Remembering Gray Barker
Gray Barker was one of the most colorful figures in the history of the UFO subject. He was the author at least two landmark books: Flying Saucers and the Three Men, which popularized the Men In Black stories of ufologist Albert Bender and The Silver Bridge, which was his take on the Mothman scare of the mid-1960s. Most if not all of his audience took his writing seriously, and Barker was a gifted reporter, but he often took liberties with the facts for the entertainment of his readers.
In 1994, I interviewed Jim Moseley for The Excluded Middle. He recalled his best friend Barker as someone who:
…had wonderful sense of humor, and a sense of wonderment (which is a good word for him) about the UFO subject. He stopped being a “believer” very early on, but kept the sense of wonderment. What he got out of it was entertainment for himself, and the audience he wrote for. He thought of himself as an entertainer, not as a scientist or a person dealing in facts. There were “New Age” types long before there was a UFO field, and he knew this audience and what they wanted to hear, so he wrote books and published them as a book business. He also had a theater that he owned and operated, and he started out as a booking agent for films at theaters in the area. So, he was always in the entertainment field and thought of himself as an entertainer. He thought I was too serious, because I believed some of it, and still do, but he didn’t believe any of it.
His last book was Men In Black: The Secret Terror Among Us, which I read in 1984. Inside the back cover was an address and phone number. When I finally got up the gumption to call, a woman who turned out to be his mother answered and told me that he had died the month before. It was really a shock and a disappointment. I had similar luck with flying saucer contactee Orfeo Angelucci, who passed away a month before I finally learned that he lived not 10 miles from my apartment.
In 1995, my friend Ralph Coon directed a documentary on Barker, called Whispers From Space. The film featured interviews with Barker’s friends and acquaintances from Clarksburg, West Virginia, his hometown, as well as Moseley. The last scene in the film is a tape recorder sitting next to Barker’s tombstone. It’s Barker speaking to a UFO convention audience about his fascination and wonder with the subject, and it’s strangely poignant.
During our interview, Moseley pulled a sheet from a stack of papers and read me one of Gray Barker’s unpublished poems, which summed up Barker’s attitude, at least during one of his many cynical periods:
UFO is a bucket of shit
Its followers: perverts, monomaniacs, dipsomaniacs
Artists of the fast buck
True believers, objective believers, new age believers
Keyhoe believers
Shushed by the three men
Or masturbated by space men
UFO is a bucket of shit
The Air Force investigated UFOs
And issued a report
Couched in polite language
Which translated, means:
“UFO is a bucket of shit”
Meade Layne is a bucket of shit
Lex Mebane is a bucket of shit
James W. Moseley is a bucket of shit
Richard Ogden is a bucket of shit
Ray Palmer is a bucket of shit
And I sit here writing
While the shit drips down my face
In great rivulets
For more, see my post on a visit to the Gray Barker Archive in Clarksburg.
This entry was posted
on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Books, Breaking News, History, Humorous, Pop Culture, UFOlogists, UFOlogy, UFOmystic Exclusive, UFOs On Film, Wake Up Down There. You can follow responses via RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response or trackback from your site.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit BlinkList Google Ma.gnolia StumbleUpon Technorati Yahoo! Help
- Related News Stories:
- New Gray Barker Biopic »
- The Barker Files »
- Greg’s Occasional Pic of the Moment #4 - Gray Barker »
- Albert K. Bender Speech From 1967 »
- John Greenewald Profile »
- Return of the MIB? »
- Timothy Green Beckley on Radio Misterioso Sunday »
- The Silver Bridge Returns! »
- Abductions, UFOs & More »
- The “Torture King” »
|
Jul 14 2008 
July 14th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
How old was Barker when he wrote those scatological rhimes?
September 24th, 2008 at 1:50 am
[...] are now two films profiling legendary ufo writer and hoaxer Gray Barker. Whispers From Space, directed by my friend Ralph Coon, was released in 1995, and it is a [...]