June 23, 2025 • 17 mins
UFO Researcher Gabriel Mckee discuss early UFO figure Gray Baker including experiences with Men in Black and his prank on Mothman Prophecies author John Keel.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Gabriel, we were talking about Al Bender and the visit
by these three mysterious men in dark suits. Of course,
Greg Barker runs with that and uses it as a
central part of his most popular book. Did it catch
on with other people in the field, other writers? Did
it gain any traction?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Yeah, it did. It was definitely something that they looked
at as a mystery. It kind of, you know, he
hooked it that way and they picked it up. But
he really was the primary person telling that kind of
story for a number of years. He called them hush
up cases in the fifties, and it wasn't until a
(00:47):
little later that they kind of got enshrined a bit
more in myth as men in black.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
And of course nobody really knew for sure. Are they
Air Force, government agents FBI or something else. We still
don't know.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Yeah, so privately, Barker at first said that he thought
it was probably some kind of government thing. Later he
started telling some of his correspondents that he believed if
you had been in the room when Bender had his visit,
you would not have seen anyone there. Essentially that this
was not necessarily, you know, a hoax, but certainly something
(01:27):
that maybe was not a physical experience, if we can
maybe put it that way, and they knew too much
about flying saucers. Which what's interesting is that he's building
a lot on the kind of tone that Donald Kehoe
had set up with his books, which are pointed towards
a conspiracy within the Air Force, that there are, you know,
(01:48):
officials in the Air Force that he called the silence
group that didn't want flying saucer information released to the public,
so very narrow and clearly defined conspiracy. Barker does not
have that kind of definition of who the men in
black are. Who they are is a mystery, and so
it's kind of a conspiracy without conspirators, and that gives
(02:09):
it a sense of kind of cosmic horror, that this
is maybe some kind of force beyond human understanding. And
what's interesting is that after Barker publishes his book, that
word silence, the term silence group that Keyho had really
narrowly defined, becomes applied not to Air Force officials but
(02:31):
to these three mysterious men in black. In a lot
of UFO writing, the silence group comes to mean that
instead of what Keyho had meant it to mean. And
that's a kind of shift of meaning that you see
with a lot of terms in the UFO world. A
very recent example is UAP, which initially means unidentified aerial
phenomena and in the UFO world of today now has
(02:54):
come to mean unidentified anomalist phenomena, in other words, anything weird.
And so this kind of narrow term becomes a broad term.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
So I mentioned before the break this character James Moseley,
Jim Moseley. I should tell you I met Moseley several
times at UFO events and corresponded with him. I was
he would write write about me and Saucer Spear his newsletter,
kind of like friendly jabs, jabbing, but it was always funny.
(03:24):
What's your take on Mosley and his relationship with Barker.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Well, he was Barker's best friend, you know, throughout Barker's
entire life, and and I think he took Gray's death
in nineteen eighty four kind of heart and was kind
of always trying to kind of keep his legacy alive.
I think in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah, they were, they.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Were very close, and he was Barker was more open
with Mosley than than with anyone else in his correspondence
and communications. Yeah, Mosley's an interesting character I don't have.
I don't feel like I have as good a handle
on him as I have Barker, would you know, perhaps
sensibly because I wasn't working in the Mosley archive, I
(04:06):
was working in the Barker archive. But yeah, he definitely
had had his own approach to the Flying Saucer mystery.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
In addition to the news, the newsletter of Saucer Smear
that was published until I think it might have been
into the.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Nineties until twenty twelve. Actually he kept it going until
he died.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Do you have a lot of those issues?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
So I have some, But I benefit, as we all do,
from the fantastic digitization work that's been done by the
Archives for the Unexplained in Sweden. They have made available
scans of the entire run of Saucer Smear and its predecessor,
(04:50):
Zene Saucer News, which is what kind of mostly kind
of got put on the map with in the fifties.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
You're right about those two getting together and having rauc
us good times, a lot of drinking involved, and when
they would start drinking, they'd get into some mischief. So
one of the targets of that mischief was John Keel, Right.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Yeah, that's right. So John Keel and Gray Barker first
crossed paths in about nineteen sixty six when they were
both in West Virginia investigating not only the Mothman but
also the contact claims of Woodrow darren Berger, who claimed
to have met a flying saucer pilots named Indrid Cold,
(05:34):
and they interviewed darren Berger together. They kind of basically
first met well interviewing this saucer witness. And what's interesting
is that Keel started it in terms of the pranks
between the two of them. So Keel, thinking he would
(05:54):
have some fun, wrote a fake note from the Men
in Black and slipped it under the door of Barker's
hotel and was shocked a couple months later to find
that Barker had published this as real evidence of the
Men in Black visiting him, despite him knowing very well
that it was a prank that Don played on him.
