X-Files: Shapes

The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 18 – Shapes

I suppose one might critique the way that indigenous tradition and mythology is utilized for the spooky storytelling of the series, but the episode certainly makes an effort to portray Native Americans with empathy and nuance.   Significantly, we get a mention of the conflict at Wounded Knee in 1973, when armed Native American activists faced off against U.S. Marshals and F.B.I. agents.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_incident)

A Native American man at the bar growls, “What I learned fighting the F.B.I. is… you don’t believe in us, and we don’t believe in you.”  It’s a poignant framing of a history of conflict and oppression that goes back centuries.  Mulder has a rather sweet reply: “I want to believe.”  It’s his trademark line of course, normally indicative of his quest for the supernatural.  Yet, here, it’s a sign of good faith and respect.  The exchange seems to suggest that the brutality and tragedy of settler colonialism can be somehow transcended or mitigated by openness and communication.  “I want to believe.”  It’s not quite belief – it’s a hope and a yearning.  It’s a place to start.

Yet some are not so optimistic.  Joe Goodensnake – evidently a werewolf of some kind – was shot by a local ranchman.  Joe’s sister, Gwen, is hostile towards Mulder and Scully: “I hate suits who are always here when they want something from us, but when we need help, they’re nowhere to be found.”  Later, the son of Goodensnake’s killer shows up at the funeral.  “I just want to show my respects,” he insists.  “I don’t want your respects,” Gwen replies.  “I want your heart to grow cold.  I want you to feel what I’m feeling!”  She spits at the ground in front of him.

In God is Red, Vine Deloria, Jr. writes, “Until the occupation of Wounded Knee, American Indians were stereotyped in literature and by the media.  They were either a villainous warlike group… or the calm, wise, dignified elder sitting on the mesa dispensing his wisdom in poetic aphorisms.”  Even if Native American mythology is here appropriated for mere television entertainment, at least it pushes the viewer beyond the most blatant stereotypes and encourages them to think more about a history that many have forgotten.

Eventually, Mulder gets the full story from Ish, though the Indian still calls him “F.B.I.”  The problem is a Manitou – an evil spirit that can change people into dangerous animals.  Curiously, there is speculation that the creature can be inherited.  There’s something intriguing about an evil spirit passed down through bloodlines, for it mixes the tangible and the ephemeral, the physical and the abstract.

The cinematography is stunning, particularly during the funeral preparations.  Bodies seem to melt into the mist like ghosts.  The close-up shots of the taxidermy specimens feel a bit forced at the beginning of the show, but they really pay off by the end as Mulder panics and shoots a bear’s stuffed head in the claustrophobic house, a place now filled with teeth and shadows.

This is a case where the simple title really adds something to the episode.  Shapes.  Obviously, it’s a reference to the shape-shifter werewolf.  Yet the word invites us to think more broadly about form and transformation.  Tooth and claw and gun.  Corpse and flame and mist.  Human and beast.  The shapes of the world.

Image: Kano Tomokazu (Getty Open Content)

Camp Crusaders! - Enter Batgirl, Exit Penguin

Batman, Season Three, Episode 1: Enter Batgirl, Exit Penguin

Personal Rating: B

(A relatively weak episode, but points for the arrival of Batgirl)

The appearance of Batgirl is set amidst constant reminders of the patriarchal order in which Barbara Gordon resides.  The Penguin is not only male, but aspires to the upper echelons of society, and even evokes FDR with that cigarette holder.  And what greater figure of a patriarch was there in mid-twentieth-century America than the President?  Penguin is the corrupted version of respectable society, and thus a suitable vehicle for representing the systemic subjugation of women.  “Welcome to the cage, my wild dove!” crows Penguin, as he abducts her in an elevator.

Robin observes, “By marrying your daughter, Penguin becomes the son-in-law of the police commissioner.”  Possible immunity could result.  Gotham City, it seems, still operates in a medieval world of marriage alliances and imprisoned women.  “Obedience,” Penguin reminds his captive, “That is the first wifely virtue.”

Fortunately, Barbara refuses to play the damsel-in-distress.  She’s not intimidated by the Penguin and escapes from her captor.  She activates the false wall behind the vanity in her bedroom – and picks up her mask.  Of course, there is a mirror on the superhero side of the wall, too, because Batgirl still wants to look good.

Batgirl’s power and independence, therefore, are all the more striking set against the marriage-plot through which Penguin seeks to entrap her.  “Here comes the bride, all bagged and tied,” sings Penguin when he thinks he has her wrapped up.  Yet Batgirl is on the loose, and fighting crime in high heels.

