The influence of Gray Barker is very soon apparent in
Malcolm Kent's The Terror Above Us. In the introduction
Kent urges his readers to "Read Lex [sic] Barker's book entitled; [sic] THEY KNEW
TOO MUCH ABOUT FLYING SAUCERS". And those "[sic]"s should also make it quickly apparent that
this volume isn't a literary masterpiece. It's actually quite negligible,
not even good enough to be bad.
The extent to which anything is exciting, frightening or bizarre is subjective,
of course, but I think almost everybody would disagree with the claims made
on the front cover after reading what follows. Even a brief glance at the Barney and Betty Hill account should be more interesting
than the "Steiner case" described within. Brief summary: despite numerous typos, subject/verb disagreements, use of
wrong words and a generally clunky and unappealing writing style, "Malcolm Kent"
is supposed to be the pseudonymn of a successful professional ghostwriter. He's good friends with a pseudonymous psychoanalyst, "Dr. Emmanuel Brant",
who has two pseudonymous patients, brothers, "Jason and Robert Steiner". The Steiners freak out when they have to drive together at night and
when they have to be near the computer tape machines at their office. Dr. Brant hypnotizes them and extracts subconscious memories of their
being abducted after driving home one foggy night. Aboard the alien spaceship
one of them has his genitals cursorily examined and both are given opportunities
to have sex with a young woman who the author is convinced was either also an
alien or some sort of alien creation, not a real Earth woman. And that's basically it. The tape deck thing was because of equipment
in the control room or something, which for some reason the brothers
got to hang out in for a while while bound. It's not at all compelling or even interesting. It's pretty clearly a work
of fiction despite the exertions of the author to convince us otherwise. Even if
we could know that it were a true account, I still think it wouldn't get much
more out of me than a shrug. There are some obvious opportunities for titillating content here
but they're all pretty much completely avoided, which is surprising, considering
the 1967 copyright date. So I think it's for completists only. The first line is, "Until the strange story of Jason and Robert Steiner
was revealed to me, and for a long while afterward, I did not believe in
what are commonly called flying saucers". Already this doesn't make sense, because the author believes
the story and is entirely convinced that the Steiners' experiences
were real and actually happened. So why would he continue not to
believe in flying saucers "for a long while afterward"? This is typical
of the lazy writing in this book.
2026 April 08 • Wednesday
Gabriel McKee's Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the
Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker covers a lot of ground,
from fringe fantasy and conspiracy theories, to an
under-examined printing and self-publishing revolution,
passing through civil rights struggles, social conventions
and widespread traditions of folklore. In addition to all that, it is a superb example of the art of biography.
This is an extraordinary volume.
Gray Barker was born in West Virginia in 1925. He lived there his whole life,
working mostly in movie theatre and drive-in promotion, booking and management,
though also in cinema equipment and, at one point, picking up a job with
United Parcel Service. Movies were a passion and so, too, was the world of UFOs and adjacent
interests (Hollow Earth and New Age occult ideas, for example). He occupied
himself professionally with those, too, as writer, editor, promoter, publisher,
lecturer, etc. McKee has done an astounding job of presenting a coherent, compelling
and convincing portrait of Barker, using a wide array of sources, including
police and court documents relating to the difficulties of being
gay in mid-century West Virginia. Even more compelling is McKee's construction of Barker's activities
as part of a narrative or metanarrative tradition and how this
relates to human consciousness and our societies and customs. All of this is accomplished with a sure hand and a light touch. The reader
will never get bogged down in academic jargon or slog through paragraphs
of boring theoretical suppositions. Gray Barker has achieved a kind of immortality, thanks to the Men in Black,
and he himself was fairly ambiguous about "belief". Much of what Barker wrote
was not true and he knew it not to be true. He perpetrated frauds and hoaxes,
intentionally, often in collusion with others, and he could be amused by as well
as sympathetic to those storytellers who believed the tales they told. The interest in the saucer scene was a useful cover for his sexual activities,
since it marked him in his small town as an eccentric sort of guy who
might as well be an unmarried loner who spent his time with another
guy with the same hobby. And ultimately Barker seems to have decided that the real issue is
a kind of freedom of expression, freedom to think, to dream, to write, to
publish, to question and to investigate. With a bit of work, definitely with a bit of work, you could make him
into an American hero. This is a fantastic book that I think would be interesting to almost anyone,
regardless of their interest in UFOs and the like. It's just brilliant. The first line is "Against a grainy, green-gray background the oblong,
silvery object seems to hang motionless".
2026 April 06 • Monday
Before Stu Phillips achieved automobile immortality by writing
the theme and music for Knight Rider, he created some a fantastic
biker score for Hells Angels on Wheels, the 903rd Soundtrack of the
Week.
