Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Let's venture into the old vault. That's right. This episode
Speaker 1: originally published three nineteen titled m I B or n
Speaker 1: ib so uh Men in Black or Nativity in Black,
Speaker 1: basically getting into the the idea of, you know, if
Speaker 1: one encounters some sort of out of the ordinary experience,
Speaker 1: like what kind of what kind of script, what kind
Speaker 1: of text, what kind of cultural understanding are you're going
Speaker 1: to apply to it? Like is it one of of
Speaker 1: demon possession or is it one of aliens? And how
Speaker 1: are these different concepts connected? Right? If you have a
Speaker 1: paranormal experience, what type of template can you can you
Speaker 1: lay over top it? Yeah, So it's a fun little discussion.
Speaker 1: So if you're in the mood for men in Black
Speaker 1: and perhaps the devil uh, then this is the episode
Speaker 1: for you. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. You know, we've covered a lot of
Speaker 1: UFO beliefs on the show over the years to talk
Speaker 1: about alien abduction experiences, strange lights in the sky, ancient aliens, speculation,
Speaker 1: and we've covered it all with our usual level of
Speaker 1: skeptical enthusiasm. I would say, not coming at it in
Speaker 1: order to prove all the stories true and believe, but
Speaker 1: also appreciating that fantastical beliefs and experiences and even delusions
Speaker 1: are interesting phenomena that are worth studying and paying attention to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why are people reporting these stories? What? What is actually
Speaker 1: occurring that might be interpreted as such? And and then
Speaker 1: why do we tell the stories that we tell? Like,
Speaker 1: all these questions are sort of bound up in the
Speaker 1: same riddle. But to read fresh, this is the basic
Speaker 1: truth of the matter. Humans have always seen things they
Speaker 1: couldn't explain, and some of these things were actual phenomena,
Speaker 1: such as shooting stars or unusual weather effects. Other times
Speaker 1: these were hallucinations, which can occur can occur for a
Speaker 1: variety of reasons, only some of which entail the ingestion
Speaker 1: of psychedelics or symptoms of mental illness, And in either case,
Speaker 1: things seen became become things remembered, and memory is a
Speaker 1: tricky thing all in its own, highly susceptible, to error,
Speaker 1: to manipulation and change due to personal desires, interpretations, cultural priming,
Speaker 1: and a host of other factors. Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that I often think about
Speaker 1: doesn't get enough attention when when people discuss fantastical experiences
Speaker 1: like say, you know, UFO abduction experiences and sightings and
Speaker 1: things like that, is is all of these in between
Speaker 1: categories that cre eight memory experiences for people or create,
Speaker 1: you know, at least in some way or another, lead
Speaker 1: a person to relate and experience that are not exactly
Speaker 1: one of three clear options. The three clear options usually
Speaker 1: presented are somebody actually physically had this UFO abduction experience,
Speaker 1: they really were taken up, or they're lying and they're
Speaker 1: just making up a story they know to be false.
Speaker 1: Or they hallucinated it like they had a vision where
Speaker 1: they imagine that they've really believed all this stuff was
Speaker 1: happening to them at the time and that you know,
Speaker 1: and then they remember that hallucination as if it was
Speaker 1: a real physical event. I think those are actually not
Speaker 1: the only three options. They usually treated as like the
Speaker 1: main three things that could have happened. I think what
Speaker 1: gets underappreciated or these sort of like weird middle categories
Speaker 1: where you know where like imagination and fancy and retelling
Speaker 1: and embellishment and all these different kinds of things sort
Speaker 1: of in act in a stew within the mind. And
Speaker 1: there's so many ways this can happen. One piece of
Speaker 1: research that I always just think it's such an interesting
Speaker 1: little example of demonstrating how contagious imagery and ideation can
Speaker 1: be between one brain subsystem and another is a two
Speaker 1: thousand six study called do you Remember proposing marriage to
Speaker 1: the Pepsi machine? False recollection? False Recollections from a campus walk,
Speaker 1: And this was in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review two
Speaker 1: thousand and six by by Semen, Philbin, and Harrison. And
Speaker 1: basically the gist here is that students were asked to perform,
Speaker 1: and too so somewhere asked to perform, and somewhere asked
Speaker 1: to merely imagine themselves performing or imagine seeing somebody perform
Speaker 1: activities both normal like checking a pepsi machine for change
Speaker 1: or lying down on a couch to relax, and also
Speaker 1: actions that were bizarre, like proposing marriage to a pepsi
Speaker 1: machine or lying down on a couch to have a
Speaker 1: chat with Sigmund Freud, and it turned out in this
Speaker 1: study at least that even just imagining performing these activities
Speaker 1: caused many subjects to later recall having actually performed them.
Speaker 1: Of course, this doesn't always happen, like sometimes you remember
Speaker 1: the difference, but sometimes you don't remember the difference. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the contents of our mind's eye are contagious in a
Speaker 1: way that can spread into memory. Things that we think
Speaker 1: about happening can in some cases become things that we
Speaker 1: believe happened. And this is possible in people who have
Speaker 1: not been diagnosed with any conditions that cause psychosis or hallucinations.
Speaker 1: It's just one of the many interesting ways that you
Speaker 1: can see uh memories being meddled with in in this
Speaker 1: kind of contagious way within the brain. And of course
Speaker 1: we do outright invent things, sometimes inful things. We have
Speaker 1: had terrifying visions, and certainly there are hoaxes in the world.
Speaker 1: But still even with hoaxes, there's there's still this element
Speaker 1: of the human imagination that ultimately helped the dream of
Speaker 1: every god, demon, fairy and an extraterrestrial that we've ever considered.
Speaker 1: And once these things are created, they're essentially available as
Speaker 1: food for our meaning hungry minds. And so the version
Speaker 1: of all of this that emerged in the post War
Speaker 1: War two period and continues on to this day, though
Speaker 1: with decreased energy, is that of the alien UFO, the
Speaker 1: unidentified flying object, the the the alien visitation. And Uh,
Speaker 1: today we're zeroing in on one particular aspect of Ufo
Speaker 1: folk belief, one with some insightful connections potentially to older
Speaker 1: religious ideas. We're gonna be talking about m I B.
Speaker 1: Men in Black? Should I sing the song from the
Speaker 1: movie now? I don't think we should do that. I
Speaker 1: don't want to get night cheese done. He's right, Uh,
Speaker 1: so clear where the Men in Black franchise, I don't
Speaker 1: even aggressively pursues. I p that is a big chise.
