-Caveat Lector-
from alt.conspiracy
-----
As always, Caveat Lector.
Om
K
-----
<A HREF="aol://5863:126/alt.conspiracy:519368">::: Gray Barker, Myth-Maker :::
</A>
-----
Subject: ::: Gray Barker, Myth-Maker :::
From: Dan Clore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Fri, Apr 30, 1999 8:16 AM
Message-id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Gray Barker: My Friend, the Myth-Maker
by John C. Sherwood
Gray Barker, who raised the "Men in Black" concept to prominence in UFO lore,
didn't mind if the sensational flying-saucer stories he published were made
up --
as long as they were presented as fact. To him it was all a joke. Here John
Sherwood ("Dr. Richard H. Pratt") for the first time confesses his role in
Barker's
flying-saucer, "Men in Black" myth-making.
If Gray Barker were alive today, he'd think he'd died and gone to heaven.
Seems that now everyone has heard of the "Men in Black," a concept he first
raised to prominence in UFO lore.
And, of course, he'd try to make a fast buck off of them.
The late Gray Barker, head of Saucerian Publications and author of numerous
books about flying saucers, was one of the most prolific writers
and publishers in the "fringe" area of UFO fanaticism.
Some amusing yet disturbing details about Barker's constructive (and certainly
destructive) contributions to the fantasy world of UFOs have lurked in my
files for
decades. Despite the personal shame I attach to them, their general release
is long
overdue.
Gray and I never met face to face, but I owe to him the beginning of my
journalistic career, and my only corrupt journalistic experience. In 1967, he
published my somewhat juvenile "history" of the 1966 Michigan UFO "scare," a
book Gray titled Flying Saucers Are Watching You. Its publication gained me
my first newspaper job. After that, Gray and I shared a lengthy
correspondence,
and he may even have considered me one of his proteges. Gray also put me in
touch with some of the more extravagant figures in the UFO field, including
the
notorious Richard Shaver of "Shaver mystery" fame, and enjoyed my reciprocal
sense of humor.
I pulled Gray's letters out of my files after my wife and I saw the trailer
for the 1997 summer movie hit Men in Black, the Tommy Lee Jones/Will Smith
megamillion-dollar movie spectacle that owes a fair share of its style to
Gray's 1956 book They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers. The fact that I had
kept the letters might bother Gray now, considering what I'm about to
confess. In fact, Gray (and some others deceived by what he and I concocted)
may meet me in hell with fangs at the ready. To those who were fooled, I
certainly owe an apology for the role I played. But
it's time that this material was made public.
Barker's day job was as a theatrical film booker in Clarksburg, West
Virginia. He
also was a talented writer, an early lover of flying-saucer lore, and a man
who
could make a good story better. He was hyperimaginative and could have written
science fiction.
A lot of what he wrote probably was just that. But he always offered his
accounts
as fact.
They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers made the Men in Black (M.I.B.) feared
within UFO circles during the late 1950s and 1960s. The book now is
hard to find, and my hardcover copy -- the third printing -- has crispy
pages. In
it, Gray told about alleged brushes between the sinister M.I.B. and a
Connecticut
man, Al K. Bender, who set the pace for what is now the stereotypical M.I.B.
story: Someone sees a UFO and tries to tell the world about it. Without
warning,
three men in black suits and driving a big black car confront the witness.
Afterwards, the witness appears too frightened to talk further about the UFO
--
or anything else. Woo-WOOO-oo!
In account after account within the pages of They Knew Too Much and
subsequent writings by others (including John Keel, who began using the
shorthand "M.I.B." in his writings), the mysterious trio -- who at times seem
to
have uncanny mental powers and weird, otherworldly faces -- squelch all
discussion about supposedly true UFO encounters. The whole notion smacked of
a huge, pre-Watergate conspiracy.
As I began to write this apologetic revelation in July 1997, the news came
that the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency indeed may have participated in a coverup not
unlike that supposedly initiated by the fabled M.I.B. U.S. intelligence
historian
Gerald K. Haines wrote an unclassified article for Studies of Intelligence, a
CIA
journal, revealing that during the 1950s the U.S. Air Force and other agencies
actually did conspire to suppress the UFO issue and to concoct false cover
stories to explain sightings of such super-secret U.S. spy planes as the U-2
and
later the SR-71 Blackbird (the Internet address for Haines's study is
http://www.odci.gov/csi/studies/97unclas/ufo.html).
So, Bender, Barker, and the rest indeed may have been inspired by a grain (or
several grains) of truth. But that doesn't contradict what I am about to
disclose
about Barker's participation in -- and encouragement of -- actual fraud to
perpetuate sales of his UFO books and magazines.
I knew little about the bizarre world of "ufology" when I typed up a detailed
account about the 1966 Michigan UFO sightings and sent the manuscript to
Saucerian Publications, the book company Gray had set up with the profits from
They Knew Too Much. Gray published my book in 1967, paid me a satisfying sum,
and made me a published writer at age seventeen. With that on my resume,
I got my first newspaper job, in my hometown of Marshall, Michigan. Two years
later, I was working in the Battle Creek Enquirer newsroom in Battle Creek,
Michigan, where I work as opinion-page editor today.
Meanwhile, Gray and I continued to correspond. Here's one telling excerpt
from a
letter of his dated June 27, 1968: "Strictly off the record, unusual interest
and fixation upon UFOs represents, in my opinion, a definite symptom of
neurosis. . . . I cannot (again off the record) bear for very long most of
the people and the fans of saucerdom, mainly because most of them are oral
aggressors (i.e., they talk all the time about saucers and make you listen).