The main title theme is an off-kilter groover with amazing fuzz guitar sound
and a chorus of male voices singing "ba ba ba". Yeah, it's awesome. Then there's slinky electric bass guitar with sitar and tambura playing over
it and percussion that includes drum kit and what sounds like an attempt
to produce tabla sounds without having tabla for "Flowers". "Biker Ballet" is a hippy dippy type song that brings back the slow-motion scatting
chorus from the main title theme and adds a spacey "Movin' but goin' nowhere"
line that gets sung a bunch of times. After that comes "Skip to My Mary J", a straight rocker with really tough
fuzz guitar sound. This might be Davie Allan & The Arrows. Sure sounds like them. The next track is "Study in Motion #1" which has vocals by The Poor and
was co-written by Phillips with Chuck Sedacca. It starts out with the "Movin' but
goin' nowhere" line and similar flower-power feel as "Biker Ballet" but expands
it with more lyrics and more elaborate harmonic structure. The scatting chorus returns over a groove that's like a hybrid of "Blue Rondo a la
Turk" and a conventional surf/hot rod number in the energetic "Tea Party"
number. Flutes get featured and the guitar and drums are really good. There has to be a slow and pretty song on here and Phillips delivers
with "Poet", which sails by pretty to arrive at gorgeous. It's just a beautiful
ballad with hauntingly lovely chord changes and a bewitching keyboard sound.
Clavinet maybe? "Sunday Art and Football" is kind of a hybrid of "Flowers" and "Tea Party" while
"Poet Scores" is a jazzy, atmospheric number for a combo of flute,
electric harpsichord, flute, electric bass guitar, drums and vibes. More people should
do stuff with this instrumentation. The same combo comes back for the final piece, "Four, Five, Six", another jazzy
number with a relaxed swing feel.
2026 April 03 • Friday
In addition to writing a biography of Gray Barker, which is equally
a story of independent writing and publishing and a dizzying collision
of metanarratives and frauds, Gabriel McKee put together Behold the
Behemouth, a book that contains Barker's poetry and other writings.
Many of the poems are quite short and pretty successful. Longer pieces don't work as
well, though they cover a lot of ground. Some favorites: Of course UFOs have to make an appearance: Since some of this material is mentioned and cited in the biography, this book is an
excellent resource to have at hand. And of course it gives insight into Barker's
character and ways of thinking.
At the Photographers
Sit very still now.
Sit very still.
Click!
"There.
Three dollars please."
Anachronism
Hercules with massive club.
Why speed in your new Ford V-8?
Why rush like mad to Washington?
Grandmaw and the Saucer
When Grandmaw saw the saucer whirling down
She raised a crooked cane into the air.
"We folks don't believe in you!" she cried—
"(This younger generation, I declare.)"
2026 April 01 • Wednesday
The 1950s were a golden age for UFOs and one of the central people
active in that area at that time was Gray Barker. MIT Press has just published a biography of Barker and Gabriel McKee,
the author of that biography, has also collected all of Gray Barker's poetry
that he could find, which has just been published by Apport Editions.
This was an enjoyable and well written book in which Barker recounts some of his
experiences as a busy person in the flying saucer world. He has his own newsletter/magazine, The Saucerian, and is thus connected
with people around the globe who publish and contribute to similar periodicals. The accounts he presents of other people's UFO stories are invariably interesting
and seem to be straighforwardly told by sound-minded and unbiased observers. At times he strays into hollow earth lore and is very impressed by the idea
that the accumulation of ice in Antarctica is going to cause the Earth to "capsize"
and flash freeze everything in an extinction-level event. He is also persuaded that
this has already happened in the planet's past. These diversions are indicative of Barker's apparent
tendency to be a little less skeptical and less logical than he should be. And while Barker
found the thought terrifying, it goes without saying that nobody worries
about too much ice building up anywhere on the planet anymore. But all of the UFO stuff in here is great. And Barker also gets into detail
about the famous "men in black" who visit these UFO investigators and
scare them into total silence and discontinuation of their work. They don't visit Barker, or at least he doesn't say that they do in the book,
but some of his colleagues have this experience and Barker shares their stories
along with other information he was able to gather. As usual, nothing in this book is verifiable or "evidence" of anything,
but it is very interesting nonetheless. It's also a window into some very curious people engaged in a fascinating hobby
in a near but also so distant time and place. UPDATE: I've been reading a biography of Gray Barker and while this book is already
not exactly straightforward, it turns out that all of Barker's work has layers
of sincerity and falsehood, pranks and reportage, manipulation and self-promotion. While his interest in the subject certainly seems to be genuine, his motivation
is often purely profit-driven as well as using this eccentric but harmless
pursuit as cover for being a gay man in mid-century West Virginia, something
that was essentially illegal. It's a fascinating but ultimately depressing story, intertwined with
an under-examined printing renaissance as important in its way as the
invention of the printing press itself. The first line is "There are no such things as flying saucers".
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