メインコンテンツまでスキップ

Gabriel McKee の解説 : Gray Barker と UFO

· 約92分

前置き​

Gabriel McKee （下）

gh_20250521_gabriel_mckee.jpg

が、彼の著書、

"The Saucerian, UFOs, Men in Black, and the unbelievable life of Gray Barker"

gh_20250521_book.jpg

の宣伝を兼ねて出演し、タイトルの件を詳述している。

初期の UFO 界隈の動きを知る上で役立つ。NotebookLM plus で分析。

動画(1:05:02)​

The Saucerian UFOs, Men in Black and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker

Gabriel McKee とは​

Me:

ソースの Podcast の語り手である Gabriel McKee について説明して。

AI

提供されたソースに基づくと、Podcast「Somewhere in the Skies」の語り手（インタビューを受ける側）である**ガブリエル・マッキー（Gabriel McKee）**氏は、以下の通り説明されます。

  • 職業・肩書: ガブリエル・マッキー氏は、著者、司書（Librarian）、キュレーター、研究者です。ニューヨーク大学の司書として勤務しています。

  • 専門分野: 科学フィクション、宗教、神学、書誌学、書籍史、そして超常現象を取り巻く文化の歴史を専門としています。彼は修士号を神学で取得しており、フィリップ・K・ディックを通じて宗教と科学フィクションの両方の世界に導かれました。その後、これらの分野の「実際の印刷文化」、特にサイエンスフィクション雑誌、ファンジン、そしてUFO関連の書籍やファンジン、さらにそれらの重複部分に強い関心を持つようになりました。

  • グレイ・バーカーとの関連: マッキー氏の研究対象として、グレイ・バーカーは初期UFO分野の「フライングソーサーの世界」において最も魅力的な人物としてすぐに浮上しました。彼のジン「The Saucerian」は、バーカーの活動において多くの点で基礎的なものであったと述べています 。

  • 著書: マッキー氏は、グレイ・バーカーの生涯と活動に焦点を当てた著書 「The Saucerian, UFOs, Men in Black, and the unbelievable life of Gray Barker」 を執筆しています。この本は、バーカーの膨大なアーカイブ研究に基づいて書かれています。

静止画​

Gray Barker

gh_20250521_bray_barker.jpg gh_20250521_bray_barker2.jpg

関連本

"They Know Too Much About Flying Saucers"

gh_20250521_book2.jpg

"The Silver Bridge"

gh_20250521_book3.jpg gh_20250521_book4.jpg

"Flying Saucers and the three men"

gh_20250521_book5.jpg gh_20250521_book6.jpg
AI

ブリーフィング資料：グレイ・バーカーと未確認飛行物体

ソース: Excerpts from "バーカーと未確認飛行物体" (Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague - Gabriel McKee, Author of 'The Saucerian')

主題: グレイ・バーカー（Gray Barker）の人生、未確認飛行物体（UFO）研究への関わり、および彼の著書や出版活動に関するレビュー。​

概要: この資料は、Gabriel McKee氏の著書「The Saucerian, UFOs, Men in Black, and the unbelievable life of Gray Barker」に関するRyan Sprague氏とのポッドキャストインタビューの抜粋に基づいています。McKee氏は、バーカーのユニークな役割、彼の時代背景、出版活動、そしてUFO分野における彼の影響力について論じています。バーカーは、従来の厳格なUFO研究者とは異なり、より遊び心のある、物語性を重視したアプローチで知られていました。

主要テーマと重要事項:​

  • グレイ・バーカーの人物像と背景:

  • ウェストバージニア州サットン近郊の農場で育ち、カレッジでは英語を専攻。書き物や映画のプロモーションに興味を持つ。

  • 後にドライブインシアターのブッキングエージェントとして働き、プロモーターとしてのスキルを磨いた。

  • McKee氏は、バーカーの生涯、特にUFO分野の内外における彼の人生が非常に魅力的であると述べています。

    • （"it was such a fascinating life, inside and outside of ufology, which you cover a lot." - 0:04:52）

UFO分野への参入：フラットウッズ・モンスター:​

  • 1952年、生まれ故郷の近くであるフラットウッズで起きた、12フィートのモンスターと円盤着陸の奇妙な物語に触発される。
  • この出来事が、彼が全米市場に進出するきっかけを探していた「Fate」誌の記事の素材となる。
  • フラットウッズ・モンスターは、バーカーが最初に行ったフィールド調査の一つでした。
    • （"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." - 0:08:48）
    • ただし、彼は自身を「調査員」として見せかけながらも、実際に現地調査を行った件数は驚くほど少なかった。

自身の出版活動：ザ・ソーサリアン (The Saucerian):​

  • 1953年に自身のUFOジン「The Saucerian」を創刊。これは初期のUFOジンの波の一部であった。
  • 他の真面目ぶったジンとは異なり、「The Saucerian」は「ワイルド」で遊び心があった。表紙にフラットウッズ・モンスターの全身イラストを掲載するなど、ビジュアル美学を追求した。
    • （"And The Saucerian was wild... He was really taking a more playful approach to everything." - 0:07:51）
  • 彼のストーリーテリングスタイルは非常にユニークで、読者はそれがバーカーによって書かれたものだとすぐに認識できた。

メインストリームから外れたテーマの推進:​

  • バーカーは、より「真面目」なUFOコミュニティの人々が「おかしすぎる」と考えた物語、例えば墜落した円盤の物語などを積極的に推進した。

    • （"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..." - 0:11:40）

  • これは、彼がUFO世界の「フリンジ（周縁）」に住んでいたことを示しているが、フリンジはしばしば後に中心へと移行するという点をMcKee氏は指摘している。

モスマンと「シルバー・ブリッジ (The Silver Bridge)」:​

  • バーカーが調査に関わったもう一つの大きなケースは、ウェストバージニア州ポイントプレザント周辺で発生したモスマン現象（1966-1967年）である。

  • ジョン・キール（John Keel）の有名な「モスマン・プロフェシー」に先立ち、バーカーは1970年に自身の本「The Silver Bridge」を出版した。

