Somewhere in the Skies - The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

On episode 409, we are joined by librarian, author, and cultural historian, Gabriel McKee, to discuss his new book about the life of the ever-enigmatic Gray Barker. Barker founded and operated Saucerian Books, an independent publisher of books about flying saucers and other ideas at the fringes of popular discourse. In The Saucerian, Gabriel Mckee tells the fascinating story of Barker’s West Virginia–based press, the unique corpus of materials it published, and how office-copying and self-publishing techniques influenced the spread of paranormal beliefs and conspiratorial worldviews over the last century. Following the development of UFO subculture, Mckee explores the life and career of a larger-than-life hoaxer and originator of pseudoscientific ideas. Purchase the book at: https://a.co/d/acfi5b2 Please take a moment to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple. Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Discord: https://discord.gg/NTkmuwyB4F Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ryansprague.bsky.social Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomewhereSkies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somewhereskiespod/ Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U Read Ryan’s articles at: https://medium.com/@ryan-sprague51 Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Copyright © 2025 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Today on the show, we welcome Gabriel McKee. Gabriel is an author, librarian, curator, and researcher specializing in science fiction, religion, theology, bibliography, and book history, and histories of the culture surrounding.

The Paranormal. We'll be discussing his brand new book, The Sossarian, UFOs, Men in Black, and the unbelievable life of Gray Barker. You are now somewhere in the skies with your host, Ryan Spray. You saw that you were the guest on there. I'm like, oh my God, Gene is going to have a field day. Because, like, his connections with Mosley and all that, it's crazy.

interested in like the the actual like physical printing of these things he's like yeah i ran barker's press for for a year so like he he like you know we kind of geeked out about printing techniques for a couple minutes i was like nobody is going to care about this except you and i but hey i cared it's so cool and i should mention everyone welcome to somewhere in the skies i am here today with gabriel mckee we're going to be talking all about his brand new book the sausarian UFOs men in black in the unbelievable of Gray Barker. Gabe, welcome for the very first time to Summer in the Skies. Thank you.

Good to be here. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, when I saw that your book was coming out and it was on the life of Gray Barker, my heart just got all warm because it's such a nostalgic era of euphology. And for anyone who's been into this topic for a while, like, you're always on the hunt for that one book. They knew too much about flying saucers. I mean, I've got a poster on my wall.

at home of it as well. And it just harkens back to a time in uphology, which seemed so innocent in many different ways and also fantastical in many different ways. Whereas today we're living in a world where everything is bureaucratic and congressional UFO hearings and stuff like that. So when I get a chance to go back to the golden era, I think we can call it of euphology. I love it. And I'm so happy that this book came out. But before we even get to that, I'm fanboying out, Gabe. Tell us a little about yourself for our viewers and listeners who may not be familiar with your work, if you don't mind. Yeah, sure.

So I'm a librarian at New York University. And I have been studying religion and science fiction really is mainly kind of my background. I have a master's degree in theology that I got before. I got my library degree. and my introduction to both the worlds of religion and science fiction was Philip K. Dick, which is probably, you know, that could be another podcast episode in the future maybe. But he's, so yeah, so I studied religion in science fiction. And then I got really interested in the kind of actual print culture around these things,

around, you know, science fiction magazine, science fiction fanzines. And then I started getting interested in, you know, UFO books and fanzines and kind of the overlap between that and science fiction. And Gray Barker just really quickly emerged as the most fascinating character from that early period of the flying saucer world in the 50s. And has seen the saucerian was kind of really foundational in a lot of ways. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, like the, for anyone to. who's into collecting UFO literature, which is a thing. Like it's a hot, I have 30 boxes of UFO books in my father's attic back home in central New York,

because I'm a, I'm a traveler. I'm all over the world doing work and everything. But one day, I hope to have that library where I can, you know, display this incredible collection of books throughout the years. And gray barkers are there. Bender is there. Palmer is there. And again, it's so cool to see that there's finally a definitive sort of biography of Gray Barker's life because it was such a fascinating life, inside and outside of eophology, which you cover a lot.

But, yeah, again, maybe for those who are new, I mean, UFOs have seemingly gone mainstream in the past decade or so. younger people are getting interested in the topic now more than ever, I would say. I used to be one of the young guns in euphology that's no longer the case, which is very depressing. But it's also very exciting that people are now learning about who these people were, whether it's John Keel or Jay Allen Heineck or Gray Barker even. So yeah, could you maybe paint us a picture of who Gray Barker was? We'll get in depth. But like who was this guy?

Where was he from? And yeah, maybe a little about his early life, if he don't mind. Yeah, sure. So Gray Barker grew up in central West Virginia. He grew up on a farm in a tiny, tiny, you can't even really call it a town.

