Hoaxers and Experiencers: Men in Black in Sweden.
I could almost sense him, the man behind me. Well, first I saw him — he was passing me in the opposite direction — and there was a slight delay in his movements, like he was checking me out. Not in a flirtatious way, more like surveillance. I was walking up from the store to my apartment, not expecting anything out of the ordinary. But the notion of the phenomenon Men in Black, from now on called MiB, was on my mind at the moment. When I turned around, feeling his eyes burning in my neck, I saw him standing in the middle of the pavement, looking up at me. “Better to ignore”, I thought and continued up to the left, over the street and in among the tall pines facing the apartment house. For some reason I looked behind me again, and there he stood on the path covered with pine needles. The mysterious man wore a jacket with a hoodie, covering his face with shadows. Him standing there frozen, watching me gave me the chills and I hurried inside and locked the door behind me.
Later that day I was joking with my partner how a MiB was following me, mostly because this was something I was researching at the time, and I was told not to worry. A while later I was home alone when I noticed how the cats were reacting to something in the hallway, focusing their attention at the door. To my horror I could see how the door handle was moving slowly, like someone was trying to get inside, like that scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing when a deep frozen Kurt Russell comes back to the base and finds himself locked out. Through the twisted peephole perspective I saw a man standing, like he was waiting for me to open. Which I did, contrary to common sense. “Are you looking for someone?”, I asked, and he answered with one word, “Loam”. I explained to him, both nervous and annoyed, that there was no Loam in this apartment and said my goodbye. He hung around outside the door for a while and then left. This was the start of more than a month of strange visits. Once he rang on the door bell in the middle of the night, asking the same question, another time we found him outside the balcony looking up at us, at first just seeing his white eyes almost luminous in the evening dark. It became routine, and we found him outside the door or one floor up, looking down at our apartment over and over again. Always the same question , “Loam?”.
Much later, long after he disappeared, I looked up Loam in Allen H. Greenfield’s The Secret Cipher of the Ufonauts, a cipher allegedly found in Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law. I became more obsessed with it, because it reminded me of those names old school contactees usually came up with when talking about the strange otherworldly beings they claimed to be in contact with, like Ashtar, Orthon, Semjase, Aura Rhanes and many others. Typing in Loam in the cipher revealed sinister words like soul, crawl and shadows appear and that didn’t help my paranoia. Loam itself is a form of soil, made from three forms of soil: sand, silt, and clay soil. It can also be spelled Lam, which comes from old English, Lām (clay, mud, mire, earth). Lam also happens to be the alleged alien entity that Aleister Crowley channeled during his 1908 Amalantrah workings, which became even more famous for the eerie portrait Crowley drew of it, a large-headed grey-like character.
So what the heck is all of this? Beats me, but one thing the MiB phenomenon leads to is paranoia. These sinister characters seems to be the perfect pathway to that dreaded rabbit hole of conspiracies and high strangeness, something countless (maybe all) witnesses have experienced ever since Gray Barker wrote about Albert K. Bender’s encounters in the 1956 classic They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers and later Bender (at least on paper, Barker was the credited editor on the book) himself in 1962, Flying Saucers and the Three Men.
Even if I heard about them way earlier, in tons of different UFO literature I devoured at my local library as a kid, the MiB phenomena wasn’t something that truly entered my pop culture mind until Barry Sonnenfeld’s blockbuster Men in Black (1997). The concept there was from a hero’s viewpoint, and the elusive so-called MiB’s were portrayed as the saviors of the universe and all around good guys — even with a disturbing tendency to erase the memories of people from time to time with a literal flash. It’s a great popcorn movie, I must admit that. A perfect combination of action, comedy and mystery — all tied together with details only a 20 year old guy with an interest in the unknown would know something about, which made it even more exciting.
I’ve been intrigued for a long time to find out if there’s any observations of MiB in Sweden, which turned into a hard nut to crack and a lot of digging. To be fair, there’s not much to go on when it comes to this subject here, and the few stories that exist are stuff one should take with a grain of salt. I’d still like to share a few of them with you — no matter the credibility of those making the reports.
Jan-Ove Sundberg was a journalist, ufologist and cryptozoologist (who had a short stint of fame with his GUST — Global Underwater Search Team, between 1997 and 2001), and whose name shows up from time to time in the annals of high strangeness. Sundberg, who was considered highly unreliable, relayed several stories involving MiB from his own research, but it should be noted he also was a notorious hoaxer, compulsive liar, stalker and many other — even more horrifying — things. One day I’ll dig deeper into his strange and disturbing life, but let’s focus on the stories he told for now, for example the one about Loch Ness.