  • この本は、モスマン現象とその周辺で起きた奇妙な出来事に関するバーカーの体験を、奇妙な夢のような散文といくつかの創作された物語、解釈困難な場面（リコーダーと呼ばれるキャラクターなど）で語っている。

    • （"...told in this very strange dreamlike prose, and with several stories that he had invented, put in, and lots of weird, weird scenes..." - 0:14:50）

  • リコーダーの章は、著者バーカー自身と、UFOの調査と執筆のあり方についてのコメントであり、彼がイベントを操作し、それに合わせて物語を創作していることを示唆している。

バーカーとキールの関係性：物語と操作:​

  • ジョン・キールは、バーカーが「シルバー・ブリッジ」にフィクションを含めたことを批判したが、McKee氏はキール自身も証人の名前を変えたり、目撃情報の数を誇張したりするなど、同様の物語操作を行っていたと指摘している。

    • （"John Keel really criticized him for in later years, saying, like, why did you put fiction in this book?... 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." - 0:15:22）

  • バーカーはキールとは異なり、「シルバー・ブリッジ」で自身の操作を「カーテンを引き戻して」見せた点が重要である。

  • バーカーとキールは、モスマン現象の調査中に互いに「いたずら」を仕掛け合っていた。キールが仕掛けた偽のメン・イン・ブラックのメモを、バーカーは自身のジンで「脅迫されている証拠」として発表した。

    • （"So, they were staying in the same hotel and John Keel made a fake note from the men in black... Barker instead publishes this in his zine as signs that he is being threatened." - 0:17:27）

  • バーカーの「いたずら」の動機は、それを暴露することではなく、継続的な謎を提供することであり、読者がそれと相互作用し、発展させ続けることを可能にすることだった。

    • （"he's doing it because he wants to give a narrative and an ongoing mystery that the audience, you know, all the world of ufologists can continue to interact with and build on." - 0:19:58）

メン・イン・ブラック (MIB) の起源とバーカーの役割:​

  • MIBの概念には、ケネス・アーノルドの初期の目撃談に関連する「カミング・オブ・ザ・ソーサーズ」に掲載された前身のような物語（暗いスーツの男たち）がある。

  • しかし、今日のMIBの文化的現象の「創始者」はグレイ・バーカーであるとMcKee氏は述べている。

  • 1953年、アルバート・K・ベンダー（Albert K. Bender）が「暗いスーツの3人の男たち」に訪問され、UFO調査をやめるよう脅迫されたと主張したことが、バーカーの最初の本「They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers」（1956年）の基盤となった。

    • （"about a month after Barker launched the Saucerion... Albert K. Bender... said that he had been visited by three men in dark suits who knew things about what he knew about flying saucers." - 0:24:38）

  • バーカーはこの本でベンダーの物語や他の関連する出来事をまとめ、これを「ハッシュアップ・ケース（hush-up cases）」と呼んだ。

  • 「メン・イン・ブラック」という用語自体は、後にジョン・キールによって考案されたが、キールがこの用語を最初に使用した記事は、バーカーが語っていた物語の多くを再利用していた。

    • （"It's not until a few years later that the term Men in Black really comes into use. And it's actually John Keel that really coins that term. But what Keel is doing... is really kind of rehashing a lot of the stories that Barker had been telling." - 0:26:11）

  • MIBの物語は時間とともに「どんどん奇妙に」なり、政府のエージェントのようなものから、70年代には「フライングソーサーのパイロット」になり、90年代にはコメディ映画シリーズになった。

バーカーの出版倫理と改変:​

  • バーカーは、自身が出版した他の著者（例：ハワード・メンガーの「From Outer Space to You」）の原稿に、自身のスタイルで段落を挿入するなど改変を行っていたことが、彼のアーカイブに残された原稿との比較から明らかになっている。

    • （"...there are full paragraphs that are inserted that are kind of seem to be in a different style. And sure enough, I'm 99% certain that Barker inserted those himself." - 0:29:45）

  • 興味深いことに、これらの挿入部分はUFOに関するものではなく、農場での生活の美しさに関するものだったりした。これは、彼の文体における「詩的で牧歌的な側面」を示唆している。

スターリング・フレイス事件 (R.E. Straith Hoax):​

  • 1957年後半、バーカーとジム・モズレー（Jim Mosley）は政府のレターヘッド（国務省）を入手し、いくつかの偽の手紙（合計7通）を作成した。

  • そのうちの1通は、著名なコンタクティであったジョージ・アダムスキーに宛てられ、国務省の文化交流委員会を名乗るR.E. Straithという人物からのものだった。手紙は、政府内に彼を支持する者がいるが公には言えない、調査を続けてほしい、という内容だった。

    • （"And it is very carefully worded from a guy named R.E. Straith from the Cultural Exchange Committee, telling Professor Adamski... that they can't say anything publicly, but there are those in the government that support his work and want him to continue." - 0:32:27）

  • アダムスキーはこの手紙を、彼の物語が真実であり政府が彼を支持している証拠として出版した。

  • しかし、バーカーは国務省のレターヘッドを使用したことが犯罪になる可能性を懸念し、非常に神経質になった。（"So Barker got very, very nervous about what was going to happen." - 0:33:58）彼は手紙を書いたタイプライターを破壊したという伝説もあるが、これはおそらく神話である。

