going on in one brain subsystem and another brain subsystem. That the actions that you see other people do. Maybe you attribute your own thoughts to your imagination of

someone else's mind. You think they're thinking whatever you're thinking, or you you you blur the lines between imagination and memory. Absolutely so I don't present this as as the answer for shadow people. Experiences are certainly for men in black, because there are various reasons that one might hallucinate Misremember we're engaging in any of these these situations we've discussed um. Oliver Sacks in his book Hallucinations specifically calls out hypnopompic hallucinations,

the hallucinations that we have coming out of sleep. Um. He describes these as a source of malevolent entity perception. So you know, it could certainly be one of the reasons at play. But then again, to go back to we were talking about earlier, something like men and Black, it's not just people having having an experience and then reporting it. It's also other people interpreting bits of that experience, and other people create eating things, creating fantasy and sci fi, etcetera.

Think getsap becoming a part of other people's hallucinations and other people's interpretation of hallucinations. So you know, it's it's not happening in a vacuum. Yeah. Interesting, I was reading an article, uh from because so I was wondering, Okay,

do men in black encounters still really happen? Yeah, you read about them from the twentieth century, from the nineteen fifties and sixties and on through the eighties and nineties, And I was like, I haven't really encountered a claim of the men in Black encounter or experience that that happened in recent decades. What's going on there? So I

looked this up and I did find an article. I found an article en slate by Aesha Harris from telve about whether men in Black sidings still happen because most of the stories you run into tend to be older. And so the author in this article asked you fologist Jerome Clark, who has mentioned in royce Witz is a coal whether people still report men in black encounters these days. Apparently the reports have quote tapered off significantly in the

fifteen years since the original Men in Black movie was released. Um, but Clark consists he does not think that the film had anything to do with that. Instead, he attributes it to a lack of investigation into the issue in recent years, especially since the passing of the ufologist John A. Keel, who apparently cataloged a lot of these experiences. UH, did a lot of this kind of research made by research

and investigation. We're talking about continually writing about it and keeping the idea alive in UFO enthusiast communities and publications. But I think also like, you know, collecting other people's experiences. Yeah, um so. On the other hand, the British ufologist Nick Redfern insists that Men in Black encounters do still happen, as chronicled in his book The Real Men in Black

in two thousand eleven. I don't know if that's trying to cash in on a movie tie in, but personally, I would say, despite what Clark says, I would tend to wonder if the movie Men in Black does have something to do with the decline in Men in Black reports. I think this could be sort of inverse to what often happens, where UFO sightings seem correlated with like Flying Saucer science fiction, and elements of these alien encounters sometimes seem to correlate with elements that show up in fiction

over time. And I wonder if this inverse correlation, if if it is actually there, I mean, I don't know, but I wonder if this inverse correlation is there, if it might have to do with the fact that the Men in Black movies are comedies, like that. They make the idea funny and more and more so than that, because certainly we have funny UFO and funny alien movies that have come out over the years. Certainly it was in a case where um, Earth Girls are easy killed

off the idea of alien abductions. But you still have a mix, right, You have serious films and scary film homes and films that clearly are made by people who want to believe. Whereas the Men in Black films are really outside of those other those earlier Men and Black films that I mentioned in the X Files episode, it's in various sprinklings of Men in Black lore and other

uh pictures and shows. I can't think of anything that's really served as a counterbalance to the Men in Black comedy movies, you know, like if we had just had one like deadly serious Fire in the Sky esque Men in Black film like like that would have done a lot,

perhaps to keep it going. Boy, what about the Eric Roberts movie, Well that was what though, yea, yeah, so it came out out of the wrong time, so you might have had balance initially, But then what happened when Men in Black two came out and three or the in the upcoming one. I think the next one is the fourth one. I could be wrong, but really there's the whole I think I'm asking you for the second time in this episode. They're making another one. There at least four, so I only of the first one of

the movies. But I remember being gross in that way, like especially late nineties movies were gross where there was a time of like c G I snot and slime, a lot of mucus. Am I wrong? Now? There was? There was a lot of gross stuff in it because there was the villain was it was a roach like essentially a large roach in a human costume, like wearing a human skin, and there were a lot of gross side gags involving that character. Did I send you a link? I think I did send you a link to where

I found the Men in Black feature film novelization. Oh yeah, well, I guess it would have been one of those. Given the timeframe and uh and that the you know, the scale of the film. Man, that's got to be like the ultimate movie novelization. You would not have imagined it

could happen, and yet it did. You know, I would love to hear from anyone out there first of all, if you've seen any of these other Men in Black film, not I mean not the comedy sequels, but like the film or the the the earlier film, and you have any insight on them. I'd also love to hear from anybody who read the original comic books, like what were they? Like, are the fans? Are there? Are there fans of the original Men in Black comics? And if they are, do

they how do they feel about the films? I'm always interested in the you know, how a particular franchise evolves like that. For that matter, if anyone out there has had experiences with you know, with Men in Black or UFOs, you know, we would we would love to hear from you. You know, we promise that if you be right in with your accounts, we will not make fun of you. We will, you know, skeptically, uh and enthusiastically approach it as we always do. Yeah, all right, Well that's it

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