THE BORROWED BOOGEYMAN: Men in Black, Papa Doc's Tonton Makout, and the Possible Weaponization of an American Nightmare
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| Two different faces of terror. One stubborn bastard who refuses to be intimidated. |
THE MAN IN BLACK WHO WASN'T HIDING
Historical source note: UFO researcher Allen H. Greenfield recounted an encounter with a mysterious individual at the June 1969 National UFO Conference in Charleston, West Virginia. Greenfield reported photographing the man and hearing him describe himself as a "man in black in training." The account was revisited in Alternate Perceptions Magazine, May 2022, in the article "Reality Checking," which also discusses a possible identification of the individual and the suggestion that the encounter may have been staged.
Source: Alternate Perceptions Magazine, "Reality Checking," May 2022.
https://www.apmagazine.info/index.php?Itemid=53&id=1829&option=com_content&view=article
Photograph attribution: Attributed to Allen H. Greenfield, Charleston, West Virginia, June 1969. Original negative, publication history, and reproduction rights not independently verified.
Charleston, West Virginia. June 1969.
A photograph allegedly taken by UFO researcher Allen H. Greenfield shows an unusual-looking gentleman dressed in black.
The image has circulated through the darker corridors of UFO literature for decades, accompanied by a rather extraordinary declaration:
"I am a man in black in training."
Now, there's a statement worth examining.
Not because it proves the gentleman was an authentic Man in Black. It doesn't.
Not because the photograph establishes the existence of a clandestine organization tasked with terrorizing UFO witnesses. It doesn't do that either.
But because of what the image accomplishes psychologically.
Here we have a man who supposedly identifies himself as a trainee in one of the most notorious organizations in American paranormal folklore.
And he allows himself to be photographed.
Think about that.
An alleged representative of an organization supposedly dedicated to secrecy, intimidation, and the suppression of inconvenient information voluntarily steps in front of a camera.
Either this gentleman was spectacularly incompetent at his chosen profession, or the photograph was never about secrecy in the first place.
Perhaps it was about publicity.
Not publicity in the conventional sense, mind you.
Publicity of a particular kind.
The kind that manufactures an expectation.
The kind that teaches an audience what to fear before that fear ever comes knocking.
The photograph's precise circumstances remain unresolved. The original negative, identity of the subject, and contemporaneous documentation require further verification. Its historical value as evidence of an actual clandestine operative is therefore limited.
Its value as a piece of mythology, however, is another matter entirely.
And that brings us to Haiti.
PAPA DOC AND THE POLITICS OF THE BOOGEYMAN
In 1957, François Duvalier became president of Haiti.
By 1959, his regime had established a paramilitary organization officially known as the Volunteers for National Security, or VSN.
History remembers them by another name.
The Tonton Macoutes.
In Haitian folklore, Tonton Makout refers to a frightening figure, an uncle with a sack who carries away disobedient children.
Duvalier's enforcers borrowed that name and transformed it into something considerably more tangible.
They became instruments of political intimidation, surveillance, repression, and murder.
They operated with extraordinary impunity, frequently outside ordinary police and military structures.
They were associated with the state while functioning as a force whose arbitrary violence made ordinary legal protections unreliable.
And they understood something about human psychology that deserves our attention.
You don't have to arrest everyone to control a population.
You don't even have to threaten everyone.
You simply have to convince everyone that they might be next.
A whispered warning. An unexpected visitor. An acquaintance who suddenly disappears.
A stranger standing across the street who seems particularly interested in your front door.
Eventually, the public begins doing the work of the enforcer.
People censor themselves.
They avoid certain conversations.
They stop asking questions.
Fear becomes self-sustaining.
Duvalier's regime also exploited religious imagery, folklore, and the political power of supernatural associations. That doesn't mean Haitian Vodou itself was responsible for the regime's violence. The distinction matters: a dictatorship appropriating religious symbolism is not the same thing as a religion endorsing dictatorship.
But the political utility of a supernatural reputation was unmistakable.
The Tonton Macoutes were real.
Their violence was real.
And their borrowed folkloric identity magnified the terror they could produce.
Now consider the Men in Black.
TWO MENACES, ONE PSYCHOLOGICAL BLUEPRINT
The earliest prominent American Men in Black accounts emerged in the 1950s, particularly through the experiences and writings of UFO researcher Albert K. Bender.
In 1953, Bender abruptly curtailed his UFO investigations, claiming that mysterious visitors had warned him away from the subject.