  • FBIによる調査はなかったようだが、国務省による内部調査はあった可能性がある。

  • この事件はしばらくUFO界で話題になったが、やがて忘れられた。しかし9年後、バーカー自身がアダムスキーの追悼出版物で「R.E. Straithの奇妙なケース」と題したエッセイを掲載し、謎を再燃させた。今度は「誰が私を嵌めようとしたのか」という新しい謎として提示した。

    • （"But now in this telling, the story is not who is R.E. Straith and is he real... But now the mystery is who was trying to frame me." - 0:35:54）

時代背景とパラノイア:​

  • バーカーの活動は、冷戦や核の脅威など、アメリカが偏執病（パラノイア）に覆われていた時代に行われていた。 UFO分野における反政府的な偏執病の源流は、政府が秘密を隠していると主張したドナルド・キーホー（Donald Kehoe）に遡ることができる。
  • しかしバーカーの場合、3人の男が誰であるかについて安定した理論を提示せず、それを可能な限り神秘的にすることで「陰謀論であるが、陰謀者がいない」という形にしている。これはむしろ「宇宙的ホラー」の感覚であり、読者に「良い恐怖」を与えることを目的としていた。
    • （"for Barker, what's interesting is that he never presents anything like a stable theory about who the three men are... And so in a way, it's like a conspiracy theory without conspirators... that it's more of a sense of like cosmic horror..." - 0:38:01）

文学的手法と「目撃体験」:​

  • McKee氏は、バーカーがUFOやモンスターの目撃談を描写する際に二人称のナレーション（"you"）を使用していることに言及している。これは、読書という行為を目撃の行為に変えようとする試みである。

    • （"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." - 0:38:46）

  • 彼は読者に、その場にいるような体験を提供しようとしたが、自身の筆を通じてその体験を少し操作し、読者が「心の目で」見ているものを誘導しようとした。

セクシュアリティとフリンジへの関心:​

  • バーカーはゲイであり、1950年代のウェストバージニアの小さな町では容易なことではなかった。

  • UFO分野での彼の関心は、彼が「文化的アウトサイダー」であると感じていたことと関連があるかもしれない。

  • ドキュメンタリー「Shades of Gray」で提示された説（デービッド・フーチェン）では、「小さな町では一つのことについてしか変人になれない。危険な同性愛者として知られるよりも、UFOの男として知られる方が良い」というものがある。

    • （"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." - 0:41:30）

  • バーカーは、全国初のゲイ権利定期刊行物「One Magazine」（1956年創刊）の非常に初期の購読者であり、ストーンウォール以前のゲイ解放運動の一部だった。

  • 彼は「クラックポット（変人、狂信者）」と呼ばれる人々に強い関心を持ち、彼らの手紙を保存し、時には出版を検討した。

  • 彼は「アウトサイダーや変人たちが自分自身である権利を擁護する」ことに興味を持っており、McKee氏はこれが彼のセクシュアリティと関連していると考えている。

    • （"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 that attitude." - 0:44:00）

物語の重要性:​

  • バーカーにとって、物語が真実か虚偽かは重要ではなかった。彼にとって重要なのは「ストーリーが現実である」ということだった。

    • （"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." - 0:48:37）

  • 彼はストーリーテリングのプロセスは真実に対して中立であるというアプローチを取っていた。

McKee氏の驚き：ウィルヘルム・ライヒ:​

  • McKee氏が研究で最も驚いたことの一つは、心理学者ウィルヘルム・ライヒ（Wilhelm Reich）の存在だった。

  • ライヒはUFOに強い関心を持ち、彼の娘エーヴァ・ライヒがバーカーに手紙を送り、「The Saucerian」を購読していたことが分かった。ライヒはオーゴン理論の研究で迫害され投獄され、獄中で死去した。

  • エーヴァ・ライヒは、父がUFOへの信念のために迫害されたことをバーカーに電話で伝え助けを求めたが、バーカーはその時ライヒを知らず、その話を「クラックポット」からの電話として処理してしまった。

    • （"But Barker doesn't know who she is. He's never heard of Wilhelm Reich... And so he, this is a case where he actually did write this off as a crackpot, is calling me." - 0:51:28）

  • バーカーが、自身のスピンオフしている物語（UFOに関心を持つ人々が沈黙させられる）の最も明白なケースの一つに、当時は気づいていなかったことがMcKee氏にとって非常に驚きだった。

    • （"And here's one undisputable case of that happening. And he didn't take the bait... But even more surprising that Barker didn't do something with this story at the time." - 0:52:13）

バーカーの倫理観：ジョン・キールのケース:​

  • McKee氏は、特にジョン・キールに対して行われたいたずらが、自身の研究においてバーカーの倫理観について考えさせられた点だと述べている。

    • （"But the one, I think, that pushes at the edges for me is actually the case of John Keel." - 0:53:35）

  • キールのメモを見ると、彼はジェイ・ペロという女性からの奇妙な連絡／MIBの物語によって次第に偏執病的になり、バーカーとモズレーが彼に多くのいたずら電話をかけ、それを彼が超常的な電話活動として受け取っていたことが示唆される。

    • （"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." - 0:54:08）

  • McKee氏は、バーカーとモズレーがキールをそこまで追い込んだのは「少しやりすぎ」だったと感じている。

    • （"And so that one did seem like a little much to me." - 0:55:15）

UFOロジーと宗教・危険性:​

  • UFOロジーには多くの宗教的または神学的な要素がある。特に、何か異常なものを見る体験は、神秘的な体験と同様に「伝えられない」という点で類似している。

    • （"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." - 0:57:29）

  • McKee氏は、UFOロジー単体が危険だとは考えていないが、操作に対して脆弱であると考えている。

    • （"I don't think, you know, taken on its own, ufology is dangerous, per se. But it is susceptible to manipulation and things." - 0:59:00）

