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.