Gray Barker's book of bunk: Mothman, Saucers, and MIB - Mothman Prophecies - Men in Black - UFO hoaxes

Those who seek the elusive truth behind the "Men in Black" and "Mothman" myths should know that material touched by Gray Barker's enterprising hand is tainted by self-serving deceit. He launched hoaxes, joined others' deceptions, and manipulated people's beliefs. "And I, "says our author, "was one of those who helped."

In the film of The Mothman Prophecies, a phone rings and Richard Gere cringes.

So does the informed moviegoer.

Pseudohistory from the 1960s is twisted into fiction for the new millennium, and a questionable account of bizarre events is reshaped into fantasy.

I say so because I have a good idea who's making that phone call.

I accuse Gray Barker.

Only naive audiences believe film dramas show history accurately. Fortunately, the mixed reviews for Sony Pictures' Mothman suggest few moviegoers or critics take its eerie story seriously. Still, someone might trust the movie promoters' hints that truth exists out there. If they go searching they'll find only more questions.

The curious will find a new mass-marker paperback edition of John A. Keel's The Mothman Prophecies, labeled by UFO writer Jacques Vallee as "significant" and "intriguing" (Hynek and Vallee 1975) and cited by Colin Wilson in Alien Dawn (Wilson 1998). In its pages:

* There's no sign of Gere's character, the fictional tormented widower "John Klein" invented by screenwriter Richard Hatem. Instead, the real-life Keel relates a series of weird anecdotal accounts sustained gleefully ever since by monster-hunters, UFO cultists, and West Virginia's tourism industry (Rife 1995).

* The mind-reading entity Indrid Cold evaporates into a fog of hearsay.

* The researcher played by Alan Bates morphs into Gray Barker, whose influence on Keel's book was palpably self-serving--and documentable.

Barker sure is having a great year. Columbia Pictures' sequel to its 1997 movie Men in Black--stepchild of Barker's 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers--will treat moviegoers again to Barker's alien spawn. But those who seek the elusive truth behind the Men in Black and Mothman myths should be reminded that material touched by Barker's enterprising hand is tainted by deceit.

Gray Barker

Barker was a theatrical film booker and educational-materials distributor based in Clarksburg, West Virginia. For three decades his sideline as a UFO writer/publisher generated extra income and self-satisfaction. The U.S. Government's bibliography of UFO publications reflected Barker's high status among the flying-saucer faithful, as he's among the handful of authors cited more than a dozen times (Catoe 1969).

Here's the dark side: Until Barker's death in 1984 at age 59, he hawked his books and magazines by embellishing stories and encouraging others to fabricate more. He launched hoaxes, joined others' deceptions, and manipulated people's beliefs. And I was one of those who helped.

Barker's UFO fame began in 1952 with reports of a space-ship-riding creature at Flatwoods, West Virginia. Barker's interviews with witnesses, written in faux objective style, appeared in Fate (Barker 1953). He soon became chief investigator for Albert K. Bender's International Flying Saucer Bureau.

In 1953 Bender dissolved the fast-growing group, blaming unidentified commands. The puzzled Barker sifted through Bender's story and similar tales, producing one of UFOlogy's classics, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (Barker 1956). Barker's prose gave Bender's story sufficient credibility to sustain an urban legend: Strange aircraft are observed, but, after black-clad men step from their huge auto, the witnesses clam up. In the 1980s Lowell Cunningham turned the tales into comic-book fiction, thus inspiring the Men in Black movies (Westcott 1993).

My involvement in all this began in early 1967 when I sent to Barker's Saucerian Publications my juvenile chronicle of Michigan's 1966 UFO flurry, which Barker gave the fanciful yet saleable title Flying Saucers Are Watching You. As it was printed, the Michigan "flap" seeped across Ohio into West Virginia, where began an eighteen-month series of reports of a flying creature popularly dubbed "Mothman."

Then came tragedy. The 700-foot Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, collapsed during rush hour December 15, 1967 (the film of The Mothman Prophecies moves the event to Christmas Eve in the present day). Some area residents saw a link between the catastrophe, which took forty-five lives, and the apparitions. It was a notion Barker would borrow and Keel would reiterate.

Soon after, I committed my only journalistic crime. Encouraged by Barker, I wrote two articles for Barker's Saucer News "exposing" time-traveling UFOnauts, using the pseudonym Dr. Richard H. Pratt. When Barker reprinted the hoax in 1983, I remained silent. On Barker's death I considered the joke over, but guilt revived a decade later with Men in Black's release.

I exorcised this personal demon by writing "Gray Barker: My Friend, the Myth-Maker" for the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER (Sherwood 1998). A former acquaintance soon reintroduced himself. James W. Moseley, Barker's friend since 1954 and Saucer News' first publisher, said Barker's death had unlocked his own lips: "The public has the right to know how many UFO hoaxes there are, how easy they are to perpetrate, and what this shows about the gullibility of the UFO field" (Moseley 2001). In early 1985, Moseley had begun a series of revelations about Barker in a newsletter, Saucer Smear. (A book by Moseley and Karl T. Pflock, Shockingly Close to the Truth!, has just been published by Prometheus Books.)