But I think Keel was a bit earnest, certainly in
(06:17):
this period, and they kind of saw him as an
easy mark, somebody who would they could kind of spin
a tail for and he would fall for it, and
so that is what they did over the next eighteen
months or so. So in the Mothman Prophecy's Keel has
(06:38):
some a really chilling chapter where he's describing strange things
happening over the phone, weird beeps and strange almost tape
recorded sounding messages and robotic messages, and the scariest one
of them all is this phone call from someone identifying
himself as Gray Barker, and yet it can't be Gray
because his voice just doesn't sound quite right. He sounds
(07:01):
like he's maybe under duress somehow, and he doesn't know
basic facts that Gray would know. If you look back
at Keel's own archive, where he has kept very detailed
day to day notes of this entire period, and that's
all available at John Keel dot com through the work
(07:22):
of Doug Skinner, who maintains Keel's archive, you can see
this called you know the day that he gets the
phone call, the Gray Barker hoax. He knows that this
is Gray playing a joke on him. But Gray, in
writing back to Keel about this, said, this is a
strange you know, I don't recall making any phone call
to you, but the strangest thing is my phone bill
(07:44):
shows a call to your number. This is a weird mystery.
Maybe you can figure it out. And so he makes
it a mystery for Keel to solve. And if you
can kind of read through those notes and see Keel
convince himself that this was not just a hoax, and
it becomes one of the scariest moments in the Mothman Prophecies,
and in the Mothman Prophecies movie. This then becomes the
(08:07):
chapstick scene, which is kind of the you know, one
of the strangest moments in that movie as well.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Wow, that's that's really something. I think Keela Hollicks would
would be angry at that. But did Keill never knew
by the time he died.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So in the early so this phone call happened in
I think nineteen sixty seven, and in seventy two, when
Keel was writing The Mothman Prophecies, he sent a letter
to Gray Barker saying that, you know, tell me the
truth what was really going on with that weird phone call?
And Barker never never gave him an answer, and so
(08:44):
I am not so sure that he ever figured it out.
Though Also if you look at those notes. You know,
Keil presents himself in his published writing differently than he
presents himself in his private notes and her writings, and
so I think, you know, if you look at that
initial note, he knew. It's just a question of how
(09:06):
thoroughly did he convince himself and how much was he thinking, Oh,
like Barker did, this is a tale that I can
spin and really hook my audience.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
The Mothman Chronicles or Mothman Prophecies. I mean, that's a
huge book, big movie. I mean, it's a story that
lives on and of course Point Pleasant has a Mothman festival. Now.
I think they're probably not all that thrilled about the
attention that they got years ago, especially with the bridge
(09:36):
collapse and loss of life, and that's associated with it,
at least in some versions of the story, But they
now have learned to embrace it, and it's a big event.
I think for that little town. Same thing. I think
the Hopkinsville, those weird aliens that it supposedly attacked a
cabin out there, I think they have a festival, or
did the Flatwoods Monster. I guess eventually over time, towns
(09:59):
like that, unities that may not have embraced it. We're
kind of embarrassed by that kind of attention, realized that
there is opportunity there as well.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Yeah. So a good friend of mine, a scholar named
Joseph Lacock, who I think has been on the show
a couple of times, wrote a really great paper a
few years ago about the Mothman and how it shifted
from being this spooky story to being a kind of
local patron monster of Point Pleasant. And there's been other
(10:28):
scholarship on this as well, with people kind of researching
how this story becomes a kind of marker of local identity.
And yeah, it is really interesting with the Mothman in particular.
The thing that really drives at home, both as a
kind of thing for the town to pick up and
(10:50):
identify itself with and also for the people writing about
it to make this a really kind of lasting mystery
is that very real designs of the collapse of the
Silver Bridge that in which I think forty six people died,
and that as a kind of big period to the
(11:11):
Mothman story is what gave it a lot of lasting power,
because it was something to really, you know, link this
story to something very powerful and very real, and so
for the town of Point Pleasant, the Mothman then became
a kind of sign of resilience, not only for the
recovery from that disaster, but the town had a really
(11:32):
rough economic time throughout the seventies and eighties, and so
this kind of strange figure of the Mothman, which is,
you know, something that no other town has, became something
that they could pick up and kind of use to
kind of rebuild the town in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Have you been to that event?
