Everyone knows about the Men in Black, those nefarious strangers in their black suits that prowl the fringes of our imaginations and dominate the landscape of truly bizarre paranormal encounters. While Men in Black are spooky enough, there seems to be a subset of reports that detail the phenomena of conversely men in white suits, and while there is no known connection at all to these two and the cases of Men in White are far rarer, it gives us a look into some weird reports that are really hard to categorize.

Some of these encounters with men or apparitions in white suits have a decidedly sinister atmosphere to them, some sense of menace permeating them. One of these is a report from a witness who says this all started when he was dropped off at school one day by his mother, on by all appearances was looking to be just another ordinary day. As he was exiting the car, he says he had a vision of an ominous individual standing across the road, of which he says:

I saw a man in a nice white suit wearing a white fedora standing outside my school. His back was to me at first, but as my mom stopped the car he turned around. His face looked like it was made of cracked porcelain and his eyes were white except for the pitch black dot of the pupil in the middle. He gave off the most horrible vibes ever. He pointed at me, tipped his hat and grinned to reveal a nice set of fangs. He said, “You.” Then he disappeared.

This was very alarming to him, but since it seemed as if his mother had not seen the entity, nor did anyone else, he decided to stay quiet about it, all the while wondering if he had really seen what he thought he had. However, he soon saw the mysterious stranger again, this time standing in the middle of the baseball field, and this time a friend with him saw the figure too. The individual once again vanished, and while this was all pretty unsettling it would culminate in a rather harrowing and dramatic experience a few nights later. The witness says of this:

I ignored the man in the white suit, but I soon learned that I shouldn’t have ever ignored him. One night around three in the morning, I had gotten up to use the restroom and was going back to bed when my closet door opened and the man in the white suit came out with a scruffier looking man. They pulled me from my bed and began to do something to me. I fell into a sort of limbo state, where I couldn’t speak or see, but I could hear and feel. The scruffy man said that he wasn’t sure if I would survive this. My chest felt like it was on fire and I felt someone reaching around inside me. Then it stopped and they both disappeared. When I fully came to, I was laying on the floor across my room and my chest was bright red and I had scratches on my chests and shoulders. My closet door was also open and I never leave it open because an open closet at night terrifies me. The same thing happened a few weeks later to my friend who saw the men in the white suits. To this day, I’m not sure what they did. I do know that I’m a lot more in touch with the supernatural than I was before. I wish I could remember his name and I wish I knew what they did.

Who were these apparitions and what did they want? Did it even really happen at all? Not all such reports have such a terrifying or negative slant, and in other cases we have such apparitions being of a more benevolent nature. Reddit user “Reintarnation” claims to have had several encounters with what he calls “The Men in White,” who he believes to be in a sense guardian angels. One of these happened one day when he and his son had been visiting a local apple festival, parking their car on a dirt road outside of the farm. He says of his weird experience:

Due to the festival’s popularity their parking lot was filled and people had started parking along the side of the road outside of the farm. I had to park at the bottom of a long hill, on a patch of dirt next to a ditch (so that my car couldn’t block the road). By the time we were done, there were no longer any new cars parking, several of the cars around me were gone, and no one was near the bottom of the hill where I was parked. When I tried to get out of the spot my tires just kept flinging up loose rocks and couldn’t get any traction. I kept trying to leave but my car wouldn’t move. I was about to get out, thinking maybe I should trek back up to the farm to ask for help when a huge white SUV pulled up beside me (now mind you, I don’t know where this guy came from because I kept checking my mirror when I was trying to get out of my spot and had a clear view up the hill for any potential cars coming and would have seen a large white car coming). Out of the car came this big guy with a white shirt, white baseball cap, and white shorts, and he calls out “do you need some help?” and proceeds to go to the back of my car, and gives it a huge push and we basically sailed out of our rut and right onto the road. I called out “thank you” and waved and he waved back and I kept driving on, and he followed me, but when I turned at a bend I lost sight of him.”

In another, possibly even stranger encounter he had with the Men in White he says:

The next story took place nearly 20 years ago while I was driving home from college. It was a four hour drive and while I was still on the highway, a dump truck entered the highway and got in front of me. I kept my distance and was looking for an opportunity to switch lanes when the dump truck’s tarp flew off and covered my windshield completely. But instead of freaking out a calm just came over me, and a voice, right in the car (I was alone) said “speed up and leave the steering wheel as is it”. I followed the directions, even though I thought I would crash any second, and the speed I was going managed to whip the tarp from my windshield and it flew off the highway into the trees. When I looked, the dump truck was far away, but I was flanked by two little white cars, kind of like Toyota Corollas, and I felt safe between them. I thought at the time this was funny because I was also driving a white Toyota Corolla and I thought, “ha, we must be a sight driving on the highway like a white car caravan”. At the next exit, both the car in front and the car in back exited and I continued driving home.

