“And the summer wore on into August, a summer that was not quite right. There were more freak weather conditions and earthquakes, and in the air were threats of something unknown that was to come. Windshields broke mysteriously from coast to coast. There were hints that astronomers had focused their telescopes close to Earth, peering at something they could not explain. A second moon, perhaps, but more likely something else: an artificial satellite, some hinted, but not ours.
“Meanwhile man threatened man and there were wars and rumors of wars. But to those who could feel it, there was something else, a half-heard rumbling in the air, like a bad dream, as the world whirled deliriously onward in what seemed to some to be a mad phantasmagoria of the dance of death.”
—Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956)
Sounds a bit like today, doesn’t it? But Gray Barker was speaking about the summer of 1954, and I, six years old at the time, wasn’t aware of any “mad phantasmagoria of the dance of death.” (Barker let his prose get away from him there. Normally he could write better than that.)
Several years later, after reading They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, I asked my parents: what was there about the summer of ’54 that might warrant such a description? They drew a blank, although they did recall some international unpleasantness involving the islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait, which actually began at the end of that summer.
Dear reader: does the phrase “Bender mystery” mean anything to you? If it does, more than likely you’re sporting a few white or at least gray hairs. Albert K. Bender and the once-notorious mystery that enshrouded him, which lie at the center of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, are mostly forgotten today. Even as the myth that sprang from them–that of the “Men in Black”–has become a common cultural property, familiar to nearly everyone.
It’s a fact, or as close to a fact as one gets in these matters: sometime in September of 1953, Al Bender of Bridgeport, Connecticut, director of a burgeoning UFO group called the “International Flying Saucer Bureau” (IFSB) and publisher of a journal called Space Review, was visited by three men who demanded that he shut down the group and cease his researches. They seem to have told him–although here things start to get hazy–that he had discovered the secret of the flying disks, and it was so strange and terrifying that it must be revealed to no one.
Hence the “Bender mystery”: (1) what had Bender discovered? and (2) who were the three men who imposed silence on him?
Interviewed by IFSB members August Roberts and Dominick Lucchesi, a few weeks after his encounter with the three men, Bender was asked multiple questions to which his reply was always the same: “I can’t answer that.” One question, at least, he was willing to answer:
Q. Did you notice what the men wore?
A. They wore the same type of clothes and hats. Dark clothes and black hats.
Black hats but only “dark” clothes; and the detail doesn’t seem to have impressed Bender as being of any great significance–he brought it up only in response to a direct question. It was Gray Barker who transformed this into the iconic “three men in black suits with threatening expressions on their faces,” and in so doing plugged the visitors into archetypal figures who’d haunted the human imagination at least since the 17th century. And sent the myth of them sailing around the world.
My answers to the two questions I’ve just posed about the Bender mystery: (1) nothing; and (2) probably FBI agents, who paid an unfriendly call on Bender for reasons that had nothing to do with UFOs, although they may have told Bender otherwise.
“Many years later,” Jerome Clark wrote me in an email in 2011, “in reply to a letter some ufologist had written him, Bender – now living in California — expressed surprise that anybody was still interested in the incident. I took this — if further evidence were needed at that stage — to indicate that the ‘Bender mystery’ was a whole lot less than met the eye. One doesn’t suppose that Bender would have been so blasé if he had really acquired what purported to be world-shattering secrets.
“It really ought to be the ‘Barker mystery.’ Barker himself is the real enigma.”
Jerry’s perhaps the foremost UFOlogist of our generation, the author (almost single-handed) of the magisterial UFO Encyclopedia, now in its third edition. He’s absolutely right. There were no earth-shattering secrets. You’ll see a bit of support for this in a moment.
I agree with Jerry also about the “Barker mystery.” But I’d want to refine his formulation. The real enigma is neither Bender by himself nor Barker by himself, but the Barker-Bender synergy, by which the “Men in Black” myth came into being.
Synergistic pairs of this kind, embodying in their persons what Jung called the union of opposites, are a recurrent theme in the history and prehistory of UFOlogy. Examples are Richard Shaver and Raymond Palmer in the “Shaver Mystery” that heralded the UFO, Betty and Barney Hill in the tradition of alien abduction. Barker and Bender are yet a third.
I explore this pattern in my new book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO–to be published on March 24, now ready for pre-order on the websites of Stanford University Press and of Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC–which has a chapter on Barker, Bender, and the Men in Black. (See the Table of Contents at the end of this post.) Here I’ll share with you a letter from Bender, cited in my book but never published, that seems to resolve the mystery of the “too much” that Bender supposedly knew about flying saucers. Also a speculation that goes a little beyond what I was prepared to say in the book, that brings us back to that “phantasmagoric” summer of 1954.
The letter is part of the “Bender-Roberts file” in the Gray Barker Collection of the Clarkburg-Harrison Public Library in Clarksburg, West Virginia–Bender’s side of the correspondence with his close colleague August Roberts, whom I’ve mentioned earlier. I found it in the Barker Collection when I visited in 2004. My warmest thanks to genial curator David Houchin, who welcomed me, spent hours chatting with me, and guided me in the use of the Collection’s resources!
The file holds letters dated March 11 and September 9, 1953. Both are entirely consonant with the naive and uncritical UFO believer that Bender shows himself to be on the pages of Space Review. But the letter of September 9 has an ominous tone that’s missing from its predecessor. “After returning from vacation, I found some surprising news from Gray Barker about some FBI investigation”–and the reference is certainly to the visit Barker received on August 28 from an FBI agent inquiring about his IFSB business card, described on pages 94-98 of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.