His later book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, published in 1962, helped establish the imagery of mysterious figures exerting pressure upon UFO investigators.
By the middle and late 1960s, writer John Keel and others were documenting a growing body of accounts involving bizarre visitors, unexplained telephone calls, apparent surveillance, and threats directed toward people associated with UFO sightings.
And while the Men in Black and the Tonton Macoutes were not historically identical organizations, their reputations suggest an interesting comparison.
The comparison is not proof of a shared origin, coordination, or operational connection.
But it reveals something fascinating about the architecture of intimidation.
Both reputations depend upon uncertainty.
Who are these people?
Who gives them orders?
What are they authorized to do?
And perhaps most importantly:
Who the hell do you complain to when the people terrorizing you appear to answer to nobody?
That last question is essential.
A recognizable government agency has an organizational structure, however imperfect its accountability might be.
A uniformed officer has a department.
An intelligence operative, at least theoretically, belongs to an institution.
But the unidentified gentleman in the black suit?
He might be military intelligence.
He might be a federal agent.
He might be a lunatic.
He might be something that isn't human at all.
The uncertainty is part of the terror.
And when uncertainty becomes a weapon, the mythology begins doing the heavy lifting.
THE MAN IN BLACK TRAINING PROGRAM
Let's return to our gentleman in Charleston.
A Man in Black in training.
Training for what, exactly?
How to select a properly sinister necktie?
How to stare through someone's living-room window without appearing overly enthusiastic?
How to make a threatening telephone call while sounding like a malfunctioning refrigerator?
Those possibilities are amusing.
The alternative is less so.
Suppose, strictly as a working hypothesis, that the Men in Black mythology could provide cover for an organized campaign of witness intimidation.
What would the training actually involve?
It might have very little to do with extraterrestrials.
It might have everything to do with psychology.
The objective would not necessarily be to prevent someone from investigating an unusual event.
It would be to make continuing that investigation personally expensive.
A researcher could continue asking questions.
But perhaps mysterious strangers would continue appearing outside his residence.
Perhaps his spouse would begin receiving strange telephone calls.
Perhaps someone would casually mention his children's school.
Not an explicit threat, necessarily.
Something more carefully constructed.
A statement designed to remain in the mind long after the person delivering it had departed.
The message would be simple:
You can continue investigating this subject.
And we can continue making your life miserable.
That's not evidence that such a training program existed. It is an examination of how a coercive operation could exploit an existing legend.
A successful intimidation campaign doesn't need to prove its capabilities.
It needs the target to imagine them.
The victim supplies the rest.
THE ART OF DENIABLE TERROR
Here's where the comparison with Duvalier's Haiti becomes particularly instructive.
The Tonton Macoutes were a documented paramilitary force tied to a documented dictatorship.
Their relationship with state power was not a paranormal mystery.
But their ability to operate arbitrarily, and often outside ordinary accountability, created a climate in which victims could not rely upon established institutions for protection.
Men in Black stories describe a different, largely unverified phenomenon, but one with a comparable psychological effect.
The alleged visitor claims authority without necessarily demonstrating it.
The witness may assume that the visitor represents some government organization.
The visitor may never actually say so.
And the resulting ambiguity is extraordinarily convenient.
If the stranger is a government agent, the witness fears institutional power.
If the stranger isn't a government agent, the witness fears an organization operating beyond institutional power.
If the stranger isn't human, ordinary notions of protection become almost irrelevant.
Three explanations.
Three different nightmares.
One remarkably efficient method of discouraging curiosity.
It is worth asking whether some historical encounters attributed to Men in Black might have involved ordinary intimidation, mistaken identities, hoaxes, or deliberate impersonation.
Those explanations are not mutually exclusive across every report.
And none requires us to dismiss witnesses who sincerely experienced frightening encounters.
But we should also recognize that a frightening experience and a correct explanation of that experience are two different things.
That's where investigation begins.
Not where it ends.
POINT PLEASANT: A MYTHOLOGY FINDS ITS STAGE
Now we arrive in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
November 1966.
Reports of an extraordinary winged creature begin circulating around the town and its surrounding countryside.
The creature would eventually become known as Mothman.
Over the following thirteen months, the region developed an increasingly elaborate body of strange-event reports.
UFO sightings.
Unusual visitors.
Disturbing telephone calls.
Claims of surveillance.
And eventually, Men in Black.
Then, on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46 people.
