The Saucerian

History

Gray Barker launched The Saucerian in September 1953 from Box 981, Clarksburg, West Virginia, with a 25-cent sample-copy price and a bi-monthly publication schedule. The masthead listed Barker as editor and publisher and Roger N. Parris as associate editor and research consultant. The Vol 1 No 1 cover promised "A Full Report of Investigation into Mysterious Late Doings with the Saucers" and opened with a four-line Hamlet epigraph: "Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou comest in such a questionable shape."

Barker's editorial statement in Vol 1 No 1 established the publication's position with unusual directness for the period. The saucers were real and had been seen by hundreds of reliable people. The editor himself had never seen one. The saucers were alien to the known parts of the Earth or to the Earth entirely. They were not secret government developments, not Russian spies, not the planet Venus. The Shaver Mystery would receive a full historical treatment in a coming issue. The publication would also engage paranormal subjects, science fiction, and the wider Fortean tradition, though Barker insisted it was not a fanzine. The voice was self-deprecating ("If you enjoy reading it, let us know, for the editor, like many, must satisfy his ego") and openly aware of working at the edge of the period's intellectual respectability.

Barker had come to the saucer question through his work investigating the West Virginia Flatwoods Monster case of 12 September 1952, a multi-witness incident in Braxton County that produced national press coverage and put Clarksburg, fifty miles to the north, on the saucer-investigation map. By the time Barker launched The Saucerian a year later, he had already written the Flatwoods report for Fate Magazine and built a correspondence network across the United States. The 1953 to 1955 run of The Saucerian preserves his early correspondence with Albert K. Bender of the International Flying Saucer Bureau in Bridgeport, Connecticut, whose abrupt 1953 closure of the IFSB and reported visit from "three men in black" Barker would publish at full length in his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.

The eight issues in the archive cover the period in which Barker was building toward the Bender material. The Vol 1 No 2 issue of late 1953 carried initial reporting on Bender's closure. The Vol 2 No 1 issue of February 1954 expanded the Bender narrative. By Vol 3 No 2 (January 1955) the publication was running longer feature pieces and accepting subscriber correspondence from a network that ran from California to Florida. Barker's editorial voice through these issues alternates between the wry skepticism of his Vol 1 No 1 statement and a more willing engagement with witness testimony as the IFSB material drew him toward the position that some force was actively suppressing civilian saucer research.

The Saucerian as a numbered run wound down in 1955. Barker reorganised the publication as The Saucerian Bulletin from 1956 onwards, a successor title with new numbering that the archive holds as a separate collection. Through Saucerian Press, his Clarksburg imprint, Barker continued publishing into the 1980s, producing books, newsletters, and reprints that remained the principal American distribution channel for contactee and conspiratorial saucer literature for three decades.