The Paracast Newsletter
April 13, 2025
www.theparacast.com
Discover the Impact of Folklorist Gray Barker to UFO Culture, Including the Men In Black Myth, with Gabriel McKee on The Paracast!
The Paracast is released every Sunday and available from our site, https://www.theparacast.com, your favorite podcast app, and the IRN Internet Radio Network. All episodes from 2022 and later now feature better audio and fewer ads. We are also re-releasing some of our most popular classic episodes.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN'T SIGNED UP FOR THE PARACAST+ YET? PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARACAST+ SO YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE ULTIMATE PARACAST EXPERIENCE AT A SPECIAL LOW PRICE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive bonus podcast, After The Paracast, plus a special version of The Paracast with all the ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Episodes for subscribers to The Paracast+ are now released 24 hours earlier. Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode (April 13, 2025): Decades before the 1997 sci-fi comedy “Men In Black” launched a multibillion dollar film franchise, a young folklorist, UFO promoter Gray Barker helped to spread the original MIB concept in a book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The details about Barker’s colorful life is told in Gabriel Mckee’s book, The Saucerian: The Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker (MIT Press). It’s the strange, but true biography of a central purveyor and promoter of flying saucer and conspiracist knowledge in the mid-twentieth century. Known mostly to people in the UFO field, Barker (who died in 1984) was an eccentric literary outsider, filled with ideas that were out of step with the world. An author and unreliable narrator of implausible stories, Barker founded and operated Saucerian Books, an independent publisher of books about flying saucers and other ideas at the fringes of popular discourse. In The Saucerian, Gabriel Mckee tells the fascinating story of Barker’s West Virginia–based press, the unique corpus of materials it published, and how office-copying and self-publishing techniques influenced the spread of paranormal beliefs and conspiratorial worldviews over the last century. Following the development of UFO subculture, Mckee explores the life and career of a larger-than-life hoaxer and originator of pseudoscientific ideas. In return, Gene and cohost Tim Swartz talk about their own encounters with Barker and his friends over the years. This is an episode you won’t want to miss. Gabriel’s site: Home
After The Paracast — Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on April 12: Gabriel Mckee, author of The Saucerian: The Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker (MIT Press), returns to discuss how the subject of his book impacted UFO culture over the years. Selling sensationalism and paranoia to his fans, the books released by Barker’s small publishing company covered a variety of UFO-related topics. Speaking with Gene and cohost Tim Swartz, he traces Barker’s life after the early days, how he eventually acquired Saucer News from his pal, editor/publisher Jim Moseley, and soon ran it into the ground. Also discussed is how the ongoing reports of Men In Black essentially did not influence the film franchise, except for the name. Though Barker himself was a skeptic, he viewed the world of occult believers as a source of ongoing entertainment. From his place on the fringes of mid-century American culture, Barker left an unmatched legacy in conspiratorial concepts that have become prominent pop-cultural folklore, that, in addition to the MIB, included Mothman, and the Philadelphia Experiment. As a mastermind behind the fantastical, Barker’s promotional efforts were the precursor to contemporary conspiracism. Gabriel Mckee is the Librarian for Collections and Services at New York University Institute For the Study of the Ancient World. He holds master’s degrees in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and in Library and Information Science from Long Island University. His areas of research include the intersection of theology and popular culture, patristics and church history, parahistoriography, and small press bibliography. Gabriel’s site: Home
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. And look for @theparacast on Bluesky Social, Facebook, Threads and X.
I Know Too Much About Gray Barker!
By Gabriel Mckee
It was the appearance of the books, more than anything else, that grabbed me first. They were neither hardcover treatises, aimed at the respectable readers in urban bookstores, nor gaudy paperbacks intended to catch the lower-brow reader’s eye from a spinner rack. These were something else — letter-size, but thin, and with bold, all-caps titles on their covers: UFO WARNING. HOW TO CONTACT SPACE PEOPLE. FLYING SAUCERS CLOSE UP (this one with bold cover text indicating that its contents had been personally authorized by space people). And all shared the same strange imprint: Saucerian Books, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. In content, design, and place of origin, these books were as far from Publisher’s Row as could be. And then there was one other book — a traditional hardcover, but with a striking blue and gold cover design, and the hands-down best title of the lot: They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.
