Hi, everyone and welcome back to Geek Time. Hi, Brad.

Hey Lulu, how's it going?

So what are you going to propose that we talk about today?

Have you ever heard of the Men in Black?

You want to talk about the movie?

No, not the movie, of course not. We never talk about movies.

The book? The comment?

No. The real Men in Black.

Hang on a minute就是黑衣人。Are they actually real?

Yeah, they're real. According to popular legend at least they are real organization.

Okay. So let's talk... I'm always into urban legends. Let's talk about Men in Black then. I, because my whole understanding of Men in Black is basically based on the movie. I think there were two or three movies, 就是黑衣人那个系列的电影. They sort of combat aliens or they are in contact with aliens, all the alien species. They seem to be like the contact people. 如果大家没有看过黑衣人电影的话, 可以去看一看，这个电影已经蛮老了, 但是还是蛮有意思的. But who are they?

So that's always a really difficult thing to really know, according to a lot of people say they’re Men in Black are just people in business suits who show up to UFO sightings. Whenever there's a UFO sighting or whenever some people are talking about the UFOs, they're the ones who show up and tell people to be quiet.

So, they have been seen in many times throughout the years. There is even some video footage of people who are supposedly men in black.

There's video footage.

Yeah. There's like you don't really see the interaction between them, but at a UFO sighting in a hotel, there were two men who showed up after two of the employees just were talking about the UFO to the news.

I see. So is it the sort of idea that government or some sort of organization doesn't want people to know about the real possibility of UFO or aliens, 好像是一个cover up situation that they use these men in black. I remember in the movie that they had this machine that they can erase your memory.

So that is something that people actually talk about as something that Men in Black can use or do. Sometimes people say that it's not really a machine, it's just the way you feel like that when the Men in Black come to talk to you, they're kind of like these cold emotionless people. They may not even be real people.

They might be drones.

It might be aliens themselves. Right. But they come they talk to you, they intimidate you. And sometimes after they come, people feel like they've lost some of their memory of what happened.

It's kind of like intimidation tactic and brainwashing at the same time. I feel like I've seen similar setup in like the Matrix.

Yeah. The agents are often seen as being like the men in black. They're kind of modeled after the men in black. There are people that just kind of show up whenever there's a problem in the Matrix, which is kind of like when the aliens come to earth, right, there's a problem in the Matrix.

I see. I see.

But is this a very common belief like if you talk to, say, average American, do they, have they heard of or at least have some awareness of the idea of men in black?

Well yeah. This has been very common theme for the last at least 40 or 50 years, ever since I was a kid I've heard of the men in black. TV shows have talked about the men in black. There’s unsolved mysteries TV shows that talked about these people that show up whenever people talk about aliens.

I see.

Very, very interesting.

I see. 所以黑衣人就是，只要老百姓发现了外星人或者宇宙飞船的话, 黑衣人就会来到你的家, 就是让你不要再讲这个事情了.

Then you said more than 50 years, what was the earliest sighting of these men in black?

The first recorded sighting of the men in black was in 1947. There was a man who saw a UFO he went to talk to the news about it. And then the men in black came to his house.

You sure that it's not just FBI or something.

It could be the FBI, but a lot of times, when people talk to FBI, the FBI act a little bit differently. They show up to your house and they show you their badge, right? They'll say I'm from the FBI. When the men in black show up, they don't show you their badge. They just show up. Sometimes they just show up and stare at you, whereas the FBI if they show up, they usually hide. They don't want you to know they're there. But if they need to talk to you, they'll come to you and they'll show you here's my FBI badge. I wanna talk to you.

I see, maybe this is just a special branch of FBI.

It could be, right. There's a lot of possibilities on who they could really be. They might be just a thing of imagination or it might be a real organization.

And the thing is I don't think they're very popular now, I think this whole idea of Men in Black which probably more popular in, let's say 20, 30 years ago maybe?