Speaker 1: And we're still going strong. There's the first one came
Speaker 1: out seven, but yeah, there's there's a new one coming
Speaker 1: out like in the next year. I don't think I
Speaker 1: ever saw past the first one. I think I too
Speaker 1: have only seen the first one. Uh that they maybe
Speaker 1: the other ones may be great, I don't know, but
Speaker 1: we're not really talking about those movies today. However, those
Speaker 1: movies are based on it believe they were based on
Speaker 1: a comic book. But but the whole franchise is based
Speaker 1: on this concept of men in Black. Uh, the end
Speaker 1: result doesn't really do the original idea justice in my opinion. Um,
Speaker 1: even though many of us me included, well, you know,
Speaker 1: we learned about men in Black for the first time
Speaker 1: through watching this nine seven sci fi action comedy. You know,
Speaker 1: I can't be positive, but I know I watched a
Speaker 1: lot of terrible like BS fringe documentaries when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, you know, all the stuff about how I
Speaker 1: think I've said this on the show before. When I
Speaker 1: was in like second or third grade, I was big
Speaker 1: into like lock S, Monster UFOs. I was convinced all
Speaker 1: that was real, and I think I I had watched
Speaker 1: like I don't know what it was and whatever masqueraded
Speaker 1: as like educational programming on television that was just like
Speaker 1: propaganda for conspiracy theories and beliefs about the paranormal. Oh,
Speaker 1: I too was very confused by episodes of specifically in
Speaker 1: Search Off hosted by Leonard Nimoi and Unsolved Mysteries hosted
Speaker 1: by Robert Stack. However, I don't I don't remember. There
Speaker 1: may have been episodes of Unsolved Mysteries that involvement in Black,
Speaker 1: But if there were, I don't remember seeing well, I
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure I saw something at some point that
Speaker 1: made me aware of the concept. But even if I
Speaker 1: wasn't aware, then yeah, definitely the movie came along. I
Speaker 1: think maybe I don't know if it was before or
Speaker 1: after the Men in Black movie. There was the episode
Speaker 1: of The X Files Jose Chunks from Outer Space, which
Speaker 1: is one of the best episodes of all time. It
Speaker 1: still holds up today. It's so good, it's so funny,
Speaker 1: and it has classic Men in Black cameos in It
Speaker 1: isn't the idea here that the Men in Black take
Speaker 1: on the guys of famous individuals, of celebrities so that
Speaker 1: you can't report it to the police without sounding ridiculous,
Speaker 1: Which is funny because in in the episode you can
Speaker 1: tell they kind of did their research. This sort of
Speaker 1: mirrors real things that people reported about Men in Black experiences.
Speaker 1: Sometimes people said that the experience would be, you know,
Speaker 1: ridiculous or absurd, as in the implication is, oh, it's
Speaker 1: because they wanted to keep everything hush hush, and so
Speaker 1: they knew if they acted absurd, I wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to tell people without them laughing at me. Now, some
Speaker 1: of you out there, you might have heard about Men
Speaker 1: in Black through at least a couple of different films
Speaker 1: that came out. One came out in nine same year
Speaker 1: as Men in Black, titled The Shadow Men, and I
Speaker 1: have not seen this yet, but I saw the trailer.
Speaker 1: It looks fabulous in a n way, featuring Eric Roberts,
Speaker 1: Dean Stockwell, and Andrew Pine, and uh, it's four of us.
Speaker 1: Seems to be more of a traditional Men in Black
Speaker 1: movie with with these like weird, tall suited individuals with
Speaker 1: dark glasses that are messing with their protagonists trying to
Speaker 1: keep them from sharing some sort of information with the
Speaker 1: world about UFOs, and then upon closer inspection they don't
Speaker 1: seem to be quite human. And then there's a there's
Speaker 1: a much earlier actually men in Black plot line in
Speaker 1: a movie from nineteen eight titled titled Hangar eighteen. But
Speaker 1: certainly by the time that The Men in Black came out,
Speaker 1: by the time you know the X Files, that had
Speaker 1: ample opportunity, uh to uh to educate everyone about the idea.
Speaker 1: We saw all sorts of other echoes in various bits
Speaker 1: of media. For instance, the thin men in the x
Speaker 1: Calm Games are classic men in black characters like uh,
Speaker 1: thin thin guys in suits with weird um facial features
Speaker 1: that are not quite human. Uh. They're a doctor who
Speaker 1: I believe has a species called the Silence that show up.
Speaker 1: They are very men in black esque, and even a
Speaker 1: couple of ultimately you know, rather different bits of cinema.
Speaker 1: But the the agents from the Matrix are essentially men
Speaker 1: in black. The Strangers of Dark City are in many
Speaker 1: ways men in black. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about
Speaker 1: that with the with the strangers, I definitely see it
Speaker 1: with the agents. Um. Well, before we get into the particulars,
Speaker 1: let's just try to sketch out the broad kind of
Speaker 1: version of the men in black folklore. What what would
Speaker 1: you say is the broadest possible interpretation of it. It's
Speaker 1: that most commonly somebody becomes in some way involved with
Speaker 1: UFO lore. They either have a UFO experience, they see
Speaker 1: a UFO, or they have an abduction experience, or they
Speaker 1: begin researching UFO phenomena. That's right, and then suddenly men
Speaker 1: wearing black show up, weird possibly government law enforcement types
Speaker 1: who are who suddenly show up in want to suppress
Speaker 1: you want to silence you, either after you have shared
Speaker 1: your claim of of UFO sightings or what have you,
Speaker 1: or in many cases before you share it. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: they tend to often be fond of like blacks, large
Speaker 1: black sedans, cadillacs. They come and they approach you, the
Speaker 1: person who is interested in UFOs for some reason or
Speaker 1: doing UFO research or how do UFO experience. They tell
Speaker 1: you either you didn't see what you think you saw,
Speaker 1: or they tell you to stop researching, or they tell
Speaker 1: you to stop spreading the word about UFOs, or occasionally,
Speaker 1: in some reports it's exactly the opposite. Sometimes people in
Speaker 1: black suits, men in black suits or black hats or
Speaker 1: whatever show up to say, actually keep going and keep digging.