Just a cluster of a couple farmhouses just north of Sutton, West Virginia. And he was, he went to college in the 40s, kind of at the height of World War II. and studied English, but he got really interested in writing. He edited his school newspaper for a little while. And in motion picture promotion, he worked as a projectionist, and then later ended up, his kind of like day job later in life was booking movies for drive-in theaters in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

And he got really good at being a promoter through this. So in 1952, his life kind of took a different direction when there was a kind of major weird saucer-related story that happened just a couple miles from where he grew up in the town of Flatwoods, West Virginia. So as he tells the story, and as we'll see, his tellings of the story need to be taken with a grain of salt, he saw the byline of his hometown in the Clarksburg newspaper, in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he was. lived most of his life. And it was describing this bizarre 12-foot monster that a group of people had seen near what they described as a landed flying saucer. And so that became known as the Flatwoods monster. And he gave that story some of its first national coverage with a write-up for Fate magazine, which he was looking at as a way to kind of break out into a national market as a writer, which was something that he wanted to do. So about a year after that, he founded his

flying saucer zine, the Sossarian. It was not the first flying saucer zine, but it was in the first wave. So the earliest ones were found in like 51, 52. And his was really interesting because a lot of the ones that existed up to that point were really trying to look very formal. So things like the Aparo Bulletin or Albert Bender's Space Review, which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about him later in this conversation. And the Saucerian was wild. It had a full-page illustration of the Flatwoods monster on the front cover. He was really taking a more playful approach to everything, one that I think he got more than a little bit from science fiction fanzines the way that they were kind of using the print technology available to them to create a visual

aesthetic. And I think the Saucerian was really part of that. And then his storytelling stuff, became really developed as he went on to, and he became a really, really great storyteller. Yeah, absolutely. He has such a unique style, like you said, and voice. And I think you know when something is written by Gray Barker, as opposed to sort of his colleagues at the time. And I know that would play a role in some hoaxes later on,

which we'll get to as well, and pinning him down as the culprit. But yeah, you mentioned the Flatwoods Monster. Now, this was sort of his first time and only time, if I'm correct, where he really went out into the field and kind of, quote unquote, investigated. Is that true? Yeah, yeah. So he did, there were a couple stories that he, you know, actually went out and did field investigations, but far, far fewer than you would expect, particularly because he really presented himself as an investigator in this early era. Part of that was because Al Bender, who had started the International Flying Saucer Bureau, really loved to give people titles. And so he named Gray the West Virginia representative right away. And then very shortly after that, named him the head of the Department of Investigation,

purely on the strength of this three or four page article in Fate magazine. But what that Department of Investigation did was mostly send very formal-looking documents back and forth to each other. They had this IFSB stamp that they would put on things. And to make them kind of look like they're, you know, a major funded international organization instead of, you know, just a couple dozen people, which admittedly was an international group. They had members in Australia and New Zealand. They were properly international. But it was really a hobbyist organization. And he got his start doing pranks with one of the other members of that investigation committee, Dominic Lachese, who was kind of his first pranking buddy in the

saucer world. Right. So I think what people have to keep in mind, too, Gabe, is like, this isn't your staunch, serious UFO investigator. If you're looking for that, Gray Barker's not the road you want to take. There's many roads you could take with that. But this guy was fun. And I think that's what is lacking from a lot of the UFO conversation is how utterly ridiculous a lot of these things are. And whether they're true or not is almost besides the point. It's the context of the time. It's the creativity. We'll get into sort of the time period and what was going on in America because I think that does play a big role. You do touch on that in the book as well. But yeah, it was just fun. And it really did start with, I think, his representation of the Flatwoods monster, which, I mean, let's be honest.

If you heard that this, like, seven foot tall monster who smelled really bad was maybe wearing, like, a dress, had an ace of spades looking head, was, like, floating through the woods in your town, I think I would find that a little ridiculous to begin. Yeah. Yeah, it was a wild story. And what he developed a reputation for in this early period was that he would promote the stories that the more serious, you know, people in the UFO community thought were too silly or were ridiculous. And in that early period, that included crashed flying saucer stories, which he was one of the only people that would publish those in the 50s. because after Frank Scully's book was revealed to have been a hoax on Scully, those stories were really consigned to the fringes in that early period. And what that demonstrates, I think, is that Barker inhabited the fringes of the flying saucer world,

but the fringe has a habit of migrating to the center, as we see in the 70s and 80s, when crash saucer stories become really the thing in ephology. Right, right. Absolutely. Well, one of the other big sort of cases that Barker is known to have investigated was The Mothman. And for anyone in my generation, it's the, it's not even the book by John Keel. It's the movie, the Mothman prophecies. Man, that movie still gives me, so it's up until today. It is well done. It's doing a very different thing than the book is doing, but it is a very good movie. Yeah, I love it. I love it. But yeah, for maybe the generation before me, it was John Keel's Mothman prophecies. And a lot of people don't know that Gray Barker actually wrote a book that was tangential

to the mothman and that was the Silver Bridge. Can you tell us a little about that one? Yeah, sure. So the mothman sightings start occurring in 1966 and 1967 in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which is about a two-hour drive from Clarksburg. And so that was one of the other cases where Barker did actually go and talk to witnesses. And one of the people who was there at the same time that he was was John Keel. And Barker and Keel were both interested in more than just the, you know, the Mothman itself.

They were interested in all manner of other weird occurrences, which there were many weird occurrences in West Virginia in that time period. and some of those weird occurrences were pranks that Keel and Barker were playing on each other. So I'll talk about that a little more in a second. So Keel's Mothman Propheies comes out in 1976. Gray Barker had actually beaten him to the punch with his book The Silver Bridge, which came out in 1970. And it is his account of that kind of couple months of investigation and the weird stuff that was happening at the time. but told in this very strange dreamlike prose,

and with several stories that he had invented put in, and lots of weird, weird scenes that are very kind of hard to interpret. There's one that involves a character called The Recorder, who seems to have magic powers and is able to change the things that are happening in the valley before him. That I think, I had to read it several times, to really understand what was happening. But I think that is kind of the key

to Barker's life, career, and writing is that chapter. Because the recorder is kind of a stand-in for Barker, the author, but also a commentary on what UFO investigating and writing really is and does. And what he's doing is manipulating the events that he's seeing

and creating a narrative for them to fit into. And this is something that John Keel really criticized him for in later years saying, like, why did you put fiction in this book? Because To Keel, these are, you know, Mothman stories are true stories. You should be like attempting to get the facts right. Whereas for Barker, it was a story that needed to be, that needed to give an audience something. And he is going to do what he needs to manipulate that. The trick, though, there is that John Keel does the same thing. He does lots of changing witnesses' names and splitting one witness into two people with different names

and saying that there were 100 sightings of something that there were three or four sightings of. So Keel is doing the same kind of manipulating. Barker's just kind of pulling back the curtain in the Silver Bridge and showing you what he's doing. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it.

Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Oh, that is so interesting. Yeah, he always thought of keel, you know, as sort of cerebral or metaphorical as he could often get. Like he was more of like a, uh, uh, an interviewer, someone who wanted to get the facts down.

But I love knowing that like you had like these two guys competing for a narrative. And that is so, uh, relevant to everything. Uphology. Yeah. You know, uh, you had the Roswell UFO incident where investigators were racing to get there to be the first to get their version of events out to the public, whether it was a military. Whether it was a military explanation or an extraterrestrial explanation, this often happens with so many UFO cases. You know, the more hardcore skeptic is going to go down the military technology route where the believer is going to go down ET, extradimensional, us from the future, what have you.

It's fascinating. I love knowing that they were kind of having this prank war going on in the middle of like a mothman phenomenon. And the hilarious thing about it is that Keel started it. So they were saying in the same hotel and John Keel made a fake note from the men in black saying, you know, like we're coming to get you and slipped it under Gray Barker's door, figuring that at breakfast the next day he's going to say like, oh, good one, John. And, and, you know, they'll laugh about it and that'll be it. Barker instead publishes this in his zine as signs that he is being threatened. And John is like, what are you doing? But then it, what happened is that Kiel kind of made himself a mark for Gray Barker and Jim Mosley, who was Barker's best friend, editor of Saucer News and later Saucer Smear, because he would basically trust whatever story was presented to him.

You'd kind of take it at face value as his first step. And that made him a real easy target for pranksters like Barker and Mosley. So the eeriest scene in the Mothman prophecies on a first read, to me at least, is this strange phone call he gets from someone identifying himself as Gray Barker, but talking in kind of a strange robotic voice and acting as if he's never met Keel before. And just it's a weird phone call. And in the book, it's really creepy. In the movie, it gets turned into the, you know, the chapsticks.

I'm just too, which is, which was, you know, really ridiculous, but also, you know, if you let the movie draw you in what seemed ridiculous in the trailer, because I remember seeing the trailer and thinking that was really silly. But then seeing it in the movie and being like, oh, no, this is actually kind of creepy. But if you know anything about Barker and Mosley, it's pretty clear this is just a prank call that they're playing on Kiel. And there's a pleading letter that John Kiel wrote to Barker years later saying, what was going on? with that phone call and Barker would not answer him on that question because and this is kind of Barker's MO so if you're hoaxing someone there's kind of a or pranking them the reason to do it is to reveal it right you're you want to send someone up and take them down a peg or you just want to have a laugh with them afterwards and so it's just a prank and then you both laugh about it Barker never

ever does that he never gives the game away he is always you know maybe maintaining the mystery. And that I think is really telling because it shows that he's not doing this for any kind of really kind of condescending reason. Right. It's not, he's not going to reveal, you know, that, you know, this world of uphology is something to be made fun of. He's doing it because he wants to give a narrative and an ongoing mystery that the audience, you know, all the world of euphology is something to be made fun of. can continue to interact with and build on. And so that, I think, is really the reason behind the hoaxes that he engaged in is not to reveal

them, but to make them mysteries that can kind of keep going on. So I talk about some of his hoaxes in the book. I don't even know what all of his hoaxes were. There are things that I can say and say, like, oh, that sounds like it could be something that he's got a hand in. but, you know, if it's not documentary evidence of it, it's a little hard to really say. Yeah. Hopefully someday we'll find like a whole slew of like, you know, tapes that he made or something in someone's attic or buried six feet beneath the surface or something. Well, I mean, the wonderful thing and the thing that made this book possible is the fact that his archive is in the, the Waldemore, which is a local history center,

the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library in West Virginia. So they acquired his papers in the early 90s. And it is a massive trove of correspondence, publications, ephemera, all kinds of stuff relating to his entire life and career. And so that correspondence, especially, is kind of where a lot of this background information comes from. And, you know, just like knowing that he was doing pranks with Blachese is because they're writing letters back and forth about the pranks they're doing. So, and that's something that, you know, some of these were just pranks on his landlady. They're not things that were ever published in, you know, UFO zines. And so it's really, anyway, it's a really wonderful resource for researching his life.

