by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
UFOlogy has always attracted its fair share of academics, and some have managed to incorporate it into their fields of study. Fields such as astronomy, psychology, sociology, history and folklore studies lend themselves easily to the subject, and the literature is filled with books, papers, and articles, often in peer-reviewed journals, by professionals in those fields. Two famous examples are Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Dr. Jacques Vallée. Some were drawn to the subject because of a personal experience (Vallée had a sighting as a teenager) and one of those was Julliard professor of humanities and folklore, Peter Rojcewicz. He focused on Men in Black stories, wrote an article that was published in an academic journal in 1987, and then made the news when he lectured on the subject.
Rojcewicz wrote a 13-page article titled, “The ‘Men in Black’ Experience and Tradition: Analogues with the Traditional Devil Hypothesis,” that was published in the April-June 1987 (Vol. 100, No. 396, pp. 148-160) Journal of American Folklore.
In his article, Rojcewicz traces the origin of the modern Men in Black “tradition” to Albert K. Bender who shut down his organization, the International Flying Saucer Bureau, in 1953 after claiming he was visited by three MiBs. Rojcewicz describes the reported appearances and behaviors of the MiB that are familiar to many readers, provides first-hand accounts, compares the MiB tradition with the Devil tradition, and concludes that folklorists should entertain “the possibility that a real experience lies behind traditional belief.”
In 1990, Rojcewicz spoke in Minnesota, as part of a lecture series presented by Medtronic, which brought in people from the world of alternative science and the paranormal to speak about their work. Covering his talk is the article (page 1 of the pdf) by Gordon Slovut headlined, “Encounters With ‘Men in Black’: Fact or Fantasy?” published in the March 24, 199o, Minneapolis Star Tribune. Read more
In our last blog, about a boy who claimed he’d been hit in the chest by a paralyzing beam of light from a UFO, we wrote, “Reports of people suffering physical effects after being zapped by UFOs appears often enough in UFO literature that an author could devote an entire book to them.” Proving our point, we stumbled upon a similar case involving a policeman as we were looking for material for this week’s blog. Whereas the former case only had a single witness, the case we’re looking at this week has multiple witnesses.
In last week’s 
Reports of people suffering physical effects after being zapped by UFOs appears often enough in UFO literature that an author could devote an entire book to them. In 1980, there was such a report out of Foxboro, Massachusetts, that was looked into by local investigators. A detailed 
In 1958, motorists in Elkton, Michigan, were alarmed by the sight of a blue creature with blinking lights and what looked to be a space helmet. Estimates of its size ranged from 2 to 10 feet tall, and mothers who spotted it while looking out the windows of their homes were 
We often write about UFO cases that end up being neglected as other more dramatic cases grab the attention of investigators and the press. A case that was doomed to just this sort of treatment involved reports on October 22, 1973, out of Indiana. This was just after the October 12th Pascagoula Incident and the October 18th Coyne Helicopter Incident, and while all three cases share the front page of the September-October 1973 APRO Bulletin, the Indiana case faded into obscurity as the other two became classics.
It often happens that reported UFO incidents get lost when the media is focused on one of more reports that might be more sensational. This seems to have been the situation in Italy in 1979. There had been a flap in Italy throughout 1978 and a 
While J. Allen Hynek was bringing the invisible college out into the open, he became involved with a documentary that has Rod Serling as its main host, along with Burgess Meredith, José Ferrer, and Vallée. The movie makes a compelling argument that UFOs should be taken seriously and includes appearances by former Blue Book heads Robert Friend and Hector Quintanilla.
Recently, there have been reports throughout the media that FBI files concerning a UFO sighting reported by three Anoka, Minnesota, police officers have been declassified and are available at the National Archives. Remarkably, almost none of the media outlets covering the story provide a link to the actual document with the exception one news outlet, KARE 11, which was kind enough to provide a 
By the time Project Blue Book was terminated, most UFO researchers, especially in the United States, were of the opinion that UFOs were nuts and bolts craft piloted by flesh and blood creatures from other planets. This is what has become known as the extraterrestrial hypothesis or ETH. At around the same time, as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, Jacques Vallée had one book published and John Keel had two published, that challenged the ETH, and caused many in the UFO community to consider other options.
In the early years of the flying saucer/UFO mystery, magazines played a significant part in the public perception of the phenomenon. One of the most popular magazines in that era was LIFE, which started covering saucer/UFO news at the very beginning during the 1947 summer of the saucers. For anyone interested in the early history of the phenomenon, Archives for the Unexplained has a collection of related magazine articles which includes LIFE