  • バーカーは「人々を楽しませ、良い時間を持たせる」というアジェンダを持っていたが、彼に続く人々には明確なアジェンダ（金銭目的、政治的な意図など）を持つ者が現れ、これがUFOロジーを政治的な方向に押しやり、初期の楽しさを奪ったとMcKee氏は指摘している。

    • （"a lot of far-right elements start creeping into ufology... 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." - 0:59:18）

  • 彼にとって危険なのはUFOロジー自体ではなく、それを自己目的のために利用する政治的アジェンダである。

バーカーのレガシーと批判的思考:​

  • バーカーのUFO文化への広範な影響は「美的」なものだった。彼は物語を読者の興味を引くように提示した。

  • 1960年代以降に見られるUFO界の「奇妙さへの推進」は、バーカーの美学に続いている。単純な目撃談では飽き足らず、より奇妙なものが必要とされるようになった。

  • バーカーは、特に後期の作品で、自身がどのように「糸を引いているか」を垣間見せることで、読者に批判的に読むことを促した。

    • （"what he also does... is to kind of pull the curtain back and show you how he's pulling the strings." - 1:02:20）

  • McKee氏は、読者がバーカーのテクニックを理解し、それが後のUFO文献や他のメディア（ブログ、YouTubeなど）でどのように使用されているかを識別できるようになることを望んでいる。

    • （"...make people a little more careful and critical readers of UFO texts... and hopefully look at them a little more carefully." - 1:02:20）

重要な引用:​

  • "Gray Barker just really quickly emerged as the most fascinating character that that early period of the flying saucer world in the 50s." (0:03:48)
  • "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." (0:07:51)
  • "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." (0:11:40)
  • "The trick, though, there is that John Keel does the same thing." (0:15:45)
  • "Barker instead publishes this in his zine as signs that he is being threatened." (0:17:46)
  • "So, Gray Barker is the inception of the Men in Black in the same way that Kenneth Arnold is the inception of flying saucers." (0:24:38)
  • "he never gives the game away. He is always, you know, maintaining the mystery." (0:19:28)
  • "And in a way, it's like a conspiracy theory without conspirators..." (0:38:01)
  • "He's trying to make, you know, the act of reading into an act of witnessing." (0:38:46)
  • "he had folder upon folder in his files labeled crackpot number one, crackpot number two, etc. Because it was too big to fit in one folder." (0:44:00)
  • "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." (0:48:37)
  • "I don't think what's dangerous there is the ufology itself. I think it's the political agendas that get, that kind of use ufology as a vehicle to advance themselves." (0:59:41)
  • "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." (1:02:20)

結論:​

グレイ・バーカーは、UFO分野の初期において、そのユニークな出版スタイルとストーリーテリングによって重要な役割を果たしました。彼は厳格な事実追求者というよりは、物語や体験の創造者であり、読者に楽しみと驚き、そして継続的な謎を提供することに重点を置いていました。彼の活動はメン・イン・ブラックの概念形成に大きな影響を与え、またUFO分野がより奇妙な物語を受け入れる方向へと導きました。

McKee氏の研究は、バーカーの複雑な人物像、その時代背景、そして彼の活動における倫理的な側面についても掘り下げており、彼がUFOという現象を単なる現実の探求としてではなく、文化的で文学的な現象として捉えていたことを示唆しています。彼のアーカイブは、当時のUFOコミュニティ、出版文化、そしてバーカー自身の内面を理解するための貴重な資料となっています。McKee氏は、バーカーのテクニックを理解することが、今日のUFO関連情報を含むあらゆるテキストを批判的に読むための助けとなることを期待しています。

AI

グレイ・バーカー関連の主要イベント時系列​

  • 1940年代: グレイ・バーカーがウェストバージニア州のサットン近郊の農場で育ち、大学で英語を専攻。書き物や映画プロモーションに関心を持つ。後にドライブインシアターのブッキングエージェントとして働く。

  • 1951年 - 1952年: 初期のUFOジンが創刊される。

  • 1952年:バーカーの故郷近くのフラットウッズで、12フィートのモンスターと円盤着陸の目撃事件（フラットウッズ・モンスター事件）が発生。

    • バーカーがこの事件について、全米市場への進出を目指して「Fate」誌に記事を執筆。これが彼の最初期のフィールド調査となる。

  • 1953年:バーカーが自身のUFOジン「The Saucerian」を創刊。他のジンとは異なり、より遊び心のあるスタイルを特徴とする。

    • 10月頃、アルバート・K・ベンダーが「暗いスーツの3人の男たち」（メン・イン・ブラックの前身）に訪問され、UFO調査を辞めるよう脅迫されたと主張。

  • 1956年:バーカーがアルバート・K・ベンダーの体験に基づいた最初の著書「They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers」を出版。この本で、口止めされたUFO関連のケースを「ハッシュアップ・ケース」と呼ぶ。メン・イン・ブラックの概念の基礎を築く。

  • 国内初のゲイ権利定期刊行物「One Magazine」が創刊され、バーカーが非常に早い段階で購読者となる。

  • ハワード・メンガーの著書「From Outer Space to You」を自身の出版社から出版。メンガーの原稿にバーカー自身が段落を追加するなどの改変を行う。

    • 1957年:後半、バーカーとジム・モズレーが政府（国務省）のレターヘッドを入手し、ジョージ・アダムスキー宛てを含む複数の偽の手紙（R.E. Straith Hoax）を作成。
    • ジョージ・アダムスキーがこの手紙を出版し、政府の支持の証拠とする。
    • バーカーが国務省のレターヘッド使用による犯罪の可能性を懸念し、神経質になる。FBIによる捜査の伝説が生まれる（実際には内部調査が行われた可能性が高い）。
    • この事件はしばらくUFO界で話題になるが、やがて忘れ去られる。

