THE TRUTH B EH I N D M E N I N BLACK
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significant cases and as a result not going down too well in the Pentagon. He soon quit the USAF in frustration and strongly affirmed UFO reality in his memoirs published in
1 956, while speculating that he was a front man to an unseen cover-up. Apart from this sleight of hand with the figures, there are grounds for suggesting that the sudden spate of absurd ' 'con tactee" stories that appeared during 1953 and 1 954 were stim ulated by the CIA Out of nowhere came various amiable crackpots claiming that they had met friendly spacemen and been taken for rides on their starships to serve as representives in some intergalactic federation. Did US intelligence have a hand in planting these stories by getting agents to claim bizarre yarns which UFOlogists would eagerly promote? Even if the contactee movement hap pened by chance, these tales were just what Dr. Robertson ordered. They made those starting to take UFO data seriously begin to doubt their wisdom. Ruppelt was eventually forced to recant because of them and published a new version of his book in which he disowned his previous positive conclusions. Given these things, we must wonder how Albert Bender' s new UFO organisation was perceived b y the intelligence agen cies and what they chose to do about it. They surely must have monitored his progress and been desperate to defuse the impact he was having on popular opinion.
T H E VISITATI O N Only days after the Roberston Panel met in 1 953, Bender ap pointed a man called Gray Barker to be director of investi gations for the US branch of his IFSB. Barker certainly wrote in colorful prose and was not opposed to making things up if they sounded better than the truth. This I can vouch for from first hand experience based on a tale he published about me in 1 983 which was about as credible as a novel by Enid S ly ton. Barker's propensity to embroider the truth may have been