Speaker 1: There's more to see, there's more to learn. Yeah. They
Speaker 1: take on more of like a like a deep throat
Speaker 1: persona and stories and throw in their lots of variegated weirdness,
Speaker 1: you know, just sort of like strange flourishes on the story. Right,
Speaker 1: So let's put all this in context. I start talking
Speaker 1: about the time frame here because I think the more
Speaker 1: we talk about it, the more obvious it becomes. Like
Speaker 1: where these elements, like even the deep throat element, the
Speaker 1: element of like like government corruption, UH, spies and espionage
Speaker 1: and what have you where it all comes from. So
Speaker 1: reading around about this, it seems like the sort of
Speaker 1: the patient zero for all of this was a man
Speaker 1: by the name of Harold Doll when all of this
Speaker 1: took place. So claims were made by Fred Krisman and
Speaker 1: Harold All about threats by men in Black following sightings
Speaker 1: of UFOs and the skies over Mari Island in the
Speaker 1: Puget Sound. And this was related in Gray Barker's book
Speaker 1: that they knew too much about flying saucers, which this
Speaker 1: book helped popularize stories of men in Black. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of this is like you know, this is
Speaker 1: the people who are into UFOs, like this is these
Speaker 1: are the texts they were reading and sharing and and
Speaker 1: then um basing some of their experiences on. So another
Speaker 1: brief thing about timeline is while various forms of paranormal
Speaker 1: abduction experiences seemed to go way back in time, the
Speaker 1: UFO thing really seemed to pick up around and after
Speaker 1: World War Two. And you can offer all kinds of
Speaker 1: reasons for this. I mean, some would have to do with,
Speaker 1: like say, alleged sightings of UFO by Allied you know,
Speaker 1: pilots and Air Air Force personnel during the war. Um.
Speaker 1: But other things might be might have to do with
Speaker 1: certain trends in science fiction movies and things like that.
Speaker 1: Now in another case, and this one was related by
Speaker 1: Peter M. Roycewitz who wrote a really important paper that
Speaker 1: we're going to come back to because I don't want
Speaker 1: to spoil what we're talking about bye bye by saying
Speaker 1: the title just yet. We will come back to it.
Speaker 1: I mentioned in nineteen two in Connecticut, you had this
Speaker 1: guy by the name of Albert K. Binder. So Binder
Speaker 1: lived with his stepfather in the top floor of a
Speaker 1: house described by a local newspaper as a quote chamber
Speaker 1: of horrors. But I mean this seems like yeah, but
Speaker 1: basically they just had bunch of Halloween decorations up in
Speaker 1: his room. That sounds fun. Yeah, I mean that's like
Speaker 1: my room growing up. So you know, nobody ever said
Speaker 1: it was a chamber of hars anyway. Uh Vender was
Speaker 1: a big sci fi fan, and he wrote a letter
Speaker 1: to a friend state quote stating that he had learned
Speaker 1: the origin and ultimate goal of extraterrestrial visitation on the
Speaker 1: Earth unquote, but then he claims that what happened is
Speaker 1: suddenly Men in Black came up and they confronted him
Speaker 1: telepathically with the intercept about the intercepted letter, and then
Speaker 1: forced him to shut down his various UFO interest projects,
Speaker 1: I mean at least for a while, because he later
Speaker 1: writes a book about all of it and claims that
Speaker 1: the Men in Black were from another planet, among a
Speaker 1: whole host of other wild claims. Was this the one
Speaker 1: about going to Antarctica? I believe? And yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's it's wild in a way that like, like you
Speaker 1: kind of want to tell him, like stop, you stop there,
Speaker 1: because you had like a compelling story, just the right
Speaker 1: number of fantastic elements, but then you just you kept
Speaker 1: going with it. Uh So. Royce at See points out
Speaker 1: that the Men in Black stories they really flourished for
Speaker 1: a very brief time in between nineteen sixty six and
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven, with multiple UFO researchers claiming that they
Speaker 1: had m IB encounters. They either encountered them alone or impairs,
Speaker 1: though mostly in threes, and they claim that these individuals,
Speaker 1: you know, they showed up and they know way too
Speaker 1: much about them. They know about you know, what their
Speaker 1: UFO experience might have been, what the details are, and
Speaker 1: and no, you know, and they know about it before
Speaker 1: you you even had a chance to go and tell
Speaker 1: other people about it. And a lot of these tales
Speaker 1: seemed to be inspired or colored by Cold War espionage fiction.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, they often claimed the men in black
Speaker 1: often claim to be military intelligence offers officers, or so
Speaker 1: the stories go, well, yeah, with the you know, sixty
Speaker 1: six sixty seven, it's hard not to miss the timing
Speaker 1: with like the James Bond franchise there and all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Yeah, and just the idea of like
Speaker 1: shadowy government figures, you know, at large. So interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: during the height of all of this, according to m
Speaker 1: royce Witz, a confidential correspondence from the Pentagon went out
Speaker 1: to intelligence the command centers, telling them to notify the
Speaker 1: Office of Special Investigations if anyone pretending to be a
Speaker 1: military officer attempted to strong arm UFO witnesses, which which
Speaker 1: is interesting because I guess it's the The idea here
Speaker 1: is that if enough people were claiming it, they probably said, look,
Speaker 1: be alert, just in case there's anybody going around pretending
Speaker 1: to be law enforcement or a federal law enforcement uh,
Speaker 1: and messing with UFO people. I think the most common
Speaker 1: allegation was that that they were somehow associated with the
Speaker 1: Air Force, right, because they're the Air Force, they should know, right. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I think back then the Air Force might have had
Speaker 1: a stranger, more futuristic connotation than it does today. Now
Speaker 1: the Air Force just seems like a more mundane branch
Speaker 1: of the armed services. That's a good point. I hadn't
Speaker 1: thought about that now. There's also there's a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff in them in Men in Black Lore that doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily or in many cases thankfully does not survive into
Speaker 1: our science fiction. For instance, Roy Switz points out that
Speaker 1: there's this whole anti Semitic strain of Men in Black
Speaker 1: lore from that time period that entailed to just a
Speaker 1: bunch of anti Semitic nonsense, which isn't surprised, and given
Speaker 1: the long history of blood libel and conspiracy theories about
Speaker 1: the Jewish people, and and how easily modern conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: fall back into this same down the same well as
Speaker 1: as well. Um, and if you if you want to
Speaker 1: see this for yourself, just spend fifteen minutes on the internet,
Speaker 1: Like you just go go to YouTube and start looking
Speaker 1: around conspiracy theories and see how long it takes you
Speaker 1: to hit something just overtly anti semitic. Unfortunately, the conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory spaces uh often just run through with this stuff, right,
Speaker 1: and then it goes beyond um anti semitism. There's also
Speaker 1: a trend to describe men and black agents as Asian
Speaker 1: or ethnically ambiguous in some way, shape or form generally
Speaker 1: embodies a kind of like like white American chauvinism. Uh
Speaker 1: and and just general idea. I mean it almost just
Speaker 1: suggests that what could you do to make somebody weirder
Speaker 1: while you just generally make them not a white American? Right?
