'Men In Black' Inspired By Scary Stories Of People Who've Seen UFOs

When "Men in Black 3" opens everywhere over Memorial Day weekend, most moviegoers will just be hoping this sequel matches the original for popcorn-munching fun.


But there are many people who say they've been victimized by and live in fear of real MIBs. And those stories, told for decades, are just as terrifying as they are detailed.

Ever since the early 1950s, long before the first "Men in Black" movie hit the silver screen in 1997, men dressed in identical black suits, hats and sunglasses, claiming to be government agents, have reportedly shown up in black cars at the homes or offices of people who reported UFO sightings.

According to those who were paid these unwelcome visits, the MIBs threatened or harassed the eyewitnesses into staying quiet about their UFO encounters.

Watch some reported Men in Black encounters:

1947: Harold Dahl reported seeing a group of UFOs while he was on a boat in Washington's Puget Sound. Soon after, he said, he was approached by a black-suited individual who threatened him and his family if he ever talked again about the UFO sighting.

1967: Robert Richardson was driving his car at night in Toledo, Ohio, when he hit something, which, he claimed, then vanished. He found a piece of metal that he believed originated from the mysterious thing he hit. A few days later, two men, wearing black hats and sunglasses and driving a black 1953 Cadillac, visited Richardson at his home at 11 p.m. to ask questions. A week later, two other men arrived, dressed in black suits, and asked Richardson to turn over the metal to them. When he informed them he had sent it for analysis, he said, they threatened to harm his wife if he didn't get it back. He never heard from them again.

But why? Who were -- and, in some cases, still are -- these strange individuals who give out seemingly meaningless warnings about UFO sightings and try to intimidate people?

"They are the archetypal sinister person who turns up on the doorstep specifically in relation to a UFO encounter," said Nick Redfern, author of "The Real Men in Black" (New Page Books, 2011).

"People who have been visited by MIB tend to fall into two categories: One is the UFO witnesses. The other category is researchers who've been visited," Redfern told The Huffington Post.

After digging closely into the history of many reported MIB encounters, Redfern (pictured below) thinks he has a good handle on what may be going on.

What we have, I'm pretty sure, is a sort of covert department or office or personnel within the official infrastructure. There are people who dress in black deliberately and go around and threaten people in certain circumstances relative to UFOs," he suggested.

"And they look like what you see in the 'Men in Black' movies. They look like agents of the government, like [actors] Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. And they issue veiled warnings not to talk about their UFO encounter."

But then there are the creepier MIB stories that emerge.

Like the one told by Dr. Herbert Hopkins. The respected family physician from Old Orchard Beach, Maine, was home alone on the night of Sept. 11, 1976. At the time, Hopkins was studying a UFO incident.

The phone rang, and a man's voice identified himself as a representative of a New Jersey UFO organization (which turned out to be phony).

"He wanted to know if he could come here and talk to me about the UFO case. He also asked if I was alone, and I said yes," Hopkins told this reporter in 1978 for a story broadcast on NBC Radio.

When Hopkins walked from the phone to the door and turned on the light, the man was already coming up the steps.

"If he was even as close as across the street or next door telephoning, he could not possibly have gotten here as soon as I did to turn on the light for him," recalled Hopkins.

When the stranger came in, Hopkins was struck by his appearance.

"He wore a neatly tailored black suit, black shoes, black socks, a white shirt with black tie, and he wore a black derby. You don't see derbies very often, and I thought to myself, 'This guy looks just like an undertaker.' When he sat down, he removed his derby.

"This character was as bald as an egg. He didn't even have eyebrows or eyelashes. It looked like he had smooth, plastic skin -- like a doll except that it was a dead-white color," Hopkins said.

"His lips were a brilliant ruby red, and he spoke in an expressionless, monotone, scanning speech. He constructed no phrases and sentences -- just a sequence of words evenly spaced. His voice was completely passive with no inflection or intonation, as if you were hearing it from a machine that could talk."

During the short time they were together, Hopkins and the strange man talked about the UFO case that the doctor had been investigating. Hopkins also noticed other very odd things about this Man in Black.

"He sat perfectly motionless and wore grey suede gloves. He idly brushed his lips with the back of a glove, and when he put his hand down, the back of his glove was bright red and the red on his mouth was smeared, so I knew he was wearing lipstick.