Interesting. Oh, that's so cool. You mentioned men in black. Now, this is probably one of the biggest contributions, Gray Barker and others made to the UFO feel to pop culture in general. And I know it gets really convoluted and sort of messy when it comes to like, when did the men in black first show up? A lot of people believe it was like, you know,

the whole shaver thing and Harold doll and all that. Others think it was with Bender. But like there's this weird, this time when the men in black started popping up. So could you maybe, I don't know, maybe kind of clear that up for us, Gabe, if you don't mind in your research? Like, what role did Gray Barker play in the middle of time? So I'll, you mentioned Palmer and Dahl. So yes, there is kind of a pre-Men and Black narrative, which is published in the story, I'm sorry, published in the book, Coming of the Saucers by Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer. Kenneth Arnold, of course,

the kind of inaugural flying saucer witness. And that relates to a siting in the Puget Sound area that was, is generally believed, I think, to have been a hoax that was just days after that Kenneth Arnold's citing. And it's generally believed to be a hoax in large part because of Ray Palmer's involvement, because he was a trickster figure every bit as complex as Gray Barker was. But it did involve, you know, men in dark suits who were interviewing witnesses and seemed to be acting kind of strangely. But similar to, I think it's similar, though, the men in black origin to, you know, the origin of UFOs themselves, where you have Kenneth Arnold's citing, and after that you see things from the past kind of being incorporated into this narrative. But it's really the Kenneth Arnold citing that is

the inception of, you know, flying saucers to use. use the original term as a cultural phenomenon, right? So other things can get kind of re, kind of retconned into it. And so I think the, the Harold Dahl and Fred Chrisman story really gets kind of retconed into the men in black. So the story that, and really, Gray Barker is the inception of the men in black in the same way that Kenneth Arnold is the inception of flying saucers. So about a month after Barker launched the Saucerian on October 1953,

Albert K. Bender, who was the head of the International Flying Sasser Bureau, said that he had been visited by three men in dark suits who knew things about what he knew about flying saucers. And they somehow threatened or encouraged him to quit his flying saucer. He very quickly shuts down the IFSB. And his friends in the group, which included Gray Barker, really wanted to know why this was and what had happened. And so this becomes the fodder for Gray Barker's first book. They knew too much about Flying Saucers, which came on in 1956, so pretty soon after these events. And in that book, Barker is taking Bender's, the story of what happened to Bender, and kind of what led up to it and other things that I

IFSB had been doing, and relating it to other stories from elsewhere in the world, that he presents as being variations on the same story. In fact, there's a lot of differences between the other stories that he's bringing in, but if there's just kind of a shred of similarity, he's going to play that up. And so it's not until a few, so Barker calls these hush-up cases, cases where flying saucer, witnesses or investigators have been told to keep quiet about what they've seen or what they know. It's not until a few years later that the term men and black really comes into use. And it's actually John Keel that really coins that term. But what Keel is doing in the articles where he's first using that term is really kind of rehashing

a lot of the stories that Barker had been telling. And some of the other stories that had then emerged later where you really get kind of a genre typology of men in black stories. And it's a genre that gets weirder and weirder as it grows. And that's largely because that's, that was Keel's interest. He was interested in the strangeness of things and, and, you know, what's the weirdest story that's out there. And so those, the stories initially really sound like, you know, maybe government agents or something. And by the 1970s, it's like, I think John Keel at one point even just point blank says, these are the flying saucer pilots. And then, of course, those stories get turned into kind of grist for the

pop culture mill. And by the 1990s, it is a, you know, a series of comedy movies. And they've gone from being the secret terror among us, which is the subtitle of one of Gray Barker's books on the subject to Galaxy Defenders. You know, very different. take on the subject. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. And like you mentioned, like it went, I'd like to touch on that too, Gabe, this time period, too. You mentioned when they knew too much about flying saucers came out. Bender had written, what was it, the three men? Flying saucers and the three men. Yeah. I really wish the manuscript for that book had survived because there's dispute about whether to what extent bender is its author versus barker and i i found no no uh really

concrete evidence on either side it's like the debate of was shakespeare actually shakespeare right yeah yeah or you know how much of um richard shaver's stories did ray palmer right is a similar one and i think in both cases, the purported author did more than they are often giving credit for. I do think Bender wrote something because Barker had not really been talking about the Bender's story for a couple years. And then very suddenly in, I think, late 1960 or 61, he starts writing people saying, Bender, you know, Bender just sent me a manuscript and he really kind of starts the wheel rolling again. But we don't have Bender's manuscript. So the, the, you know, did Barker rewrite it?

Did he, you know, just kind of tweak it here and there? The official policy is that, you know, Barker edited it in the sense of like he wrote some footnotes for it, but otherwise it's presented. You know, that's how the book presents itself. And the extreme other side is Barker wrote the whole thing. So it's definitely somewhere in between. We just don't know where. It always is with these guys. Well, there were a couple of words.

I was able to really, because we do have the manuscripts of a couple of the other Saucerian publications that he put out in his archive. So for example, the first book that his press put out was from Outer Space to You by Howard Menger, one of the flying saucer contactees, who said that he had first encountered people from Venus at the age of 10. And his original type script is in Barker's file. So you can actually look at it side by side with the published book, and I did, and really see where it's different. And yes, there are, you know, there are full paragraphs that are inserted

that are kind of seemed to be in a different style. And sure enough, I'm, I'm 99% certain that Barker inserted those himself. I did a really careful run through of that manuscript to see what the differences were. Okay. Yeah. And again, like you, we both mentioned earlier, like, you know, when Gray Barker has had his, quote, unquote, fingertips on that typewriter. Yeah, yeah. But what's interesting is the inserted parts aren't about UFOs. They're about life on a farm. Okay. It's about, you know, because it's in the story of Mender meeting the space woman

who is 10. And there's this paragraph that's just about the beauty of nature that's not in Mender's manuscript. And so it's interesting that, yes, you have the like the fingerprints in terms of like hoaxes or where things turn up, but you also have this kind of poetic, pastoral. kind of place that his influence turns up to. I love that. Yeah, kind of painting the picture. Yeah. That's cool. The Somewhere in the Sky's podcast is free to listen to every week.