Speaker 3 (11:53):
I haven't been to the festival, but I did go
to the museum when I was in West Virginia just
a few weeks ago. It's about two hours away from Clarksburg,
and so all of my research was really focused on,
you know, the archive there and places Grey Barker lived,
and this is a place that was tied to him,
(12:15):
but just a place he visited. So it was always
a little too far out of my way. But at
this time I knew I had to get there.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Oh you're gonna have to go. They could make you
like chairman of the parade or something like that. After
this book comes out. So Barker, again, he's always got
his finger on the pulse of the topic and his audiences.
So along come these contact ease at dam Ski, Manger, Truman, Bethum,
people like that who say, yeah, I met aliens, I
(12:42):
got on their ship, I flew to Venus kind of stuff,
always with these exotic names for the aliens that they meet,
and Barker, it sounds like from your book that he
went back and forth on how legit he thought these
things were. But eventually he goes to these big events,
the Giant rat Rock convention, and as a speaker at
(13:03):
some of these events share that part of the story
with us.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
So yeah, the contact ease, the kind of canonical first
one is Georgia Damski, people who claim to have met
friendly space space beings, you know, humanoid beings, often from
Venus or elsewhere in our own solar system. And these
stories became really popular in the early and mid fifties.
(13:27):
In particular, there were dozens of them, but they were
not well regarded within what we might call the mainstream
of the UFO world, and they were considered to be
kind of hucksters and con men, and there was a
real emphasis among a lot of groups like NICAP and
civilian saucer intelligence to kind of maintain a kind of
(13:50):
ideological purity and what we might say, this kind of
focus on only reliable witnesses, you know, you know, people
like police and pilots. But that's a constructed idea of reliability.
Barker didn't really care about that. These were all part
of the same story. To him, this kind of this
(14:13):
big cultural story of flying saucers, and the weirdest parts
and the silliest parts were every bit as important as
the kind of kind of more sober and reliable kind
of aspects of it. So he thought these stories were
fun and so, and he knew that people would would
(14:33):
buy them. His target audience was really anything with flying saucer,
and you know, people who would buy anything with flying
saucer in the title. And so this was really part
of the story for him, But that made him a
bit unpopular with with a lot of the more serious investigators.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Did he speak at the events like Giant Rock or
just went there? I think as you described one scene
where he and Moseley are selling books. But was he
a speaker.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
He was a speaker at least one of them. He
went two or three times there. I know he spoke
at least once I think he was presenting on the
Men in Black. Other times I think he was mainly
there to sell books, but also just to be there
to kind of connect with people. But it was expensive
(15:21):
to get to the desert of California from West Virginia,
and so he couldn't make it happen too many times.
And once, if we're to believe the numbers in his letters,
he made a total of I think twenty five dollars
in book sales at one of the later ones, And
so it was not a money making trip for him.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
And what do his private papers and letters say about
his take on a Damski and others.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Of his ill Yeah, I mean I think he did
not think that this was a real physical event, Adamski's
meeting with a spaceman, and I think that was generally
the case with most of the contact ease. But he
always maintains a question mark of you know, could it
have been, you know, an astral experience or you know,
(16:08):
some kind of you know, other other dimensional encounter. And
I'm never sure how much he is presenting that as
you know, cover for this being something that the rest
of the Flying Saucer world thought was silly and how
much was an authentic, you know theory, because these were
kind of ideas that were coming to importance in the
(16:32):
sixties and seventies, with people like John Keel and Jacques
Valet emphasizing, you know, the possibility of of some kind
of other dimensional visitation. And so I don't know if
if that was something that Barker believed, you know, with
with kind of my my scare quotes from earlier on
that word, or or if it was maybe just a
(16:55):
way to kind of keep the mystery going.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Government cover up issue pop up. Of course, in during
Barker's life, I guess the MIBs sort of play a
role in that in the views of some people, I
want to get into government cover up parts. And also
you had mentioned how the weirdest parts of these stories
are just as important to Barker. That sort of touches
(17:20):
a nerve with me in the sense that some very
weird things happen in association with UFO cases that might
otherwise seem pretty credible except for the weird details that
pop up almost as if it's on purpose.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Listen to More Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Gabriel, we were talking about Al Bender and the visit
by these three mysterious men in dark suits. Of course,
Greg Barker runs with that and uses it as a
central part of his most popular book. Did it catch