Oh, yeah. It was after the first sighting like in the 50s and 60s, they really started ramping up. They really started getting popular, probably because like the news and those types of things became more widespread.

Yeah, like 20, 30 years ago when the movie came out, it was really really popular, everybody knew the Men in Black.

Thanks to the movie, the movies I think were in the 90s.

Yeah, yeah. The first movie came out and like the late 90s.

But this is the thing, because of the Men in Black movie franchise就是黑人电影. So I always thought this was just like a comical imagination. So like a made up story, you know, it's like Harry Potter or Avatar that sort of thing.

That's the whole point. A lot of times there's what we call a PsyOp, psychological operation.

PsyOp? Isn't that a military thing就是心理战? Isn't that a military thing?

Yeah. Basically, they want you to feel like this group of people is just a comical thing. It can't possibly be real. If your neighbor starts talking about the Men in Black coming to their house, people will laugh it off. They'll think that's just a movie, right?

Oh. Hiding in plain sight.

Mhm. Exactly.

That's smart.

So if you want to cover something up, instead of trying to make it a super big secret, you tried to use modern media to make it into some trumped up story or made up story fantasy.

Exactly, no one's going to believe someone who said they saw Harry Potter, right?

Yeah. I have to rethink about Hogwarts. Maybe it really does exist and that was just a cover up.

Hogwarts could be a PsyOp, right? Exactly.

Yeah. J.k. Rowlings might have just been hired by the government to cover up the magic world.

Some people say that J.K. Rowlings isn't even really a real person. They just think she's just like an actor.

Okay. Now that's blowing my mind, I think if they use this type of strategy, the PsyOp, what you call it, psychological operation, to do things like the opposite direction instead of trying to cover up, put it in plain sight, actually make it into a blockbuster movie and then people will never really take it seriously.

Yeah, Men in Black, Stargate, 20 or 30 years ago, I started hearing things about a real Stargate, and I was just like what are you talking about, it's a TV show. And then I started looking into it, and then even in the TV show Stargate, they make a joke about PsyOp. So about how there is really, the show, there it's a government agency that goes to other planets using a stargate, but someone knows about it, and so they PsyOp it, and make it into a TV show, within the TV show. It's brilliant.

Yeah. That is really messing with my brain, with my mind.

Mhm.

But are they just exclusively related to UFO, aliens, spaceship?

Not just UFOs. It's primarily UFO sightings, but as the men in black, I think as the legend became much wider, you started seeing them in other situations, right? I mentioned like you there was a hotel siting where people talked about the UFOs that they saw to the news, and then the men in black came to the hotel. They were caught on video. But there were some other things. There was something called the Mothman.

Woo… I know that it's就天蛾人. I think that's a big urban legend in America. Right?

Yeah, we can probably get into the Mothman. And in another episode. But…

If you want to sound geekier.

It's really really big, right? There's a lot of legend going on there, but they said that even during like this whole Mothman episode during the men in black went there, some people think the Mothman might have been an alien, some people think that it might be something else, but the men in black, they showed up during to talk or to hush people up during the things that were going on with the Mothman.

It does just sound like anything that's inexplicable, anything that's too mysterious for people to understand, for the general public to understand at this current stage, seems that the men in black will be sent out to hush the whole...or to cover the whole thing up.

Exactly.

If we believe in conspiracy theory. Yeah. All right, I think we're gonna wrap up the basic episode where we told you about the concept of Men in Black, and then introduced you to the horrifying idea of that all of these might just be a PsyPo or psychological operation.

In the advanced episode, we're going to get a little bit into this whole concept, and also what they really do, and any more possibilities behind this whole urban legend. Thank you, Brad, for coming to the show.

No problem. See you in the next episode.

We'll see you in the next episode. And meanwhile, if you wanna say anything about men in black or something similar, leave us a comment in the comment section, we'll see you next time. Bye.

See you next time. Bye everyone.