And yet more on the Men In Black

Yep.  Did more MIB research last night.  Here are a few more fragments, this time a combination of Keith's book and entries in Jerome Clark's The Unexplained.

This from a newspaper in Britain, 1905:
A man in black appeared suddenly in the bedroom of "an exceptionally intelligent young woman of the peasant stock."
What's more astounding?  The MIB encounter or the vast difference in journalistic sensibilities over the past 100 years?

John Keel, Fortean researcher and author of The Mothman Prophecies and UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse, had several personal dealings with MIBs.  He told of keeping "rendezvous with black Cadillacs on Long Island, and when I tried to pursue them they would disappear impossibly on dead-end roads."
Keel warned that MIBs should not be approached as they seem to be able to use hypnosis.  As one UFO witness said after an MIB encounter, "I never saw them blink."

Perhaps the most interesting of MIB cases investigated by Keel or by anyone else for that matter, is that of Indrid Cold.  In 1966 in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, a man named Woodrow Derenberger was driving his panel truck home after a hard day of work.  As he crested a hill, a strange craft came up from behind him and then swerved around to block the road.  A door slid open and a man with "dark hair combed straight back" and "heavily tanned skin" emerged.  He was grinning broadly and continued to do so throughout the encounter.  He communicated with Derenberger telepathically, asking him all manner of strange questions about this planet and identifying himself as "Indrid Cold."  Then the strange entity told Derenberger that he would him visit again and got back into the vehicle and left.  Derengerger was then subject to several strange phone calls, each with no one on the other end of the line, save for a series of electronic tones.  All of this was during the spat of sightings in the area of the creature known as Mothman.
If you ask me, Indrid Cold would make a good story antagonist.  Something of a less malevolent Cigarette Smoking Man from X-Files.

In an apartment building in New York City, residents kept seeing the apparition of a tall man in a long black trenchcoat and a black, wide-brimmed hat pulled down low over the face.  Investigators theorized it was the ghost of a spy from the Revolutionary War.  Further research proved this to be highly unlikely.  One thing however, did turn up.  The building was once home to Walter Gibson.  Gibson sat in his apartment for hours on end, writing multiple installments of The Shadow.
Could a physical manifestation of The Shadow have been brought about as a result of Gibson's considerable expenditure of mental energy on one single image?  If that is the case, then could all (or many) MIB incidents be gestalts of our own psychological dreads given physical form?  Straight from the id?  I wonder...



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