--- title: "He Made Them Up, Made Money, And Kept The Letters." dek: "The men in black entered the world in a 1956 book by a West Virginia publisher. He wrote to one collaborator afterwards: evidently the fans swallowed this one with a gulp. His whole archive is in a public library." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: Off-World author: Ambrose Teague and Marguerite Lyle (fictional) published: 2026-08-10T02:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/saucerian-kept-the-letters tags: men in black, Clarksburg, publishing, hoax, archives genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # He Made Them Up, Made Money, And Kept The Letters. *The men in black entered the world in a 1956 book by a West Virginia publisher. He wrote to one collaborator afterwards: evidently the fans swallowed this one with a gulp. His whole archive is in a public library.* 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. > **Figure:** Where every part of the legend comes from — see https://theyburied.com/article/saucerian-kept-the-letters ## 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. > One man is the source, the publisher, the magazine that reviewed it, and the archive it now sits in. That is not a conspiracy. That is a small business. ## 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. ## Sources (invented) - The publisher's papers, A named collection in a county public library — Read across two days in the reading room; boxes 12 to 16 (April 2026) - The 1956 book and the full run of his magazine, Published, and held in the same collection — Read; the magazine's review of the book is in the issue after the book appeared (April 2026) - Ottilie Marchbanks-Nwachukwu, Librarian, special collections — Interviewed at the desk and again by telephone (April 2026) - Prof. Sunniva Delacroix-Obiora, Folklorist — Interviewed by video call twice (May 2026) - The published confession of a collaborator, An article in a magazine of record, 1998 — Read; he wrote it himself, under his own name, describing what he had done at eighteen (2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-2089: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2089 ## What we could not confirm - What happened in September 1953. A man closed his club and said three men in dark suits had called on him. He may have been lying, frightened, unwell, or telling the truth. He is not here to ask and this newspaper is not going to decide it for him. - How much of the rest was invented. We can show one hoax, in writing, in the man's own hand, and a magazine that reviewed its own publisher's book. We cannot draw a line through the whole archive. - Why it took. Our folklorist thinks this is the only interesting question and she does not claim to have answered it either. ## Right of reply **Prof. Sunniva Delacroix-Obiora, folklorist** (Asked to reply because she expects the piece to be used as a debunking and thinks that is the least interesting thing in it. Printed unedited.): > Your story is accurate and I think it is aimed at the wrong target. > > Yes, he invented things. Small publishers in that period invented things constantly, in every genre, and most of what they invented is gone. Nobody remembers the other four hundred saucer pamphlets of the 1950s. Something happened to this one. > > The question a folklorist wants answered is: why did this take? > > Here is my answer, and it is not flattering to anybody including me. The men in black are the only part of the whole saucer literature that is about *us*. Everything else in that literature is about them — their craft, their metals, their intentions. The men in black are about what happens to a 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 very small in front of them, in a decade that had given them excellent reasons to feel that way. > > He did not invent that feeling. He found it, and he was a good enough publisher to know he had found it. > > So when your readers get to the end and feel superior, I would like them to notice that the invention outlived the inventor by forty years and is now in films, and ask themselves what it is doing for the people who repeat it. It is doing something. It has always been doing something. 'A man made it up' is true and it is the beginning of the question, not the end. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.