The disaster became permanently entangled with the Mothman legend.
John Keel's subsequent writings, particularly The Mothman Prophecies, helped bring the strange events of Point Pleasant into the broader American paranormal imagination.
Here is where I want to introduce a more provocative possibility.
What if Point Pleasant was not merely a location where several unusual stories happened to converge?
What if it also became an unusually effective environment for the development, amplification, or testing of an intimidation mythology?
I am not claiming that the Mothman sightings were fabricated by intelligence operatives.
Nor am I claiming that the Silver Bridge disaster was engineered.
There is no credible evidence establishing either proposition.
But consider the information environment.
A relatively small community experiences an extraordinary wave of attention.
Witnesses report unusual phenomena.
Journalists and investigators arrive.
Rumors spread.
Different categories of anomalous experience begin overlapping.
And among those stories emerge accounts of mysterious individuals apparently interested in discouraging investigation.
From the standpoint of psychological influence, it is a remarkably fertile environment.
The community already has a mystery.
The public already has an appetite for extraordinary explanations.
And the appearance of threatening strangers gives that mystery a human face.
Or something close enough to one.
WAS POINT PLEASANT A PUBLIC-RELATIONS CAMPAIGN?
Let's entertain an uncomfortable hypothesis.
Not a conclusion.
A hypothesis.
What if the Men in Black phenomenon benefited from the publicity surrounding Point Pleasant because it provided a narrative environment in which the intimidating visitor became part of a larger supernatural threat?
Imagine the difference between these two scenarios.
In the first, a UFO witness receives an unpleasant visit from a strange man.
The witness may interpret the encounter as harassment.
In the second, the same witness has spent months hearing about flying creatures, mysterious lights, uncanny visitors, and otherworldly intelligences.
Now the strange man arrives.
He doesn't have to do much.
The community's mythology has already prepared his introduction.
His black suit becomes a uniform.
His awkward behavior becomes evidence that he is something other than human.
His ambiguous statements become threats.
And his very existence seems to confirm that somebody, somewhere, knows more than the public is being told.
This is the central psychological mechanism I find worth investigating.
The mythology prepares the witness to fear the encounter before the encounter takes place.
A real intimidation operation could exploit such expectations.
Equally, ordinary events might be interpreted through them without any organized campaign at all.
Both possibilities deserve scrutiny.
What we cannot responsibly do is treat the existence of an effective psychological mechanism as proof that someone deliberately engineered the entire phenomenon.
The difference between a useful hypothesis and an established historical fact is evidence.
And I intend to keep that distinction intact.
THE CHARLESTON PHOTOGRAPH AS A RECRUITMENT POSTER FOR FEAR
Now reconsider the alleged 1969 photograph.
A gentleman dressed in black.
A mysterious statement about being in training.
A story sufficiently peculiar to survive for decades.
The photograph doesn't have to document an authentic Men in Black operative to perform a cultural function.
In fact, its ambiguity may be the very reason it remains interesting.
A convincing photograph of an identifiable government agent would eventually lead toward an identifiable person.
A documented hoax might eventually resolve into a known prank.
But an unexplained photograph accompanied by an extraordinary claim can remain suspended indefinitely between possibilities.
And that is fertile ground for mythology.
The image effectively supplies a costume.
A behavioral expectation.
An implied organization.
And the suggestion that new members are being recruited and trained.
It tells the audience that the Men in Black aren't merely isolated apparitions.
They might be part of a continuing institution.
There might be experienced operatives.
There might be trainees.
There might be procedures.
There might be an entire apparatus operating somewhere beyond public scrutiny.
None of those possibilities is demonstrated by the photograph.
But all of them can be suggested by its accompanying story.
This is how a small artifact can acquire a significance far beyond its evidentiary value.
It doesn't merely illustrate a legend.
It teaches people how to imagine the legend operating in the real world.
FEAR DOESN'T NEED TO BE TRUE TO BE EFFECTIVE
This is the uncomfortable lesson connecting the Tonton Macoutes with the Men in Black mythology.
The Tonton Macoutes existed.
They were responsible for genuine terror.
Their folkloric name helped reinforce a reputation already supported by actual violence.
The Men in Black occupy a different evidentiary category.
Individual reports exist, but the existence of a unified clandestine organization matching the mythology remains unproven.
Yet the stories themselves can still influence behavior.
An investigator who believes mysterious agents might retaliate against his family may hesitate to publish his findings.