On the morning of August 16, 1971, the cherub faced Sundberg was in Foyers Bay, located in the middle of the famous lake, stumbling around in the wild trying to get to the construction site of a power station. He was working on a story about the Loch Ness monster for the gentleman’s magazine Lektyr. Whatever he was looking for in the bushes didn’t prepare him for the sight he saw moments later.
In front of him, in an open space among the trees, stood a strange craft (which reminded him, or maybe more the staff at Flying Saucer Review, of a giant smoothing-iron, more specifically a classic Husqvarna. The similarity is striking). Outside of it appeared, from the bushes, three alleged aliens, all dressed in what looked like gray diver’s suits (this is a theme that will come back in Sundberg’s own mythology of the MiB. More on that later). The beings climbed aboard the craft and flew silently away, and seemed to descend again at Loch Mhor. This is the short version, in a story that’s been thoroughly investigated by, for example, FSR and Stuart Campbell in 1981 (in a follow-up article to the 1973 original report by Ted Holiday) who concluded that the whole thing was totally made up by Sundberg.
Anyways, when he came back to his hometown Motala, Sweden, mysterious Men in Black visited him at his house and anonymous callers told him to keep quiet about the incident. Another time a black figure walked around in his garden during the night, leaving strange, dumb-bell shaped footprints. He also suffered from poltergeist phenomena and disturbing dreams. Sensationally enough, he claimed to have photographs of the strange looking UFO, but not a single photo appeared — at least not one that actually showed something tangible.
Sundberg claimed to have sent photographic evidence to Dr James Harder at APRO, but nothing more is known about this. One might think that Sundberg, after telling his remarkable story, just didn’t want to comment further to any curious investigators, for the sole reason he was bluffing.
When confronted with the discrepancies brought up by FSR in 1981 by AFU Newsletter’s Anders Liljegren, Sundberg’s first reaction was a hesitant: “What can l say to make people believe me? l have seen what l have seen!”. He then proclaimed he also had decided to withdraw a bit from the ufology scene, for his own good: “l’ve never felt so good In my life as of now. l have found out it’s important to keep a certain distance to the subject and not to be too much involved”. He also stated, in his communication with researchers and investigators, that the whole ordeal with the drama with the UFO and the mysterious men led to a nervous breakdown and therefore didn’t feel like bringing it up again. In articles he wrote regarding his investigation by Loch Ness he never brought up seeing either a UFO or aliens,. The whole thing seemed like a sensitive subject for him. I will leave Jan-Ove Sundberg for now, but will get back to him soon for some additional MiB observations, true or not true. Instead, let’s take a look at a beloved and reliable man.
Bevan Berthelsen was during a couple of hectic years in the 1970s one of the most active proponents of the UFO subject in Sweden, including being the chairman of UFO-Sverige between 1976 and 1978. However, his interest actually started as late as in the summer of 1972. At the time Bevan, who hadn’t changed his name from Thorvald yet, considered UFOs and aliens to be a laughing matter. He didn’t take it seriously at all! This night would change it all, because of a good old case of sleepwalking. He left his bed, got dressed and took his bike (sleep-cycling?) around two kilometers to the desolate area of Slätängen, where he found himself awake and wondering what the heck he was doing there in the middle of the night. Oddly enough he plucked a bouquet of bluebells before cycling home again, confused over his first and only encounter with the gentle art of sleepwalking.
One week later he noticed how he got the urge to read and study everything in the UFO subject and borrowed all the books he could find at the library. This led to him to start Köpings UFO-förening in January, 1973 and not long after, on March 11 the same year, he and three other witnesses saw a cylinder shaped object passing over his hometown, Köping. It was the start of an obsession which lasted until 1980, when he left the UFO community and entered the spiritual movement Subud together with his wife. But what about those mysterious MiB? Well, the same day as his UFO observation hit the local news paper, he heard a knock on the door. Living in a country house with views in all directions, the visitor seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Knocking on the door was a man in his thirties, dressed in a brown suit and white shirt, with suntanned skin and slanted eyes — but not, what Bevan could see, of asian descent. “How are you feeling?”, the man said and asked for directions. After receiving instruction on how to continue down the road, he left the head-scratching owner. “Who the hell was that?”, Bevan thought and ran out and looked for him — but the odd looking man was gone. The road went straight in both directions, with no places for the man to hide.
This might not seem overly strange, but remember this the countryside, in Sweden 1973 and a very “exotic” experience at the time. Bevan felt that this was truly something out of the ordinary. As a comparison I can mention how my mother in her youth dyed her hair black, and directly got aggressive and racist reactions from other Swedes. So the sight of someone not looking typical Swedish was something rare. This could of course also count for Bevan’ s own reaction, that the man with his slanted eyes felt out of place.