“Holy agility,” says Robin, after she helps them in a fight.

Interestingly, Batgirl doesn’t want to join the Dynamic Duo’s team.  After Alfred discovers her secret, she insists that he promise never to reveal her identity to anyone – even Batman!  Batgirl will fight alongside our heroes – but she’ll do so as her own woman, not a sidekick.

“I’m sorry to be so helpless,” says Barbara, after pretending to be rescued by Batman and Robin.  Alfred’s knowing look emphasizes the irony of her statement.  Of course, even her own theme song – revealed in a later episode – will try to infantilize her.  “Whose baby are you, Batgirl?”  A feminist crime-fighter’s work is never done.

The Mighty Batgirl

Yvonne Craig passed away recently, so I thought I would honor her memory by reflecting on her role as Batgirl in the classic 60s Batman show.  The arrival of Batgirl in the third season does alter the dynamic of the Dynamic Duo in odd ways.  It just feels a bit off-balance with this new and independent crime-fighter.  That being said, it’s worth it, because Batgirl is pretty awesome.

In “real” life she is, of course, Barbara Gordon, the daughter of the Commissioner.  Unlike our millionaire hero, though, she does work for a living – and we first meet her as a mild-mannered librarian.  Though perhaps not mild enough – in one episode her father reminds her that, “a good librarian is a calm librarian.”  Words that we should all remember.  In any case, Barbara wants some more thrills, so she somehow arranges for a bat-cycle and a flashy costume and begins her career as a vigilante.

She’s a bit more cavalier about it than our stuffy heroes.  Arriving on the scene of her first fight, she declares, “…I was glad for the chance to join in the fun.”  After being reminded by Batman of the solemn nature of their struggles, she replies, with spunk, “Crime fighting is a serious matter to me, too, Batman, but we might as well get a few laughs out of it.”

Batgirl fights just as well as her male allies – and takes out her foes with some stunning high kicks.  She has an awesome entrance in her premiere episode, posing before combat with her fists on her hips and looking super confident.  It’s not easy to strike that show’s campy balance of coy solemnity, but Yvonne Craig did it well.  I may start up some more Batman reviews to explore the character more fully.

Rest in peace, Ms. Craig.  You were a great Batgirl.  And you reminded us that life is like crime fighting – a serious matter, but we might as well get a few laughs out of it.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvonne_Craig#/media/File:Yvonne_Craig_Batgirl.JPG

Audrey Hepburn and the Mirror of Authenticity

I just had the opportunity to see Roman Holiday on the big screen and wanted to share my thoughts on this romantic masterpiece.  Audrey Hepburn is perhaps more often respected for her elegant fashions than for her versatility as an actress, but this movie proves how good she could be.  She shows us a girlish princess on the brink of a mental breakdown, a drugged and half-asleep but still poetry-spouting would-be seductress, an innocent but somewhat mischievous young woman exploring Rome, and a broken-hearted royal bound by duty.  It’s a remarkable performance, and all the more so because Hepburn plays it with such apparent effortlessness.  The movie has a fabulous script, but Hepburn and Gregory Peck bring it to life with every word, glance, and gesture.

It’s easy to look at films with a certain alienation and cynicism.  We might be eager to immerse ourselves in a special-effects extravaganza or a fairy tale comedy, but we still know these things are not real life.  Roman Holiday doesn’t need special effects, and so human appearance and human relationships become special.  It is a kind of fairy tale, but ends with a heart-breaking reality.

Hepburn and Peck just feel so authentic.  The two of them aren’t posturing for their own mythology – they're sharing moments with one another, living and breathing and laughing together.  That’s partly a matter of chemistry between the co-stars, but also, I think, of Hepburn’s personality, of her ability to exist in a moment without artificiality.  One of her biographers, Barry Paris, quotes a Cosmopolitan article in which the reporter comments “When she reads, she reads; when she fits, she fits; when she talks clothes, she talks clothes; when she sits under a drier, she simply sits and dries.”  Her son, Sean Ferrer, recalled how Ms. Hepburn used to say “Boil it all down to what counts the most: What is the essence of what you are trying to do, what is the most important thing?”  Ferrer writes, “She lived her life believing in the power of simplicity.”

