Lucy Palmer is a former security officer and a Wiccan. She shared with me the unsettling and bizarre story of Shelagh and her partner, Robert, and their disturbing immersion into the fraught domain of the Men in Black: “They lived together as partners since meeting in 1983, when the paranormal experiences began almost immediately. At the time this occurred Robert was working in a supermarket and Shelagh was at home alone. It was August 1991 and Shelagh was in the kitchen when she heard the front door bell ring. The building was a terraced house on a very busy Oxford Road in Reading [England]. The house had a flight of seven or eight stone steps up to the front door. This was the kind of house with another set of steps leading to a below street level basement room. Shelagh went to the front door which had a large pane of frosted glass in it, meaning you could see the shadow of anyone standing outside. But what struck Shelagh is that she could not see the dark form of anybody waiting outside, so her initial thought was that they might have gone down to the basement door.

“She opened the door and was confronted by a man with a broad smile on his face, so the suggestion is that he had been stood outside but cast no shadow on the glass! He wore an immaculate black suit, white shirt and black tie. She described his suit as ‘too perfect to be real, with perfect creases in the legs. She reported his shirt as a very dazzling white, hypnotically so. She particularly noticed that he didn’t have a single bead of sweat on his face or staining his shirt collar, even though it was a very hot, cloudless day. His eyes were black and his skin a Mediterranean olive. He carried a brand new briefcase in his right hand. Shelagh was a former police officer, having served in the Rhodesian Special Branch in the 1950s and 1960s. With her experience she has on many occasions demonstrated a good sense of recall which is why she took all this visual information in the first moments of confronting him.

“Then the weird part of her report is that although the road behind him was a busy main road leading directly into the heart of Reading, she gradually became aware of no traffic and no pedestrians passing, with this, everything behind him seemed to slip out of focus. He, on the other hand, still smiling inanely, became sharper focused and she could do nothing about it. Shelagh says her vision was restricted, against her wishes, to focus only on his presence. She could see a small metal pin badge on his right suit jacket lapel and realized this item was what she was continuing to stare at. It sounds like it was exerting a hypnotic fascination. Shelagh never was able to describe what he badge was because even though she was concentrating on it, she found it challenged her by continually slipping out of focus. He then spoke, there was an accent, foreign, probably European, but she could not place it:

“‘Hello, is Robert in?’

“‘No, he’s at work.’

“‘Oh okay,’ the MIB replied, ‘When is he home?’

“‘Probably about 6 this evening.’

“The MIB continued to smile as something very strange then happened. It was like a sudden jump in a film because the next moment he was stood two steps further down, but he hadn’t physically moved. Still smiling, he then told her: ‘You do need to stop what you are doing.’ Then the jump happened a second time and he was stood down on the pavement, all the time perfectly motionless with hands and briefcase held rigidly at his side. Still smiling and looking up at her. Then the next ‘jump’ and he had turned to face the left, (her right). Then he started to walk away – this being the first actual physical movement she was aware of.

“The moment he was out of sight she stepped out of the porch expecting him to be walking along the pavement or getting into a car – but he had disappeared. At that point she realized the street sounds had returned and the usual stream of traffic had resumed. She walked along the street, looking down the only side-road close by, but didn’t see him, or him in any vehicle. She told Robert about this when he got home and it was documented as another weird encounter. There was no follow up and he never returned physically.

“Shelagh had a long history of remarkable clairvoyance, in the 60s she had been a High Priestess in a Wiccan coven. So her occult presence was long and experienced. In the 1970s she appeared to undergo an abduction experience. Then when she met Robert in the early 1980s they received many communications from spirit guides alluding to a ‘mission.’ This messaging, received through Shelagh as the medium was accompanied with a string of paranormal events – the MIB being just one of them.

It’s very weird accounts like this one told by Lucy Palmer that demonstrate the Men in Black are not “secret agents” of “the government.” They are much stranger than that…