Guardian angels or something else? Other strange encounters are really hard to define, and are not particularly malign or benevolent, just plain odd. From True Ghost Tales comes one such account, from a witness who at the time had just started a new job and was walking to work in broad daylight. As he was walking along he saw an eerie sight, of which he says:

To get to my work I have to walk past a fire station. As I walked past, in the corner of my eye, I saw a man standing in the middle of the fire station grounds, he was wearing a white suit and he had white hair, it made me jump a little because he was just standing there staring at me, but as I quickly looked up there was no-one there. I didn’t stop until I got into work, but I did look back a few times to make sure no one was behind me. I didn’t get a bad vibe from him so I’m not too worried about this. Also opposite the fire station there is an elderly peoples home, I thought perhaps he may of been looking at that instead of me and I just happened to catch sight of him.

Was this just reading too much into things or something else? Reddit user “organic-beans” has a pretty surreal account, which apparently happened to his mother. He says one day the mom was running late to a meeting and was frustratingly stopped by a red light. As she stood there anxious for it to change so that she could continue her half sprint to her job, she noticed a man standing across the street who was impeccably dressed in an immaculate white suit, polished white shoes, and a white top hat. The strangest part of it was that no one else seemed to notice him, just sort of flowing around him and ignoring him, which was odd to say the least. The poster says:

I live in a city where things like this are NOT common, people would usually stare or take pictures if you wore something like that but nobody noticed the man except for my mom. The man noticed my mom looking at him and he went up to my mom and said with a smile “you’re very lucky”. My mom found it quite strange but she was in such a hurry, she couldn’t really process anything except for the fact that she was late for a meeting. So my mom just gave him a quick nod, at the same time the light turned green and my mom started to cross the road but couldn’t stop thinking about how peculiar the whole thing about the man was so she turned back to look but the man was gone. There was no way the man could’ve just disappeared cuz there were no small corners or alleyways to hide in. Plus, he stood out so much in the crowd that you can notice him far away.

What was this all about and who was that man in white? What did he want, where did he go, and what was the meaning of his cryptic remarks? It is all almost dreamlike in its bizarreness, and a similar report comes from Reddit user “m_cam88,” who says that he had been out with friends on the evening in question, walking downtown on a night with a gorgeous full moon above. At one point his friends went on to a supermarket without him as he took a rest in a nearby park to admire the view of the moon, after which he went to catch up with them at the store. It was as he went around the corner to get to the market that that he would have a rather odd experience, of which he explains:

As I turned the corner I immediately stopped dead in my tracks to see a tall African American man who was dressed entirely in white staring me dead in the eyes. The thing that stuck with me was not only what he said next, nor even his height which had to be at least 6ft 4”, but it was the way his eyes fixed on mine. You see, before I turned the corner I was looking at the exact spot where my field of vision expanded to reveal his eyes. It explicitly felt as though he had been looking directly at me through the stone walls. I stopped and, with him looking at me, he said these exact words, “You’re bright. You’re blessed.” I just kind of nodded and walked around him to the store. But before I went in I reflected on the way he seemed to have been looking at my eyes before I even saw him. I back tracked and spied around the corner: nothing. There was no one. I should add that he didn’t seem ethereal. There were no accompanying hallucinations or anything. It’s just stuck with me… The way he was there almost out of nowhere and then gone. I think the reason I consider this paranormal is a combination of the fact that I’ve never forgotten the memory, particularly the peculiar staring and his words then subsequent disappearance. Of course it could’ve been just some guy who was wearing really clean white clothes who liked to stand around corners preemptively blessing people and then running the full length of the city block to hide in case they did a double take.

Other reports of “Men in White” seem to be firmly in the realm of ghosts. From Your Ghost Stories is an account from the U.S. state of Virginia, from a poster related her mother’s experience. She says that one night her mother woke up in the middle of the night to something she could not explain. She says:

Sometime in the middle of the night she woke up with the feeling of being watched. When she looked at the door there was a tall man with a long beard at the door looking at her. Problem about that 1: She had never seen him before. 2: Besides my parents and L being there no one else should have been there. 3: Even if someone had come in the house and upstairs my parent would have heard them since their room was right near the stairs. Anyway the man had on a white suit and was looking at her like “What in the world are you doing in my house, Lady?” She was so scared. There had recently been a murder down the road and she wonder if the killer was in the house. She tried to get her slipper to bang it on the floor to get my dad up there. No one heard the slipper but finally she was able to scream for my dad. Before he could get there the man had disappeared. A few months later my dad was clearing a squirrel out of a room in the house where the owners stored their belongings, when he came across a picture of a tall man with a beard in a white suit. He showed it to L and she said she did not believe in ghosts but that looked like the man she saw that night. It turned out that man was a former owner of the house. He didn’t die in the house. He could have been buried in the family cemetery in front of the house but we don’t know.

Was this a ghost or something more? Indeed, what lies at the origins of such outlandish encounters that we have looked at here? It is quite possible that we are looking at a range of different phenomena here with such reports as we have looked at here, with none of them linked in any way except for the detail of the white suits, but they are all very strange in their own right. What is going on with such reports, and from what sort of strangeness do such encounters originate? Are these demons, ghosts, or something else? Do they have any connection to their black suited brethren? There is no way at all to know, and these impeccably dressed men in white will likely remain specters beyond our understanding.