8bitagent wrote:Luther Blissett wrote:Got around to watching this last night (rented: itunes: $4) and it was amazing. While I had definitely done my fair share of Mothman research years ago, seeing this gave me new understanding of some aspects of the case or helped me to add visual contextualization. I'll have to admit that the Mothman Prophecies film starring Richard Gere helped to muddy the waters on what exactly the difference was between the Men In Black and Indrid Cold, as I had forgotten that Indrid Cold appeared primarily to Woodrow Derenberger and his family (though also to at least two other motorists on Route 77 the same night as Derenberger's initial meeting).
Interesting to note the the aspects of this case that take on "Grinning Man" mythos appear to the eyewitnesses by different means. To Derenberger, his initial encounter with Cold has Cold grinning at his passenger's side window and communicating telepathically. To the Lilly family in Point Pleasant, the Grinning Man was a huge home intruder. To Mary Hyre, the Point Pleasant journalist covering many of the Mothman reports, the grinning man was a short Asian man with a bowl haircut, dark tan, thick glasses, black suit, and a halting accent.
I didn't know that the one classic "Grinning Man" case, that in Elizabeth NJ, was from October 1966, one month before Derenberger's encounter with Cold - though the account from the two boys doesn't necessarily sound like Cold as he's wearing a cheesy, 60's sci-fi-sounding glittering green spacesuit.
The Mary Hyre men in black cases are interesting beyond the grinning Asian man who stole her pen. I was a little disappointed that the documentary didn't go as in-depth into those - their behavior towards almost all witnesses was so outlandish and the questions so absurd - maybe it would have taken away from the film but I find that kind of high weirdness testimony to be almost more compelling than anything else.
Very interesting to note that a pair of hunters spying on Derenberger saw Men in Black visiting him - and who were apparently there to warn Derenberger to stop talking about Cold to the press and the authorities.
Does anyone have an account from Derenberger of his missing six months when he supposedly left the planet with Cold?
I had never even heard of the grinning man aspect. And it sounds like, there was a whole buffet of bizarre Forteana going on in that area beyond mothman/UFOs/men in black.
It's interesting how it's the late 1960's, yet witnesses say the men and their vehicles took on a slightly anachronistic aesthetic. It's like these non corporeal projections, while manifesting as physical, change to reflect the times but often miss the mark. I'm reminded of the phantom airships people used to write about in the late 19th century
But the whole men in black phenomenon reminds me of this, probably one of the most bizarre blogs Jeff ever wrote
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2 ... nders.html
Contactee and witness reports have always run a pretty wide gamut as far as the aesthetics of craft and their occupants are concerned. It is HIGHLY entertaining to imagine extraterrestrials sitting down to think about how to project themselves to humankind - in antiquity, they settled on angels, then devils, then hair-covered hominids in 16th-century Asia onward, then fairies, then little people, then fat michelin men in 19th and 20th century France, then little green men, then robots, then greys, then reptilians, etc etc. Or on the flipside, through Hugh's lens, it is also highly entertaining to imagine intelligence agencies deciding how to project these psychonauts onto unwitting civilian victims. But the reality of contactee lore show that while a lot of these trends come and go, possibly based on culture, there are a few constants unchanged throughout the years. I like the outlier aesthetics and find some of those cases to be the most frightening and interesting (like Jeff's post here:
If you go out in the woods or the Sherman Ranch or Bibendum). I can't ever imagine having an experience like this in general - and trying to imagine a "Michelin Man" contact in my bedroom in the middle of the night is just beyond dissonant. I think when we read contactee reports that sound mysteriously like a lobster humanoid in 1983, or a hammerhead shark humanoid in 1977, we need to take those with a grain of salt, because while the costume designers for the Star Wars trilogy were highly creative folks, I don't know that any one of them were basing their designs off of personal experience with the weird. But hey, maybe!
The men in black mythos is remarkably consistent throughout history, when threatening, authoritarian, black-garbed men were going around warning people to keep their mouths shut about various events that had befallen them, through the pre-internet 20th century when a person would have had to have a lot of wherewithal to research the legends and cases to know the details that well.
I have to put this question to the board because my stance is biased - in the 80's and 90's, before the movie, was "men in black" a household phrase? "Men in black" have been a part of my family's history since the 60's because they were the ones who broke into my mother's childhood home (twice), ransacked my grandfather's office, and stole his reports and models of their experience. Though these guys were always presumed by my family to have been agents of the FAA, my grandfather's employer.
I'd love to see a South American Lawn Gnome documentary. Damn.
p.s. 8bit, gmail stopped automatically logging AIM usernames into their service and I was too busy at work to notice for like two weeks. Starting Tuesday I should be back online though.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