Was it her simple but focused immersion in the world that made it so difficult for her to cry on cue?  Peck recalled that Hepburn was “good at everything except shedding tears.”  Or was sadness something too deep, too personal to readily produce simply for the sake of a movie?  The director, William Wyler, had to shout out her – to make her cry as a person, not an actress – before he got the needed teardrops for a crucial scene.  Maybe that’s a sign of a limited or inexperienced actress.  But it’s that sincerity that shoots through the screen like an arrow into your heart, that makes you see in a fictional story an authentic image of your soul.

The film doesn’t end in a single climax, but in a series of heart-wrenching encounters.  The kiss after an escape through the river.  The solemn car ride as they are about to part.  Another desperate kiss.  Silence and separation.  Then comes the press briefing where the two would-be lovers can only stare at one another, so close and yet too far away.  Was bitter-sweet romance ever done with such confident reserve?  Watch Hepburn’s giddy, trembling smile at the recollection of joyful memories – then watch it fade away as she prepares to leave.  It’s a love story made for an actress who once declared “I think sex is overrated.”

Joe Bradley’s motives are selfish at the start, but gradually change.  So, too, do those of Princess Ann.  I’m not a big fan of the arbitrary aristocratic “duty” to which the princess sacrifices herself and her relationship with Joe, but the final scene makes an important statement about love.  Their love is real even when it is thwarted and unspoken.  It shapes them, defines them – it ennobles them in ways that birthright or wealth could never achieve.  Love is expressed in and through the self but reaches beyond it.  Joe Bradley goes to the press conference partly to reassure the princess that he won’t betray her secrets.  Gregory Peck is so awesome here.  He somehow conveys both his joy at seeing her – even now, even in these torturous circumstances – and his pain at losing her.  His final long walk through the ornate yet meaningless building is stunning cinema – and that brief moment when he turns to look back is just one of the small but vital touches that makes this such an astonishing film.

Oh, Roman Holiday.  You’re a film that proves the truth of what Charles Dickens wrote in Great Expectations: “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears…”

Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Audrey_Hepburn_and_Gregory_Peck_on_Vespa_in_Roman_Holiday_trailer.jpg

X-Files: Fire

The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 11 – Fire

It’s something of a delight to discover a classic X-Files episode that you don’t remember – and may never have seen.  Fire has some wonderful moments.  There’s Mulder’s quip right at the start:  “That’s one of the luxuries to hunting down aliens and genetic mutants… you rarely get to press charges.”

I realized something important about The X-Files while watching this episode – while nominally about “super” qualities – as in supernatural – it’s just as often and more profoundly a show about vulnerabilities.  Here we learn of Mulder’s fear of fire, spawned from yet another childhood trauma.  And we discover his “old flame,” Phoebe Greene of Scotland Yard.  Mulder has spent years getting over her – and she’s still eager to mess with his head.  Yet Scully is on to her.  Dana’s cheerfully contemptuous “hello” is priceless.

And who can resist a Sherlock Holmes reference?  Not me.

Scully: “Three pipe problem?”

Mulder: “That’s from Sherlock Holmes.  It’s a private joke.”

Scully, with droll perkiness in her voice: “How private?”

It’s not really – or only? – that Scully is romantically interested in Mulder and therefore jealous.  She’s bemused by his naiveté and probably concerned that his emotions will interfere with his work.  And, most importantly, she cares about his welfare.

Scully: “So she shows up knowing the power she has over you and then she makes you walk through fire, is that it?”

The episode has moments of elegance, both in dialogue and imagery.  There are several evocative close-ups of flame.  Obsessive desire and fire are interwoven throughout the narrative.  And – in one of those moments where the show just bleeds intellectual enthusiasm – the FBI’s arson expert observes, “Fire’s got a certain genius, you know, a certain demon poetry.”

But, in the end, it’s all about Mulder and Scully, as they dance their dance of doubt and humor, of coy intimacies and supernatural adventures.

“Mulder, you keep unfolding like a flower.”

Image (altered): “Fire in London,” by Thomas Rowlandson and/or A. C. Pugin.  British Library Flickr page.

The Witch That Owns The Winter

Hellboy: Darkness Calls – Chapter 3

Frontispiece Image: Flight Through the Woods

Chapter 3 is when this book really begins to show its brilliance. 

The witches mumble in England.  “All the queens of old… are dust.”  Gruagach, in pig monster form, walks into their midst.  Gruagach is a strange and perhaps unlikely spokesperson for “the children of the earth” – the fey, the monstrous, the mythic.  Yet he is an eloquent speaker.  “Time to decide,” he insists.  “Fade away… or... make the daytime world weep for fear.”