Speaker 1: So royce Witz shares a two account by one Michael Elliott,
Speaker 1: and I'm just going to read a passage from it here. Quote.
Speaker 1: He had a dark complexion, but not Oriental or Indian,
Speaker 1: but dark. He had black hair with something of the
Speaker 1: greasy looks, something looking somewhat punk by today's standards. He
Speaker 1: was very thin, with a chiseled nose and chin, and
Speaker 1: had and it had sunken eyes. The man wore a
Speaker 1: black suit that needed ironing and possibly cleaning. He had
Speaker 1: on a white shirt and a black Texan like string tie.
Speaker 1: Later when he rose to leave, I remember noting that
Speaker 1: the suit was much too large for him, despite his
Speaker 1: being over six ft as I estimated it. So there's
Speaker 1: a lot to unpack their like just so much of
Speaker 1: the like the racial other so many like just just
Speaker 1: racist ideas about like uncleanliness and and so forth. But
Speaker 1: also though something the strange and kind of different there
Speaker 1: is that I feel like later on the men in
Speaker 1: black phenomena came to be much more associated with like
Speaker 1: the black suits, meaning a kind of government associated authority
Speaker 1: and power. I think about like the cigarette smoking man
Speaker 1: in Um in the X Files, and as opposed to
Speaker 1: the kind of like weird Rumple, like the suit needed
Speaker 1: cleaning and it was too big for him, that that
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like it really fits with the what would
Speaker 1: end up as the later standard idea of men in black. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because certainly by the time you get to you know,
Speaker 1: the more X Files version of it, and these these
Speaker 1: variations that you see in the Matrix, for instance, it's
Speaker 1: very much an idea of men in black as a
Speaker 1: like the symbols and or at least foot soldiers of
Speaker 1: top down government conspiracy anonymous, faceless authorities that they sort
Speaker 1: of like represent anonymized power. And yet in these earlier
Speaker 1: stories there were also some other additional weird factors. We
Speaker 1: already mentioned that the Air Force Association. But then there
Speaker 1: are these additional dimensions to the lore in which say,
Speaker 1: for instance, they have exaggerated characteristics that are almost comical,
Speaker 1: and they walk with a crazy gait, almost drunken lye uh.
Speaker 1: There's one account that Royce Woods shared whether it's you know,
Speaker 1: just talking about them just walking like in a weird way,
Speaker 1: with like as if their hips were swivel joints gliding
Speaker 1: and rocking effect. I mean, one gets the image of
Speaker 1: the Ministry of Funny walks in your head when you
Speaker 1: when you read these, uh these stories. But he stresses that,
Speaker 1: you know, one has to to again consider this from
Speaker 1: the vantage point of both tradition and experience. So tradition
Speaker 1: bears keep the lore of something like Men in Black
Speaker 1: alive through everything from weird fiction and movies to oral
Speaker 1: accounts and uh, you know like ufology publications, um, and
Speaker 1: even though they haven't necessarily experienced and them experienced it themselves.
Speaker 1: And then you have passive tradition bearers who know about
Speaker 1: it but don't actually pass it along. And then there
Speaker 1: are those who claim to have definite experiences with men
Speaker 1: in black and they tell their stories, which of course
Speaker 1: may may vary wildly. So it's it's I think it's
Speaker 1: a great way to look at something like this and
Speaker 1: the interplay between these different categories interpretation of paranormal experience
Speaker 1: via established lore and then accounts giving selective credence to
Speaker 1: that lore and inspiring new details as well, but again
Speaker 1: very selectively. So you know, it's like someone's saying, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I read this story there are men in
Speaker 1: black going around and they're they're suppressing the truth about
Speaker 1: aliens visiting our world. And then someone's like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: had this this really weird thing that happened the other
Speaker 1: day where these people in black suits showed up and
Speaker 1: you're like, yeah, yeah, this is line up. And then
Speaker 1: they took me to add Arctica and then they and
Speaker 1: then we were in end and Arctica I meant Jesus,
Speaker 1: and you know, like and then they'll say, well, okay,
Speaker 1: well it's still the basic principle lines up and that
Speaker 1: supports my my story, right, They like, you can discard
Speaker 1: the stuff about Antarctica, but still say, well, like, well,
Speaker 1: meeting men in black suits is not implausible exactly. Alright, Well,
Speaker 1: I think on that note, we're going to take a break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we're gonna get into the
Speaker 1: more of the meat of the episode. We're going to
Speaker 1: get into the reason that we chose the title for
Speaker 1: today's episode. Uh M I B or n I B
Speaker 1: M men in Black or Nativity and Black. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're back now, Robert. It seems correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: that you were inspired to want to talk about this
Speaker 1: topic today because of this paper. It's an older paper,
Speaker 1: it seems to be sort of a classic in the
Speaker 1: uphology uh area. It was published in the Journal of
Speaker 1: American Folklore in nineteen eight seven by Peter M. Roycewitz
Speaker 1: about the men in Black tradition. Is Is this what
Speaker 1: got you into the subject? Yeah, I've never really looked
Speaker 1: into men and black before, aside from you know, seeing
Speaker 1: some of these films that we've discussed, like as a
Speaker 1: fulclore tradition, as a folklore tradition, I haven't really read
Speaker 1: anything about it, and then ran across this paper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the men in black experience in tradition analogs with the
Speaker 1: traditional devil hypothesis. So obviously I'm instantly captivated. Um And
Speaker 1: in case you didn't pick up on it, the title
Speaker 1: of this episode the n ib Nativity and Black. That
Speaker 1: is the Black Sabbath Song, one of the grades. So
Speaker 1: in this paper he suggests that there's a lot of
Speaker 1: room to compare the men in black figure with that
Speaker 1: of the Christian devil. Okay, we can take a look
Speaker 1: at this. Specifically, he points to the tradition of the
Speaker 1: devil as this kind of a comic trickster in the
Speaker 1: eleventh through nineteen centuries, a shadow figure that serves as
Speaker 1: a kind of counterpoint to that of a saint. And
Speaker 1: I also have to add he didn't really get into this,
Speaker 1: but it made me think back to our discussions in
Speaker 1: the past about witchcraft theorists and suck cubi and incubie.