“It all adds up to one thing however,” Bender wrote to Roberts, “the government sure is interested in the saucers in one way or another.” And he added: “I have not been approached as yet, but rest assured I will be prepared for them when they show up.”
Later that month they did show up. And, to judge from what he later told Roberts and Lucchesi, he wasn’t as “prepared for them” as he imagined.
That’s the last letter from Bender to Roberts for nearly a year–or, at least, the last that’s preserved in the file. When Bender writes again it’s August 4, 1954–“the summer wore on into August, a summer that was not quite right“–and Bender’s tone has changed entirely. It’s no longer “Dear Augie” but “Dear Mr. Roberts”; and the writer is angry, and icy-cold.
Bender warns Roberts, in response to his letter of August 2 (which has not been preserved), that “since this is a free country, and our freedom of the press has not been deprived of us, go right ahead and print anything you desire, but be sure that what you print is true and has proof to back it up. … I considered your letter uncalled for, and I certainly must say that as long as I knew you, I have never said one thing against you, and always thought well of you. Just because a person is unable to meet you on your terms is no excuse for you to assume that his intentions are not honorable.
“As for any book I intend to write, you had better check again, as that is the least of my thoughts, since my main worry at the moment is getting married in a couple of months.
“Rest assured, that when I do write it won’t be on any subject as non-sensical [sic] as the saucers.”
So the flying saucers, to which Bender had once dedicated himself, are “non-sensical.” Proof that, whatever he learned from the three men, it wasn’t that the UFOs conceal some awful secret. Rather, that encounter, followed by the passage of the months, convinced him they were nonsense not worth his time or attention.
And the 31-year-old bachelor, who lived with his stepfather and entertained himself by transforming a portion of their house into a “chamber of horrors” tricked out with artificial spiders, bats, and shrunken heads, was getting married.
Bender tells the story of the courtship in his 1962 book Flying Saucers and the Three Men, dedicated “to BETTY who came to me by way of the saucers.” It’s a touching and tender story, and unlike so much in that bizarre book, indisputably authentic.
Betty Rose was a petite, charming redhead from England, met by correspondence through the IFSB. Early in 1954 she came to the US to visit Bender, and together they took in the sights of New York City. And then she was gone.
“As she walked up the stairs to enter the plane, she gave me one last wave, then moved quickly through the doorway. A strange feeling hit my stomach. I stood there still waving and could not move from the spot until I saw the plane taxi to the runway and take off. … As the plane vanished in the distance I realized I had left something important undone, an unasked question which she now had no opportunity to hear from my lips. And so it was that I found out, for the first time, that I was in love.”
And so he asked the question. And Betty said yes. That October, the Bridgeport Telegram ran an item under the headline, “Albert Bender to Wed Betty Rose Saturday.”
Not a word about any of this in They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.
Published in 1956, Barker’s book could easily have made at least passing reference to Bender’s marriage in 1954. (According to Flying Saucers and the Three Men, Barker and Betty Rose “talked many times by telephone and tape,” even though they didn’t actually meet until 1959.) Yet what may have been the single most important and transformative event in his friend’s life, Barker passes over in silence.
Instead, we’re given ominous hints about “a summer that was not quite right.”
Which happened to be the summer of Bender and Betty Rose’s courtship.
Sometimes that which is not said in a communication is the truest guide to what’s communicated. I made that point in one of the earliest posts on this blog, about the 1967 movie The Graduate. Nowhere does the film explicitly refer to the Vietnam War (apart from a few fragmentary verses scattered here and there between the lines of the wistful love song “Scarborough Fair”). Yet the war, and the moral anomie it spawned in the society that waged it, suffuses the film like a poisonous fog.
I ended the post with a quote from Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav: “Nothing cries out louder than silence.”
What must it have meant to Barker that the man he’d known as a confirmed bachelor like himself, a few years older than himself, was suddenly in love and preparing to get married?
Barker’s homosexuality, I suppose, is now widely known to the world of UFOlogy. The grinding, unending trauma of being a closeted gay man in 1950s West Virginia silently pervades They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, as the Vietnam War pervades The Graduate–this is the point I’ve made in Intimate Alien. How must Barker’s sexual orientation have intertwined with his friendship with Bender, which lies at the base of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers?
Don’t misunderstand me. I am NOT suggesting that Barker and Bender were lovers, or that Bender even had any inkling of his friend’s orientation. But that there was some homoerotic element in Barker’s feelings for Bender, which appear to have been real and intense, seems to me all but inevitable.
An element that would have been thwarted as cruelly as could be imagined in the summer of 1954, with Bender’s rejection of UFOs as “non-sensical” and his wooing of a beloved woman.
“And the summer wore on into August, a summer that was not quite right …”
Or, as I wrote of Barker in Intimate Alien:
“He promoted Bender, used Bender, made money off Bender. But he also believed in Bender, and when Bender disillusioned him, he fell into despair.”
by David Halperin
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Now ready for pre-order from Stanford University Press–my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, to be released March 24, 2020.
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Thanks for your blog. I believe that there is a real physical reality to UFO’s(& a lot of BS). I also think our culture, folklore, psychology, & projection is also a big part of the story.
Thanks for posting, David!