on with other people in the field, other writers? Did
it gain any traction?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Yeah, it did. It was definitely something that they looked
at as a mystery. It kind of, you know, he
hooked it that way and they picked it up. But
he really was the primary person telling that kind of
story for a number of years. He called them hush
up cases in the fifties, and it wasn't until a
(00:47):
little later that they kind of got enshrined a bit
more in myth as men in black.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
And of course nobody really knew for sure. Are they
Air Force, government agents FBI or something else. We still
don't know.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Yeah, so privately, Barker at first said that he thought
it was probably some kind of government thing. Later he
started telling some of his correspondents that he believed if
you had been in the room when Bender had his visit,
you would not have seen anyone there. Essentially that this
was not necessarily, you know, a hoax, but certainly something
(01:27):
that maybe was not a physical experience, if we can
maybe put it that way, and they knew too much
about flying saucers. Which what's interesting is that he's building
a lot on the kind of tone that Donald Kehoe
had set up with his books, which are pointed towards
a conspiracy within the Air Force, that there are, you know,
(01:48):
officials in the Air Force that he called the silence
group that didn't want flying saucer information released to the public,
so very narrow and clearly defined conspiracy. Barker does not
have that kind of definition of who the men in
black are. Who they are is a mystery, and so
it's kind of a conspiracy without conspirators, and that gives
(02:09):
it a sense of kind of cosmic horror, that this
is maybe some kind of force beyond human understanding. And
what's interesting is that after Barker publishes his book, that
word silence, the term silence group that Keyho had really
narrowly defined, becomes applied not to Air Force officials but
(02:31):
to these three mysterious men in black. In a lot
of UFO writing, the silence group comes to mean that
instead of what Keyho had meant it to mean. And
that's a kind of shift of meaning that you see
with a lot of terms in the UFO world. A
very recent example is UAP, which initially means unidentified aerial
phenomena and in the UFO world of today now has
(02:54):
come to mean unidentified anomalist phenomena, in other words, anything weird.
And so this kind of narrow term becomes a broad term.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
So I mentioned before the break this character James Moseley,
Jim Moseley. I should tell you I met Moseley several
times at UFO events and corresponded with him. I was
he would write write about me and Saucer Spear his newsletter,
kind of like friendly jabs, jabbing, but it was always funny.
(03:24):
What's your take on Mosley and his relationship with Barker.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Well, he was Barker's best friend, you know, throughout Barker's
entire life, and and I think he took Gray's death
in nineteen eighty four kind of heart and was kind
of always trying to kind of keep his legacy alive.
I think in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah, they were, they.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Were very close, and he was Barker was more open
with Mosley than than with anyone else in his correspondence
and communications. Yeah, Mosley's an interesting character I don't have.
I don't feel like I have as good a handle
on him as I have Barker, would you know, perhaps
sensibly because I wasn't working in the Mosley archive, I
(04:06):
was working in the Barker archive. But yeah, he definitely
had had his own approach to the Flying Saucer mystery.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
In addition to the news, the newsletter of Saucer Smear
that was published until I think it might have been
into the.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Nineties until twenty twelve. Actually he kept it going until
he died.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Do you have a lot of those issues?
Speaker 3 (04:30):
So I have some, But I benefit, as we all do,
from the fantastic digitization work that's been done by the
Archives for the Unexplained in Sweden. They have made available
scans of the entire run of Saucer Smear and its predecessor,
(04:50):
Zene Saucer News, which is what kind of mostly kind
of got put on the map with in the fifties.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
You're right about those two getting together and having rauc
us good times, a lot of drinking involved, and when
they would start drinking, they'd get into some mischief. So
one of the targets of that mischief was John Keel, Right.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Yeah, that's right. So John Keel and Gray Barker first
crossed paths in about nineteen sixty six when they were
both in West Virginia investigating not only the Mothman but
also the contact claims of Woodrow darren Berger, who claimed
to have met a flying saucer pilots named Indrid Cold,
(05:34):
and they interviewed darren Berger together. They kind of basically
first met well interviewing this saucer witness. And what's interesting
is that Keel started it in terms of the pranks
between the two of them. So Keel, thinking he would
(05:54):
have some fun, wrote a fake note from the Men
in Black and slipped it under the door of Barker's
hotel and was shocked a couple months later to find
that Barker had published this as real evidence of the
Men in Black visiting him, despite him knowing very well
that it was a prank that Don played on him.