Speaker 1: The idea here was that while demons could take on
Speaker 1: alluring forms to tempt sinners to greater sin, their guys
Speaker 1: could not be complete, because otherwise it wouldn't be fair
Speaker 1: to the faithful. You needed there to be a tell.
Speaker 1: So you might have a dude who's being seduced by
Speaker 1: a demonic succubus. But unfortunately, while she mostly looks like
Speaker 1: a beautiful woman, she's got i don't know, like bare
Speaker 1: hands or something right or duck feet is specifically one
Speaker 1: that shows up in some of these old woodcuts. Like like,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're a sinner, you're probably gonna either
Speaker 1: not look at the feet, or you're gonna see the
Speaker 1: feet and pretin you didn't see them and go on
Speaker 1: with your sinning. But if you're faithful, then at the
Speaker 1: very least you'll notice that there's some demonic pantages going
Speaker 1: on here, and then you should really cut and run.
Speaker 1: You'll be more observant exactly. So I'm reminded of that.
Speaker 1: It feels like there's a certain like level of that
Speaker 1: with the uncanny um behavior and appearance that is often
Speaker 1: described in these um Also going back to the author
Speaker 1: Walter Stevens take on witchcraft persecution that we've talked about
Speaker 1: in the past, his idea was that it was in
Speaker 1: large part an effort to prop up failing faith in
Speaker 1: the supernatural during the early modern period. That's interesting, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we so we've talked about this on the show before,
Speaker 1: but the idea that people often have wrong is that
Speaker 1: they believe that like witchcraft, persecution piqued in the Middle Ages,
Speaker 1: and like the you know, the medieval period. But that's
Speaker 1: not true, which during an age of of reason, of
Speaker 1: everything seemed to be on the uptick. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: when it really came about. And so what the idea
Speaker 1: here is that if people start having threats to the
Speaker 1: idea of their theology, of their religious beliefs, they'll counter
Speaker 1: those threats with attempts to prove it. And if you
Speaker 1: could prove that demons are real, then you can prove
Speaker 1: that God is real. That's right. Heaven, you know, it
Speaker 1: tends to be a little stingy and dishing out proof
Speaker 1: of its existence. But if Hell can provide us with
Speaker 1: physical proof and or and specifically carnal experience ants by
Speaker 1: which to prove its reality, then that, by extension, proves
Speaker 1: the reality of Heaven and really had the reality of God.
Speaker 1: Now we don't know if Steven's interpretation here is correct,
Speaker 1: but I do think that's a really interesting way of
Speaker 1: reading that historical fact. Right, Yeah, I think you know,
Speaker 1: and I think he would probably agree that you have
Speaker 1: all these other factors involved as well. Certainly, um an
Speaker 1: age of of of misogyny as well. But but but
Speaker 1: I do wonder about all of that in relation to
Speaker 1: Men in Black and UFOs because if there is any
Speaker 1: doubt to the reality of UFOs and alien abductions in
Speaker 1: your mind and you would prefer to believe, if you,
Speaker 1: like the poster, want to believe, then if you have
Speaker 1: strange men showing up and pressuring you to be silent,
Speaker 1: well then that's even more evidence, right, that there's something here,
Speaker 1: there's some truth, because otherwise no one would care if
Speaker 1: you shared the truth with the world, right. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: devils wouldn't be seducing all these people if there if
Speaker 1: there weren't a god to fight against exactly. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: again Royce was to really get into that idea, but
Speaker 1: it's kind of my own ponderings. Now. He did bring
Speaker 1: up the idea of tulpas into Betan mysticism. So this
Speaker 1: is the notion that intense thought can materialize a form
Speaker 1: a thought being. And in this men in Black they're
Speaker 1: they're kind of a tulpa of fear and anxiety surrounding
Speaker 1: Big Brother Tulpas or an interesting subject that we can
Speaker 1: maybe return to. In fact, the listeners in the past
Speaker 1: have asked us to do episodes on tulpas. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: probably should. Then it would be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Maybe we get to read with an excerpt from from
Speaker 1: a Boges short story. Well, I do think there's something
Speaker 1: interesting to talk about with the idea of tupas as
Speaker 1: materialized thought forms sort of like you know, imagination manifested
Speaker 1: as reality when it comes especially to like virtual worlds
Speaker 1: and technology. You know, one of the things that the
Speaker 1: technology philosopher, I don't know if he'd call himself that,
Speaker 1: but i'd call him that Jared Lannier used to talk
Speaker 1: about with like the possibilities afforded to us by things
Speaker 1: like virtual reality, is the idea to not just play
Speaker 1: games in virtual environments, but to be more manifestly and
Speaker 1: directly creative than we could ever be in any other
Speaker 1: kind of environment, to have methods through which we we
Speaker 1: just continually refine our abilities to translate thoughts and creativity
Speaker 1: directly into forms that can be sensed interesting. So you could, like,
Speaker 1: you know, under this kind of ideal virtual reality environment,
Speaker 1: you could have something like a tulpa. You could you know,
Speaker 1: just imagine something and then have it brought into being
Speaker 1: in front of you, and then interact with it. So
Speaker 1: as far as Roycewitz is um used the term here,
Speaker 1: I think what we're talking about here is a kind
Speaker 1: of subconscious projection of both the fear of mainstream rejection
Speaker 1: by authority concerning UFO sidings, as well as a fear
Speaker 1: of retribution. And I think this is interesting because we
Speaker 1: do see this a lot, uh these days, you know,
Speaker 1: in messaging against political and co for all others. You know,
Speaker 1: like in a political adversary is at once both the
Speaker 1: thing that doesn't take us seriously and is also actively
Speaker 1: working against us in a dangerous way. So the enemy
Speaker 1: is both inept and insidious at the same time. It's
Speaker 1: funny umberto Echo, you know, pointed out that one of
Speaker 1: his characteristics of fascism, as he described it, was that
Speaker 1: fascism perceives its enemies as both impossibly powerful and extremely weak,
Speaker 1: Like at the same time, you know that that its
Speaker 1: enemies constitute this overwhelmingly threatening plot against the power of
Speaker 1: the you know, the fascist contingent in the state, and
Speaker 1: at the same time constantly talking about the weakness of
Speaker 1: their enemies and denigrating what they can do in contrast
Speaker 1: with the fascist's own strength. Is the minute so I
Speaker 1: wonder to what extent then, in black are kind of
Speaker 1: a fear of and a desire for fascism, you know,
Speaker 1: like like the fear of these these government enemies showing
