The Aliens of Men in Black: Edgar the Bug, the Worms, Frank the Pug and the Arquillians

Men in Black, released on July 2, 1997, opens at the Mexican border, where two agents in black suits pull a van of migrants aside, let the humans go and unmask the one passenger who is an alien in a coat; the joke, that the government's alien problem is an immigration problem, runs the whole film. Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) recruits a New York police officer (Will Smith) as Agent J into a bureau headquartered behind a ventilation building at the Battery Tunnel, where a few hundred extraterrestrial refugees, exiles and tourists are processed, licensed and watched, and where the Earth's population is kept in ignorance with a flash of a neuralyzer. The film was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld from Lowell Cunningham's 1990 comic, made the creature designer Rick Baker's aliens a gallery, and earned more than any comedy of its decade.

Its aliens are a census. The worm guys, four brown, long-necked creatures in shirts who drink the bureau's coffee and smoke, became the series' mascots; Frank, a pug who is a Remoolian in a dog, informs for K and, in the sequel, sings; Mikey, the border-crossing alien, is a bulbous amphibian in a trench coat; the twins who run the bureau's monitors are a tentacled pair; and the immigration board shows, on the day J arrives, that Sylvester Stallone, Isaac Newton and a talk-show host are aliens living quietly among us. The film's most famous alien is the one it hides until the end.

A saucer crashes on a farm in upstate New York and its occupant, needing a disguise, takes the farmer's skin. Vincent D'Onofrio's performance as the Bug in the Edgar suit, a man walking as if his bones were in the wrong places and his face were slipping, is the film's best joke and its only real horror, and the Bug's mission gives the plot its shape: it has come for the Galaxy, a source of energy hidden on Earth by an Arquillian prince in exile, and if it takes the marble home the Arquillians will destroy the planet to keep it from the Bugs. The Bug kills the prince, kills a pawnbroker, and, when the suit fails, tears out of it in the film's last act as a cockroach the height of a house, all mandibles and legs, and eats Agent K, who shoots his way out.

The Bugs are the film's one species drawn as pure enemy. The bureau describes them as a race that has laid waste to worlds, breeding, consuming and moving on, and the Bug in Edgar behaves as a Bug would, snapping at insects, smashing a car for the sugar-water in it, and treating every human as food or a suit. Rick Baker built the creature as a cockroach with the proportions of a praying mantis, and the design belongs to the line of insect aliens that runs from the ant invaders of 1950s cinema to the Xenomorph; the difference is that the film's sympathy, in the end, is with the Bug's contempt for us, which K, in the scene in which J crushes a cockroach in front of the dying alien, seems half to share.

The Arquillians are the film's great reveal. Rosenberg, a jeweller in a Manhattan shop, is found dead with his face split open, and inside his skull the coroner, Laurel Weaver (Linda Fiorentino), finds a tiny green humanoid in a control chair, dying, who tells the agents that the Galaxy is on Orion's belt; Rosenberg was a head-sized robot piloted by a prince of an Arquillian royal house, and his people, giant in comparison, send a battle cruiser to demand their marble back and give the Earth a deadline. The joke, that the mightiest species in the film is three inches tall and that the Galaxy it wants is a bauble on a cat, is the film's argument about scale, made again in the final shot, in which the Milky Way is a marble among marbles.

The sequels widened the census. Men in Black II (2002) had Serleena, a Kylothian shapeshifter in the form of a lingerie model, the worms in a fight, and Frank the Pug singing; Men in Black 3 (2012) had Boris the Animal, the last Boglodite, and time travel to 1969; Men in Black: International (2019) had the Hive, a shapeshifting parasitic species, and a bureau with a mole. The animated series of 1997 to 2001 ran through dozens more. The bureau's aliens are, across the series, refugees first: the film's premise is that most of them are here because somewhere else was worse, and the agents exist to keep the ones that are dangerous from ruining it for the rest.

The suits came from the lore, and the lore is stranger than the film. In September 1953 Albert Bender, who ran the International Flying Saucer Bureau from Bridgeport, Connecticut, shut it down and told his members that three men in dark suits had visited him and warned him to stop; Gray Barker's They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) made the visit a legend, Bender's own 1962 book made the men aliens, and John Keel's reporting in the late 1960s, in West Virginia during the Mothman sightings, described dark-suited, oddly formal, badly informed visitors who frightened witnesses and vanished. The glossary covers the figure; Lowell Cunningham's comic took the name and the suits and reversed the role, so that the men who silenced witnesses became the men who protected them from what they had seen.

The other borrowing is the census itself. The idea that aliens live among us in disguise, known to a government office that manages them, is the crash-retrieval story's natural sequel, and the film's bureau is the good-natured version of the agencies that the UFO whistleblowers article describes their subjects as having worked for; the immigration joke, and the migrants at the border, come from the Coneheads, whose 1993 film had already made the alien an undocumented resident of New Jersey. The Grey, notably, is almost absent from the bureau: the film's aliens are worms, bugs, pugs and princes, and the Greys in fiction article explains why, by 1997, a film about aliens among us could leave the abductors to The X-Files.