Meanwhile.   In a series of epic panels, Hellboy battles the Baba Yaga’s army of skeletons.  An avalanche of moldy bones against one red monster that thinks he is a man.  Hellboy is a superhero trapped in a world of impotence and futility.  He can beat any immediate group of foes – but not an endless supply of revenants.  Not in the Yaga’s realm, at least.  He runs.

He is rescued by giant wolves.  “Uh… okay,” he stammers.  Look at that panel.  After the chaos of battle, there is quiet and calm – trees become almost abstract lines.  Then the white world turns dark, and the Leshii waits by a fire.  He’ll aid Hellboy, and when the white shroud returns, it obliterates the army of corpses.

Artistically, these might be the best two pages in the book – and that’s saying something.  I want to work through them in detail.  1.  The quiet wood, by moonlight, contrasted with the Leshii’s bitter gripes about the “half-blind” Yaga.  Even the crescent moon echoes the “half-blind” image.  2.  The army: tattered, weary… soldiers without will or purpose of their own.  3 and 4.  A close up on the corpse faces – with thick globs of snow like winter’s blood.  5 and 6.  Whiteness – more menacing and consuming now than those deep gorgeous shadows that are so prevalent and so beautiful in the Hellboy books.  7 and 8.  Whiteness, fading into wolf.  “Hellboy, wake up.”  Dream wolf.  Spirit wolf.  9.  “Huh?”  Hellboy’s big arm and little legs remind me of President Franklin Roosevelt, crippled by polio, yet still strong and defiant.  Hellboy looks vulnerable here.  10.  Wolves everywhere, in the darkness behind HB.  They just bloom in the shadows.  11. RUN.  12.  Shock portrayed wonderfully on that stern face, even though it’s so blocky that it might be made of wood.  A puff of breath in the cold.  Study those pages!  That’s how to tell a story!

Has there ever been a stranger villain than the Baba Yaga, flying around in her mortar and pestle?  As much as I’d like to do more research, I’ll resort to the crutch of Wikipedia, which quotes Andreas Johns in The Slavic and East European Journal.  According to Johns, the Baba Yaga is “a many-faceted figure, capable of inspiring researchers to see her as a Cloud, Moon, Death, Winter, Snake, Bird, Pelican or Earth Goddess, totemic matriarchal ancestress, female initiator, phallic mother, or archetypal image.”  I think I’ll have more to say about her later.

A quick mention of one of my favorite characters in all of Hellboy.  There’s a tiny little domovoi, a house spirit, which lives in the oven of an abandoned dwelling.  He sits smoking with Hellboy, warning him about the Baba Yaga.  Hellboy talks frankly with him: “I was so G-- d--- mad, I thought, what the hell, why not fight a whole army of skeletons?”

Meanwhile.  Perun, God of Storms, “Lord over the whole world,” sits in the woods drawing lightning in the mud… filthy, tangle-bearded, melancholy masculinity, waiting for the next storm or battle that might interest him.  Is this a figure of fading patriarchy, too lazy too defend his fragile empire?  There’s something quiet and contemplative about the god here, though we know he rages in nights of thunder.  The Baba Yaga sneaks up on him with some skeletal archers.  “I will tolerate no gods in my Russia…”  He falls into the river, bleeding.  That’s some pretty awesome deicide.  It’s like something out of a Dashiell Hammett noir crime novel, but, you know, with skeletons and arrows.

Image: Boston Museum of Fine Arts

The Battle for a Fateful Body

Hellboy: Darkness Calls – Chapter 2

The frontispiece image:  Hellboy in a Cathedral Door

Hellboy just wants to be left alone.  Unfortunately, eldritch forces battle relentlessly for control of him – seeking his aid, or his destruction.  Now some witches pray to dark and night, and pull the demon-man into the sky, where he joins the flight of pigs and potent cats, witch-bodies and creaking broomsticks.  They drop him like a human meteor into a ruined church.

Here Duncan Fegredo paints a majestic scene of shadows and cobwebs, of cloaks and huddled bodies – a conclave of witches, waiting for a king.  They tell of Bromhead’s fate – a fool seduced by arcane secrets, overwhelmed by forces beyond his dreams.

“Call down the moon!” a bird commands.  And the man is doomed.

At this point, as is often the case, Hellboy seems the ultimate individualist.  The witches fret and fear and conspire, whispering and pleading and threatening.  They are a collective of shadows, threads on a larger tapestry of fates and histories that are profoundly interconnected but which mean little or nothing to Hellboy.  He shrugs them off… but the individual cannot fully escape the social and natural forms in which she or he is so thoroughly enmeshed.