  • 1960年 - 1961年頃: バーカーがアルバート・K・ベンダーから原稿を受け取ったとし、彼の物語に関する活動を再開する。

  • 1960年代: バーカーが同性愛に関する活動で起訴される。

  • 1966年 - 1967年: ウェストバージニア州ポイントプレザント周辺でモスマン現象が発生。

  • 1966年: バーカーがジョージ・アダムスキーの追悼出版物で「R.E. Straithの奇妙なケース」と題したエッセイを掲載し、9年前に自身が関与した偽の手紙事件の謎を再燃させる。今度は「誰が私を嵌めようとしたのか」という視点で提示する。

  • 1960年代後半: モスマン現象の調査中に、バーカーとジョン・キール、ジム・モズレーの間でいたずらが頻繁に行われる。キールがバーカーに仕掛けた偽のメン・イン・ブラックのメモを、バーカーは自身のジンで「脅迫の証拠」として発表する。バーカーとモズレーがキールにいたずら電話をかけ、キールはそれを超常現象と解釈する。

  • 1970年: ジョン・キールの「モスマン・プロフェシー」に先立ち、バーカーがモスマン現象と周辺の出来事に関する自身の著書「The Silver Bridge」を出版。この本には、フィクションや奇妙な描写が含まれる。

  • 1970年代: ジョン・キールが「メン・イン・ブラック」という用語を初めて使用した記事を執筆。バーカーが伝えていた物語の多くを再利用する。メン・イン・ブラックの物語が政府エージェントから「フライングソーサーのパイロット」へと変遷し、より奇妙になる。

  • 1976年: ジョン・キールが著書「モスマン・プロフェシー」を出版。

  • 1980年代 - 1990年代: UFO分野に極右勢力が入り込み、政治的な方向に押しやる。

  • 1990年代: バーカーの蔵書・資料（アーカイブ）がウェストバージニア州のクラークスバーグ・ハリソン公立図書館にあるウォルデマー地域史センターに収蔵される。メン・イン・ブラックがコメディ映画シリーズになる。

  • 日付不明: デービッド・フーチェンによるドキュメンタリー「Shades of Gray」が制作される（バーカーの生涯とアーカイブに関するもの）。

  • 近年: ガブリエル・マッキーがバーカーの生涯と活動に関する著書「The Saucerian, UFOs, Men in Black, and the unbelievable life of Gray Barker」を執筆・出版。

登場人物リスト​

  • グレイ・バーカー (Gray Barker): ウェストバージニア州出身のUFO研究者、作家、出版社経営者。厳格な調査者というより、物語や体験の創造者として知られる。自身のUFOジン「The Saucerian」を創刊し、「They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers」「The Silver Bridge」などの著書でメン・イン・ブラックやモスマン現象といったテーマを広めた。ホラ話やいたずらを駆使してUFOコミュニティの謎を深め、読者に楽しさと驚きを提供した。同性愛者であり、文化的アウトサイダーへの関心が高い。
  • ガブリエル・マッキー (Gabriel McKee): 本ソースの主要な情報提供者。司書、著者、研究者であり、科学フィクション、宗教、神学、書誌学、書籍史、超常現象に関する文化の歴史を専門とする。バーカーの生涯と活動に関する著書「The Saucerian, UFOs, Men in Black, and the unbelievable life of Gray Barker」の著者。
  • ライアン・スプラグ (Ryan Sprague): ポッドキャスト「Somewhere in the Skies」のホストであり、ガブリエル・マッキーにインタビューを行った人物。UFO研究に長年関わっており、バーカーの時代のUFOロジーにノスタルジーを感じている。
  • アルバート・K・ベンダー (Albert K. Bender): 国際未確認飛行物体ビューロー（IFSB）の代表。1953年に「暗いスーツの3人の男たち」に脅迫されたと主張し、UFO調査から撤退した。バーカーの最初の著書「They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers」の主題となった人物であり、メン・イン・ブラック概念の直接的な起源に関わる。
  • ジム・モズレー (Jim Mosley): バーカーの親友であり、出版活動における共犯者。UFO関連の定期刊行物「Saucer News」や「Saucer Smear」の編集者。バーカーと共に偽の手紙事件やジョン・キールへのいたずらに深く関与した。
  • ジョン・キール (John Keel): モスマン現象に関する著書「モスマン・プロフェシー」で知られる作家・研究者。メン・イン・ブラックという用語を広めた人物。バーカーやモズレーから頻繁ないたずらを受け、それを自身の著作で超常現象として描写した。バーカーの著作におけるフィクションの混入を批判したが、自身も物語の操作を行っていたと指摘されている。
  • ドナルド・キーホー (Donald Kehoe): 初期UFO研究者。政府がUFOの秘密を隠蔽しているという主張を繰り返し、UFOロジーにおける反政府的な偏執病の源流を作った一人。バーカーの出版社は、彼の成功にあやかって書籍のマーケティングを行った。
  • ジョージ・アダムスキー (George Adamski): 初期に著名になったフライングソーサーのコンタクティ（異星人との接触者）。バーカーとモズレーが作成した偽の手紙（R.E. Straith Hoax）の受取人となり、その手紙を自身の主張の証拠として利用した。
  • R.E. Straith: バーカーとモズレーがジョージ・アダムスキーに送った偽の手紙に署名された架空の人物。国務省の文化交流委員会の一員と名乗った。
  • ドミニク・ルッチェージ (Dominic Lucezzi): 国際未確認飛行物体ビューロー（IFSB）の調査委員会メンバーであり、バーカーの最初期のいたずら仲間の一人。
  • ハワード・メンガー (Howard Menger): フライングソーサーのコンタクティ。「From Outer Space to You」の著者で、バーカーの出版社から最初に出版された本となった。メンガーの原稿はバーカーによって改変された。
  • ウィルヘルム・ライヒ (Wilhelm Reich): 心理学者。ジークムント・フロイトの弟子。晩年にオーゴン理論やUFOに関心を持った。彼の娘がバーカーに連絡を取り、援助を求めたが、当時はバーカーに認識されなかった。
  • エーヴァ・ライヒ (Eva Reich): ウィルヘルム・ライヒの娘。父のUFOへの信念を含む迫害についてバーカーに電話で連絡を取り、助けを求めた人物。バーカーのジン「The Saucerian」の購読者だった。
  • ジェイ・ペロ (Jay Pero): ジョン・キールに奇妙な連絡やメン・イン・ブラックに関する物語を提供したロングアイランドの女性。キールが偏執病的な状態になる要因の一つとなった可能性がある。
  • テッド・ブロッカー (Ted Blocker): ニューヨークの民間未確認飛行物体調査グループ（Civilian Saucer Investigation）のメンバー。R.E. Straith Hoaxの手紙を受け取った者の一人。
  • デービッド・フーチェン (David Houchen): バーカーのアーカイブの長年のキュレーター。ドキュメンタリー「Shades of Gray」で、「小さな町では一つのことについてしか変人になれない」というバーカーに関する説を提示した。
  • ドロシー・マーティン (Dorothy Martin): 予言が外れたことで知られるサイキック・コンタクティ集団のリーダー。社会学の研究対象となった（著書「When Prophecy Fails」）。バーカーは彼女の集団をUFOジンで取り上げ、彼らの信念を擁護する姿勢を見せた。
文字起こし

