Nick Redfern February 4, 2022

My previous article was on the subject of how Albert Bender – the guy who began the Men in Black phenomenon in the early 1950s – descended into states of paranoia, bad health, and fear, and all after he got into the worlds of the occult, the paranormal and the supernatural. It’s important to note that Bender was not the only one. Let’s have a look at some other very similar examples. We’ll begin with Gordon Creighton, a man who ran the longstanding Flying Saucer Review magazine. Like so many people in the UFO field, Creighton believed that the UFO phenomenon had extraterrestrial origins. The time came, though, when that changed – and to a significant degree. By the 1970s Creighton had concluded the UFO phenomenon was driven not by extraterrestrials, but by supernatural Middle Eastern Djinn. When he passed away in 2003, none other than the U.K.’s Times newspaper ran an obituary on the man himself. An extract from that same obituary reveals the following:

“Government service occupied most of the working life of Gordon Creighton, but he perhaps made his greatest mark as an authority on unidentified flying objects. His conviction that extraterrestrials were visiting Earth seemed oddly at variance with the more orthodox worlds of diplomacy and Whitehall. His expertise took him into government research on maps in oriental and other languages with the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names, and he spent eight years as an intelligence officer on Russian and Chinese affairs at the Ministry of Defense. It is said that in the intelligence post he worked directly below the secret Whitehall department where the Air Ministry and the RAF were studying information on UFOs.” It should be noted that, after the late 1970s, Creighton never again believed that ETs were visiting us. It was always those aforementioned Djinn. Not only that, privately, he admitted to living in absolute fear of the Djinn. Just like Bender, Creighton found himself in a world of terror.

It was much the same with the late Brad Steiger. He began believing that the Men in Black were agents of the U.S. government. By the 1960s, however, Brad’s thoughts had changed and he was eventually on a paranormal path. As Brad said: “Now days whenever I review those days of encounters with the Men in Black, I am led to think of the mythological figure common to all cultures and known generically to ethnologists as the Trickster. The Trickster plays pranks upon man­kind, but often at the same time he is instructing them or transforming aspects of the world for the benefit of his human charges. Most cultures view the Trickster as a primordial being who came into existence soon after the creation of the world. For Brad, the M.I.B. were nothing less than paranormal entities.

(Nick Redfern) M.I.B.: Not what they seem to be

Another story revolves around one of the earliest, well-known Contactees of the 1950s: George Hunt Williamson. Unlike so many of the so-called Contactees – people who claimed close encounters with aliens in desert environments in the 1950s – Williamson chose a very alternative way to contact his alien friends. Further down the line, in 1954, Williamson and Ufologist Al Bailey published their own saucer-dominated volume: The Saucers Speak. Williamson first focused his attempts to contact extraterrestrials via the alternative mediums of short-wave radio. It wasn’t long, however, before Williamson began using nothing less than Ouija Boards. Actar of Mercury; Adu of Hatonn in Andromeda; Agfa Affa from the dark depths of Uranus; Ankar-22 of Jupiter; Artok of Pluto; and numerous others were among the motley alien crew with whom Williamson claimed to have communicated. I should stress that anyone who has tried to make contact with paranormal entities will know that it’s very difficult to work out if the voices are really coming from the target – or from a dangerous, manipulative, trickster-style figure. When it came to Williamson we may never know the truth. Williamson probably didn’t, either.

Now, onto the Collins Elite, a small group in the U.S. government that began believing that the UFO puzzle was extraterrestrial in nature, but that – over time – came to believe the entities they tried to contact were demonic. On January 22, 2007, I did an interview with priest and ufologist, Ray Boeche. We chatted for a long time and, during the conversation, Ray told me an account of how he’d come across a group of people in the U.S. government who had bought into the “aliens are really demonic” theory. A few days later, Ray told me the full story of how he had been approached by two employees of the U.S. Department of Defense. They were looking for Ray’s help, guidance and advice on the UFO/demons issue. Ray continued to me that on an unclear number of times, the group had tried to contact what they called “Non-Human Entities.” We’re talking about “things” that many of those in the UFO research field would call “aliens.” There’s something else, though: the group soon developed overwhelming bad luck. Some fell sick. Other people in the organization died during experiments to try and contact the NHEs. There were others who quit the group – fearful of the “gates” they had opened. All of the above demonstrates that, yet again, when you mix UFOs with the occult, with demonic phenomena, with the paranormal and with the supernatural, things can go wrong on so many occasions. Just be beware and aware.

MU*

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