I do genuinely like a few saucerers (and former saucerers) like yourself,
who, along with their interest in saucers,
seem to be pretty sane and can have a sense of humor about it."
That same year, in creative zeal, I had sent to him a sci-fi piece I wrote
about a
scientific organization that discovers that UFOs are actually time machines,
then
encounters a more sinister enemy group of time-travelers who try to destroy
them. The story began with a pseudoscholarly discussion by a fictitious
scientist,
Dr. Richard H. Pratt, about time travel and UFOs. The rest of it was about
Pratt's mysterious encounter with three strange individuals "trapped" in our
own
time.
Gray urged me to try to make the incident seem real by creating a fictitious
organization out of whole cloth. In youthful amorality, I picked up Gray's
ball and
sent a letter to Ray Palmer's Flying Saucer magazine, which, in early 1969,
published verbatim my anonymous announcement of the formation of an
organization that identified itself only as the B.I.C.R., supposedly formed
by three
men whose names were given as William A. Gautier, Thomas Harper, and R. James
Kipling (names I concocted using my shelf of books by great fiction
writers). Meanwhile, as I prepared for my busy college years, I had disbanded
a
small but legitimate UFO-investigation group I had led since 1965 and ceased
publishing a small "saucer 'zine" I had been sending to associates in
thirteen states.
Gray's letter quoted above went on about the reaction to the news in the UFO
world about my UFO group's disbandment: "Did you see Saucer Scoop?" he wrote.
"They're doing a big deal on you, suggesting you really were hushed by the
blackmen. I'll always be glad to print an article by you if you'll tell the
real (or
made up) story of how these strange forces made you quit. You might as well go
out of saucers in the usual syndrome."
I wrote to Gray saying that I would follow up in the form of a rewritten
version of
the Dr. Pratt/time-travel sci-fi piece I'd already sent him. I said I would
make it
clear that it was just a story. Here was his response on July 12, 1968: "I
think that
the sci-fi story you are thinking of, revealing at the end that it's made up,
would be
a little too negative. Already some readers are accusing us of making up
things
(which we do occasionally of course). How about an article just making your
exiting from research even more mysterious than ever!"
In my youthful naivete and desire to be published, I didn't challenge the
wrongness of this. It took me a few months to put together the revised story,
now
ready to be published as true. In a letter dated December 7, 1968, Gray
coached
me: "Try to make it as technical as possible to make it look like a real
scientific
report. The real scientists who read our 'zine will see the hoax and I hope
take it
as a joke." My article "Flying Saucers: Time Machines," by "Dr. Richard H.
Pratt," was published in the Spring/Summer 1969 issue of Barker's magazine
Saucer News, followed by "The Strange B.I.C.R. Affair" in the Summer 1970
issue.
An interim letter, recounting his work on a book about the West Virginia
"Mothman" sightings, reflects Gray's attitude about publishing fiction as
nonfiction:
"About half of it is a recounting of actual sightings and events in the Ohio
Valley
circa 1966. . . . I think that the `true accounts' are told in an exciting
way, but I
have deliberately stuck in fictional chapters based roughly on cases I had
heard
about." Evidently, Gray had few qualms about publishing as fact fictional
material
deliberately contrived for release under the Saucerian Press label and for
Saucer
News.
Gray wrote to me about the reaction to "Flying Saucers: Time Machines":
"Evidently the fans swallowed this one with a gulp." Subsequent notes in my
files
include copies of letters Gray sent to other UFO researchers, including Ray
Palmer, disingenuously requesting follow-up data on the supposedly true
identity
of "Richard H. Pratt," who now supposedly had dropped mysteriously from sight.
These notes thankfully drew suspicion away from myself.
In early 1983, shortly before he died of a heart attack, Gray published
another
book, M.I.B: The Secret Terror Among Us, which he dedicated to Al K. Bender,
the Connecticut man who had inspired They Knew Too Much. Gray devoted an
entire chapter to "Dr. Pratt" and presented the story as if it really
might be true. To my perpetual shame, I shut up again. After all, I told
myself,
Gray had given me my career break -- and he was publishing my stuff. I tried
to
ignore that he was playing fast and loose with the truth. And I had realized
that a
lot of what he had written before probably was just as loose.
Over the years, I have received mail from various people who have wondered
whether I might know something about the background of the strange "B.I.C.R.
affair." I always claimed that I knew nothing or that I didn't want to talk
more
about it. Even after Gray died, I kept quiet.
But the myth has moved to a new stage in its evolution, and it is only right
that
some background be provided about the man who helped to launch it. I have
tuned in the TV series Night Skies and seen the Men in Black portrayed as
government agents flying scary black helicopters. And, of course, it wouldn't
surprise me to see Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith return in a sequel to last
summer's big movie hit. It's only a matter of time before someone puts
together a
supposed "true history" of the M.I.B.; and because of Gray, it will be very
difficult
to separate the wheat (if there is any) from the chaff.
The saving grace is that the movie was presented as a comedy. That's
appropriate, because so much of it really is a huge joke. And that weird
laughter
you hear is coming from Gray Barker's grave.
About the Author
John C. Sherwood is opinion-page editor for the Battle Creek Enquirer in
Battle Creek, Michigan. He can be reached at 120 W. Hanover St., Marshall,
MI 49068. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW:
http://www.internet1.net/~sherwood/
--
--------------------------------------------------- Dan Clore
The Website of Lord Weyrdgliffe:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/index.html Welcome to the Waughters....
The Dan Clore Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/necpage.htm Because the true mysteries
cannot be profaned....
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!"
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
