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The Men in Black Ride Again
By Scott Corrales
FATE :: August 2006
Lady, you’d better tell me what this is about!” shouted the taxi driver to his fare. Another taxi cab identical to his own had pulled up behind him and was now ramming his car in the back—all of this in broad daylight and on Avenida Corrientes, one of the busiest arteries of the city of Buenos Aires.
The woman looked through the rear window in terror at the attacking livery vehicle, its driver, and more ominously, its passenger. “No! This can’t be!” she wailed.
“Look, lady, you don’t seem to be the type to get into trouble, but…do you know that guy? The other cab driver seems to have gone nuts!” The first driver was doing his best to avoid getting rammed again and hitting other traffic in turn. Gunning the accelerator, the taxi ran a yellow light and managed to put an end to the frantic and surreal pursuit.
While the foregoing may seem like the script for a new Bruce Willis project, it isn’t. It is simply the ending of a real-life experience involving the wife of an Argentinean UFO researcher who found herself the target of a pursuit by the impeccably dressed characters known in ufology as the Men in Black, or MIB.
The anonymous woman, who told her story to author Fabio Zerpa, was aware of her husband’s research and of his success in meeting with a diplomat who gave him a crucial piece of information on UFOs. On February 20, 1983, she had gone to downtown Buenos Aires for a medical appointment when she realized that she was the subject of unwelcome attention by a bearded man in dark clothing who pretended to read a newspaper as he shadowed her movements, even boarding the same bus. “No one would sit near him,” she added, which served to heighten her sense of paranoia about the man.
Losing herself among the big city throngs, the woman was frightened to see the man again—reading his newspaper—at the corner of a busy intersection, having somehow kept ahead of her by a considerable distance. Out of sheer terror, she neglected her appointment and instead went into a hair salon, confident that the stranger would not dare follow her there. Leaving the salon, she boarded another bus to return home—no sign of the stranger.
Changing clothes, the woman once again headed to the downtown area, this time by subway, feeling that “everyone’s eyes were upon her” as she left the train car. To her horror, she realized that her bearded pursuer was disembarking from another car, quickly trying to close the distance between them.
In true action-film fashion, the woman ran up the subway stairs and across the street, zigzagging her way through traffic. This time a new pursuer joined the chase—a formally attired man in a gray suit, black velvet topcoat, and a blue pullover sweater clearly visible under his suit jacket despite the 90-degree temperature. He seemed uncertain as to how to step onto an escalator. It was this last, overdressed-for-the-weather pursuer who boarded the taxicab that rammed into her own, after she had decided to go to her husband’s office in a quest for safety.
At this point, the reader will be thinking of a number of possibilities that may explain the preceding account without involving anything untoward: the woman may have simply been paranoid; the pursuers may have been real enough, but only interested in holding her for ransom; they may have been foreign operatives interested in grilling her about her ufologist husband’s meeting with the diplomat. But the detail of the overdressed man seemingly unable to step onto an escalator (as if he had never seen one before) is strongly reminiscent of other incidents in which the so-called Men in Black manifest a sense of astonishment at perfectly mundane activities or situations, such as eating Jell-O or cutting a steak, situations highlighted in John Keel’s landmark The Mothman Prophecies.
In fact, it was Keel’s work on the subject that made him the unquestioned expert in documenting the uncanny powers of these beings. In 1960, William Dunn, Jr., a UFO investigator, had his home burglarized, his files burned, and his photos stolen. Men in Black were notably active during the West Virginia “Mothman” sightings of 1966–67 as well as in Long Island, New York. Far from believing them to be extraterrestrial agents, Keel introduced the concept of the Men in Black as negative, paraphysical forces whose warnings were not to be taken lightly ...
Read the rest of this article in the August 2006 issue of FATE
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