During the early 1950s, Albert Bender oversaw the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), a civilian research group based out of Bridgeport, Connecticut, with a worldwide membership of 1500. In conjunction with the IFSB, Bender published Space Review, a newsletter dedicated to the latest saucer happenings.

In March 1953, the IFSB conducted a group mental telepathy experiment (“Contact Day”) to establish ET contact by transmitting the following mental message:

 

THE MESSAGE

(To Be Memorized)

 

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft. Calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet EARTH. We of IFSB wish to make contact with you. We are your friends, and would like you to make an appearance here on EARTH. Your presence before us will be welcomed with the utmost friendship. We will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of EARTH. Please come in peace and help us in our EARTHLY problems. Give us some sign that you have received our message. Be responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality. Let us hear from you. We are your friends. (End of message.)

 

In early September 1953—in what would have been the October issue of Space Review—Bender planned to announce the solution of the flying saucer mystery, but before he could do so was visited by three mysterious Men-in-Black (MIBs) who spooked him into silence. Bender delivered the following portentous message in Space Review for his fellow IFSB members to ponder:

STATEMENT OF IMPORTANCE

“The mystery of the flying saucers is no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by orders from a higher source. We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but because of the nature of the information we are sorry that we have been advised in the negative. We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious.”

Bender ceased publication of Space Review, closed down IFSB, and retired from ufology. He later revealed to close associates that the solution to the “mystery” was that the U.S.A. would soon fall victim to a massive flying saucer attack! However, this attack was not interplanetary, but actually originated from the Earth’s polar regions. Due to this dangerous knowledge, Bender was ostensibly hushed up, one of the very first victims of the legendary “Silencers” who have haunted UFO lore ever since. Others have speculated that Bender cooked up the whole caper as a convenient excuse to exit ufology, as the pressures of overseeing IFSB had become too much, perhaps even leading to a psychological meltdown.

It was Bender’s purported MIB encounter which reignited attention to a phenomenon that’s almost as old as time itself.  These tales of creepy black garbed men go back eons and have long been associated with the sinister doings of witches, warlocks, and other things that go boo in the night.  Upon closer examination, it appears that Bender’s MIB experiences may have had more to do with his long standing interest in the occult rather than some sort of secret government backlash in response to flying saucer investigations.

Due to his peculiar interests, Bender transformed an upstairs room in his stepfather’s house into what he called his “chamber of horrors.” He painted the walls with depictions of grotesque scenes from the works of Shelley, Stoker and Poe and adorned it with “macabre items such as artificial human skulls, shrunken heads, bats, spiders, snakes.” At the same time, Bender was “reading books on black magic, occult subjects, and other similar works…[he] even tried to hold some séances.” In recent years, UFO researcher and occult historian Allen Greenfield discovered—among some old photos of Bender’s “chamber of horrors”—that in one corner of the room an altar had been erected, ostensibly used for ritual magic. From this, it could be conjectured, Bender’s occult dabblings might have awakened some ancient demons that paid him a visit.

In Flying Saucers and the Three Men (1963), Bender recounted his visit by the three mysterious men, whom he says whisked him away to planet Kazik. It was there that he was taken to a room where three exceptionally attractive women “dressed in tight white uniforms” removed his clothing and, as Bender recalled:

“My body suddenly became rigid and I could not move a single muscle…I became frightened…my fright changed to embarrassment as I felt their hands begin to remove my clothing. I could do nothing to stop them, for I was stiff as a board. With great efficacy they removed every piece of my clothing, leaving me naked as the day I was born…[they produced] a vile containing a liquid which they poured over my body. Then the three messaged the liquid into my skin. As they did so my body became warm as if heat were being applied. They messaged every part of my body without exception…”

Bender emerged briefly from his self-imposed ufological exile with an ‘appearance’ at what was the largest and best attended UFO Convention in U.S. history in New York City on June 24^th, 1967, called, appropriately enough, “The Big Flying Saucer Show.” However—due to unspecified fears for his safety—Bender sent a tape recording that was played to a packed house of wide-eyed attendees. In it, he reminisced about the history of the IFSB, his chilling MIB encounters, in addition to a number of recent contactee-type experiences which were going to be part of a new book Gray Barker planned to publish. Barker later described Bender’s forthcoming book as “not good enough to do anything with.”

John Stuart’s strange story appeared in UFO Warning (1963) published by Gray Barker’s (sometimes saucy) Saucerian Press. The back cover blurb for this classic tome states: “FORCED INTO SEX ABOARD A FLYING SAUCER!” In his introduction to UFO Warning, Gray Barker mused: ”I cannot completely understand this volume, and I don’t think that many others can either…In its rawest and most primary sense it will serve as a warning to many UFO students!”

John Stuart’s saucer odyssey began in 1950 when he started collecting UFO clippings from around the world and reading any and all books on the subject. One evening in 1952, Stuart received a knock at his door and, lo and behold, when he went to check on it, there was no one there! Stuart suspected that this incident was far more than a mere prank played on him by some mischievous kids and that it was somehow related to his flying saucer investigations. Not long after the mysterious-ringing-of-the-doorbell-affair-with-no-one-there, Stuart was in bed reading late one night when his telephone rang, and on the other end was an anonymous caller (from another planet, presumably) who warned him to “Stop interfering in affairs that don’t concern you! You have been warned!”

