The Truth About a Man in Black

I got a phone call the other day, from an interviewer for an Internet show dealing with unusual occurrences and the supernatural. The person I spoke with was interested in a member of my family who’d passed away a couple years back and a certain experience that relative had reported. I hadn’t thought about the story in ages, but it was an interesting conversation and dispelled something that probably had gone on for too long.

My uncle’s name was Dr. Herbert Hopkins. Most of you will say “huh?” and rightly so. A few of you, who are, like me, interested in studying legitimate unusual phenomena may recognize the name, and a handful really into investigating strange occurrences may know exactly who I am talking about. Those who don’t, stayed tuned and I’ll fill you in.

First, a bit of background in a couple areas, on my uncle himself, and on the peculiar phenomena known as the Men in Black (no, not the movie with Will Smith or Johnny Cash clones with bad attitudes).

My uncle was well-known locally and somewhat nationally for a couple reasons. He was a renowned allergist and made WHO’S WHO for his pioneering work with MS. He had a genius level IQ, and knew it, and as is the case sometimes with folks like that (nothing I’ll personally ever have to worry about) had trouble relating to people he thought beneath him in intellectual ability (though conversely he constantly craved an audience, no matter what level). He was often very cold and distant, clinical, the exact opposite of my aunt, who was a lovely, caring woman, if easily deluded. I spent nearly an entire summer living with them while my mother was going through a number of operations, and for the most part I loved every minute of it. Some of my best memories are of the holiday times we spent there, at least with my aunt and cousins, because relating to Uncle Herb was difficult on the best of days (God forbid you did something stupid because you would be belittled for it, and at times I was stupidity-prone). He was vehement in his opinions, strident in expressing them, and unforgiving of those who dared to disagree. And if he caught you, you were in for literally hours of enduring those opinions. Then usually a neck brace from nodding the whole time (if you knew what was good for you). But he could build an electronic organ from scratch, damn near cure the common cold sometimes and his house was a child’s wonderland of passages and an entire wall of speakers (and believe me once those were fired up the whole house shuddered with sound.) He was brilliant and the world was better for him. But sometimes that brilliance has its price, or takes its toll.

He also, for a time in the 1970s, ran a psychic “church”. I have some stories about that, but I’ll save those for another day.

Men in Black. Those enigmatic dudes dressed in, um, black, who show up after a UFO encounter to give some poor soul a bucket load of grief. Them of pasty faces, no lips and all the warmth of Martha Stewart.

And unfortunately the second thing my uncle is known for.

The story originally appeared in the tabloid rag The Star (though I clearly recall the night he first told it. I had just entered high school and my grandparents were up from Florida. They were the ones who my aunt was out with that fateful night and who brought the story back to me.) It was later picked up, with minor variations (or embellishments) in Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown, the excellent encyclopedia set Mysteries of Mind, Space & Time and Jenny Randles’ book, The Truth Behind the Men in Black, among others.

The story goes like this: On a balmy September night in 1976 here in Old Orchard Beach, Dr. Herbert Hopkins, then 58, was home alone (he rarely went anywhere at that point) when he got a mysterious phone call from somebody purporting to be from the New Jersey UFO Research Organization, asking to stop by and discuss a recent case my uncle had been working on. My uncle was a fairly well-known hypnotherapist who had been assisting with the David Stephens abduction case (somewhat famous for the Oxford, Maine, sighting and abduction incident. Stephens and a friend had encountered floating lights on a night drive, experienced hallucinogenic after-effects and missing time.) This person from the NJ-UFO-RO wanted to discuss the case, so my uncle agreed. No sooner did he hang up and switch on the living room light (there were three doors to this place, one from the street, two from the side, one of those entering the shed leading to the kitchen and the other leading directly into the living room. A fourth door actually lay between those, leading to the underground doctor’s office and waiting room. So why the Man in Black (MIB) picked the living room instead of the front door is unknown.) than did this MIB appear at the door. The man had said he was calling from a phone booth, but the distance to the closest booth was many blocks away. (In one version I personally got from my uncle they had a big black car. The story grew quite a bit over time.)

The man had a bald head, drawn-on lips (he wore some sort of lipstick that rubbed off on his glove) and the usual deadpan, monotoned attitude associated with MIBs. I won’t go too deep into the actual story because you can read about it in numerous places, but in a nutshell, this MIB made a coin dematerialize to another “plane”, claimed to have done the same to the heart of another abductee nearby (he was referring to Barney Hill, whose heart, is indeed still intact) and threatened to do the same to my uncle if he did not erase all the tapes from the hypnotic session interviews of David Stephens (anyone wonder why a being who can makes hearts and coins vanish didn’t just simply make the tapes vanish? Tapes that were already public knowledge, incidentally, so why bother?)

At the end of the meeting the MIB’s voice slowed like a battery running down and he staggered away. Which is a pretty intimidating thing to do when you are threatening someone…

There is a related incident a bit later with my uncle’s oldest son and wife (who lived in an apartment on the property), but I will leave that one alone for now. Suffice to say, take it with a huge grain of salt. (As an aside, my cousin was later murdered by that very same wife, so that probably tells you something of the family dynamics there.)

Anyway, like I said, the whole thing was sold to the Star and propagated throughout many legitimate journals devoted to psychic and unusual phenomena investigation. Mostly based on a Dr.’s reputation, despite the obvious inconsistencies of the tale and inherent 50s paranoia overtones (which was exactly where the tale came from. My uncle was an avid reader of 50s horror and sci fi comics, paperbacks and old pulps and minimal research will turn up the parallels.)

My uncle was, unfortunately, a fantasy-prone individual, craved the center of attention and limelight and on a base level he sometimes just made things up—no matter how hyperbolic—to top everybody else. As brilliant as he was in many areas, however, he was unskilled at fiction.

And for much of the ‘70s and 80s, he was an alcoholic. Every night was spent alone with a magnum of wine (he made his own wine, too, in a still in the basement). He would stumble up the stairs at about 5am, tripping over the “invisible dog”. How did I know about the invisible dog? Well, a handful of times when I was sleeping over I would be awake and hear that tripping and the inevitable curse, “goddamn dog!” The real dog, incidentally, was next to me on the bed, staring out at the hall, wondering what the hell the thud had been.

The bottom line for this particular Man in Black tale is unfortunately pretty mundane. This mysterious being in black, inspired by cheap fiction and alcohol, probably less of malicious intent and more from some sad need for attention, was, alas, a simple lie, one that needs to be corrected for those into serious research in this area.

And y’all thought your relatives were weird?