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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Gabriel, we were talking about Al Bender and the visit

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Speaker 2: by these three mysterious men in dark suits. Of course,

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Speaker 2: Greg Barker runs with that and uses it as a

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Speaker 2: central part of his most popular book. Did it catch

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Speaker 2: on with other people in the field, other writers? Did

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Speaker 2: it gain any traction?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it did. It was definitely something that they looked

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Speaker 3: at as a mystery. It kind of, you know, he

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Speaker 3: hooked it that way and they picked it up. But

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Speaker 3: he really was the primary person telling that kind of

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Speaker 3: story for a number of years. He called them hush

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Speaker 3: up cases in the fifties, and it wasn't until a

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Speaker 3: little later that they kind of got enshrined a bit

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Speaker 3: more in myth as men in black.

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Speaker 2: And of course nobody really knew for sure. Are they

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Speaker 2: Air Force, government agents FBI or something else. We still

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Speaker 2: don't know.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, so privately, Barker at first said that he thought

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Speaker 3: it was probably some kind of government thing. Later he

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Speaker 3: started telling some of his correspondents that he believed if

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Speaker 3: you had been in the room when Bender had his visit,

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Speaker 3: you would not have seen anyone there. Essentially that this

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Speaker 3: was not necessarily, you know, a hoax, but certainly something

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Speaker 3: that maybe was not a physical experience, if we can

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Speaker 3: maybe put it that way, and they knew too much

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Speaker 3: about flying saucers. Which what's interesting is that he's building

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Speaker 3: a lot on the kind of tone that Donald Kehoe

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Speaker 3: had set up with his books, which are pointed towards

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Speaker 3: a conspiracy within the Air Force, that there are, you know,

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Speaker 3: officials in the Air Force that he called the silence

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Speaker 3: group that didn't want flying saucer information released to the public,

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Speaker 3: so very narrow and clearly defined conspiracy. Barker does not

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Speaker 3: have that kind of definition of who the men in

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Speaker 3: black are. Who they are is a mystery, and so

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Speaker 3: it's kind of a conspiracy without conspirators, and that gives

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Speaker 3: it a sense of kind of cosmic horror, that this

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Speaker 3: is maybe some kind of force beyond human understanding. And

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Speaker 3: what's interesting is that after Barker publishes his book, that

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Speaker 3: word silence, the term silence group that Keyho had really

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Speaker 3: narrowly defined, becomes applied not to Air Force officials but

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Speaker 3: to these three mysterious men in black. In a lot

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Speaker 3: of UFO writing, the silence group comes to mean that

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Speaker 3: instead of what Keyho had meant it to mean. And

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Speaker 3: that's a kind of shift of meaning that you see

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Speaker 3: with a lot of terms in the UFO world. A

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Speaker 3: very recent example is UAP, which initially means unidentified aerial

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Speaker 3: phenomena and in the UFO world of today now has

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Speaker 3: come to mean unidentified anomalist phenomena, in other words, anything weird.

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Speaker 3: And so this kind of narrow term becomes a broad term.

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Speaker 2: So I mentioned before the break this character James Moseley,

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Speaker 2: Jim Moseley. I should tell you I met Moseley several

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Speaker 2: times at UFO events and corresponded with him. I was

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Speaker 2: he would write write about me and Saucer Spear his newsletter,

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Speaker 2: kind of like friendly jabs, jabbing, but it was always funny.

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Speaker 2: What's your take on Mosley and his relationship with Barker.

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Speaker 3: Well, he was Barker's best friend, you know, throughout Barker's

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Speaker 3: entire life, and and I think he took Gray's death

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Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty four kind of heart and was kind

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Speaker 3: of always trying to kind of keep his legacy alive.

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Speaker 3: I think in a lot of ways.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, they were, they.

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Speaker 3: Were very close, and he was Barker was more open

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Speaker 3: with Mosley than than with anyone else in his correspondence

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Speaker 3: and communications. Yeah, Mosley's an interesting character I don't have.

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Speaker 3: I don't feel like I have as good a handle

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Speaker 3: on him as I have Barker, would you know, perhaps

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Speaker 3: sensibly because I wasn't working in the Mosley archive, I

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Speaker 3: was working in the Barker archive. But yeah, he definitely

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Speaker 3: had had his own approach to the Flying Saucer mystery.

