The Starcruzer crew were enjoying a Blu-ray version of Men in Black the other night - and yes, Blu-ray really is better than anything else out there, though it's fair to say even the sharpest picture is won’t improve a bad movie. But that's no prob with MiB which is excellent at all resolutions.
But seeing MiB got us thinking about where the words came from, and then we saw an obituary for the man who coined it, the US UFOlogist and paranormal investigator, John Keel, who died aged 79, earlier this month.
He first mentioned MiB in a 1967 issue of Saga magazine, in which he described sinister figures of “gaunt, evil aspect, often with Hispanic or Oriental features”. Keel claimed to have seen such entities on TV, while he watched Richard Nixon’s presidential inauguration ceremony; yet later, when he studied photographs of the event, the MiB seemed to have completely disappeared.
Keel certainly had an excellent track record in weirdness reports and studies of strange phenomena, as well as adding new terms to the language. In 1971 he coined the word ‘ultraterrestrial’ to describe UFOnauts, and earlier had written The Mothman Prophecies, reporting on a huge winged creature called the Mothman, thought to appear before disasters, or even cause them. This was made into a tolerable 2002 movie, starring Richard Gere and Alan Bates.
In the end, Keel doubted that UFO astronauts actually exist, instead concluding that there might an advanced civilization living here on Earth in another dimension, parallel with, but not part of our own existence. As for the MiB, we’ll take those excellent movie heroes Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones any day!
A word about the ‘Powers of Ten’ outro on the video above: it just has to be one of the best movie sign-offs - ever.
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