But I think Keel was a bit earnest, certainly in
(06:17):
this period, and they kind of saw him as an
easy mark, somebody who would they could kind of spin
a tail for and he would fall for it, and
so that is what they did over the next eighteen
months or so. So in the Mothman Prophecy's Keel has
(06:38):
some a really chilling chapter where he's describing strange things
happening over the phone, weird beeps and strange almost tape
recorded sounding messages and robotic messages, and the scariest one
of them all is this phone call from someone identifying
himself as Gray Barker, and yet it can't be Gray
because his voice just doesn't sound quite right. He sounds
(07:01):
like he's maybe under duress somehow, and he doesn't know
basic facts that Gray would know. If you look back
at Keel's own archive, where he has kept very detailed
day to day notes of this entire period, and that's
all available at John Keel dot com through the work
(07:22):
of Doug Skinner, who maintains Keel's archive, you can see
this called you know the day that he gets the
phone call, the Gray Barker hoax. He knows that this
is Gray playing a joke on him. But Gray, in
writing back to Keel about this, said, this is a
strange you know, I don't recall making any phone call
to you, but the strangest thing is my phone bill
(07:44):
shows a call to your number. This is a weird mystery.
Maybe you can figure it out. And so he makes
it a mystery for Keel to solve. And if you
can kind of read through those notes and see Keel
convince himself that this was not just a hoax, and
it becomes one of the scariest moments in the Mothman Prophecies,
and in the Mothman Prophecies movie. This then becomes the
(08:07):
chapstick scene, which is kind of the you know, one
of the strangest moments in that movie as well.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Wow, that's that's really something. I think Keela Hollicks would
would be angry at that. But did Keill never knew
by the time he died.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So in the early so this phone call happened in
I think nineteen sixty seven, and in seventy two, when
Keel was writing The Mothman Prophecies, he sent a letter
to Gray Barker saying that, you know, tell me the
truth what was really going on with that weird phone call?
And Barker never never gave him an answer, and so
(08:44):
I am not so sure that he ever figured it out.
Though Also if you look at those notes. You know,
Keil presents himself in his published writing differently than he
presents himself in his private notes and her writings, and
so I think, you know, if you look at that
initial note, he knew. It's just a question of how
(09:06):
thoroughly did he convince himself and how much was he thinking, Oh,
like Barker did, this is a tale that I can
spin and really hook my audience.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
The Mothman Chronicles or Mothman Prophecies. I mean, that's a
huge book, big movie. I mean, it's a story that
lives on and of course Point Pleasant has a Mothman festival. Now.
I think they're probably not all that thrilled about the
attention that they got years ago, especially with the bridge
(09:36):
collapse and loss of life, and that's associated with it,
at least in some versions of the story, But they
now have learned to embrace it, and it's a big event.
I think for that little town. Same thing. I think
the Hopkinsville, those weird aliens that it supposedly attacked a
cabin out there, I think they have a festival, or
did the Flatwoods Monster. I guess eventually over time, towns
(09:59):
like that, unities that may not have embraced it. We're
kind of embarrassed by that kind of attention, realized that
there is opportunity there as well.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Yeah. So a good friend of mine, a scholar named
Joseph Lacock, who I think has been on the show
a couple of times, wrote a really great paper a
few years ago about the Mothman and how it shifted
from being this spooky story to being a kind of
local patron monster of Point Pleasant. And there's been other
(10:28):
scholarship on this as well, with people kind of researching
how this story becomes a kind of marker of local identity.
And yeah, it is really interesting with the Mothman in particular.
The thing that really drives at home, both as a
kind of thing for the town to pick up and
(10:50):
identify itself with and also for the people writing about
it to make this a really kind of lasting mystery
is that very real designs of the collapse of the
Silver Bridge that in which I think forty six people died,
and that as a kind of big period to the
(11:11):
Mothman story is what gave it a lot of lasting power,
because it was something to really, you know, link this
story to something very powerful and very real, and so
for the town of Point Pleasant, the Mothman then became
a kind of sign of resilience, not only for the
recovery from that disaster, but the town had a really
(11:32):
rough economic time throughout the seventies and eighties, and so
this kind of strange figure of the Mothman, which is,
you know, something that no other town has, became something
that they could pick up and kind of use to
kind of rebuild the town in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Have you been to that event?