But if you would like to help support the show, we have a very active Patreon page where you give what you think the show is worth. In return, you'll get early access to the main show, bonus episodes, and priority to ask our guests your. listener questions. Your support truly makes the show continue and grow. So to learn more and to join, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. The hoaxes. Now, one of the big ones, and I know it can get, again, these things get convoluted, but the stray flutter. This is one that is infamous in the UFO world. It's got kind of a funny, I guess, ending to it. Could you tell us a little about this part?

part of the book gave? Yeah, sure. So in 1950, late 1957, I believe it was, Gray Barker and Jim Mosley got their hands on some government stationary. And they decided to have some fun. So they wrote a number of hoax letters. I think Mosley said it was seven in total. And one of those is addressed to George Adamski,

who is remembered as the first flying saucer contactee. And it's a letter on State Department letterhead. Why the State Department? Because that's the letterhead they had. And it is very carefully worded from a guy named R.E. Strait from the Cultural Exchange Committee telling Professor Adamski addressed as my dear professor that they can't say anything publicly, but there are those in the government that support his work and want him to continue.

And Adamsky was somebody who was kind of desperate for official recognition and things like that. And so it's really targeting him very directly, you know, with what he is wanting to receive from the world. And Adamsky publishes it as, you know, proof that his stories are true and the government supports him. Barker, though, gets very worried when this happens. The other five hoax letter, five or six hoax letters sank without a trace. There was no real discussion of them, except I found in one of the other archives I looked at, the archive of Ted Blocker, who was a member of civilian saucer investigation in New York. Some of the other recipients of the hoax letters knew right away who had sent this to them.

but that there was maybe a crime involved here using State Department letterhead. So Barker got very, very nervous about what was going to happen. And the story that is later told is that he destroyed the typewriter that this was written on and had it, he basically poured it into some wet cement at a construction site. Whether that is true or if that's myth-making is an open question. Another thing that probably is myth-making is that in his correspondence over the next couple months, Barker starts telling a couple people that he's being investigated by the FBI, that they came and took handwriting samples and were asking a lot of pointed questions about his typewriter.

I don't think there was an FBI investigation. A couple people have put in FOIA requests to the FBI and have turned up nothing. One of the books on this says, well, clearly the FBI, is hiding what they knew. I think that is maybe a little bit more a sign that clearly the FBI did not talk to him at this time. But I think he was investigated in an internal investigation by the State Department because it was their letterhead. They're the ones being investigated. And also an embarrassment to them if this comes out. And so Barker does not seem to face any criminal liability for this. The investigation fizzles. I think the State Department just dropped

it because it was an embarrassment. I did hear from somebody just the other day that they did get some information from the State Department about this. And I haven't actually seen it yet. And so I'm kind of eagerly awaiting getting that information, you know, for the second edition of the book. Yep. So yeah, I think that is what happened. But then nine years after this whole thing has fizzled out and it's really been forgotten in the U.S. So it was a very hot topic in the U.S. world for a couple months, but it really fizzled out. Who is the one who revised it? Gray Barker himself. So in 1966, he's publishing a kind of memorial volume for George Adamski shortly after his death. And he puts in there a long essay called The Strange Case of R.E. Straith,

where he's kind of reopening this mystery. And now in this telling, the story is not who is R.E. Strath, and is he real? Which was what the flying saucer world was trying to figure out in the months after this. But now the mystery is who was trying to frame me. Okay. Yep. Build on that.

Yeah. So going back to sort of the zine aspect of all of this Gabe, we have to think of the time period in which these guys were working in putting this stuff out. America was in a strong

hold of paranoia at the time, whether it was like the Cold War or things like that or the threat of like nuclear annihilation at the time. And space brothers, come help us, come save us. Or, you know, the government's bad. They're covering up all of this stuff. What role do you think that paranoia played in all these guys coming out with this stuff, whether it was Bender or mostly or even Barker? Yeah, so I think the kind of patient zero for this in a lot of ways is Donald Kehoe, because really the drum that he was beating from the very early 50s on was the government is keeping secrets from you. And so I think a lot of the anti-government paranoia that develops later and takes some dark turns, especially in the 80s and 90s, it kind of does start with him.

Obviously, in parallel to that, you have the broader. culture, you know, McCarthyism and things like that are, you know, major factors in 50s culture more broadly. But for Barker, what's interesting is that he never presents anything like a stable theory about who the three men are. And in fact, he makes it as mysterious as possible. And so in a way, it's like a conspiracy theory without conspirators, that it's more of a sense of like cosmic horror, that there is something in the universe that doesn't want you, you personally, the reader of my book, to know too much about flying saucers. And so for him, it is very much, it's not so much this kind of societal paranoia so much as a really personal kind of approach

to the individual reader of his book to give them a good scare. And that I think was really the thing that he wanted to do with his writing. Yes, you know, there is that personal touch that he always would put on it. Like, I'm speaking to just you. Yeah, and he uses second person. I kind of went into this in the book in looking at his literary techniques, and he uses second person narration when he's describing UFO sightings and monster sightings. He's trying to make, you know, the act of reading into an act of witnessing.