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 Saucerian, UFOs, Men in Black, and the unbelievable life of Gray Barker. You are now Somewhere in the Skies with your host, Ryan Sprague. When I saw that you were the guest on there, I'm like, oh my god, Gene is gonna have a field day, because his connections with Moseley and all that, it's crazy. (0:01:08)

I'm super interested in the actual physical printing of these things. He's like, yeah, I ran Barker's Press for a year. We kind of geeked out about printing techniques for a couple of minutes. I was like, nobody is going to care about this except you and I. Hey, I cared. (0:01:31)

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 Saucerian, UFOs, Men in Black, and the unbelievable life of Gray Barker. Gabe, welcome for the very first time to Somewhere in the Skies. Thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, yeah. (0:01:51)

And 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 ufology. And for anyone who's been into this topic for a while, you're always on the hunt for that one book. They knew too much about flying saucers. (0:02:11)

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 ufology, 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. (0:02:32)

So when I get a chance to go back to the golden era, I think we can call it a ufology. 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. (0:02:49)

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. (0:03:19)

But he's... so yeah, so I studied religion and science fiction. And then I got really interested in the kind of actual print culture around these things around, you know, science fiction magazines, 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. (0:03:48)

And Grey Barker just really quickly emerged as the most fascinating character that that early period of the flying saucer world in the 50s. And his zine, The Saucerian, was kind of really foundational in a lot of ways. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, like the... for anyone 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 traveler. (0:04:17)

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 Grey Barker's 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 Grey Barker's life, because it was such a fascinating life, inside and outside of ufology, which you cover a lot. (0:04:52)

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 ufology. 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 J. Allen Hynek, or Grey Barker, even. So yeah, could you maybe paint us a picture of who Grey Barker was? (0:05:27)

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 you don't mind. Yeah, sure. So Grey Barker grew up in central West Virginia. He grew up on a farm in a tiny, tiny town. You can't even really call it a town, just a cluster of a couple farmhouses just north of Sutton, West Virginia. And 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. (0:06:07)

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. (0:06:29)

When there was a kind of major, 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. (0:06:47)

He saw the byline of his hometown in the Clarksburg newspaper in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he 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 break out into a national market as a writer, which was something that he wanted to do. (0:07:26)

So about a year after that, he founded his flying saucer zine, The Saucerian. It was not the first flying saucer zine, but it was in the first wave. So the earliest ones were founded 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. (0:07:51)

So things like the Aperol 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. (0:08:20)

And I think The Saucerian was really part of that. And then his storytelling style 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. (0:08:48)

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. (0:09:12)

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. (0:09:32)

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. (0:09:55)

They had this IFSB stamp that they would put on things and they, you know, 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. (0:10:17)

And he got his start doing pranks with one of the other members of that investigation committee, Dominic Lucezzi, 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. (0:10:42)

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, you know. 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. (0:11:10)

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. (0:11:36)

I think I would find that a little ridiculous to begin with. (0:11:40)

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. (0:12:21)

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 ufology. 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 not even the book by John Keel, it's the movie, The Mothman Prophecies. Man, that movie still gives me chills up until today. (0:13:01)

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? (0:13:23)

Yeah, sure. So The Mothman sightings start appearing, 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 Mothman itself. (0:13:54)

They were 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 Prophecies 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. (0:14:50)

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. (0:15:15)

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. (0:15:22)

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. (0:15:45)

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. (0:16:04)

He does lots of changing witnesses' names and splitting one witness into two people with different names and saying that there were a hundred sightings of something that there were three or four sightings of. So, Keel is doing the same kind of manipulating. Barker is just kind of pulling back the curtain in The Silver Bridge and showing you what he's doing. Oh, that is so interesting. (0:16:24)

Yeah, I always thought of Keel, you know, as sort of cerebral or metaphorical as he could often get. Like, he was more of, like, 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 relevant to everything ufology. You know, 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 explanation or an extraterrestrial explanation. This often happens with so many UFO cases. (0:17:06)

You know, the more hardcore skeptic is going to go down the military technology route, where the believer is going to go down ET, extra dimensional, 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. (0:17:27)

So, they were staying 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, 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. (0:17:46)

And John is, like, what are you doing? But then it what happened is that Keel 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 kind of take it at face value as his first step. (0:18:19)

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. (0:18:42)

