Barker's Book of Bunk - Letter to the Editor - Brief Article

After reading John C. Sherwood's article "Gray Barker's Book of Bunk" (May/June 2002), I wanted to add my own experiences with Barker, which closely parallel his. I knew Barker, having met him at several UFO conferences and having carried on a correspondence with him over several years. If you sat down with Barker and chatted with him one-on-one, he was surprisingly cordial with skeptics (which is quite unusual for a major UFOlogist). He would more or less admit that most of what he wrote was hunk, that he knew it was bunk, and that he wrote such things primarily for the money. (He is not the only well-known UFO writer to have made such a confession to me.) Barker did have some sort of vague belief that "something odd" was going on, but he was by no means dogmatic about it. He said to me, "If you want to understand what I really think and believe, you should read my book The Silver Bridge" (mentioned by Sherwood). Barker promised to send me the book, and an autographed copy soon arrived. It is not a book that makes wild and emphatic claims about paranormal goings-on. Instead, it is a book about ordinary people in real-life situations, and the difficulties they face. It reaches no firm conclusion. The sightings of Mothman and alleged encounters with aliens are placed within this context. Barker seems to be saying that when people face difficult situations in life, they may turn to such fantasies.

It should be noted that another hoax that Barker helped to promote but did not originate (similar to his role in giving us the Men in Black) is Alternative 3, which began as an April Fools joke on a British TV network. The premise of the story is that there is a secret space program conducted jointly by the U.S. and USSR (the Cold War being just a hoax diversion) to transport the Earth's elite to Mars to escape a coming ecological catastrophe. Barker's June 1979 column in UFO Review claims that this book was "banned" in the United States. However, a trivial investigation revealed that the "ban" simply meant that the Canadian distributor of the book--the first edition to reach North America--did not have the rights to sell copies in the U.S. (see www.debunker.com/ texts/alternative3.hrml). A U.S. edition from a different publisher soon followed. Nonetheless, to this day, the supposedly "banned" Alternative 3 has become a fixture of conspiracy lore, and will probably remain so for many years to come.

Robert Sheaffer Lakeside, California

Robert Sheaffer, author of UFO Sightings, is S1's "Psychic Vibrations" columnist.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
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