Speaker 1: up at your door or step to suppress you, and
Speaker 1: also the desire for it, like the validation that would
Speaker 1: come with it. Oh. Absolutely, that's a really good point.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's something that's always going on in like
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory psychology is you know, if you not to
Speaker 1: say that there aren't real you know, there are real
Speaker 1: conspiracies and real abuses of power and all that, But
Speaker 1: in the ones that are more fanciful and imaginary and
Speaker 1: based on you know, poor evidence and all that, uh,
Speaker 1: where people just build these architectures of shadowy organizations out
Speaker 1: there pulling the strings on all the puppets everywhere. You
Speaker 1: can absolutely see this tension between of course, like the
Speaker 1: fact that the conspiracy is a terrible thing, and you
Speaker 1: think it's a terrible thing and you wouldn't really want
Speaker 1: it to exist, but at the same time, the fact
Speaker 1: that you believe in it kind of does make you
Speaker 1: want it to exist because because other people don't believe you,
Speaker 1: and you want to be proven right and so evidence
Speaker 1: of this horrible, unimaginably bad thing actually is kind of
Speaker 1: pleasurable and exciting to you. Yeah, and this gets this
Speaker 1: is something you see with UFO siding experiences and alien
Speaker 1: abduction experiences as well. Is that no matter no matter
Speaker 1: to what degree the individual believes the experience happened. And
Speaker 1: and I certainly want to drive that home that there
Speaker 1: are there do soon to be cases where people believe
Speaker 1: something happened and and and it may be traumatic, uh
Speaker 1: And and I don't want to dismiss that trauma. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, like being a part of it
Speaker 1: is to be a part of something important, like the
Speaker 1: the the aliens came to me, So there is something
Speaker 1: if not important about me, then at least my experience
Speaker 1: is important now. And and that that can be empowering.
Speaker 1: And when we see that in in you know, religion
Speaker 1: all the time too. Uh, the idea that that that's
Speaker 1: something out there in the universe takes interest in us
Speaker 1: like that that is a value. So you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: it's just nice that the men in black care and
Speaker 1: they showed up and they can bake up cookies. Now, Rosa,
Speaker 1: it's also connects the men in black idea to the
Speaker 1: out of the Brothers of Shadow in Eastern mysticism. And
Speaker 1: this is something I wasn't familiar with this previously either,
Speaker 1: though I guess I might have seen some echoes of
Speaker 1: it in various nineties television shows. Yeah, I feel like
Speaker 1: this link might be kind of tenuous. Um, But I
Speaker 1: tried to go dig deeper into this to figure out
Speaker 1: what's going on here. So it seems to me that
Speaker 1: the idea of the Brothers of Shadow is sort of
Speaker 1: an appellation by Western occultists, like like say the Theosophus
Speaker 1: or Madame Bolovatsky and all that sort of unfairly applied
Speaker 1: or associated with a sect or suborder of Tibetan Buddhism
Speaker 1: known as the dug Puzz or drug puzz, the drug lineage.
Speaker 1: Now I'll come back to that in a second. But
Speaker 1: so I was thinking about the concept of paranormal agents
Speaker 1: in black suits, and like, why why is that right
Speaker 1: there in their name, the fact that they wear black suits. Um,
Speaker 1: it's so interesting in what it reveals about about culture
Speaker 1: and psychology and archetypes, Like the black suit tie is
Speaker 1: clearly a very meaningful part of the folklore architecture here.
Speaker 1: It says something about power, says something about anonimity, it
Speaker 1: says something about formality and professionalism and maybe some other qualities.
Speaker 1: But the black suit more traditionally, I mean, now that's
Speaker 1: this is very becoming very global, But it used to
Speaker 1: be a more like Western kind of European and American
Speaker 1: model of you know, how you demonstrate professionalism and culture, right,
Speaker 1: and it was sort of spread to other areas as
Speaker 1: a part of spreading Western culture. Yeah, And so I
Speaker 1: was wondering, Okay, what would men in black look like
Speaker 1: at other times and in other cultures with different ideas
Speaker 1: about the meanings of colored clothing and different types of clothing.
Speaker 1: I was trying to imagine, Okay, if you have men
Speaker 1: in black in Chinese UFO experiences, what they dressed the
Speaker 1: same when they wear black suits? Or would they tend
Speaker 1: to more often wear something different. So I tried to
Speaker 1: see if I could find any men in black type
Speaker 1: reports from for example, China, and I didn't really come
Speaker 1: up with anything. I was reading an article from in
Speaker 1: the South China Morning Post about the UFO society of China. Uh.
Speaker 1: This article reported quote, over the past ten years, there
Speaker 1: have been five thousand reports of UFOs in China, and
Speaker 1: it told the story of a man who claimed to
Speaker 1: have been abducted by an alien woman from Jupiter who
Speaker 1: had sex with him during his absence from Earth. And
Speaker 1: there were no men in black anywhere in these stories. Now,
Speaker 1: there may be some type of analogous men in black
Speaker 1: experiences in Chinese UFO encounters, but if if so, I
Speaker 1: couldn't come across any evidence of it, though. That's interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I haven't done any any reading on really Chinese UFO accounts.
Speaker 1: I've done a little bit on the like sasquatch cryptid
Speaker 1: reporting in China, but not the UFOs. But that's interesting. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just interesting that clearly UFOs are a
Speaker 1: somewhat global experience phenomena. Uh, people claim to have had
Speaker 1: these experiences in different parts of the world, but not
Speaker 1: everybody's going to have the exact same like kind of
Speaker 1: feelings about men in black suits with ties, or maybe
Speaker 1: they will, I don't know. Maybe that's a more universal
Speaker 1: kind of signifier at this point. Yeah. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess the the UFO theorist would argue that, of
Speaker 1: course the men in black are gonna wear black suits
Speaker 1: if suits are the standard of dress and they're just
Speaker 1: gonna They're gonna wear whatever is appropriate given the culture
Speaker 1: at the time. But what would that be, I mean
Speaker 1: that that would help help us get a better idea
Speaker 1: of what the men in Black exactly are supposed to represent. Well, well,
Speaker 1: let's see if they landed in say Victorian England, what
Speaker 1: would they have worn where they would be dressed up
Speaker 1: like uh, like like the the the police that they
Speaker 1: definitely wear bowler hats, like it looks like Scotland yard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess. So, you know, whatever the standard is, right,
Speaker 1: Edwardian men in black like that a should be the sequel.
