Since the 1940s, reports about Men in Black have described them as government agents or shapeshifting aliens in disguise who threaten witnesses of extraterrestrial phenomena.
On June 21, 1947, Harold Dahl and his son Charles were gathering logs near the eastern shore of Maury Island, Washington when Harold suddenly saw something strange in the sky above him. What looked like six donut-shaped objects were suddenly hovering roughly half a mile above his boat. But before Dahl could even attempt to understand what he was looking at, a barrage of metal debris rained down on him.
What seemed like liquid metal struck Charles, while Harold managed to snap a few photographs of these strange flying machines. When they got back on land, Harold immediately showed the photographs to his supervisor, Fred Crisman. Initially skeptical, Crisman then decided to check out the scene for himself — and actually saw one of the strange flying objects hovering right there before his very eyes.
The men were flabbergasted by what they had just witnessed, but the story was just getting started, and what happened next may remain the most chilling part of the story.
The next day, Harold Dahl claimed that he was visited by a mysterious man in a black suit who was able to describe his experience in eerily accurate detail. The man then told him, “What I have said is proof to you that I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe.”
Wikimedia CommonsA drawing of the Maury Island UFO incident.
Before he left, the man gave Dahl a warning: say nothing of the incident, or bad things will happen.
Harold Dahl’s story went largely unheard for years, until the publication of Gray Barker’s book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, in 1956 — the first book to focus on the mysterious organization known as the Men in Black.
But just who are the Men in Black? While the 1997 Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones film might paint the Men in Black as “galaxy defenders” who stop extraterrestrial threats against Earth, those who claim to have encountered the Men in Black in real life describe them in a much more disturbing way.
Some have described the Men in Black as pale-skinned, tall men who appear in groups of two or three to silence witnesses who’ve seen extraterrestrial phenomena. Some accounts describe the Men in Black as nothing more than human men in dark suits, but others have described them as something other than human — even alleging that the Men in Black could communicate telepathically and levitate above the ground.
These varying accounts have led some people to believe that the Men in Black are government agents, while others claim that they may in fact be shapeshifting aliens in disguise.
Delve into the story of the real Men in Black who reportedly silence those who’ve spotted UFOs. Then, explore the previous entry in our UFO series, the Ariel School sighting of 1994.
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