He Made Them Up, Made Money, And Kept The Letters.

CLARKSBURG, W.Va. — The men in black have an address.

It is a public library in Clarksburg, West Virginia, in the papers of a small-press publisher who died in 1984. Boxes 12 to 16. You need a reader's card, which is free, and you need to ask at the desk.

Our correspondent was the only person in the room both days.

Where they enter the world

A man in Connecticut closed his flying saucer club in September 1953 and said that three men in dark suits had called on him and told him to stop.

That is the seed, and this newspaper is not going to decide what happened to him. He may have been lying, frightened, unwell, or telling the truth. He is dead and it is not ours to settle.

What happened next is documented to the page.

A publisher in West Virginia turned it into a book in 1956, and it is in that book that they acquire the black suits, the black car, the flat delivery and the arriving-at-your-door. Not in 1953. In 1956, in print, for sale.

He reviewed his own book

He also ran a magazine.

The issue that came out after the book appeared carries a review of the book. The review is warm. Both are in the same collection, one box apart, and our correspondent read them in the same afternoon.

This is not a scandal. It is what a small press was, and anybody who has run one will recognise it immediately.

The letter

The thing this newspaper drove to West Virginia for is a letter.

In the late 1960s he asked an eighteen-year-old correspondent to invent an encounter. The young man did: he wrote it up under a doctorate he did not have and a name that was not his, describing being silenced by three figures after learning what the craft really were.

The publisher printed it.

Then he wrote to the young man about how it had gone, and the sentence in that letter is the reason this story exists:

Evidently the fans swallowed this one with a gulp.

The young man grew up and, in 1998, wrote the whole thing out himself under his own name, in a magazine of record. This newspaper did not have to find him or persuade him. He said it in public twenty-eight years ago and it has been sitting there since.

The book nobody quotes

The man whose 1953 visit started it published his own account in 1962.

In it, the visitors are from Antarctica.

Almost nothing that circulates about the men in black comes from that book, which is odd, given that its author is the only person who claimed to have met them. The version everybody knows is the publisher's version, and the difference between the two is a fact you can check in an afternoon.

What our folklorist would not let us end on

Professor Sunniva Delacroix-Obiora read our draft and asked to reply, on the grounds that we were aiming at the wrong target, and her statement runs in full at the foot of this page.

Her argument is that a thousand saucer pamphlets were invented in that decade and are gone, and something happened to this one, and why is the only question worth asking.

Her answer is the best paragraph anybody has given this desk this year. Everything else in that literature is about them — their craft, their metals, their intentions. The men in black are the only part that is about us: about what happens to an ordinary person who finds something out. They wear suits. They arrive at your door. They are polite. They know your name.

That is not a story about space. It is a story about institutions, told by people who felt small in front of them, in a decade that had given them reasons to.

He did not invent the feeling. He found it, and he was a good enough publisher to know what he had.

What this story establishes

That the men in black as everybody pictures them were assembled by one man in one town who wrote the book, printed it, reviewed it in his own magazine, commissioned at least one hoax in writing, and kept the paperwork.

The paperwork is the point. He could have burned it. Publishers burn things.

He gave it to a library instead, and the library catalogued it, and it has been on a shelf in Clarksburg for forty years waiting for somebody to drive over and ask.