In 1993 Jan-Ove Sundberg, who in all fairness was a quite good writer, published his second book, Fantomubåtarna (“The Phantom Submarines”), where he claimed that the years of submarine encounters in the archipelago along the Scandinavian coasts really were USOs, Unidentified Submerged Objects. Basically Aquatic aliens. What’s true or not in this book is difficult to say, but there’s a big chance a lot of it was based on actual observations — but with a lot of added (and retracted) details from Sundberg’s side. However, there’s a few interesting MiB-style encounters which are worth bringing up. Just take them with a grain of salt, sea salt at least — as we’re talking about something as strange as… FROGMEN IN BLACK!
One witness, Torbjörn Danielsson, had his encounter in 1982. He was working a saw mill when a SAAB 900 EMS drove up beside him outside the mill. The driver gesticulated, and Torbjörn understood that he wanted to say something. Beside him in the passenger seat was another man, both of them had slightly dark skin and tailored suits. “They had angular faces, almost like they were chiseled. They looked like brothers”. He compared them to stick figures because of their very plain looks. They also spoke an unusually “pure” Swedish with no dialects and sounded like they were reading the news. The man asked several odd questions, including “What’s your time cycle?” (a weird detail that coincides with an episode of The Haunted Objects Podcast I listened to at the time of writing this) . A while later he saw them down by the water, together with a third man, dressed in diver’s suits. Some would say foreign spies, but in Sundberg’s opinion this was clearly MiBs.
On the evening of October 18, 1989, a witness (out fishing) observed an object in the water, similar to a submarine, surrounded by eight to ten frogmen. They were shorter than usual, around 150–160 centimeters in length, dressed in black diver’s suits, some kind of transparent protection in front of their faces and neither — what he could see — any kind of diving equipment.
Two years later, on November 7, 1990, a man was out walking his Collie, and met four frogmen coming up from the water. They stared at him, causing him to feel a terrible fear! “I don’t know how the thought struck me, but they didn’t seem to be totally human. Their piercing eyes kind of hypnotized me, and I got paralyzed and unable to get away from there!”. The frogmen walked past him, two on each side, and a few hundred meters away the paralysis stopped. He could see how they went into the water and disappeared. In total Sundberg recounts 26 encounters with mysterious frogmen, often with — in the case their skin was visible — a darker complexion, no visible equipment and in most cases caused both irrational and rational fear in the witnesses. In several cases the witnesses received weird or threatening phone calls afterwards, and in one case, the Collie-man from 1990, he found prints of frogman-shoes outside his house.
Now, once again, take these reports with a huge grain of sea salt, considering the source of them, the infamous Jan-Ove Sundberg. In an interview in Sökaren, 1984, he says without shame, “I actually think people in this country want to read lies, scams and fraud! They read it as a form of entertainment”. Jan-Ove passed away in 2011, 64 years old, from cancer, after learning he would live to the tender age of 83 from a famous astrologer in New Delhi. He’s still today talked about in Swedish ufology, but not because of all the good he did — instead it’s actually, a least most of the times, in the opposite. There’s no question though, how his legacy forever will be cemented into the world of high strangeness.
No matter what, the MiB-phenomenon is fascinating, both as personal experiences and as mythology within ufology. These nicely dressed characters feel like they’re coming from folklore, connected to fairy tales and legends. The smooth appearance and odd behavior isn’t far from the old trolls and fairies of Swedish folklore, symbols or both danger and adventure. Maybe they’re sprung from Biblical mythology and the three wise men/kings, most likely meant to be magicians: Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar. Like so many modern MiB they show up during and after strange lights in the sky and end up doing some unauthorized stalking. Maybe that story is the start of the mythology we’ve learned to love and fear so much, or is it something more to it than biblical memes? Let’s speculate a bit, or at least, let me do it. I’m gonna take one for the team, so please follow me into the wilderness of speculative ramblings.
In an earlier text, titled Memes in Black, I’m exploring the concept of Men in Black as symbols — and wrote down the following — and highly speculative — hypotheses on what they might be.
Simulations.