Apparently this wasn’t enough to spook Stuart and in 1953 he joined a UFO research group based out of Hamilton, New Zealand, called the Flying Saucer Investigation Society. After a few months with the group, Stuart had some sort of falling out with fellow members and left to form his own “organization” called Flying Saucer Investigators (FSI). Joining Stuart in this endeavor was a fetching young gal named Doreen Wilkinson (referred to in UFO Warning as Barbara Turner.) In fact, the only two members of Stuart’s group were he and Wilkinson.

Although Stuart was married at this time, his UFO research activities with Wilkinson formed an intense collaboration, and he seemed to go out of his way in UFO Warning to dispel the notion that their relationship had been anything more than platonic. However, things start getting hinky in UFO Report when Stuart reveals that—at one point in their relationship—Wilkinson began to make sexual overtures and because of this Stuart suspected she had fallen sudden victim to supernatural possession. This “supernatural possession” occurred around the same time that a “space man” appeared before Stuart and Wilkinson and telepathically instructed the pair to cease and desist with UFO investigations or their lives would be in danger.

During one of their weekly UFO research get togethers, Wilkinson was overcome by a sudden cigarette craving and so they took a pause as she went out to a nearby market to pick up a pack of smokes. Upon Wilkinson’s return,

“…the front door flew open, and a figure rushed into my arms. [Doreen] said in a voice filled with fear: ‘There’s something out there!’

“Quickly reassuring her, I hurried outside, stopping on the top step as a terrible stench struck me. I almost fainted in terror. It was burnt like plastic and sulfur. I stood there for a moment, and then walked down to the front gate, neither hearing or seeing anything. I searched the rear of the grounds, finding nothing, and had just started to return to the door when I heard distinct sounds behind me. I stopped and shone my torch. There was nothing there. I walked on. The sounds followed. I stopped and the sound stopped. I moved. It moved. Again I stopped, was amazed and startled when “it” kept on! The peculiar shuffling, scraping sound went past me, and I felt something solid brush against my shoulder! This was the first indication I had that ‘they’ were as solid as I!”

When the creature at last manifested, it was freaky as all get out:

“The monster’s head was large and bulbous. No neck. A huge ungainly body supported on ridiculously short legs. It had webbed feet. The arms were thin and not unlike stalks of bamboo. It had no hands, the long fingers jutting from the arms like stalks. Its eyes were about four inches across, red in color. There was no nose, just two holes, and the mouth was simply a straight slash across its appallingly lecherous face. The whole was lime green in color and it was possible to see red veins running through its ungainly form. The monster was definitely male.”

At the sight of this eight foot tall “loathsome, hideous, evil, disgusting, horrifying” beast, Stuart and Wilkinson were suddenly paralyzed as if some psychic force had frozen them in their tracks. The creature moved towards them with its “filthy eyes fixed on [Doreen’s] slim body” and started to reach out for her, then suddenly pulled back and disappeared.

Not long after—as Stuart was walking Wilkinson back to her hotel one evening—Doreen spoke “impishly” about the possibility of a space man waiting in her room, and that if he was handsome enough, “I’ll take him to bed with me.” These words, it appears, proved portentous, as that very night Wilkinson was attacked in her room by an invisible entity that ravaged and raped the poor lass over a two hour period.  In December 1954, Stuart and Wilkinson “were forced to close down [FSI] after these very frightening attacks…In that month Barbara fled in terror.”

Gray Barker later remembered “reading over the [UFO Warning manuscript] with Jim Moseley…and how we broke up at each Frightening Experience, which seemed to end each chapter, and punctuated by the principals in the story lighting another cigarette! It’s too bad that at that time I was not fearless enough to print the uncensored original manuscript!”

For more crazy shit like this be sure to pick up your very own copy of A is for Adamski: The Golden Age of the UFO Contactees.

Paul Villa’s interactions with otherworldly entities allegedly began in 1953 in Long Beach, California, when he encountered a seven-foot-tall spaceman moseying along the beach.

Villa’s next run-in with the space brothers allegedly occurred on June 16^th, 1963, when he was telepathically instructed to drive his pick-up truck to the location of a landed saucer. The saucer, in this instance, was a mothership from the Coma Berenices galaxy carrying nine humanoids—a mix of men and women—ranging from seven to nine feet tall. Included in their arsenal were nine remotely-controlled disk shaped drones (14 inches in diameter) that were used for Earth recon missions, controlled from instrument panels inside the mothership. During this meeting, the UFO occupants “permitted Villa to take photos of their ship which posed and hovered close to the surface.”

On April 18^th, 1965, Villa was telepathically instructed to travel to Bernalillo, New Mexico, and it was there he photographed a spaceship that projected a laser beam, igniting a small vegetation fire. (At least that was the claim Villa made; that the craft had started a fire, although what the black mark looks like is a shadow cast by the alien craft, or whatever it actually was.)

A photo of this arsonist spaceship was among several other Villa saucer photos published in Gabe Green’s UFO International. Project Blue Book investigators later determined that Villa fabricated these photos using a miniature model of a flying saucer.

For more crazy shit like this be sure to pick up your very own copy of A is for Adamski: The Golden Age of the UFO Contactees.

 

 

 

 

And for the audio related version of this story, go here!