And in the book, it's really creepy. In the movie, it gets turned into the chapstick scene, 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 being like, oh, no, this is actually kind of creepy. (0:19:03)

But if you know anything about Barker and Mosley, it's pretty clear this is just a prank call that they're playing on Keel. And there's a pleading letter that that John Keel 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. (0:19:28)

The reason to do it is to reveal it. Right? 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, 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. (0:19:58)

It's not, he's not going to reveal, you know, that, you know, this world of ufology 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 ufologists 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. (0:20:34)

So I, you know, I talked 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, there's not documentary evidence of it. (0:20:52)

It's gonna, 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 Waldemar, which is a local history center at the Clarksburg Harrison Public Library in West Virginia. So they, they acquired his papers in the early nineties and it is a massive trove of correspondence, publications, ephemera, all kinds of stuff relating to his entire life and career. (0:21:37)

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. (0:21:58)

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, for researching his life. (0:22:04)

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 field, 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 Dahl and all that. (0:22:35)

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 Men in Black? So I'll, you mentioned Palmer and Dahl. So yes, there is kind of a pre Men in 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, being the kind of inaugural flying saucer witness. (0:23:14)

And that relates to a sighting 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 sighting. 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, who were interviewing witnesses and seemed to be acting kind of strangely. (0:23:45)

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 sighting. And after that, you see things from the past kind of being incorporated into this narrative. But it's really the Kenneth Arnold sighting that is the inception of, you know, flying saucers, to use the original term, as a cultural phenomenon. (0:24:09)

Right? So other things can get kind of re, kind of retconned into it. And so I think the, the, the Harold Dahl and Fred Chrisman story really gets kind of retconned 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. (0:24:38)

So about a month after Barker launched the Saucerion on October 1953, Albert K. Bender, who was the head of the International Flying Saucer 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 investigation. 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. (0:25:12)

And so this becomes the fodder for Gray Barker's first book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, which came out in 1956. So pretty, 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 the 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. (0:25:45)

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. (0:26:11)

It's not until a few years later that the term Men in 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. (0:26:27)

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 was Keel's interest. He was interested in the strangeness of things and what's the weirdest story that's out there. And so the stories initially really sound like maybe government agents or something. (0:26:59)

And by the 1970s, 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 series of comedy movies. (0:27:19)

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. Very different take on the subject. Yeah, it's fascinating. And like you mentioned, 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. I really wish the manuscript for that book had survived, because there's disputes about whether, to what extent Bender is its author versus Barker. Interesting. And I found no really concrete evidence on either side. (0:28:08)

It's like the debate of was Shakespeare actually Shakespeare, right? Yeah. Or how much of Richard Shaver's stories did Ray Palmer write? It's a similar one. And I think in both cases, the purported author did more than they are often given credit for. I do think Bender wrote something, because Barker had not really been talking about the Bender story for a couple of years. (0:28:39)

And then very suddenly, in I think late 1960 or 61, um, 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, 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. (0:29:13)

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 where 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 typescript is in Barker's file. (0:29:45)

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 seem to be in a different style. And sure enough, I'm 99% certain that Barker inserted those himself. I did a really careful run through of that manuscript. (0:30:05)

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. Well, what's interesting is the inserted parts don't aren't about UFOs. They're about life on a farm. Okay. It's, it's about, you know, because it's, it's in the story of Menger meeting the space woman when he was 10. And there's this, this paragraph that's just about the beauty of nature, that's not in Menger's manuscript. (0:30:43)

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 that his influence turns up to. (0:30:54)

I love that. Yeah, kind of painting the picture. Yeah, that's cool.

The hoaxes. Now, one of the big ones, and I know it can get again, these things get convoluted, but the Stray Flighter. This is one that is infamous in the UFO world. (0:31:57)

It's got kind of a funny, I guess, ending to it. Could you tell us a little about this part of the book, Gabe? Yeah, sure. So in 1950, late 1957, I believe it was, Gray Barker and Jim Mosley got their hands on some government stationery. And they decided to have some fun. So they wrote a number of hoax letters. (0:32:27)

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. Straith 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. (0:32:58)

And Adamski was somebody who was kind of desperate for official recognition and things like that. And so it's really targeting him very directly with what he is wanting to receive from the world. And Adamski publishes it as proof that his stories are true and the government supports him. Barker, though, gets very worried when this happens. The other five or six hoax letters sank without a trace. (0:33:39)

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. (0:33:58)

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 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. (0:34:44)

A couple of 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. (0:35:04)

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. (0:35:28)

And I haven't actually seen it yet. And so I'm kind of eagerly awaiting getting that information for the second edition of the book. 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. So it was a very hot topic in the UFO world for a couple months, but it really fizzled out. Who is the one who revised it? (0:35:54)

Greg 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. Straith 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. (0:36:27)

Okay. Yeah. Build on that. Yeah. So going back to sort of the zine aspect of all of this, Gabe, the, we have to think of the time period in which these guys were working in putting this stuff out. (0:36:44)

America was in a stronghold 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. (0:37:09)

What role do you think that paranoia played in all these guys coming out with this stuff, whether it was Bender or Mosley 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 fifties on was the government is keeping secrets from you. (0:37:28)

And so I think a lot of the anti-government paranoia that develops later and takes some dark turns, especially in the eighties and nineties, 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 major factors in fifties 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. (0:38:01)

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's something in the universe that doesn't want you, you personally, the reader of my book, to know too much about flying saucers. (0:38:27)

And so for him, it is very much, it's not so much this kind of societal paranoia as 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. (0:38:46)

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. (0:39:09)

He wants you to be there and to, you know, since you can't actually be on a hilltop in Flatwoods, 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. (0:39:25)

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 developer 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. (0:40:05)

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, you know, New York Times bestsellers. And Flying Saucer Conspiracy, which I think was his third or fourth book, had just come out. (0:40:26)

