Albert Bender and the “Max Steiner Music Society” – A Life Post-UFO

What sort of man was Albert K. Bender–he who supposedly discovered the secret of the UFOs, for which he was “silenced” in 1953 by the Three Men in Black?

Gray Barker, whose They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) gives the classic account of his silencing, describes him in the most glowing terms.  Air Force veteran, executive at the Acme Shear Company’s Bridgeport (Connecticut) plant, a man whose “conversation reflects a wide knowledge of almost everything you can bring up,” whose “piercing eyes seem to look right through you” yet whose warm good humor sets you at ease.

James Moseley, later to become Barker’s best friend and to spend the last three decades of his life grieving Barker’s death in 1984, met Bender a few months after his encounter with the Three Men.  He was less impressed.  As remembered in Moseley’s 2002 memoir, Bender was “an eccentric factory worker” (p. 14), “obviously neurotic” (p. 121).  “An owlish and nervous little man with black hair and black horn-rimmed glasses to match,” Moseley described him (p. 41); and the “silencing,” Moseley thought, never happened.  “I insisted it was far more likely that Bender made the whole thing up as a dramatic excuse to bow out of the saucer game, for whatever personal reasons might have been driving him.”

Afterward, Moseley noted, Bender married and “the happy couple later moved to California and into the deep obscurity they so richly deserved.”

Obscurity?  Only if notoriety in the UFO world is the marker of one’s importance to others, to the world at large.

After dropping out of UFOlogy, Bender found a distinguished second avocation, to which he brought the organizational skills that had made his “International Flying Saucer Bureau” (IFSB) the most thriving and active UFO research group of its time.  Talents that suggest to me that Barker’s enthusiastic account of Bender, though no doubt exaggerated–he was chief timekeeper at the plant where he worked; does that make him an “executive”?–was nearer the truth than Moseley’s put-downs.  He had a truly “executive” ability to get things done.

In 1965, while he and his wife Betty were still living in Bridgeport, he founded the “Max Steiner Music Society.”

You may or may not have ever heard of Max Steiner, just as you’ve almost certainly never heard of Albert Bender.  Bender’s obscurity may have been “richly deserved”; Steiner’s most emphatically was not.  Born to a Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire–as a little boy, he’d sat on the lap of Emperor Franz Josef–Steiner was one of Broadway’s and then Hollywood’s greats, composer of film scores for more than 300 movies (Gone With the Wind and Casablanca among them).

By 1965, he was a forgotten man.  Bender must have picked up on the injustice of this, and set about remedying it.

How?  Why?  I have no idea.  Bender was a man of many parts, and how they all fit together remains a mystery.  (Was this an aspect of the real “Bender Mystery”–the irreducible mystery of a human being?)  In my forthcoming Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, I explore the life story of another remarkable man, the Harvard professor and abduction researcher John Mack; I show how Mack’s twin passions, for alien abductions and for the Englishman whom we call “Lawrence of Arabia,” were two aspects of the same personality.  But Bender the flying saucer researcher and Bender the Max Steiner enthusiast?  They were the same man, but who this man was continues to elude me.

As with the saucers: Bender’s enthusiasm paid off.  Like his IFSB, the Max Steiner Music Society became an international organization, only this time with a star-studded membership.  “Soon,” writes Peter Wegele in his book on Steiner, “actors like John Wayne, Fred Astaire, Vivien Leigh, and Vincent Price joined the society.  So did directors John Huston and Otto Preminger and fellow composers Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, Dimitri Tiomkin, Hugo Friedhofer, and Nino Rota, among others.” 

He’d tapped into something, responded to a need that many had felt but hadn’t taken the initiative to do anything about.  Until Bender.

He and Steiner became friends.  When Steiner celebrated his 82nd birthday in 1970, Bender was there.  “Max,” he told the composer, who’d worn a Beethoven wig for the occasion, “you look better than Beethoven.”  To which Steiner replied: “I should hope so–he’s dead.”

Steiner died at the end of 1971.  But not before he’d received an honor which he owed, directly or indirectly, to the advocacy of Albert Bender.  Again quoting Wegele:

“Issue no. 27 of the newsletter of the Max Steiner Music Society announced that Steiner received a great honor on his eighty-third birthday—an entry in the Golden Book of the State of Israel, next to Albert Einstein and David Ben Gurion.  It read, ‘Max R. Steiner, Beverly Hills, California, on the occasion of his eighty-third birthday and his musical achievements, May 10^th, 1971, inscribed by Samuel and Hagith Sternberg, M.S.M.S. [Max Steiner Music Society], Israel branch, with heartiest wishes.'”

By this time, Al and Betty Bender had left the East Coast for good.  They’d moved first to Bakersfield, California, and then to Los Angeles.  (How they supported themselves after leaving Bridgeport remains unclear, at least to me.)  Remarkably, Bender hadn’t totally left his UFOlogy behind.  Is it possible that his interest in the flying disks, which he’d first enthusiastically pursued and then dismissed as “non-sensical,” revived after Steiner’s death?  In November 1976 he wrote to UFOlogist Jerry Clark that “in 1977 something spectacular will take place involving space.”  (It didn’t.)