Speaker 1: That's what I want to see. Well, I'm sorry, I
Speaker 1: got side tracked. I want to come back to the
Speaker 1: idea of the Brothers of Shadow. So I think that
Speaker 1: from what I can tell, this is term applied by
Speaker 1: like these Western occultists, uh to a sect or suborder
Speaker 1: of Tibetan Buddhism, as I was saying, called the dugpas
Speaker 1: with the drug push, the drug poll lineage. And and
Speaker 1: I think this association seems to be unfair as they
Speaker 1: obviously do not see themselves as like sorcerers or shadowy
Speaker 1: nefarious figures like the Western occultists characterize them uh, though
Speaker 1: for what it's worth, older Western taxonomy is sometimes referred
Speaker 1: to the monks of this order as red hats, and
Speaker 1: they do dress in red robes and hats on some occasions,
Speaker 1: though this is true of many orders of Tibetan Buddhist monks,
Speaker 1: not just the drug tradition. So obviously the cultural associations
Speaker 1: are getting lost across history and translation here with this
Speaker 1: whole relation to the Brothers of Shadow, I don't think
Speaker 1: this means that Tibetan experiences with UFOs and men in
Speaker 1: Black wouldn't necessarily involve people dressing in red, though it
Speaker 1: doesn't make you have to consider this like what parts
Speaker 1: of the men in Black belief architecture are contingent and
Speaker 1: what parts would be universal. All right, on that note,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break, but when we
Speaker 1: come back, we're going to discuss the Men in Black
Speaker 1: just a little bit more than all right, we're back.
Speaker 1: You know, another comparison between the men in Black experience
Speaker 1: tradition and other types of paranormal experiences people tend to
Speaker 1: have is experiences that are commonly associated with with sleep
Speaker 1: related episodes, like the shadow people. Yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: this is an interesting topic that I think I discussed
Speaker 1: a much older episode of stuff to blow your mind,
Speaker 1: but it seemed appropriate to bring it back up here. Um. Basically,
Speaker 1: it all hinges on a two thousand six study Swiss
Speaker 1: study that was published in the journal Nature about a
Speaker 1: possible connection between various shadow people um experiences and something
Speaker 1: actually going on inside the brain. Now, what exactly are
Speaker 1: these shadow people experiences? Like? So basically it's the it's
Speaker 1: it's not so much a full on men in black scenario,
Speaker 1: like I saw a weird man in a black suit
Speaker 1: standing you know, you knocked on my door and we talked,
Speaker 1: and he told me not to tell anyone about flying saucers.
Speaker 1: Nothing like that. But it's more of a a symptom
Speaker 1: that's been reported for a while by a psychiatric and
Speaker 1: neurological patients where there is a feeling there's a sense
Speaker 1: of a dark figure, say in the room with you,
Speaker 1: like looming over your bed maybe or something. Uh, and
Speaker 1: in fact that that's there in the men in black tradition.
Speaker 1: Some some of these reports mentioned that like people who
Speaker 1: had encounters with them, sometimes they'd be standing there over
Speaker 1: their bed, Yeah, looming over your like a ring wraith
Speaker 1: right um, so the researchers in the study. Then they
Speaker 1: made the discovery while evaluating a psychologically normal twenty two
Speaker 1: year old woman for surgical treatment of epilepsy, and when
Speaker 1: they electrically stimulated her brains left temporo parietal junction or TPJ,
Speaker 1: they repeatedly gave she repeatedly had the sensation of a
Speaker 1: lurking shadow in her presence, like a shadow man, And
Speaker 1: she perceived this shadow person just behind her, interfering with
Speaker 1: her attempts to read a book. And when the researchers
Speaker 1: stimulated her in a seated position, she perceived herself to
Speaker 1: be seated in the entity's lap um quote he was
Speaker 1: clasping her in his arms, which she described as an
Speaker 1: unpleasant feeling. So essentially what seemed to have been taking places.
Speaker 1: She was observing her own body the whole time, but
Speaker 1: as the t PJ concerned self processing, self other distinction
Speaker 1: and multisensory body integration info, the electrical stimulation caused her
Speaker 1: to attribute her own actions to an alien other, and
Speaker 1: a similar distortion maybe at work in various other uh,
Speaker 1: you know, psychiatric manifestations of alien entities. You know anything,
Speaker 1: that involves her being a nus other being in your room,
Speaker 1: being an alien, a demon, a man in black, a spirit,
Speaker 1: a fairy, etcetera. So the researchers proposed that electrical stimulation
Speaker 1: of this area in the patient disturbed multisensory and and
Speaker 1: uh sinso motor integration of information with respect to her body,
Speaker 1: leading to the appearance of a first rank symptom of
Speaker 1: schizophrenia in a person with no psychiatric history. And it's
Speaker 1: notable here that the hyperactivity in the temporo parietal cortex
Speaker 1: of patients with schizophrenia may lead to the misattribution of
Speaker 1: their own actions to other people. So we see, you know,
Speaker 1: a related um situation there. Well, that seems like another
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a more clinical type of condition,
Speaker 1: but UM related to the milder version I talked about earlier.
Speaker 1: How you know, there appears to be sometimes just contagion
Speaker 1: between what's going on in one brain subsystem and another
Speaker 1: brain subsystem. That the actions that you see other people do.
Speaker 1: Maybe you attribute your own thoughts to your imagination of
Speaker 1: someone else's mind. You think they're thinking whatever you're thinking,
Speaker 1: or you you you blur the lines between imagination and memory.
Speaker 1: Absolutely so I don't present this as as the answer
Speaker 1: for shadow people. Experiences are certainly for men in black,
Speaker 1: because there are various reasons that one might hallucinate Misremember
Speaker 1: we're engaging in any of these these situations we've discussed um.
Speaker 1: Oliver Sacks in his book Hallucinations specifically calls out hypnopompic hallucinations,
Speaker 1: the hallucinations that we have coming out of sleep. Um.
Speaker 1: He describes these as a source of malevolent entity perception.
