According to the “infinite monkey theory,” an infinite number of monkeys randomly hitting a keyboard an infinite number of times will at some point type the complete works of William Shakespeare. That would be an impressive, albeit accidental, accomplishment. But could it be topped? Could an infinite number of monkeys add music to the words and compose the complete works of The Beatles? How about The Monkees? Queen? It turns out the odds of this happening are better because of a species called the singing lemur which has just demonstrated that humans and birds are not the only animals with musical rhythm – singing lemurs matched the beat of Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” What next … lemurs leading the cheers at football games?

Buddy, you’re a monkey, lemur
Shouting in the trees, gonna take on the world someday
You got mud on your face, you big disgrace
Waving your tail all over the place
Lemurs, lemurs rock you
Lemurs, lemurs rock you
— (apologies to Queen)

Singing lemur by Alfred Grandidier (1875-1921)

While most songs have a 1:1 beat structure with the notes being of the same length, Queen’s “We Will Rock You” has a 1:2 ratio where some notes are twice as long as the others – specifically, the short-short-long pattern of stomps and claps. Mastering that rhythm was thought to be something only humans and a few birds (the nightingale thrush is one) could do until Chiara De Gregorio, a primatologist at Italy’s University of Turin went to the rainforests of Madagascar to study the critically endangered primate known as the indri (Indri indri) or singing lemur – one of the world’s largest lemurs. Their singing was well known – their loud songs can last up to three minutes and are a form of communication or warning signals – but it was thought to be random. De Gregorio and her team discovered otherwise.

“Since indris’ songs are composed of notes that are organized in phrases, they were very good candidates to understand if indris would share the same categorical rhythms that are typical of human music.”

De Gregorio explains in Inverse (and in a study published in Current Biology) how the researchers recorded indris singing in the wild, measured the intervals between the lemur’s musical notes, then “calculated the ratios between two subsequent notes by dividing each onset for its duration plus the duration of the following one.” They were shocked to find the lemurs using the 1:2 ration because “aspects of human musicality rare in other species.”

“Finding in indris [a] musical universal may indicate that human music is not truly novel, but its intrinsic musical properties are more deeply rooted in the primate lineage than previously thought.”

Does the band need a horn section?

Is this a “Planet of the Apes” moment that will lead to singing lemurs taking over the music charts? Hardly. In fact, there’s no chance a million of them working together could compose Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “We Will Rock You” because the indri are so critically endangered – there are less than 10,000 in the wild on Madagascar. De Gregorio hopes her work can help save the indri from extinction. Maybe what she needs is a singing lemur cheer.

We will, we will save you, yeah, yeah, come on
We will, we will save you, alright, louder!
We will, we will save you, one more time
We will, we will save you

On June 29, 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act into law, authorizing the construction of 41,000 miles of the Interstate Highway System to provide access between U.S. military bases in the event of a war with the Soviet Union and its allies. Fortunately, the main benefit of the interstate system was to fuel the growth of the United States geographically and economically, but the military is now thinking about the need for another superhighway system to protect the U.S. against new enemies … in space. Who will build this space superhighway? The Space Force, of course!

“If you read their language, if you read their products — which I am a vigorous student of — if you look at what they do they telegraph everything that they’re going to do, they believe that the Moon is manifest destiny for them (and part of their) economic … and security equation.”

Space Uber driver?

Speaking last week at a National Defense Transportation Association seminar on space logistics, Space Force Brigadier General John Olson warned the audience that China is his perceived enemy in space based on their activities recently with a lunar rover on the Moon’s far side, a quickly constructed space station and two recent tests of hypersonic space gliders that could possibly be nuclear-tipped. Olson is an Air Force reservist, has NASA experience, served in the Obama White House at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and is now Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Technology and Innovation of the Space Force and Mobilization Assistant to the Chief of Space Operations, so it’s no surprise that his solution to winning a space race with China is through Space Force mobilization. But … a space superhighway?

In the near term, Olson told the attendees this means encouraging industry to push forward the boundaries of space activities to make real the promise of future space utilization. Space Force is in the early stages of working with industry via Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs, which involve no funding) on figuring out how to build the space infrastructure required — such as re-fueling depots along a “space superhighway,” he explained.

Breaking Defense was in attendance at the meeting and reports that Olson pitched the benefits of commercial space logistics – just like the interstate highway system – to help the US military “dominate” Space Command’s Area of Responsibility (AOR) which is defined as 100 km above the Earth to infinity, and support a support “resilient and persistent occupation” of space by the US “at a lower cost.” And like the interstate highway system and the current private space program, Olson sees “90-to-95 percent” of the investment in the space superhighway coming from industry.