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. (0:40:29)

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. (0:41:02)

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. (0:41:30)

So what role do you think that played in his, I guess, his interest or fascination in the fringe or these types of things, Gabe? Yeah, yeah, sure. 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 Gray by David Houchen, who was the longtime curator of the Barker Archive. That's a great documentary. (0:42:09)

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. (0:42:37)

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. And this was, you know, 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. (0:43:03)

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 the way in which he was was prosecuted and the type of punishment he received versus, you know, similar cases. In fact, his longtime partner was was prosecuted at the same time and received very different punishment. So it's definitely an interesting narrative. (0:43:40)

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 as kind of a cultural outsider. And so I think that is one of the reasons that he was drawn not just to ufology itself, which is kind of, you know, at the fringes of culture in a lot of ways, but to the fringes of that fringe. (0:44:00)

So he was very interested in contactee narratives, and other kind of weird accounts of personal experience that we might call term crackpot literature. In fact, he had folder upon folder in his files labeled crackpot number one, crackpot number two, etc. 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. (0:44:29)

Have you got a book manuscript, and a couple of the books that he published, you know, actually came out of that. (0:44:33)

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 that attitude. There's a really kind of moving editorial in one of the early issues of the Saucerian, where he's writing about the Dorothy Martin group. So that's a kind of psychic contactee group. (0:45:01)

They're well known now because they were the subject of the sociology book, When Prophecy Fails. It's a group that had 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. (0:45:22)

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. (0:45:44)

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. (0:46:15)

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, just wanted to be who he was. 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. (0:46:41)

So yeah, that's pretty... I also love that, like, Barker was never about, is this true? Are UFOs real? He didn't care. 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 dishearten some of my listeners or viewers, that I'm like, not seeking the truth, I'm seeking my place in all of this. (0:47:11)

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 ufology 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. (0:47:36)

You know, insofar as a lot of people refer to UFOs as the phenomenon these days. And for a while, I said, you know, there is no single phenomenon. There are 17, 30 different phenomena that people have grouped together as one thing. And then I realized like, oh, that grouping together is the phenomenon. (0:48:05)

It's this cultural motivation to have there be a thing, a container for all these different things to go into. And hoaxes are part of that. And pranks are part of that. (0:48:12)

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. (0:48:37)

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 driving motivation. And so yeah, truth and fiction don't come into it. It is the storytelling process is kind of neutral on the truth. And that is really the approach that he was taking. Yeah, absolutely. (0:49:11)

Absolutely. 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, was not expecting that? Yeah, so one of the biggest ones was Wilhelm Reich. So Wilhelm Reich was a kind of student of Sigmund Freud, fled essentially Nazi persecution to the US in the 1930s or 40s, and then got interested in weird stuff. (0:49:50)

So he developed this orgone 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. (0:50:15)

And in fact, just last week, when I was at the archive in Clarksburg, I found a letter from Reich's daughter, Ava Reich, who was kind of assisting him in his experiments in this period, to Gray Barker, subscribing to the Saucerian. 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. (0:50:53)

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. Ava 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. (0:51:28)

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, Wilhelm Reich was already dead. (0:51:58)

And so years later, in the 1970s, he now knows who Wilhelm Reich is, and he writes another editorial on this saying, 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. (0:52:13)

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, you know, incorporate this into any of his narratives. And that, the surprising thing to me was, one, 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. (0:52:39)

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? (0:52:57)

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 Gray Barker the villain of my book? I think I came to a place where I kind of made peace with who he was. (0:53:35)

But the one, I think, that pushes at the edges for me is actually the case of John Keel. 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 spiraling. (0:54:08)

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 Pero. 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. (0:54:34)

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. (0:55:15)

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 Kiel as hard as they did. I do think John Kiel came out okay, you know, 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. (0:55:52)

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. So... That's fair. Oh, and you know, I mean, it takes two to tango when it comes... there have been cases throughout the years of ufology that... where disinformation was given to people and kind of made them go mad, but it only kind of fueled the fire that was already there of possible madness. (0:56:17)

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 Mothman Prophecies is an amazing book. (0:56:31)

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 ufology? I mean, a lot of people do consider ufology a cult, maybe a religion at times. (0:57:04)

But what do you think, as someone who has studied religions, has studied these sorts of things throughout the decades, if not centuries, is ufology 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 element to a lot of ufology and other paranormal topics. (0:57:29)

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. (0:57:59)

But unless you've had the experience yourself, then you only have, you know, the account of it to work on. 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. (0:58:24)

And so I think that is definitely a big point of overlap. To the question of is ufology dangerous? I mean, that's definitely an interesting question, as well. Because I don't think, you know, taken on its own, ufology is dangerous, per se. But it is susceptible to manipulation and things. So Barker did not have much of an agenda. (0:59:00)

He really wanted people to have a good time, and be entertained, and maybe have some kind of transcendent 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. (0:59:18)

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 that a lot of far-right elements start creeping into ufology in the 80s and 90s, and really do push it in a political direction that I think was absent earlier than that. (0:59:41)

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 ufology itself. (0:59:51)

I think it's the political agendas that get, that kind of use ufology as a vehicle to advance themselves. For sure. It's like anything, you know. 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. And we live in that ambiguity in ufology 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. (1:00:23)

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 was 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. (1:00:55)

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 ufology 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. (1:01:34)

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. (1:01:58)

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. (1:02:20)

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 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 UFO texts, and, you know, 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. (1:03:14)

Absolutely. Yeah, discernment is key, guys, for sure. Awesome, Gabe. Well, of course, obvious last question, where can we find the book and everything you're up to? (1:03:20)

Yes. So the book is called The Saucerian 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 gabrielmcke.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. (1:03:59)

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 will 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 in somewhere. Thanks for having me. (1:04:12)

(2025-05-22)