“Do you believe in God?”

“That is a creation of your people on Earth. You have strange races and colors in your people, and many languages are spoken, but it seems that all your peoples have had the desire to worship something during their evolution. They, growing like small children, wanted to have an anthropomorphized idea to cling to. Their belief was so great that in some cases miracles seem to have been created. These were written down for others to read, but these stories were told over and over until they are now considered to be true.”

“What about Jesus Christ here on Earth?”

“A great believer in the God, with miraculous attributes of great exaggeration. He could not save Himself from death, and even His own race did not believe in Him, yet they worshiped the same God.”

“Do you not have a god on your own planet, and do you worship anything?”

“We do not worship anything, but we all know that the great central body created all of us, and cast us off into space to form a life or to remain a barren piece of matter floating about.”



The scene of this dialogue is Antarctica, where until late 1960 the extraterrestrials come to exploit our planet’s resources maintained their base. It’s August, 1953. Albert K. Bender, UFO researcher of Bridgeport, Connecticut–notorious for his “silencing” that autumn by three mysterious men in black suits–has been transported by these three “men” (aliens, actually) to “a most important meeting” with their leader, a bisexual being known as the Exalted One. Bender asks the questions, and the Exalted One replies.

All this is reported in Flying Saucers and the Three Men, the 1962 book in which Bender claimed to reveal the truth of what had befallen him nine years earlier. Hardly anyone in the UFO world has ever taken his story seriously. Even Gray Barker, who’d launched the myth of the Men in Black with his 1956 They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers and who now brought Flying Saucers and the Three Men out with his Saucerian Press imprint, had his doubts. Maybe, Barker suggested in his “Epilogue by the Publisher,” Bender had let himself get tangled up with occult forces which he misinterpreted as extraterrestrials. Or maybe he was just hallucinating.

It’s only now, from the perspective of more than fifty years, that we can see there was more to Flying Saucers and the Three Men than any of us UFOlogists can have suspected back when it came out. Not that there’s the smallest chance that the alien encounters Bender describes took place anywhere outside his imagination. But why did he imagine them as he did? And with how much sincerity, if any, did he present these fictions as historical fact?

Looking back, as I do in my forthcoming book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, it’s possible to see Flying Saucers and the Three Men as a transition between the “contactee” literature of the 1950s and the alien-abduction tradition of the late 20th century, which in 1962 was just aborning. (The earliest abductees, Betty and Barney Hill, had their UFO encounter in the fall of 1961. But it wasn’t until February 1964 that, under hypnosis, they began to “recall” the forgotten events of that encounter.) Bender, like his contactee predecessors, is treated to fantastic journeys and long interviews with beings from other planets. But his extraterrestrials are no longer benevolent “space brothers” but coldly efficient exploiters, content to take what they can get from planet Earth and then leave humanity to its fate. They regularly abduct humans, partly out of necessity, partly from what appears to be sheer sadistic amusement. The “examination table,” familiar from the abductees’ recollections, is foreshadowed in Bender’s experience.

And, in sharp contrast to the soppy religiosity that pervades the contactee narratives, Bender’s ETs are aggressively atheist.

The dialogue I’ve quoted earlier is from the end of Bender’s chapter 13. It continues on chapter 14, where Bender asks the Exalted One whether there’s a life after death. “On our planet there is no life once the body is destroyed, but we are fortunate in having a life span five times your own. Some live even longer, but they are the gifted ones. We have no disease on our planet, but the things which causes many to die is the great blackness that covers our planet when we pass a certain cluster of celestial bodies on our trips around the great central body.”

In this respect, too, Flying Saucers and the Three Men can be seen as a foreshadowing of things to come in the world of UFOlogy–specifically, the Raelian movement, which originated in the mid-1970s with “Rael’s” claimed encounter with extraterrestrial beings while on a walking tour of the French mountains. The Raelian “gospel,” revealed to Rael (a.k.a. Claude Vorilhon) by his ET contacts, denies the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. But the UFO entities take the place of God, looking out for us and offering a scientifically based path to human immortality. The vision presented in Flying Saucers and the Three Men is vastly bleaker, godless in a far more absolute sense than Rael’s.

Bender himself, by his own account (pages 185-186), had difficulty swallowing it.

“It is quite difficult for Christians to believe there was no such person as Jesus Christ [which, actually, isn’t what the Exalted One said]–but then again, we all know how a little gossip in a small town can grow until it reaches proportions of gigantic size. … I am a believer in the Bible, and although the visitors revealed many things to me, they could not totally sway my belief. The Bible contains teachings a person receives quite early in life, and it takes more than a few words to make one believe it is false.

“And what a grim thought to believe there is no life after death! If this is the case, there is little hope for the ultimate future, and fewer reasons for living a good life here on Earth. Of course none of us will know the truth until we pass on, and then it will be impossible for us to come back and tell others about it.”

So then why did Bender concoct a story in which his supreme authority figure reveals a “truth” that he himself found repugnant?

I have no good answer, except to say that Flying Saucers and the Three Men, false as its ET revelations certainly are, can’t be written off simply as a hoax. Something was going on inside Bender of which we can perceive only shadows, vague and indistinct–yet, in their weirdness, haunting.

This, and not flying saucers or the Three Men, is the true “Bender mystery.”

by David Halperin

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