Keith presents the disturbing case of Dr. Hopkins in Maine, who was visited in 1976 by a bald, lipless man in black while researching a UFO abduction. The visitor demonstrated apparent psychic ability by identifying coins in the doctor's pocket, then caused a penny to slowly dematerialize in Hopkins' open hand. The man warned that the same thing had happened to UFO abductee Barney Hill's heart. Hopkins destroyed all his research and never investigated UFOs again.
The program traces men in black accounts back to the 1500s, when similar figures appeared in connection with witchcraft and plague outbreaks across Europe. Callers share their own encounters, including a woman whose terminally ill father was visited by men in black who told him they would return to take him to his deceased wife. Keith concludes that while most cases involve government intimidation, a small but irreducible core of encounters remains unexplainable.
Key Moments
Four categories of Men in Black: Keith lays out his core thesis: Men in Black encounters fall into at least four types - government agents shutting up UFO witnesses since the early 1950s, hoaxers and self-deluded UFO buffs, possible alien-connected cases, and a genuinely supernatural category he says we know a lot about but cannot explain.
Dr. Hopkins, the disappearing penny, and Barney Hill: Keith details the 1976 Maine case of Dr. Herbert Hopkins, hypnotically regressing a UFO abductee, who was visited by a bald, lipless, lipstick-mouthed man in black who dematerialized a penny in the doctor's open hand and told him the same thing had happened to Barney Hill's heart.
Maury Island - the first MIB visit: Keith places the earliest documented Men in Black encounter 13 days before Kenneth Arnold's Mount Rainier sighting: the Maury Island affair near Tacoma, where three donut-shaped UFOs allegedly dropped metal and slag onto a boat, and a man in black contacted witness Harold Dahl the next day to tell him to keep his mouth shut.