Then the Baba Yaga – old witch-queen of Russia – sends a gnomish messenger to the cathedral.  And so Hellboy walks away, but through a hidden gate or portal… and into a world of white winter.  Vengeance is old – as old as hungry Grendel and boastful Beowulf, as old as the brutal but strangely infantile Greeks at Troy.  Old grudges are the gnarled roots of the world – and Hellboy trips upon the schemes of his indefatigable enemy, falling into a tide of snow.

Image: British Museum (text from Hellboy)

Hellboy as Folk Hero

Hellboy: Darkness Calls – Chapter 1

Joyce Carol Oates, a National Book Award winner, observed, “In the ruins of American empire, what more appropriate figure of salvation/damnation than Mike Mignola’s Hellboy?”

I fell in love with the Hellboy comic partly because of Mike Mignola’s subtle, haunting artwork.  There were plenty of great stories in the early books, but the mythological power of the series reached a new level in the collection Darkness Calls.  Duncan Fegredo’s art is more complex and frenetic than Mignola’s – but it works really well.

Frontispiece image: A Hand Writes in Blood

Italy.  In the bucolic wilderness a man has entered a ruined castle.  In a chamber beneath the earth he invokes a goddess of darkness.  Stone statues watch him, their faces mere echoes of life – unable to do anything now but contemplate the drama that unfolds before them.

“Hectate,” says Bromhead.

Birds flutter about, even though this is a subterranean space.  An iron maiden appears, a device of torture given spirit-form.  Iron as ephemeron.  Ghosts are weighty things in the world of Hellboy.  Arcane knowledge reveals the ghost behind the iron – a zombie-lich woman, rather than a true goddess.  The man is smug as he notes her “human heart.”  He has no such thing, perhaps, but he does have power.

England.  A bird delivers broken horns to wrinkled witches – a fragment of Hellboy reshaped into his likeness.  Soul and substance bound together, like demon flesh and human spirit in the character of our protagonist.

A house by the sea.  Hellboy doesn’t speak in poetry.  He grunts and grumbles.  He smokes and drinks and swears.  His near-infinite strength is masked by his slumping, sleepy posture.  His magic-addled destiny is counterbalanced by indifference, weariness, even resentment.

“Aye, aye, Mister Stormalong,” sing some witches, summoning.

Alfred Bulltop Stormalong was a New England folk hero.  Reading the entry on Wikipedia, it’s easy to imagine that this guy was the spark behind the whole notion of Hellboy.  Bulltop?  A life-long rivalry with a Kraken!?  It's interesting that the Wikipedia entry mentions a possible connection with African-American folk songs, though I see no evidence that Stormalong himself was supposed to be black.  Curiously, one version of Stormalong’s death involves a race with a steam ship – a noteworthy parallel to John Henry’s famous battle with a steam hammer.

Come to think of it, there could be an interesting dialogue between race and Hellboy.  I’m reminded of Ralph Ellison’s fascinating suggestion: “I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds” (“Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” in Shadow and Act).  Isn’t that akin to what Mignola’s doing with Hellboy? ... Portraying a giant body, brutalized but indestructible, which becomes the stage for all of history and mythology, the nexus point and crisis point for humanity?  Then read Hellboy’s “Hell” as slavery: a place of chains and punishments, a subterranean space of which many won’t dare to speak, but which underlies or influences every evil and every temptation in the world above?

The woods.  Shadows from deep history still linger, with sharp swords and wicked hearts.  A witch hunter.  The war on women is old, after all, strewn with nooses – couched in the discourse of madness, magic, abnormality.  Now one man is a corpse in the woods, tangled in the trees, waiting.

“I drive away clouds… and break the jaws of snakes with my words,” says a stranger, a man who might not be a man.  Witch corpses burst from the ground, like withered and tormented flowers spawned from the splash of an arcane brew.  The leaves and broken branches swirl like a vortex at sea.  The sea, the woods – it’s all the same, it’s all mutable and interconnected.  Storm along, storm along…

Images (both altered): “Head with Horns,” Paul Gauguin (Getty Open Content), John Henry Statue - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)#/media/File:John_Henry-27527.jpg

Blackness, Etherians, and Saucerian Rights

Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) – Conclusion

After Albert Bender of the civilian-operated International Flying Saucer Bureau was visited by the men in black, Barker convinced two friends to interview him.  Despite the fact that Bender replies “I can’t answer that” to a long string of questions, there are some fascinating moments and tantalizing responses.  When asked, “Does the government know about saucers?” he replies, “They have known what they are for two years.”  Bender had been intimidated after coming up with a theory that Barker suggests may have been too close to the truth.  When asked “Can’t you tell me just where you got your theory?” he says “I went into the fantastic and came up with the answer.”  When asked an open question about writing a story intended to pull out some clue, Bender responds with the following.  “Here is something no one has used before.  Suppose there was another world out in space, and there the people were black.  What do you think would happen if they came to this planet?  Do you think they would help the colored or the white people?  You know the prejudices that exist here, and if they came to Earth, what do you think would happen?”