He wants you to be there and to, you know, since you can't actually be on a hilltop in Flatwood's, West Virginia, in 1952 seeing a 12-foot monster. He wants to give you as much of that experience as he can. And yet, as we've seen with his writing, he's going to tweak and manipulate that experience a little bit through the way that he presents it. Right. And kind of guide what you're seeing in your mind's eye.

Yeah, exactly. I could see him if he were born, like, in these last few decades, he would definitely be like a first person video game development. or like work on virtual reality or something. Yeah, yeah. And then when they knew too much about flying saucers came out, I found some correspondence between Barker and his publisher. And they were really trying to ride on Donald Kehoe's coattails a little bit.

So Kehoe was one of the only UFO authors to appear on the bestseller list. In fact, in the 50s, it was only Kehoe and Adamski that had proper New York Times best sellers. And Flying Saucer conspiracy, which I think was his third or fourth book, had just come out. And they were really trying to, they tried to get him to blurb. They knew too much about flying saucers, but he didn't like Barker very much. So that didn't happen. But in terms of like the book is even the same trim size, the same page count, and they were trying to make it the same price. They were like, they needed to make it longer so they could charge a little more so that it could be just like Kehoe's book. And so they were, I think they were really trying to hook into the kind of conspiracism that Kehoe was developing, at least in terms of marketing the book.

And then, but Barker is taking it off on his own tangent with his writing style and the specific stories that he's telling. Hey, emulation, right? It's the strongest form of flattery in many ways. Something that's not touched on as much when it comes to Gray Barker often is his sexuality. And this is something that you do explore in the book in a historical context, sociological, obviously, in many different ways. So what role do you think that played in his, I guess, his interest or fascination in the fringe or, or these types of things gay. Yeah, yeah, sure.

So, so yes, Barker was gay, and that was not necessarily an easy thing to be in the 1950s, especially not in West Virginia, on a small town. So there's a theory that's presented in the documentary Shades of Grey by David Howchin, who was the longtime curator of the Barker Archive.

That's a great documentary. And David proposes that, in a small town you can only be eccentric for one thing and that it's better to be known as the flying saucer guy than the dangerous homosexual. And so I think there's a lot to that theory. But a couple interesting things that I found in my research is one is that Barker was a very, very early subscriber to the first national gay rights periodical. So one magazine, which had first been published in 1956 and there is a letter, a change of address letter in Barker's archive to them in 1957, so just a year after they started publishing. This was, you know, the, really the first

kind of national forum for the kind of gay liberation movement that we think of as not really starting until after Stonewall in 1969. And so Barker was part of that movement 12 years earlier than that. And so I think that's definitely a very interesting factor. He was prosecuted for some activity that he engaged in in the 1960s. I get into the details of that in the book and kind of the way in which he was prosecuted and the type of punishment he received versus similar cases. In fact, his longtime partner was prosecuted at the same time and received a very different punishment. So it's definitely an interesting narrative.

But broadly speaking, I think Gray was interested in outsiders in a lot of different ways, kind of cultural outsiders and viewed himself, I think, as kind of a cultural outsider. And so I think that is one of the reasons that he was drawn not just to uphology itself, which is kind of a, you know, at the fringes of culture in a lot of ways, but to the fringes of that fringe. So he was very interested in contact e narratives and other kind of weird accounts of personal experience that we might term crackpot literature. In fact, he had folder upon folder in his files labeled crackpot number one, crackpot number two, et cetera, because it was too big to fit in one folder.

But he wouldn't just, you know, throw these letters away. He saved them. He filed them away. He would often write back and say, oh, this is interesting. Have you got a book manuscript? And a couple of the books that he published actually came out of that. And so I think he really had an interest in kind of defending the rights of outsiders and eccentrics to be themselves. And I think his sexuality plays a role in that attitude.

There's a really kind of moving editorial in one of the early issues of the Sossarian where he's writing about the Dorothy Martin group. So that's a kind of psychic contactee group. They're well known now because they were the subject of the sociology book when prophecy fails. It's a group that has essentially predicted the end of the world and then the end of the world didn't happen. So where do they go from here? But a group of sociologists was embedded with the group kind of in disguise and kind of taking notes on what was happening. But they were also being published in the Flying Saucer Press at the time. So Barker had been covering their predictions because they said flying saucers are going to rescue this group,

you know, will be taken to space and be saved. And one of the members of that group had lost his job. He worked at a university and had been fired over his beliefs. And Barker writes a really moving editorial. He says at the end of the editorial, we would take up arms to defend your rights to predict the end of the world and be saved by spacemen. And I think that really embodies a lot of his attitude that he really wants people to be free to explore weird ideas, explore their identities, and kind of make their own way of existing in this world. And I think a lot of that really does tie back to, you know, his personal experiences, you know, as a gay man from a small town who, you know, was just wanted to be who he was. You said this place was steps from the water.

We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now.

Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Yeah, it's beautiful, man. I mean, the fact that he never left, sort of his hometown, says a lot about him and what role that played in his identity and the struggles he probably faced like many others at the time, even today. So, yeah, that's pretty, I also love that, like, Barker was never about, is this true?

Are UFOs real? He didn't care. Yeah. And I find myself, you know, some 20 something years later in studying UFOs, sort of under that same, I guess, motivation. And while that might disheartened some of my listeners or viewers that I'm like not seeking the truth, I'm seeking my place in all of this. We all are in many different ways in our lives, like meaning.