The Max Steiner Music Society dissolved in 1981, presumably without any intervention of Men in Black.  The massive collection of materials they’d gathered relating to Steiner’s life and work was donated to Brigham Young University.  BYU’s online “Register of the Max Steiner Collection,” as it’s now called, pays them tribute:

“A major figure in the perpetuation of the memory of Max Steiner is Albert K. Bender, founder of the Max Steiner Music Society. Under Bender’s leadership, the MSMS boasted a worldwide following, the publication of a journal and a newsletter, and even a library of audio tapes produced and maintained by James Reising. Even though the society officially ceased operation when the Steiner Collection came to BYU in 1981, Bender has been of invaluable assistance in locating additional materials and in sharing information about his many encounters with Steiner. The Max Steiner Memorial Society, in the United Kingdom, has carried on the aims of the original MSMS and of Steiner’s music through the able stewardship of Brian Reeve, Bob Blackmore, Bob Wood, and Neil Daft, all from the London area.”

Did the writer of these words know that Albert K. Bender was also the man who Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers?  The author of Flying Saucers and the Three Men (1962), wherein he described his encounters with extraterrestrials whom he could contact by holding a small metal disk in his palm and closing his eyes while repeating the word “Kazik”?

Bender apparently planned a sequel to Flying Saucers and the Three Men, to be entitled The World of Kazik.  In the summer of 1982 we find him corresponding with Gray Barker about revisions to the manuscript.  (Was this why he disbanded the Max Steiner Music Society–so he could work on the book?)  In a letter of August 4, 1983, preserved in the Gray Barker Collection of the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library, Bender writes as if publication is imminent.  The letter is typed on stationery printed with the tender scene from the movie “Frankenstein” where the monster is befriended by a little girl, too naïve and trusting to know she ought to be afraid of him.

(But the scene ends with the monster throwing the child into the pond and drowning her, under the impression that that she’ll float like the flowers they’ve been playing with.  Make of this what you will.)

The World of Kazik never appeared.  Barker died in 1984, and with him Bender’s last link to his old world.  I’ve already quoted what Jerry Clark told me: that at some point, Bender responded to a UFOlogist’s query about his “silencing” with surprise that anybody was still interested.  Which of course, as Jerry points out, doesn’t much suit the idea that Bender “had really acquired what purported to be world-shattering secrets.”

As far as I know, Bender lived happily with his Betty Rose till death did them part.  Meanwhile the process he’d set in motion, of rescuing the memory of Max Steiner’s genius from oblivion, went on–first with him, then without him.  Once more Wegele:

“On March 3, 1973, [Steiner] posthumously was accepted into membership at the Motion Picture Hall of Fame.  On December 30, 1975, he received a star on Vine Street on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 

“On June 1, 2002, Max Steiner was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Society of Composers and Lyricists. … On September 16, 1999, the United States Postal Service issued a series of six commemorative stamps, featuring the portraits of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman, and, of course, Max Steiner.  In Israel a tree was planted in his honor.”  All these fruits of his labor, Bender lived to see.

He died on March 29, 2016, two and a half months shy of his 95th birthday.

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Once revered by us old-time UFOlogists as something of a culture hero–the man who Knew Too Much, about things of which we struggled to know anything whatsoever–Albert Bender has fallen into disrepute.  If I’m not mistaken, most of us have bought into Moseley’s disparagement: “an owlish and nervous little man,” “obviously neurotic,” around whose twerpy figure an undeserved myth (now exploded) once grew up.

This is, I think, a gross injustice to a very unusual man.  A man I would like to have known.  (And, it turns out, could quite possibly have known, if I hadn’t labored under the misapprehension that he was long dead.)

Chapter 6 of Intimate Alien is entitled “Three Men in Black,” and as you might imagine, Barker and Bender are its main subjects.  A lot of what you’ve just read was originally written for Intimate Alien, cut only at the last stage when I realized I’d gone above my space limits.  But I couldn’t forbear to mention that there was “more to Bender than present-day UFOlogists are apt to give him credit for.

“Asked by Roberts and Lucchesi [his IFSB colleagues, trying to extract from him some clue about what he’d discovered that the Three Men were so anxious he not reveal] to suggest a subject for a science-fiction story, Bender replied: ‘Suppose there was another world out in space, and there the people were black.  What do you think would happen if they came to this planet?  Do you think they would help the colored or the white people?  You know the prejudices that exist here, and if they came to Earth, what do you think would happen?’  This was 1953; the landmark events of the civil rights movement hadn’t yet happened.  Yet Bender was alive to ‘the prejudices that exist here,’ and intuited the UFOs’ potential to mirror the society’s racial torment.”

Which I also write about in Intimate Alien.  But that’s another story.

by David Halperin
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