It’s one of the few meaningful replies that Bender provides in the interview.  Sadly, and strangely, Barker doesn’t really elaborate on the point.  There are no references here to the “men in black” as appearing to be African Americans, though one strange inquisitor is later described as deeply tanned.  Assuming that Bender’s statement is accurately reported and sincerely intended (admittedly big assumptions), what does it mean?  It seems strange that he would be so evasive to most questions and then “give away the game” with a straightforward answer.  If the reference to racial prejudice was just a metaphor, was there another oppressed or maligned group that these aliens might favor?  There are certainly remarks about Russians and Communists throughout the account – not surprising considering this is 50's America in the Cold War.  Did Bender believe the aliens were “Reds?”  Was that the unthinkable inversion of power that the race comment was meant to reveal?  Or was Bender’s remark just a hoax, a game, a meaningless distraction from some other secret plot?

There isn’t that much serious science in the book, but there are some interesting speculations.  My favorite is the notion that flying saucers are piloted by interdimensional travelers.  In this scenario, “etherians” use “ether ships” to materialize and dematerialize in our physical universe.   “Thus the theory tends to tie in with tales of saucers that disappear, or travel noiselessly through our atmosphere at fantastic speeds which would melt ordinary metal.”  Barker goes on to link these etherians with ghosts, suggesting that most supernatural phenomena could be linked to the Saucer Mystery.  It’s a fun theory because it “explains” so much, even if tangible evidence is lacking.

The book’s final section is devoted to the silencing of various UFO investigators – most of whom are visited by menacing strangers who claim or hint that they are from the government.  Are these “men in black” part of a web of international espionage, agents of occult organizations, or actual aliens?  There aren’t any solid answers, but lots of curious reports.

A fabulous sentence at the end really gives you a sense of Barker’s tone and spirit.  “I doubt if our forefathers knew anything of flying saucers when they set up an immutable expression of our rights, but if they were living today, and heard stories such as I have told, I believe they would express their conviction that the freedoms they instituted or proclaimed could be interpreted to provide that their descendants have also the inalienable right to chase flying saucers to their hearts’ content.”

Freedom!  Saucers!  Just don’t let the men in black know that you’re curious…

Image: Odilon Redon (1896)

The Real X-Files?

Gray Barker's They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) is a rather fascinating book.  I recently found a copy in a used bookstore and was quickly drawn into a world of UFOs, flying saucers, and interplanetary conspiracies.  Evidently, Barker was largely responsible for initiating the “men in black” mythology so closely associated with UFO investigations.  Even though Wikipedia suggests that Barker is a questionable source at best, he certainly provides a great read.

Barker worked in the motion picture industry, in a “buying-booking concern,” but used his free time to produce a magazine called The Saucerian.  If nothing else, They Knew Too Much would interest me as an insight into the psychology of the period – and of UFO researchers in particular.  Yet there are also plenty of evocative reports to stimulate the imagination.  The book begins with a series of “close encounters” including the “Flatwoods Monster” of West Virginia – which some say was probably an amalgamation of an owl, a meteor, and a flashing light.  But in Barker’s account it was a huge creature with a red face, light-beam eyes, and “terrible claws.”  We also hear the story of Mrs. Hilda Walker in Texas who reported “the figure of a man with wings like a bat” perching on a tree.  Barker notes, “No one saw the bat man’s saucer, though saucer addicts presumed he had arrived in one.”

Much of Barker’s book revolves around Albert K. Bender, the founder of the International Flying Saucer Bureau, “A civilian investigating agency” in Connecticut.  Barker presents Bender as a rational person, noting Bender's editorial in Space Review where he declared, “The mystery of the Flying Saucers will eventually be solved by calm, clear-thinking individuals.”  Bender eventually appointed Barker as Chief Investigator for the IFSB.

Yet just as Bender was supposedly about to reveal incredible new insights about UFOs, he declared that he would no longer involve himself in the study of “saucers.”  He had been visited by three men in dark suits… and now he was scared of what might happen to him.