Speaker 3 (11:53):
I haven't been to the festival, but I did go
to the museum when I was in West Virginia just
a few weeks ago. It's about two hours away from Clarksburg,
and so all of my research was really focused on,
you know, the archive there and places Grey Barker lived,
and this is a place that was tied to him,
(12:15):
but just a place he visited. So it was always
a little too far out of my way. But at
this time I knew I had to get there.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Oh you're gonna have to go. They could make you
like chairman of the parade or something like that. After
this book comes out. So Barker, again, he's always got
his finger on the pulse of the topic and his audiences.
So along come these contact ease at dam Ski, Manger, Truman, Bethum,
people like that who say, yeah, I met aliens, I
(12:42):
got on their ship, I flew to Venus kind of stuff,
always with these exotic names for the aliens that they meet,
and Barker, it sounds like from your book that he
went back and forth on how legit he thought these
things were. But eventually he goes to these big events,
the Giant rat Rock convention, and as a speaker at
(13:03):
some of these events share that part of the story
with us.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
So yeah, the contact ease, the kind of canonical first
one is Georgia Damski, people who claim to have met
friendly space space beings, you know, humanoid beings, often from
Venus or elsewhere in our own solar system. And these
stories became really popular in the early and mid fifties.
(13:27):
In particular, there were dozens of them, but they were
not well regarded within what we might call the mainstream
of the UFO world, and they were considered to be
kind of hucksters and con men, and there was a
real emphasis among a lot of groups like NICAP and
civilian saucer intelligence to kind of maintain a kind of
(13:50):
ideological purity and what we might say, this kind of
focus on only reliable witnesses, you know, you know, people
like police and pilots. But that's a constructed idea of reliability.
Barker didn't really care about that. These were all part
of the same story. To him, this kind of this
(14:13):
big cultural story of flying saucers, and the weirdest parts
and the silliest parts were every bit as important as
the kind of kind of more sober and reliable kind
of aspects of it. So he thought these stories were
fun and so, and he knew that people would would
(14:33):
buy them. His target audience was really anything with flying saucer,
and you know, people who would buy anything with flying
saucer in the title. And so this was really part
of the story for him, But that made him a
bit unpopular with with a lot of the more serious investigators.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Did he speak at the events like Giant Rock or
just went there? I think as you described one scene
where he and Moseley are selling books. But was he
a speaker.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
He was a speaker at least one of them. He
went two or three times there. I know he spoke
at least once I think he was presenting on the
Men in Black. Other times I think he was mainly
there to sell books, but also just to be there
to kind of connect with people. But it was expensive
(15:21):
to get to the desert of California from West Virginia,
and so he couldn't make it happen too many times.
And once, if we're to believe the numbers in his letters,
he made a total of I think twenty five dollars
in book sales at one of the later ones, And
so it was not a money making trip for him.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
And what do his private papers and letters say about
his take on a Damski and others.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Of his ill Yeah, I mean I think he did
not think that this was a real physical event, Adamski's
meeting with a spaceman, and I think that was generally
the case with most of the contact ease. But he
always maintains a question mark of you know, could it
have been, you know, an astral experience or you know,
(16:08):
some kind of you know, other other dimensional encounter. And
I'm never sure how much he is presenting that as
you know, cover for this being something that the rest
of the Flying Saucer world thought was silly and how
much was an authentic, you know theory, because these were
kind of ideas that were coming to importance in the
(16:32):
sixties and seventies, with people like John Keel and Jacques
Valet emphasizing, you know, the possibility of of some kind
of other dimensional visitation. And so I don't know if
if that was something that Barker believed, you know, with
with kind of my my scare quotes from earlier on
that word, or or if it was maybe just a
(16:55):
way to kind of keep the mystery going.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Government cover up issue pop up. Of course, in during
Barker's life, I guess the MIBs sort of play a
role in that in the views of some people, I
want to get into government cover up parts. And also
you had mentioned how the weirdest parts of these stories
are just as important to Barker. That sort of touches
(17:20):
a nerve with me in the sense that some very
weird things happen in association with UFO cases that might
otherwise seem pretty credible except for the weird details that
pop up almost as if it's on purpose.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Listen to More Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
Popular Podcasts
Cold Case Files: Miami
Joyce Sapp, 76; Bryan Herrera, 16; and Laurance Webb, 32—three Miami residents whose lives were stolen in brutal, unsolved homicides. Cold Case Files: Miami follows award‑winning radio host and City of Miami Police reserve officer Enrique Santos as he partners with the department’s Cold Case Homicide Unit, determined family members, and the advocates who spend their lives fighting for justice for the victims who can no longer fight for themselves.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.