"Then I could see that his mouth was a perfectly straight slit. Apparently, he did not have what we call lips, so the lipstick was put on as a decoy -- his mouth was more like a ventriloquist's dummy."

This classic MIB story gets even stranger.

The odd visitor told Hopkins to take a coin out of his pocket and hold it in the palm of his hand.

"He said, 'Watch the coin,' and it started to develop a silver color instead of copper, and then the silver became bluish and the penny was getting quite fuzzy, out of focus, blurred, and then it simply was gone -- it slowly dematerialized."

Following the coin magic, the stranger ordered the doctor to destroy all information he had gathered about the UFO case.

"As he spoke his last words, I noticed his speech was slowing down. His words became slower and farther spaced. He slowly got to his feet, unsteadily, and he said very slowly, 'My -- energy -- is -- running -- low -- must -- go -- now -- goodbye.' Just like that."

Hopkins said that the MIB -- whoever or whatever he was -- clung tightly to the railing as he went down the steps outside, placing both feet on each step, and then disappeared around the corner into a bright light.

When the chilling encounter was over, a terrified, intimidated Hopkins destroyed all traces of any UFO materials he had.

Dan Aykroyd's personal account of a possible MIB encounter:

So who are the real Men in Black who have scared people for decades? Are they government agents trying to spread disinformation about UFOs? But for what purpose?

"The MIB movies are very entertaining, but they portray one angle of a mystery that is actually two-pronged," said Redfern.

"You've got this government conspiracy angle, but you've also got this Gothic archaic mystery that ties in as much with the occult and paranormal as it does with flying saucers."

Here comes Yahoo's own Web browser -- Axis

Yahoo's search group attempts to take control of its destiny by launching its own browser. Surprise: It's good.

By Rafe Needleman

Yahoo is announcing tonight that it's getting into the browser business with its new Axis browser. There are versions for iPad and iPhone, and plug-ins for the desktop browsers Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari.

 The design goal, according to Ethan Batraski, head of product for the Search Innovation Group at Yahoo, is to eliminate the middle step in the usual Web search process: Enter a query, see the results, go to a page. With Axis, you're supposed to be able to go directly from query to page, skipping the step of surfing a sea of links.

The implication that Axis entirely bypasses the need to pick from search results is false, but Axis does nonetheless have a much better way of getting you from searching to visiting a Web page. The browser works well. This is an aggressive product for the struggling Yahoo to launch out of its search group.

Here's why: Yahoo, which still generates more than a billion dollars a year in revenue from its search division, makes a lot of that money from that second step in the search process. It runs ads on search result pages.

On Axis, there are no search result pages.

Instead, what you get when you search, at least 80 percent of the time, Batraski says, is a horizontal display of Web page thumbnails. (The other 20 percent of the time you get text boxes with results in them.) It's easy to see if one of the pages is what you're looking for, and then you can go there directly. To see the tiles again and go to other results, you just pull down the page from the top. To move forward or backward in the list of results directly from a page you're on, you drag your finger from the right or left. bypassing the results list entirely.

So, to be clear, there actually is a list of search results. It just looks a lot better because it's integrated into the browser. Ads will get inserted into the list of search tiles eventually, assuming the product is a success with users. But for the time being, the more successful Axis is, the more it will drive Yahoo traffic away from search revenues -- which only this last quarter began to recover after years of sliding.

As a tactic for launching the browser, focusing on the user experience above all and forgoing search revenues is probably very wise, since it may be difficult for the browser to make a dent in the market. I asked Batraski about other alterna-browsers that struggled to win major market share, and mostly failed: Flock, Rockmelt, Opera, AT&T's Pogo, and others. Why does Yahoo think it can pull a Chrome with its product?

Distribution, says Batraski. There are 700 million people using Yahoo, and they can all be marketed to. Also, Yahoo distributes browsers (mostly IE with the Yahoo embedded toolbar) to 80 million people a year. The company knows how to get browsers out there, at least on desktop operating systems. But Axis on the desktop is actually not its own browser, but rather a plug-in that works with the browser a user already has. If you use the plug-in's URL and search box in the lower-left of your browser, you'll get Yahoo's results. If you forget it's there and use the browser's standard URL/search box, you get whatever you've already been getting.