I encountered these titles as part of the UFO book collection of award-winning author Jack Womack, whose library of books on the paranormal, conspiracies, and the outer fringes of human experience was already a subcultural legend. Jack was splitting off the UFO component of his collection to be placed, alongside his author’s archive, at Georgetown University, and I was part of the team inventorying the collection and assembling a book of his commentary on it (Flying Saucers Are Real!, Anthology Editions, 2016). And this process had initiated a desire to learn as much as I could about the one man responsible for the most striking, compelling, and bizarre books in the collection: Gray Barker.
Initially I was interested as a collector: I wanted to get my own copies of the books issued by Saucerian Books, assuming at the time that there couldn’t be more than a dozen or so. My project began as a bibliography — and I ultimately discovered that Barker published well over a hundred books, fanzines, and newsletters over more than three decades. But many of them were only held at libraries in West Virginia, as was Barker’s archive: a hundred linear feet of correspondence, publications, and documents. It was too much material to absorb — but, as a librarian, I had a good sense of how to approach even so massive an archive. I had no expectation of finding the truth about flying saucers in this mass of material. But I hoped to learn something about how the grand cultural narrative of flying saucers had developed and grown.
I soon learned that the story of Barker’s life was every bit as compelling as the narratives of the books he published. Born on a farm in rural West Virginia, he attended college at the height of the Second World War (the draft board had rejected him for being “psycho-neurotic,” possibly a euphemism for his homosexuality). He developed his skill as a writer capable of being both chillingly terrifying and riotously funny through work in student journalism and poetry. And when flying saucers and their associated mysteries grabbed his attention, he created his own dual persona in the pages of his influential saucerzine The Saucerian — a sober and serious investigator, beneath which lurked a mischievous gadfly.
With his friends, including James W. Moseley, editor of the pioneering Saucer News, he concocted pranks and hoaxes that many still accept as genuine. He guided the world of Ufology with narratives like a master storyteller, building campfire tales to a crescendo to the terror and delight of “the Field.” In one of his final books, Barker described a “remarkable Vision” of an enormous otherworldly being, dangling UFOs from fishing poles into the skies above the Earth. This was God as hoaxer — or, perhaps, the hoaxer as God — and a telling glimpse at how Barker saw himself.
And it was not Barker’s life alone that proved fascinating. The books he published offered glimpses into the inner lives of his authors, many of whom were UFO “contactees” who described their communications with friendly space beings. But it was the earthbound aspects of their narratives that grabbed me more. In The People of the Planet Clarion, roadworker Truman Bethurum describes his early life in the waning days of the Old West for dozens of pages before he turns to his encounters with the spacewoman Aura Rhanes.
John W. Dean, author of the grand contactee concordance Flying Saucers Close Up, rails against the Veteran’s Administration for mismanaging his medical care, while expressing his desire for physical rejuvenation from the spacemen.
Connie Menger, wife of New Jersey contactee Howard Menger, offers an inside look at the daily meetings of an early saucer contact group in Song of Saturn.
These were the stories of ordinary people (how many roadworkers’ memoirs can you name?) — but they may never have been written if their lives had not turned toward the extraordinary. And Barker saw in them narratives that he could package and sell to his audience. His readers, too, lived ordinary lives, and yearned for them to be transfigured too.
The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker explores its subject as a storyteller who worked to shape the narrative of UFOs, establishing the themes, styles, and tricks that stories of the paranormal used to this day. From the Mothman and the Philadelphia Experiment to the very concepts of conspiracism and “high strangeness,” his fingerprints are all over the ways in which we discuss all things unidentified. If you look close enough, you may see the strings — and, at the other end, Gray Barker’s hand pulling them.
Gabriel Mckee is a librarian at New York University. His research concerns popular culture, book history, theology, and parahistoriography. His recent work includes authoring The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker(MIT Press), co-editing Theology and the DC Universe (Lexington Books), and serving as the managing editor for the Zebrapedia project, an online repository of manuscript material by science fiction author Philip K. Dick.