A witness who has heard accounts of harassment may refuse an interview.
A researcher may begin interpreting unrelated encounters as evidence of surveillance.
And once that expectation takes hold, the distinction between an actual threat and an anticipated threat becomes psychologically complicated.
The fear is real even when its proposed source remains uncertain.
This is why the Men in Black mythology deserves serious attention.
Not necessarily because every frightening visitor was a genuine operative.
But because the mythology creates a ready-made vocabulary for intimidation.
And ready-made vocabularies are useful to anyone interested in manipulating perception.
WHO BENEFITS FROM THE BLACK SUIT?
Whenever I examine a persistent mythology, I ask a simple question.
Who benefits?
Who benefits when witnesses become reluctant to speak?
Who benefits when researchers begin doubting their own judgment?
Who benefits when legitimate questions are buried beneath increasingly extravagant speculation?
And who benefits when the public begins associating an entire field of inquiry with paranoia, absurdity, and fear?
There may be different answers in different circumstances.
Sometimes the beneficiary is a hoaxer seeking attention.
Sometimes it's an author selling books.
Sometimes it's an ordinary individual whose behavior has been transformed into folklore.
And, hypothetically, sometimes an organization with an interest in discouraging scrutiny could benefit from the existence of a frightening and difficult-to-verify legend.
The last possibility is worth investigating.
It is not something we can simply assume.
Because the moment we begin treating every unexplained visitor as evidence of a coordinated suppression campaign, we risk becoming participants in the very mythology we're trying to understand.
A serious investigator must resist that temptation.
Even when the more dramatic explanation makes for a hell of a story.
THE BLACK SUIT LEDGER: QUESTIONS STILL UNANSWERED
The Charleston photograph deserves a proper provenance investigation.
Where is the original negative?
What is the earliest verifiable publication of the image?
Did Greenfield identify the precise location where the photograph was taken?
Was the subject attending a convention, a gathering, or an unrelated event?
Were there independent witnesses?
Can the purported statement about being a Man in Black in training be traced to a contemporaneous account, rather than a later retelling?
And how did the photograph's caption or interpretation change as it moved through UFO literature?
The larger historical comparison raises additional questions.
How did American UFO writers describe Men in Black before the Point Pleasant wave?
When did the supernatural qualities of these visitors become prominent?
How did the reputation of the Tonton Macoutes evolve in international reporting during the same period?
And can we identify documented cases in which authorities, impersonators, or private individuals deliberately exploited existing paranormal fears to intimidate witnesses?
Those questions are answerable in principle.
They require archives, contemporaneous accounts, publication histories, and evidence.
Not another round of people shouting about secret agents on the internet.
We have plenty of that already.
THE BORROWED BOOGEYMAN
In Haiti, a dictatorship borrowed a figure from folklore and gave him a gun.
In American UFO culture, an unidentified visitor in a black suit acquired a reputation that could make an ordinary knock at the door sound like the beginning of a nightmare.
These histories are not equivalent.
One concerns a documented system of political terror.
The other concerns a complex mixture of witness testimony, folklore, popular culture, and unresolved claims.
But the comparison reveals something about the relationship between fear and authority.
A frightening reputation can extend the influence of whoever appears to possess it.
Anonymity can magnify power.
Ambiguity can discourage resistance.
And mythology can become a psychological force independent of whether its central claims are true.
That brings us back to the gentleman in Charleston.
The alleged Man in Black in training.
Perhaps he was an actual participant in something clandestine.
Perhaps he was playing a joke.
Perhaps the photograph's story grew substantially in the retelling.
I don't know.
And until better documentation emerges, neither does anyone else.
But I am increasingly interested in a different question.
What happens when the public is taught to recognize an imaginary organization so thoroughly that an actual intimidator could simply put on its uniform?
What happens when the boogeyman becomes a costume anyone can wear?
And what happens when people are so frightened of the costume that they stop asking who's underneath it?
That, my friends, is where folklore stops being merely a collection of stories and becomes a potential instrument of power.
The Tonton Macoutes demonstrated how a real regime could exploit an existing nightmare.
The Men in Black legend raises the possibility that a sufficiently established nightmare could be exploited by someone who never needed to establish an organization at all.
The suit does not prove the authority.
The mythology supplies it.
And perhaps the most important question was never whether the man in Charleston was a genuine Man in Black.
Perhaps it was why someone wanted us to believe he could be.
Taking Stock of What Stalks You.
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