And I found meaning in trying to live in this mystery, this ambiguous mystery. of uphology or saucers or whatever you want to call it. So it's good to know that that existed back then and it can exist even today, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Gray Barker, like you said, it didn't matter to him if a story was true or false. You know, I insofar as a lot of people refer to UFOs as the phenomenon these days. And I for a while, I said, you know, there is no single phenomenon. There are 1730 different phenomena that people have grouped together is one thing.

And then I realized like, oh, that grouping together is the phenomenon. It's this cultural motivation to have there be a thing, a container for all these different things to go into. And so, and hoaxes are part of that. And pranks are part of that. And so for Barker, he really is looking at the big picture. And the big picture is these are all stories that we tell to each other. And it doesn't really matter if we tell a story about something that has physical, you know, objective reality that we might be able to find the answer about.

Or if it's something that is made up or something that he made up. The story is what's real. And what's real is, you know, what happens when I tell you a story and give you an experience. And that experience for him is the drive. motivation. And so yeah, truth and fiction don't come into it. It's, it is, the storytelling process is, is kind of neutral on the question of truth. And, and that is really the approach that he was taking. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. What, what were some of the most surprising things or like the most bizarre things you discovered in researching Barker's life and all his

cohorts and enemies and friends and in all of this. What did you come out on the other side being like, wow, what's not expecting that? Yeah. So one of the biggest ones was Wilhelm Reich. Okay. So Wilhelm Reich was a kind of student of Sigmund Freud, fled essentially Nazi persecution to the U.S. in the 1930s or 40s, and then got interested. interested in weird stuff. So he developed this Orgon theory, which is, you know, we can talk about that another day, perhaps the details of that. There is a fantastic book that just came out last year by a guy named James Reich, No Relation, called Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers, that really digs into Wilhelm Reich's interest in UFOs, because he did get very interested in UFO stuff.

And in fact, just last week when I was at the archive in Clarksburg, I found a letter from his daughter, from Reich's daughter, Ava Reich, who was kind of assisting him in his experiments in this period to Grey Barker subscribing to the Sossarian. So he was not just interested, but was, you know, actively part of the culture. But in the late 50s, Reich had basically been enjoined from building some of his devices, which he was selling through the mail. The federal drug, the Food and Drug Administration had said, like, you're saying that these can cure things, and there's no proof of that. They're basically treating him like a quack doctor.

And he refused to stop, you know, his research. and he was arrested for it and he died in prison. So while he was imprisoned, Barker got a phone call from Dr. Aver Reich, saying, you know, my father has been persecuted for his, among other things, his belief in UFOs. And having read what you've written about Albert K. Bender, I wonder if there's anything you can do to help us. But Barker doesn't know who she is. He's never heard of Wilhelm Reich. It's not, you know, an area of culture that he's aware of. And so he, this is a case where he actually did write this off as a crackpot is calling me.

He did include this in kind of a year-end letter that he was sending to some of his friends. That concludes, like, does anyone know anything about this Dr. Reich? But by the time he did that, Wilhelmreich was already dead. And so years later in the 1970s, he now knows who Wilhelmreich is. And he writes another editorial on this thing. I wish I had known at the time. But what's really surprising to me about it is Barker is a guy, who is interested in stories of people who are interested in flying saucers being silenced for

their views. That's the story he's been spinning. And here's one undisputable case of that happening. And he didn't take the bait. He didn't, he didn't, you know, incorporate this into any of his narratives. And that, the surprising thing to me was one that, that Wilhelm Reich was aware of Gray Barker. Like, that's kind of incredible. But even more surprising that Barker didn't do something with this story at the time. Right. Well, to piggyback off of that, Gabe, like, it's one thing for hoaxes and to have fun and to storytell, quote, unquote. But do you personally find any of what Barker did as, like, unethical?

I mean, literally concocting these things. Or if it were, let's use the example of Reich. if he were to say he was silenced and imprisoned because of this or something like that. Like, where is there a line, you think, for you personally? Yeah, there were a couple points in kind of researching the book where I did take a step back and be like, is Greybarker the villain of my book? I think I came to a place where I kind of made peace with who he was. But the one I think that pushes at the edges for me,

is actually the case of John Keel. Because if you, so Doug Skinner, who runs Johnkeel.com, has published on that website all of John Keel's notes from his research and investigations in 1966 and 1967. And a lot of that material ended up in the Mothman prophecies. And what you see, if you read those notes kind of from beginning to end, is John Keel really, really spiraling because he has been presented with this bizarre contact slash MIB story that's been presented to him by this woman from Long Island named Jay Paro. And it starts out with him being kind of appropriately skeptical. And within a couple months, because she keeps giving him new and stranger stories,

he is at the end just fully accepting, you know, she called me on the phone and said there was an MIB in the room and I couldn't hear him, but this is what he said. And he's just presenting that, you know, fully as the facts. And he seems to become really pretty paranoid in the clinical sense, I think, by the end of this. And I do believe that a lot of what he was experiencing in that period was pranks that were being played on him by Barker and Mosley. They were making a lot of prank calls to him at the time, and those end up, you know, being presented as paranormal phone activity in the Mothman prophecies. And I think they were feeding this story. I don't have documentary proof of that, but it really feels like the kind of thing they were doing in a couple

other cases where we do have some proof, including another one that was targeting Kiel around the same time. And so I think they really were doing something very risky by pushing keel as hard as they did. I do think John Keel came out okay. By all accounts, you know, he was, you know, sane and stable by the 70s or 80s, but I do think he had a moment in the late 60s where he had been kind of pushed to the brink by the things that he was investigating and reporting. And I think some of that pushing was done by Barker and Mosley. And so that one did seem like a little much to me. That's fair.