Copyright 1999-2025 The Paracast Company. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
April 13, 2025
www.theparacast.com
Discover the Impact of Folklorist Gray Barker to UFO Culture, Including the Men In Black Myth, with Gabriel McKee on The Paracast!
The Paracast is released every Sunday and available from our site, https://www.theparacast.com, your favorite podcast app, and the IRN Internet Radio Network. All episodes from 2022 and later now feature better audio and fewer ads. We are also re-releasing some of our most popular classic episodes.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN'T SIGNED UP FOR THE PARACAST+ YET? PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARACAST+ SO YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE ULTIMATE PARACAST EXPERIENCE AT A SPECIAL LOW PRICE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive bonus podcast, After The Paracast, plus a special version of The Paracast with all the ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Episodes for subscribers to The Paracast+ are now released 24 hours earlier. Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode (April 13, 2025): Decades before the 1997 sci-fi comedy “Men In Black” launched a multibillion dollar film franchise, a young folklorist, UFO promoter Gray Barker helped to spread the original MIB concept in a book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The details about Barker’s colorful life is told in Gabriel Mckee’s book, The Saucerian: The Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker (MIT Press). It’s the strange, but true biography of a central purveyor and promoter of flying saucer and conspiracist knowledge in the mid-twentieth century. Known mostly to people in the UFO field, Barker (who died in 1984) was an eccentric literary outsider, filled with ideas that were out of step with the world. An author and unreliable narrator of implausible stories, Barker founded and operated Saucerian Books, an independent publisher of books about flying saucers and other ideas at the fringes of popular discourse. In The Saucerian, Gabriel Mckee tells the fascinating story of Barker’s West Virginia–based press, the unique corpus of materials it published, and how office-copying and self-publishing techniques influenced the spread of paranormal beliefs and conspiratorial worldviews over the last century. Following the development of UFO subculture, Mckee explores the life and career of a larger-than-life hoaxer and originator of pseudoscientific ideas. In return, Gene and cohost Tim Swartz talk about their own encounters with Barker and his friends over the years. This is an episode you won’t want to miss. Gabriel’s site: Home
After The Paracast — Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on April 12: Gabriel Mckee, author of The Saucerian: The Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker (MIT Press), returns to discuss how the subject of his book impacted UFO culture over the years. Selling sensationalism and paranoia to his fans, the books released by Barker’s small publishing company covered a variety of UFO-related topics. Speaking with Gene and cohost Tim Swartz, he traces Barker’s life after the early days, how he eventually acquired Saucer News from his pal, editor/publisher Jim Moseley, and soon ran it into the ground. Also discussed is how the ongoing reports of Men In Black essentially did not influence the film franchise, except for the name. Though Barker himself was a skeptic, he viewed the world of occult believers as a source of ongoing entertainment. From his place on the fringes of mid-century American culture, Barker left an unmatched legacy in conspiratorial concepts that have become prominent pop-cultural folklore, that, in addition to the MIB, included Mothman, and the Philadelphia Experiment. As a mastermind behind the fantastical, Barker’s promotional efforts were the precursor to contemporary conspiracism. Gabriel Mckee is the Librarian for Collections and Services at New York University Institute For the Study of the Ancient World. He holds master’s degrees in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and in Library and Information Science from Long Island University. His areas of research include the intersection of theology and popular culture, patristics and church history, parahistoriography, and small press bibliography. Gabriel’s site: Home
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. And look for @theparacast on Bluesky Social, Facebook, Threads and X.
I Know Too Much About Gray Barker!
By Gabriel Mckee
It was the appearance of the books, more than anything else, that grabbed me first. They were neither hardcover treatises, aimed at the respectable readers in urban bookstores, nor gaudy paperbacks intended to catch the lower-brow reader’s eye from a spinner rack. These were something else — letter-size, but thin, and with bold, all-caps titles on their covers: UFO WARNING. HOW TO CONTACT SPACE PEOPLE. FLYING SAUCERS CLOSE UP (this one with bold cover text indicating that its contents had been personally authorized by space people). And all shared the same strange imprint: Saucerian Books, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. In content, design, and place of origin, these books were as far from Publisher’s Row as could be. And then there was one other book — a traditional hardcover, but with a striking blue and gold cover design, and the hands-down best title of the lot: They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.
