Gray Barker: UFO conspiracy theorist

One night in 1953, three mysterious men sporting black suits reportedly arrived uninvited at the home of Albert K Bender in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The menacing trio, who reportedly identified themselves as agents of the US government, threatened Bender with prison if he told anyone about a secret he had discovered – information relating to the source of the flying saucer mystery. They scared him so badly that he was physically sick for three days.

Bender was no mere disinterested civilian. An obsessive ufologist, he was the founder of the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), the world’s first civilian UFO investigation club. Shortly after that ominous visit, and on the orders of those ‘secret agents’, he shut down the IFSB.

At least one person was both disappointed and intrigued by this development: Gray Barker, only recently recruited as the IFSB’s chief investigator and a contributor to its magazine, Space Review.

“He was 6ft 4ins tall, with a gentle southern accent and a sly sense of humour,” recalled his friend John Keel, a fellow investigator of UFOs and monster stories. “And it can truly be said that he knew too much about flying saucers.”

It was Barker’s exploration of the ‘men in black’ (latterly abbreviated as MIB) that had a long-lasting and global impact on ufology and wider popular culture.

Born in West Virginia in 1925, in his youth Barker worked in the theatre industry, then began publishing, writing and editing stories about UFOs, monsters and the paranormal. He graduated from Glenville State College in 1947 – the year in which the phrase ‘flying saucers’ was coined to describe a formation of strange batwing-shaped objects reported by a private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, in Washington state. Arnold’s sighting was quickly followed by the Roswell incident, when wreckage of a flying object was recovered from the desert in New Mexico. This story would later become a central element of the most popular UFO conspiracy theory, which claims that the US government is hiding crashed alien spacecraft.

• Read more | The Roswell incident: Did the US Government cover up an alien crash in 1947? The real history that challenges the conspiracy

Barker enjoyed blurring the line between fact and fiction, and in his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers he dramatised and embellished his account of Bender’s story to capture the public imagination. It worked: his retelling of the episode launched the legend of the ‘men in black’ into the paranoid world of ufology at the height of the Cold War.

Silent alarm

Written around the time of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous campaign to expose alleged communist infiltration of the US government, They Knew Too Much… became the best-known title in a series of books that Barker edited and published from his home in West Virginia. The book charted the activities of what he called the ‘Silence Group’, whom he claimed had warned Bender and other IFSB members to end their investigations. In it, Barker quotes Bender: “Just as the three men were leaving, one of them lingered for a moment and said, ‘In our government, we have the smartest men in the country. They can’t find a defence for [UFOs]. How can you do anything about it?’”

Menacing ‘agents’ travelled in groups of three, wore black suits and drove large, brand-new automobiles

As rumours about the ‘Silence Group’ spread following the book’s publication, other enthusiasts and people who claimed to have witnessed UFOs came forward, insisting that they’d also received visits from men in black. Like Bender, many appeared genuinely terrified – yet none suffered any reprisals after talking about their experiences. The menacing ‘agents’ often, but not always, travelled in groups of three, wore black suits and drove large, brand-new automobiles, usually Cadillacs or dark sedans.

Bender’s encounter occurred in the same year that the CIA convened a top-secret panel of scientists to decide how to deal with the growing number of unsolved sightings reported to the US Air Force. UFO writer Jerome Clark speculates that the men who visited Bender might have been genuine secret agents who were following the panel’s recommendations that civilian UFO groups should be closely watched.

The legend blurred with science fiction in 1962 when Barker published a book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, written by Bender – who had now emerged from hiding, and promised to reveal the truth about his visitation. Even the more open-minded UFO believers found it hard to swallow one extravagant addition to Bender’s story – an account of his abduction to the south pole by monstrous aliens from the planet Kazik.

Aliens in disguise

More enticing to the UFO industry was the revelation that the ‘agents’ who visited Bender were aliens in disguise – a fresh theme that imaginative writers and artists could develop further. Barker continued to promote the legend, alongside UFOs and other mysteries, via the magazine he edited, The Saucerian (later The Saucerian Bulletin), while rival authors also began creating their own folklore.

The Silver Bridge, a creative fiction book published by Barker in 1970, linked the collapse of the bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in December 1967 with a frightening creature called the Mothman. His friend John Keel, another occult journalist, expanded on the legend in a book-length account, The Mothman Prophecies. Published in 1975, it featured Barker and was adapted into a 2002 Hollywood film starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney. In his book, Keel – the first to use the acronym MIB – detailed visits to the homes of witnesses who had reported encounters with both the Mothman and UFOs before the bridge tragedy that claimed the lives of 46 people.

From the late 1960s, accounts of MIB visits were becoming ever more bizarre and surreal. Stories described MIB moving robotically, or having telepathic powers, odd hairstyles and shaved eyebrows. Their weird demeanour placed them alongside depictions of gangsters, fictional terrorists and spies in contemporary films and TV shows. They resembled, for example, the SMERSH agents pursued by James Bond in novels and films. Meanwhile, MIB links with conspiracy theories were cemented by ‘sightings’ in Dallas soon after John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

Believer or sceptic?

Barker died in 1984, aged just 59, having contracted HIV. A decade after his death, the Men in Black launched onto the global medial landscape. They appeared in The X-Files TV series, then the first of four Men in Black movies was released in 1997 – the 50th anniversary of Arnold’s report of the first ‘flying saucers’. Based on a comic by Lowell Cunningham, the first three of these comedy sci-fi films follow the exploits of two agents, played by Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, who work for a secret agency that polices extraterrestrials living secretly on Earth.

• Read more | Watergate is the ultimate American conspiracy – but what if we’ve been misunderstanding it all along?

Did Barker really believe the stories that he promoted? Or was he purely motivated by financial gain? Evidence suggests that he was a sceptic: he told his friend (and fellow UFO writer) James Moseley that he “pretty much took all of ufology as a joke”. After Barker’s death, Moseley confessed that in 1957 the pair had written a fake letter, on US Department of State stationery, sent to George Adamski – who claimed to have met aliens from Venus and Mars, and travelled in their flying saucers. The letter appeared to corroborate Adamski’s fantastic tales.

In 2002, another of Barker’s circle, journalist John C Sherwood, published an exposé that revealed the MIB creator’s ‘dark side’. “He launched hoaxes, joined others’ deceptions, and manipulated people’s beliefs,” Sherwood claimed in Skeptical Inquirer.

Gray Barker laid the foundations for the modern belief that the US government is actively involved in a cover-up

Gray Barker laid the foundations for the modern belief that the US government is actively involved in a cover-up. In 2019, a Gallup poll found that 68 per cent of Americans believe “the US Government knows more about UFOs than it is telling us”. That came shortly after an online campaign called Storm Area 51, which drove support for breaking into the secret military base in the Nevada desert where many believe the US government is flying captured alien craft.

In July 2023, US intelligence officer David Grusch testified before a congressional hearing that the Pentagon was involved in reverse-engineering non-human spacecraft, and had recovered their dead pilots. He also claimed that people had been threatened and killed in order to conceal what has been called the ‘Cosmic Watergate 2.0’. If Grusch is to be believed – and his claims have been challenged by numerous experts – then the ‘men in black’ are more than a mere fantasy conjured up by Gray Barker.