Speaker 1: So you know, it could certainly be one of the
Speaker 1: reasons at play. But then again, to go back to
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier, something like men and Black,
Speaker 1: it's not just people having having an experience and then
Speaker 1: reporting it. It's also other people interpreting bits of that experience,
Speaker 1: and other people create eating things, creating fantasy and sci fi, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Think getsap becoming a part of other people's hallucinations and
Speaker 1: other people's interpretation of hallucinations. So you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: not happening in a vacuum. Yeah. Interesting, I was reading
Speaker 1: an article, uh from because so I was wondering, Okay,
Speaker 1: do men in black encounters still really happen? Yeah, you
Speaker 1: read about them from the twentieth century, from the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties and sixties and on through the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: And I was like, I haven't really encountered a claim
Speaker 1: of the men in Black encounter or experience that that
Speaker 1: happened in recent decades. What's going on there? So I
Speaker 1: looked this up and I did find an article. I
Speaker 1: found an article en slate by Aesha Harris from telve
Speaker 1: about whether men in Black sidings still happen because most
Speaker 1: of the stories you run into tend to be older.
Speaker 1: And so the author in this article asked you fologist
Speaker 1: Jerome Clark, who has mentioned in royce Witz is a
Speaker 1: coal whether people still report men in black encounters these days.
Speaker 1: Apparently the reports have quote tapered off significantly in the
Speaker 1: fifteen years since the original Men in Black movie was released. Um,
Speaker 1: but Clark consists he does not think that the film
Speaker 1: had anything to do with that. Instead, he attributes it
Speaker 1: to a lack of investigation into the issue in recent years,
Speaker 1: especially since the passing of the ufologist John A. Keel,
Speaker 1: who apparently cataloged a lot of these experiences. UH, did
Speaker 1: a lot of this kind of research made by research
Speaker 1: and investigation. We're talking about continually writing about it and
Speaker 1: keeping the idea alive in UFO enthusiast communities and publications.
Speaker 1: But I think also like, you know, collecting other people's experiences. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um so. On the other hand, the British ufologist Nick
Speaker 1: Redfern insists that Men in Black encounters do still happen,
Speaker 1: as chronicled in his book The Real Men in Black
Speaker 1: in two thousand eleven. I don't know if that's trying
Speaker 1: to cash in on a movie tie in, but personally,
Speaker 1: I would say, despite what Clark says, I would tend
Speaker 1: to wonder if the movie Men in Black does have
Speaker 1: something to do with the decline in Men in Black reports.
Speaker 1: I think this could be sort of inverse to what
Speaker 1: often happens, where UFO sightings seem correlated with like Flying
Speaker 1: Saucer science fiction, and elements of these alien encounters sometimes
Speaker 1: seem to correlate with elements that show up in fiction
Speaker 1: over time. And I wonder if this inverse correlation, if
Speaker 1: if it is actually there, I mean, I don't know,
Speaker 1: but I wonder if this inverse correlation is there, if
Speaker 1: it might have to do with the fact that the
Speaker 1: Men in Black movies are comedies, like that. They make
Speaker 1: the idea funny and more and more so than that,
Speaker 1: because certainly we have funny UFO and funny alien movies
Speaker 1: that have come out over the years. Certainly it was
Speaker 1: in a case where um, Earth Girls are easy killed
Speaker 1: off the idea of alien abductions. But you still have
Speaker 1: a mix, right, You have serious films and scary film
Speaker 1: homes and films that clearly are made by people who
Speaker 1: want to believe. Whereas the Men in Black films are
Speaker 1: really outside of those other those earlier Men and Black
Speaker 1: films that I mentioned in the X Files episode, it's
Speaker 1: in various sprinklings of Men in Black lore and other
Speaker 1: uh pictures and shows. I can't think of anything that's
Speaker 1: really served as a counterbalance to the Men in Black
Speaker 1: comedy movies, you know, like if we had just had
Speaker 1: one like deadly serious Fire in the Sky esque Men
Speaker 1: in Black film like like that would have done a lot,
Speaker 1: perhaps to keep it going. Boy, what about the Eric
Speaker 1: Roberts movie, Well that was what though, yea, yeah, so
Speaker 1: it came out out of the wrong time, so you
Speaker 1: might have had balance initially, But then what happened when
Speaker 1: Men in Black two came out and three or the
Speaker 1: in the upcoming one. I think the next one is
Speaker 1: the fourth one. I could be wrong, but really there's
Speaker 1: the whole I think I'm asking you for the second
Speaker 1: time in this episode. They're making another one. There at
Speaker 1: least four, so I only of the first one of
Speaker 1: the movies. But I remember being gross in that way,
Speaker 1: like especially late nineties movies were gross where there was
Speaker 1: a time of like c G I snot and slime,
Speaker 1: a lot of mucus. Am I wrong? Now? There was?
Speaker 1: There was a lot of gross stuff in it because
Speaker 1: there was the villain was it was a roach like
Speaker 1: essentially a large roach in a human costume, like wearing
Speaker 1: a human skin, and there were a lot of gross
Speaker 1: side gags involving that character. Did I send you a link?
Speaker 1: I think I did send you a link to where
Speaker 1: I found the Men in Black feature film novelization. Oh yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I guess it would have been one of those. Given
Speaker 1: the timeframe and uh and that the you know, the
Speaker 1: scale of the film. Man, that's got to be like
Speaker 1: the ultimate movie novelization. You would not have imagined it
Speaker 1: could happen, and yet it did. You know, I would
Speaker 1: love to hear from anyone out there first of all,
Speaker 1: if you've seen any of these other Men in Black film,
Speaker 1: not I mean not the comedy sequels, but like the
Speaker 1: film or the the the earlier film, and you have
Speaker 1: any insight on them. I'd also love to hear from
Speaker 1: anybody who read the original comic books, like what were they? Like,
Speaker 1: are the fans? Are there? Are there fans of the
Speaker 1: original Men in Black comics? And if they are, do
Speaker 1: they how do they feel about the films? I'm always
Speaker 1: interested in the you know, how a particular franchise evolves
Speaker 1: like that. For that matter, if anyone out there has
Speaker 1: had experiences with you know, with Men in Black or UFOs,
Speaker 1: you know, we would we would love to hear from you.
Speaker 1: You know, we promise that if you be right in
Speaker 1: with your accounts, we will not make fun of you.
Speaker 1: We will, you know, skeptically, uh and enthusiastically approach it
Speaker 1: as we always do. Yeah, all right, Well that's it
Speaker 1: for this episode. If you want to check out other
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, some of the
Speaker 1: various other uh sort of paranormal episodes that we've recorded
Speaker 1: over the years, you can find them. It's Stuff to
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