One gets the feeling that the desktop versions of Axis exist primarily as accessories to the mobile versions, so users can move between platforms and keep their open tabs and histories intact. When you're logged in, Axis knows what you do on each device and makes it easy to pick up on one where you left off on another.

Mobile is where the action is, so it makes sense that Yahoo threw the bulk of its development love into the tablet and smartphone versions. On the iPad, Axis is simply a great browser. The integrated search feature is intuitive, and being able to move through search results without having to go back to search makes sense. After only a few minutes using it I thought, Why hasn't Google done this yet? It's that good.

Although mobile devices like the iPad come with embedded browsers, Batraski says the product has Apple's blessing. He also said that Apple reps have told him they're not throwing many resources into Apple's own iOS browser, Safari. Axis takes the best that Safari has to offer -- its core rendering engine, Webkit -- and really does make it better. But no matter what Apple says, it's not yet fully behind alternative browsers like Axis: On iOS, you can't change your default browser (unless you jailbreak your device). Click a link in an e-mail message or another app, and your device will open it up in Safari, no matter how in love with Axis you are.

Batraski is convinced this will change eventually, and that if it doesn't, Apple will have a Microsoft-scale antitrust issue on its hands.

What about Android? The Android version of Axis is still in development, and while it's much easier for a user to get an alternative browser installed and embedded in an Android product, it's a pretty safe bet that Google isn't exactly going to roll out the welcome mat for Yahoo's browser. Google already has two of its own browsers for mobile, the Android browser and the still-in-beta Android version of Chrome. And those drive traffic to Google's ads, not Yahoo's. (Firefox, by the way, defaults to using Google for search, so even when people use it instead of Chrome, Google still wins.)

The Axis browser may not conquer the world, but it is a very strong mobile product with an important new design concept for search. It's also a gutsy business move from Yahoo. It's rather refreshing.

Microsoft Tries a So.cl Experiment

By Rachelle Dragani / TechNewsWorld

Microsoft's latest entrant in the online social networking scene made itself available to all users Monday. So.cl -- pronounced "Social" -- is meant as an experimental destination for finding and sharing content, with an emphasis on educational environments. Microsoft doesn't appear to have positioned So.cl as a Facebook killer though. You can even sign on to So.cl via Facebook.

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) opened So.cl, its experimental approach to a social network, to all users Monday, aiming to create a place to find and share online articles, videos and digital content, all with the help of its search engine Bing.

So.cl doesn't appear to be a direct challenge to established social media sites like Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), Twitter or LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD). In fact, it's possible to use a Facebook ID or a Windows Live account to sign in to the site. Once they're logged on, users can post content in different categories ranging from sports to movies to different hobbies. The site will also recommend further searches.

The site also has a "Video Party" feature, wherein So.cl users can search for and assemble videos to share with other users.

So.cl users can share, comment, tag and "riff" on each other's posts, much like on Facebook or other networks, but it's not meant to be a site where old friends can go to check up on the details of each others' lives. Instead, Microsoft hopes that users will find new ways to interact based purely on content.

So.cl is geared specifically toward students or younger learners. Microsoft's FUSE Labs, the arm of the company that spearheads the project, said the site aims to explore how young people use digital content and social media to learn via the Web.

Microsoft intially rolled out So.cl (pronounced "social") in December to information and design students at the University of Washington, Syracuse and New York University, but now is the first time the network is open to all users.

Microsoft didn't respond to our request for comment.

Different Approach

Microsoft has positioned So.cl as an experiment. It's something that could go in a number of different directions, Roy Morejon, president of Command Partners, told TechNewsWorld.

"With Microsoft focusing on social search and the endless possibilities of personalized search within the So.cl network and Bing/Yahoo search queries, it will be interesting to see what overlap or integration come from this," he said.

If the company can find the right niche within education, said Morejon, it could be an interesting way for Microsoft to get ahead in an area, where sites like Facebook and Twitter are mostly discouraged.

"Much of what Microsoft is pushing is university and education-based networking, especially with their partnering with the University of Washington, Syracuse and NYU," he said. "This is where I see the potential for profits within the education niche and learning how students share information with the purposes of learning."

