The Saucerian / Saucerian Bulletin

History

Gray Barker launched The Saucerian in September 1953 from Box 981, Clarksburg, West Virginia. Roger N. Parris served as Associate Editor. Sample copies cost twenty-five cents; subscriptions ran six issues for one dollar, published bimonthly. Barker opened his first editorial with Shakespeare: "Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd..." He then cheerfully admitted he had no idea what the saucers were, that smarter people than him were working on the same problem, and that he was equipped with a press and that made him "particularly taxing upon his fellows."

The first issue carried a full report on the Flatwoods Monster investigation (the case that had drawn Barker into the subject the previous year) alongside plans for fiction, poetry, speculation, and a history of the Shaver Mystery. Barker had investigated the Flatwoods incident in September 1952, when residents of Braxton County, West Virginia reported a creature near a crashed object on a hilltop. That investigation, conducted when Barker was a young man working as a theatre manager, changed the direction of his life.

Barker's editorial voice was unlike anything else in ufology. He was funny, self-deprecating, conspiratorial, and deeply unreliable in ways that made him more entertaining rather than less. His 1956 book "They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers" introduced the Men in Black concept to popular culture: mysterious figures in dark suits who allegedly silenced witnesses. The Saucerian publications extended that sensibility. Sighting reports sat beside conspiracy claims, contactee narratives, and Fortean curiosities. Barker had a showman's instinct and made no apology for it.

That quality makes him a complicated archival figure. Later researchers (particularly John Sherwood, who confessed in 1998) revealed that Barker had fabricated material, including hoax letters attributed to other people and fictitious government documents. But the fabrications existed alongside genuine sighting reports, authentic witness correspondence, and real investigative work. The challenge for researchers using Saucerian material is distinguishing which is which, a task that requires cross-referencing against other contemporary sources in the archive.

Barker continued publishing books and pamphlets through Saucerian Press from Clarksburg until his death in December 1984. His correspondents included virtually every major figure in American ufology: James Moseley (his closest friend in the field), John Keel, Ivan Sanderson, and dozens of investigators, contactees, and witnesses. The Barker papers, now held at the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library in West Virginia, remain one of the largest primary archives of correspondence from the 1950s and 1960s UFO community.