April 13, 2025 — Gabriel Mckee Talks About Gray Barker

Decades before the 1997 sci-fi comedy "Men In Black" launched a multibillion dollar film franchise, a young folklorist, UFO promoter Gray Barker helped to spread the original MIB concept in a book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The details about Barker's colorful life is told in Gabriel Mckee's book, The Saucerian: The Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker (MIT Press). It's the strange, but true biography of a central purveyor and promoter of flying saucer and conspiracist knowledge in the mid-twentieth century. Known mostly to people in the UFO field, Barker (who died in 1984) was an eccentric literary outsider, filled with ideas that were out of step with the world. An author and unreliable narrator of implausible stories, Barker founded and operated Saucerian Books, an independent publisher of books about flying saucers and other ideas at the fringes of popular discourse. In The Saucerian, Gabriel Mckee tells the fascinating story of Barker’s West Virginia–based press, the unique corpus of materials it published, and how office-copying and self-publishing techniques influenced the spread of paranormal beliefs and conspiratorial worldviews over the last century. Following the development of UFO subculture, Mckee explores the life and career of a larger-than-life hoaxer and originator of pseudoscientific ideas. In return, Gene and cohost Tim Swartz talk about their own encounters with Barker and his friends over the years. This is an episode you won't want to miss. Gabriel's site: https://gabrielmckee.com/

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