Over-Saturation

For all the talk of So.cl taking a different approach, though, the network shares some similarities with the mainstream social networks, Ty Downing, CEO of SayItSocial, told TechNewsWorld.

"Unfortunately, until we all can really get a chance to drive into this new network, the jury is still out on how it will compete -- or fizzle -- but as of now, I just see this as a desperate and belated attempt to jump into the billion-dollar social arena," he said.

Even the company's experimental approach to the social networking scene might be too much for the mainstream Internet user to handle, said Downing.

"Consumers are suffering from social burnout," he said. "Consumers are tired, exhausted and simply are not ready to learn another social network, in my opinion."

Ultimately, Microsoft will have to give users a huge incentive to join So.cl in addition to their already time-consuming media habits, Greg Sterling, founder of Sterling Market Intelligence, told TechNewsWorld. That's an incentive Microsoft has yet to offer, he said, and unless it can, the site will ultimately suffer.

"In this early version it hasn't yet answered that question, 'Why should I use this?' And the company will have to aggressively promote the site and its benefits to end users or it will languish," he said.

One million counterfeit Chinese electronic parts used in US military, report finds

WASHINGTON – Some one million counterfeit electronic parts from China were in use in U.S. military aircraft, risking national security and the safety of U.S. soldiers, a Senate committee report has found.

The Senate Committee on Armed Services report, released Monday, revealed that it had uncovered 1,800 cases of fake parts -- including Special Operations helicopters -- used by the military.

"Our report outlines how this flood of counterfeit parts, overwhelmingly from China, threatens national security," committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said.

The report noted that Beijing was openly allowing counterfeiting operations in the country, and attempts by committee officials to get visas to travel to China as part of the year-long investigation had been unsuccessful.

The committee's ranking member Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the prevalence of counterfeit electronic parts in U.S. military systems made the country vulnerable and posed a risk to "our security and the lives of the men and women who protect it."

"The Department of Defense and its contractors must attack this problem more aggressively, particularly since counterfeiters are becoming better at shielding their dangerous fakes from detection," he said.

While the senators put the blame squarely on China, the report said U.S. authorities and contract companies contributed to the vulnerabilities to the defense supply chain by not detecting the fakes, or routinely failing to report suspected counterfeiting to the military.

"The failure of a single electronic part can leave a soldier, sailor, airman or marine vulnerable at the worst possible time," the report said.

"Unfortunately, a flood of counterfeit electronic parts has made it a lot harder to prevent that from happening."

Gay superheroes come out after Barack Obama's marriage announcement

Jean-Paul Beaubier, aka Northstar, a Canadian with piercing blue eyes and silver-streaked black hair who can move and fly at superhuman speeds, will propose to his longtime boyfriend Kyle Jinadu in the issue, "Astonishing X-Men #50"

The public debate about gay marriage in the US has spilled into the superhero world, with two of the biggest comic book groups following Barack Obama’s lead by supporting same-sex unions.

By Mark Hughes, New York

Marvel Comics has announced that Northstar, the only openly gay superhero in American comics, will marry his long-term partner Kyle in a forthcoming issue.

One image from next month's edition shows Northstar proposing to a visibly shocked Kyle, while another shows the happy couple at an altar surrounded by their super friends and family, including X-Men’s Wolverine.

Not to be outdone, DC Comics, Marvel’s biggest rival, has announced that one of its established characters, previously thought to be heterosexual, will be coming out as gay.

DC has not said which of the characters it will reveal as homosexual, meaning it could be Batman, Superman or even Wonder Woman.

Axel Alonso, the Marvel Comics editor-in-chief, said that the decision to legalise gay marriage in New York state in July 2011 prompted Northstar’s proposal. He did not say why it had taken nearly a year for the Canadian superhero to pop the question.

Mr Alonso told Rolling Stone magazine: "When gay marriage became legal in New York State, it raised obvious questions since most of our heroes reside in New York State.

"Northstar is the first openly gay character in comics and he's been in a long term relationship with his partner Kyle so the big question was – how would this change his relationship?

"Our comics are always best when they respond to and reflect developments in the real world. We've been doing that for decades, and this is just the latest expression of that."