According to a popular fringe hypothesis we’re living in a simulated reality, a non-material universe where someone/something is keeping us under control, either we’re programmed to behave in a certain way or letting us roam free in what’s basically a test environment for a some kind of experiment. I’ve always said that if that’s so, we’re living in an organic simulation; the result or symptom of the oozing slime on top of a pulsating, intergalactic mushroom on some distant, far off planet. But that’s a different story, and please don’t take it too seriously. Anyway, let’s say that all of this is artificial, a game like The Sims, but the high definition reality we’re living in is so advanced we won’t even notice when it’s created in front of us, depending on where we look or how we behave. It would of course be a technology superior to ours by millions of years, but would it be perfect? Perfection is never perfect, there’s always something “wrong”, something “off”, contrary to what we believe — especially when it comes to intelligent beings. If dolphins are such god-like creatures, why would they want to mate with some poor human diver? Wouldn’t they be intelligent enough to understand the diver is of a different species or that it’s plain wrong to have sex with someone who’s not interested in such amorous activities? Haven’t they heard of consent? Intelligence don’t necessarily means smart you know. What if the MiBs are viruses intruding in our existence, trying to interfere with our daily lives — especially if we’ve encountered any kinds of anomalies in programming, bugs, like the paranormal? Their behavior would not be able to replicate our own perfectly, and their way of talking/thinking/moving would be slightly different and in some cases extremely different from us. Them often having a darker skin complex could be connected to the racist idea that humans with darker skin are less trustworthy, something that’s more evident than ever now in this chaotic existence, and that makes us see the MiB as such.
Probes.
UFOs have been seen for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. They’ve gone through several incarnations, like chariots from the gods, airships, campy 50’s flying saucers, spheres and eggs, even rockets and nowadays more and more complex geometrical shapes — truly otherworldly compared to our understanding of reality. I mean, who the heck flies a plain, metallic looking cube? Or one with a sphere within it? An alien race might! Outside the abduction culture there hasn’t been that many sightings of actual aliens either, except gray figures of short stature, the infamous Nazi-tinted “Nordics” (blond, tall christ-wannabes), hairy dwarves, a couple of giants, maybe a mantis or two and similar beings with humanoid features: one head, two arms and legs. To be honest, if there are intelligent civilisations out there — how big a chance is it that they would be even the slightest similar to how humans are built? Maybe they’re so damn weird they either let us see them as something less disturbing — or maybe they even never set their feet on this planet and instead sends in human-like probes that mimics our behavior, looks and way of thinking — but as the extraterrestrials (or ultraterrestrials) themselves are way too different from us they can only guess how a human would work, and the result is weird looking men in old fashioned clothes and cars behaving unnaturally. A good example is Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic (1997), where cockroaches imitate humans to get close to us (and eat us, but let’s not think about that). Like astronauts, dressed as humans, these aliens take a closer look at those of us that might have noticed them and let them know, in a very awkward manner, that we should stay away and mind our own business. Maybe they’re not even organic, just robotic reproductions of what might look like a human? The way we and them communicate is too abstract, so they send in something to maybe — just maybe — get a chance to understand what’s going on. Which might explain the unnatural, robotic behavior in some MiB observations.
Manifestations.
In some ways maybe this is the wildest, most far-fetched hypothesis as it deals with the non-material, the esoteric and occult: the MiBs are created by our own collective consciousness as a way to find order in a world of chaos and explanations to the high strangeness around us. I’ve always felt that we get what we deserve, and through our collective consciousness we unwillingly create figures that are harmful for our world. I believe that we to a certain degree create material entities without our intention to do so. This is not as crazy as it sounds, but more like this: every dictator/destructive person of power is a collective creation taken from millions after millions of humans and the darker parts of their minds. Imagine all that small-minded bitterness, all that racism and greed that never fully develops into something more serious but slowly grows subconsciously inside us all, leaking out in small doses from us all and just grows bigger as it finds like minded feelings. All hate and greed and stupidity are slowly creating a race of hateful people, some more and some less, which creates a society of stupidity — which shapes newer generations, from parents to kids to friends to co-workers to… you get my point. Maybe the MiBs are tulpas, created from our own imagination into a material manifestation and now we can’t get rid of them. Watch Jane Schoenbrun’s archive documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018) for a closer, and excellent look, at this abstract and yet so tangible concept, the shape of Slenderman.
There’s very little proof — as with much in this field — of the existence of the Men in Black. I suggest we need to look at the phenomenon as something purely esoteric, a manifestation of some sorts. Not necessarily like tulpas or similar thought-manifestations, but as symbolic projections of our own paranoia.
When experiencing something out of the ordinary, our senses sharpen — goes into high alert — and things that usually are ordinary, or at least a little bit odd, get excessively exaggerated. The looks the mailman gives you becomes more intense, facial features turn more extreme. We start to see details we never noticed before. One example is Viveca, who together with her friend met a tall man (“the tallest man I’ve ever seen!”) dressed in a dark suit at a nightclub, he acted weird and awkward and wore old-fashioned glasses, like something from the sixties. He went up to her, bowed and disappeared into the night again. The next day Viveca was out walking her dog when he once again appeared, bowed to her and continued to walk. She noticed his hair was pitch black and didn’t move at all, like it was glued to his head. In the eyes of Viveca she had just met the archangel Michael! It’s all in the eyes of the beholder, as the old saying goes.
