According to Beckley, MIB have been with us for many hundreds of years, speculating that such diverse characters from the history of witchcraft and folklore as the Elizabethan "Black Men", the Native American "Black Man" and late nineteenth century reports of malevolent traveling salesmen, might have been manifestations of what we now know as Men in Black.
British ufologist Nick Redfern discussed his research into the Men in Black (MIB) phenomenon, in which he looked at numerous cases from the start of UFO sightings to the present day. The first report of Men in Black was associated with Albert Bender, who was studying UFOs in the early 1950s and formed a popular group called the International Flying Saucer Bureau. But then, he suddenly shut the organization down after he was visited by three men wearing black suits who told him that he was getting too close to the truth, and if he knew what was good for him, he’d leave the subject alone. Later, researcher Gray Barker popularized Bender’s tale, and implied that the Men in Black were government agents, Redfern