I mean, it takes two to tango when it comes. There have been cases throughout the years of euphology that, where disinformation was given to people and kind of made him go mad. But it only kind of fueled the fire that was already there of a possible madness. Yeah. And, you know, the other side of this is one of the reasons they were doing it is because they respected him as a writer and they knew that he was going to turn these into good stories. And, you know, that did happen.

The Monmouth Propheasies and this is an amazing book. Absolutely, man. Look at where it is today. Amazing. Your work, Gabe, as we sort of wrap things up here, you are a sort of a student and a teacher of theology, which I find very interesting as well. What role do you think that plays in all of this in euphology? I mean, a lot of people do consider uphology a cult, maybe a religion at times.

But what do you think, as someone who has studied religions, has studied these sorts of things throughout the decades, if not centuries? Is euphology dangerous or religious in any ways? What do you think of that? Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting question. So, yeah, I think there is a lot of kind of religious or theological elements. element to a lot of uphology and other other paranormal topics. I mean, there's a lot of kind of mysticism involved. A couple of the points of overlap are, you know, the experience of seeing something unusual is like a mystical experience in a number of ways. And one of those is that it's

something that you can't communicate. You can try and people certainly do. But unless you've had the experience yourself, then you only have, you know, the account of it to work on. And, and UFOs are the same way. And that's why I say in my introduction, UFOs are a literary phenomenon. Because we have the stories, and that's what we have to work from. And mystical literature is the same way, where, you know, you can't study someone's actual mystical experience. You can study their account of their mystical experience. And so I think that is definitely a, a big point of overlap. So the question of, is uphology dangerous?

I mean, that's definitely an interesting question as well, because I don't think, you know, taken on its own, euphology is dangerous per se. But it is susceptible to manipulation and things. So Barker did not have much of an agenda. He really wanted people to have a good time and be entertained and maybe have some kind of, you know, transcendent, you know, experience or some kind of way of building an identity that comes from this.

There are people that come along after him who very much do have an agenda. And that can be something as simple as, you know, being in it for the money. I think a lot of the people that we've seen before, congressional committees in the past few years are really just angling for, you know, defense department grants. Or it can be something, you know, kind of more politically sinister. So a lot of far-right elements start creeping into uphology in the 80s and 90s and really do push it in a political direction that I think was absent earlier than that. And that I think is really an unfortunate turn and it's something that took a lot of the fun away that we have in the Barker period.

So I don't think what's dangerous there is the euphology itself. I think it's the political agendas that get. that kind of use uphology as a vehicle to advance themselves. For sure. It's like anything. You can see a tool on the ground, and it really depends on the person, like what they're going to use that tool for.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And we live in that ambiguity in euphology constantly, where I struggle. Like, am I enabling something I shouldn't be when all I'm really trying to do is get these stories out there, like Barker. I'm a man of stories myself.

I literally wrote a book called Stories, from somewhere in the skies. I don't care if it's true or not. It was true to the person who experienced it. And I'm not going to take that away from them. I wasn't there when these things happened. So, yeah, I understand that constant struggle that many in the UFO or UFO adjacent world live in,

of like, should I be doing this? But at the same time, you look at someone like Barker as an example that, you know what? It's not up to me what someone. takes from what I write. Like let them feel what they feel, believe what they want to believe. This is just me putting it out there. And that's not to take like strip it of your responsibility. But yeah, it just it's muddy. It's murky. And that's something euphology has always been. Yeah. And one thing that I hope that people take from this book is so I think Barker's

kind of broad influence on the UFO culture was. an aesthetic one where he was going to present stories in a way that they were going to get readers. And that if you want, you know, people to take your story seriously, they need to read it first. And therefore he's kind of giving you the stories that are going to get read. And what happens is this kind of push towards strangeness that we see in the 60s and 70s is kind of following that. like the UFO world had built up a tolerance for simple sightings of, you know, light in the sky. You need to give me something weirder.

And I think Barker's aesthetic influence really permeates every kind of UFO book after the 1950s because you need to present it in a way that's going to be entertaining. And so, but what he also does in some, especially in some of his later works, is to kind of pull the curtain back and show you how he's pulling the strings. And so what I hope people take from this book is kind of a way to look at who Barker was, how he operated what techniques he used in his writing, you know, with his intention just to be to be entertaining. And see how those same forces are at play in other works that come after him.

And to kind of make people a little more careful and critical readers of, of the, of UFO texts and, you know, any, any kind of text that's presented to you, be it, you know, a book, a blog post or a YouTube video, and see maybe where those same techniques are at play. And hopefully look at them a little more carefully. Absolutely. Yeah, discernment is key, you guys, for sure. Awesome, Gabe.

Well, of course, obvious last question. Where can we find the book? and everything you're up to. Yes. So the book is called The Sausarian, UFOs, Men in Black, and The Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker. It's published by the MIT Press and is available anywhere fine books are sold.

Your local bookstore is always my recommendation. You can find me online at gabrielmachee.com. And yeah, my other works are available through there as well. Perfect. And guys, honestly, we only scratched the surface of the life. of Gray Barker. So I'll put everything in the show note, links below, Gabe, as well.

Fascinating. Again, like, I've been waiting for a book on one of these guys to come out, and I'm so glad that this one would now stand next to my copy of they knew too much about flying saucers. So, yeah, thank you for that, and thank you so much for coming on somewhere in this guest.

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