Another very bizarre incident happened to Swedish psychic medium and witch Serafia Andersson during a session in a solarium. From her angle she could look out into the room around the equipment and suddenly saw a tall man dressed in black in the corner of the room. Moments later he was much closer, looking in at her and saying “We can’t do this where I come from”, and then disappeared. A typical example of the absurd humor the phenomenon often exhibits. An interesting detail here is that if one look back at the bizarre abduction (though he went quite willingly, at least with a mysterious pill) of Carl Higdon on October 25, 1974, is that the alien he claimed to have met, said “your sun burns us”. What is it with alleged visitors from outer space/another realm and not being able to do some serious sun tanning?
I’m not denying mysterious visits can come from military personal, three letter agencies or other kinds of spooks — it’s something that might be very likely when it comes to stuff that’s been reported as unusual comes comes to the government’s knowledge, but I’d say that the concept of MiB is projected on these incidents, making them seem more strange than they really are.
This can be very much rooted in our nature, to keep our guards up — but also, if you allow me to go even more wild; a projection of the phenomenon (as in something paraweird, non-material) onto other human beings around us. For a moment, minutes, hours or days it uses the human symbols around as proxies for something extraordinary and sometimes even scary.
People can be unwilling actors, without their knowledge, in our own event-riddled universe. Like avatars for the unknown. When Allen H. Greenfield snapped a photo of an alleged MiB, during the National UFO Conference in Charlottesville, 1969, maybe what he captured; a human avatar for the phenomenon itself?
Let’s end this with a fascinating little experience as shared by Karin, in the Facebook group Allmänheten diskuterar ufo och UFO-Sverige, in 2022. I like this one. It’s mysterious, creepy and highly personal. And there’s something MiB-ish with it, even if she never makes that connection herself.
Kerstin was only 11 years of age in 1968, but she clearly remembers that autumn evening. She and her younger brother were home alone, her parents were away playing Bingo. Around 11pm she looked out her parents bedroom window, facing the gravel road outside their house.
She wondered when their parents would come home, and was hoping to see their car coming down that road as she stood there. However, what she did see terrified her: in the middle of the road stood a man, with a long coat with the collar almost covering his face. He wore a hat, pushed down so his eyes were hidden. He had his hands in his pockets and in front of him a couple of bright smaller spheres or orbs were flying around. It was a scary and disturbing sight, but it piqued her interest, and she ran down to get her brother so he also could see it.
When they returned to the bedroom, the man was gone. After being mocked for sharing this story on Facebook she removed her post, and this is all I managed to save.
However, the last thing she wrote before deleting the thread is that she saw the man again, but didn’t specify where and when. As usual, the Men in Black are never too far away.
For more Swedish high strangeness, please read the following texts:
We Will Be Back: The 1944 Alien Abduction at Klissberget.
The Jawbone of Axala: From Giants in Norse Mythology, Observations in Modern Times to Bloody Murder.
Amongst Trolls and Bigfoot in Sweden.
Owls, UFOs and Sweden.
Fred Andersson is a Swedish story producer and writer with over twenty years of experience in commercial television and the author of three books. He lives in Märsta, outside Stockholm, with his photographer husband Grzegorz and two overly active cats. Join him on Twitter and Instagram.
Sources:
The Complete Cipher of the UFOnauts (Allen H. Greenfield, 2018)
Alien Dawn (Colin Wilson, p. 124 & 125, 1999)
Exorcism and UFO Landing at Loch Ness (F.W Holiday, Flying Saucer Review, #5, 1973)
False Report from Loch Ness (Stuart Campbell, Flying Saucer Review, #6, 1981)
“Jan-Ove Sundberg” (Jan-Ove Sundberg, Paranormal.se)
“What Happened to Bevan Berthelsen” (Håkan Blomqvist, 2014)
“Berthelsen fick UFO-Sverige att växa” (Håkan Blomqvist, 1991)
“Men in Black: Hallucinationer hos dårfinkar eller hemliga agenter? (Lars B. Lindholm, Pentagram, #3, 1995)
Fantomubåtarna (Jan-Ove Sundberg, p. 103–112, 1993)
“”Texas” Sundbergs fantastiska värld” (Sven Magnusson, Sökaren, #9, 1984)
A Self-Induced Hallucination (Jane Schoenbrun, 2018)
“Memes in Black” (Fred Andersson, Medium.com, 2020)