I encountered these titles as part of the UFO book collection of award-winning author Jack Womack, whose library of books on the paranormal, conspiracies, and the outer fringes of human experience was already a subcultural legend. Jack was splitting off the UFO component of his collection to be placed, alongside his author’s archive, at Georgetown University, and I was part of the team inventorying the collection and assembling a book of his commentary on it (Flying Saucers Are Real!, Anthology Editions, 2016). And this process had initiated a desire to learn as much as I could about the one man responsible for the most striking, compelling, and bizarre books in the collection: Gray Barker.
Initially I was interested as a collector: I wanted to get my own copies of the books issued by Saucerian Books, assuming at the time that there couldn’t be more than a dozen or so. My project began as a bibliography — and I ultimately discovered that Barker published well over a hundred books, fanzines, and newsletters over more than three decades. But many of them were only held at libraries in West Virginia, as was Barker’s archive: a hundred linear feet of correspondence, publications, and documents. It was too much material to absorb — but, as a librarian, I had a good sense of how to approach even so massive an archive. I had no expectation of finding the truth about flying saucers in this mass of material. But I hoped to learn something about how the grand cultural narrative of flying saucers had developed and grown.
I soon learned that the story of Barker’s life was every bit as compelling as the narratives of the books he published. Born on a farm in rural West Virginia, he attended college at the height of the Second World War (the draft board had rejected him for being “psycho-neurotic,” possibly a euphemism for his homosexuality). He developed his skill as a writer capable of being both chillingly terrifying and riotously funny through work in student journalism and poetry. And when flying saucers and their associated mysteries grabbed his attention, he created his own dual persona in the pages of his influential saucerzine The Saucerian — a sober and serious investigator, beneath which lurked a mischievous gadfly.
With his friends, including James W. Moseley, editor of the pioneering Saucer News, he concocted pranks and hoaxes that many still accept as genuine. He guided the world of Ufology with narratives like a master storyteller, building campfire tales to a crescendo to the terror and delight of “the Field.” In one of his final books, Barker described a “remarkable Vision” of an enormous otherworldly being, dangling UFOs from fishing poles into the skies above the Earth. This was God as hoaxer — or, perhaps, the hoaxer as God — and a telling glimpse at how Barker saw himself.
And it was not Barker’s life alone that proved fascinating. The books he published offered glimpses into the inner lives of his authors, many of whom were UFO “contactees” who described their communications with friendly space beings. But it was the earthbound aspects of their narratives that grabbed me more. In The People of the Planet Clarion, roadworker Truman Bethurum describes his early life in the waning days of the Old West for dozens of pages before he turns to his encounters with the spacewoman Aura Rhanes.
John W. Dean, author of the grand contactee concordance Flying Saucers Close Up, rails against the Veteran’s Administration for mismanaging his medical care, while expressing his desire for physical rejuvenation from the spacemen.
Connie Menger, wife of New Jersey contactee Howard Menger, offers an inside look at the daily meetings of an early saucer contact group in Song of Saturn.
These were the stories of ordinary people (how many roadworkers’ memoirs can you name?) — but they may never have been written if their lives had not turned toward the extraordinary. And Barker saw in them narratives that he could package and sell to his audience. His readers, too, lived ordinary lives, and yearned for them to be transfigured too.
The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker explores its subject as a storyteller who worked to shape the narrative of UFOs, establishing the themes, styles, and tricks that stories of the paranormal used to this day. From the Mothman and the Philadelphia Experiment to the very concepts of conspiracism and “high strangeness,” his fingerprints are all over the ways in which we discuss all things unidentified. If you look close enough, you may see the strings — and, at the other end, Gray Barker’s hand pulling them.
• • •
Gabriel Mckee is a librarian at New York University. His research concerns popular culture, book history, theology, and parahistoriography. His recent work includes authoring The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker(MIT Press), co-editing Theology and the DC Universe (Lexington Books), and serving as the managing editor for the Zebrapedia project, an online repository of manuscript material by science fiction author Philip K. Dick.
Copyright 1999-2025 The Paracast Company. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!