This interspace highway system won’t be a concrete ribbon to the Moon – Olson sees it at first as a series of refueling depots. It will start with “Rocket Cargo” – using rockets to deliver military supplies point-to-point on Earth. That will lead to delivering supplies (and possibly weapons) to future space stations and eventually to the Moon and beyond. Does this mean the U.S. is abandoning the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) which bans any nation state from claiming sovereignty over the Moon and other celestial bodies, and prohibits military maneuvers or weapons testing or establishing military bases on celestial bodies? Olson says no – or perhaps not yet – but implies that China’s actions seem to indicate it plans to – despite being a signatory with Russia on the OST.

Could a space superhighway start out with a military purpose and then evolve into a commercial and public highway like the interstate system? It’s possible, although the highway system was built when Americans were already driving – no one but billionaires are traveling to near space at the moment. IS the Space Force equipped to build such a highway? It’s sounds more like private corporations will do the building for a share of the toll fees, while the Space Force will be the traffic cops.

Does this sound like the militarization of space? What do you think? What would President Eisenhower think?

The topic of today’s article is on the fact that there are two groups of M.I.B., rather than just one. There might be more than two, but two is enough for today. I have to say that this issue – of there being two types of M.I.B. – is one of the most misunderstood within the UFO subject. Almost certainly, that explains why Gray Barker saw the M.I.B. as government agents, while Albert Bender saw them as something akin to high-tech, multi-dimensional demons. One of the groups originated with the U.S. government. The other, however, had – and still has – very different origins. Over the years, I have come to realize just how weird this two-pronged phenomenon is. Now, you will too. Some M.I.B. come from the worlds of government, the military, and the intelligence agencies of several countries. The FBI, at the order of J. Edgar Hoover, opened a file on Barker in the Fifties. The CIA’s “Robertson Panel” recommended keeping a secret watch on UFO groups – in the event they had “Red” leanings – in the 1950s. Clearly, some visits to UFO witnesses and researchers were from one or more of the various “ABC” agencies of the U.S. government. And those visitors were not beyond intimidating some of the early figures in Ufology. They did so by flashing ID cards and ordering those same figures to walk away from it all. Those who came calling and knocking loudly on front-doors in the post-Second World War era wore suits and fedoras – and often black. It just so happens, though, there was that other group of black-suited characters. They wore fedoras, too. These are what we might justifiably call the real M.I.B. They’re still around and they are most definitely not human.

It must be said this second group of M.I.B. were far removed from the world of government. They still are far removed from government.  They are pale, skinny, cadaverous figures who look like they would be at home in an old, 1930s-era, black-and-white horror movie – and with Bela Lugosi at the helm. To this day, they still look like that: sickly and zombie-like. It gets weirder. Witnesses to the M.I.B. (and to their comrades, the Women in Black) tell of feeling sick and ill in their presence: as if they are being drained of energy. “Crashing” would be a good word to use. Yes, the vampire parallels are easy to make in M.I.B. world. Those unfortunate enough to encounter the Men in Black report poltergeist activity in their homes and in the wake of the confrontations. The real M.I.B. are far less like Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, and far more like the menacing characters-in-black in the 1998 movie, Dark City. You want to see what the M.I.B. really look like? Check out Dark City.

It’s unclear which group of M.I.B. came first – the government ones or the much stranger ones. Most of the data, however, suggests the supernatural group were first on the scene – in the late 1940s. By the early 1950s, however, government agencies knew enough of this weirder side of Ufology. And, as a direct result, government agents “hijacked” the real M.I.B. phenomenon for their own purposes. When they needed to cover their tracks, those in the intelligence world, and/or those in the military whose job it was to intimidate people who had seen UFOs, would put on the black suits and the black fedoras. They became the M.I.B. Essentially, they were playing a role that was inspired by a much stranger mystery. Documentation declassified via the terms of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act makes it clear that, in the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Air Force and the FBI were on the trail of the M.I.B., but they had no real idea of who or what they were. This didn’t stop the world of officialdom from pretending to be the M.I.B., however, when the time and the place was deemed appropriate.

So, in conclusion, yes, the M.I.B. are indeed all too real. In the early years of the Cold War, a genuine enigma of a supernatural – possibly extraterrestrial – nature was carefully, and brilliantly, mimicked by intelligence agents to ensure their real identities were never known. Those same government agents may actually not have had any real idea of what, or who, it was they were copying. Even up to today, they probably still don’t know. But, here’s the important thing in all of this: that lack of understanding of what the M.I.B. are has not stopped spies, agents and experts in the fields of surveillance and intimidation from passing themselves off as M.I.B. Meanwhile, in the background and in the shadows, the real, non-human Men in Black – with their plastic-looking faces and their bulging eyes – continue to lurk, waiting for their next target.