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Speaker 2: In addition to the news, the newsletter of Saucer Smear

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Speaker 2: that was published until I think it might have been

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Speaker 2: into the.

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Speaker 3: Nineties until twenty twelve. Actually he kept it going until

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Speaker 3: he died.

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Speaker 2: Do you have a lot of those issues?

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Speaker 3: So I have some, But I benefit, as we all do,

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Speaker 3: from the fantastic digitization work that's been done by the

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Speaker 3: Archives for the Unexplained in Sweden. They have made available

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Speaker 3: scans of the entire run of Saucer Smear and its predecessor,

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Speaker 3: Zene Saucer News, which is what kind of mostly kind

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Speaker 3: of got put on the map with in the fifties.

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Speaker 2: You're right about those two getting together and having rauc

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Speaker 2: us good times, a lot of drinking involved, and when

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Speaker 2: they would start drinking, they'd get into some mischief. So

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Speaker 2: one of the targets of that mischief was John Keel, Right.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. So John Keel and Gray Barker first

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Speaker 3: crossed paths in about nineteen sixty six when they were

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Speaker 3: both in West Virginia investigating not only the Mothman but

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Speaker 3: also the contact claims of Woodrow darren Berger, who claimed

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Speaker 3: to have met a flying saucer pilots named Indrid Cold,

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Speaker 3: and they interviewed darren Berger together. They kind of basically

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Speaker 3: first met well interviewing this saucer witness. And what's interesting

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Speaker 3: is that Keel started it in terms of the pranks

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Speaker 3: between the two of them. So Keel, thinking he would

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Speaker 3: have some fun, wrote a fake note from the Men

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Speaker 3: in Black and slipped it under the door of Barker's

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Speaker 3: hotel and was shocked a couple months later to find

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Speaker 3: that Barker had published this as real evidence of the

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Speaker 3: Men in Black visiting him, despite him knowing very well

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Speaker 3: that it was a prank that Don played on him.

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Speaker 3: But I think Keel was a bit earnest, certainly in

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Speaker 3: this period, and they kind of saw him as an

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Speaker 3: easy mark, somebody who would they could kind of spin

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Speaker 3: a tail for and he would fall for it, and

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Speaker 3: so that is what they did over the next eighteen

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Speaker 3: months or so. So in the Mothman Prophecy's Keel has

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Speaker 3: some a really chilling chapter where he's describing strange things

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Speaker 3: happening over the phone, weird beeps and strange almost tape

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Speaker 3: recorded sounding messages and robotic messages, and the scariest one

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Speaker 3: of them all is this phone call from someone identifying

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Speaker 3: himself as Gray Barker, and yet it can't be Gray

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Speaker 3: because his voice just doesn't sound quite right. He sounds

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Speaker 3: like he's maybe under duress somehow, and he doesn't know

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Speaker 3: basic facts that Gray would know. If you look back

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Speaker 3: at Keel's own archive, where he has kept very detailed

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Speaker 3: day to day notes of this entire period, and that's

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Speaker 3: all available at John Keel dot com through the work

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Speaker 3: of Doug Skinner, who maintains Keel's archive, you can see

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Speaker 3: this called you know the day that he gets the

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Speaker 3: phone call, the Gray Barker hoax. He knows that this

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Speaker 3: is Gray playing a joke on him. But Gray, in

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Speaker 3: writing back to Keel about this, said, this is a

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Speaker 3: strange you know, I don't recall making any phone call

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Speaker 3: to you, but the strangest thing is my phone bill

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Speaker 3: shows a call to your number. This is a weird mystery.

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Speaker 3: Maybe you can figure it out. And so he makes

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Speaker 3: it a mystery for Keel to solve. And if you

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Speaker 3: can kind of read through those notes and see Keel

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Speaker 3: convince himself that this was not just a hoax, and

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Speaker 3: it becomes one of the scariest moments in the Mothman Prophecies,

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Speaker 3: and in the Mothman Prophecies movie. This then becomes the

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Speaker 3: chapstick scene, which is kind of the you know, one

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Speaker 3: of the strangest moments in that movie as well.

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Speaker 2: Wow, that's that's really something. I think Keela Hollicks would

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Speaker 2: would be angry at that. But did Keill never knew

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Speaker 2: by the time he died.

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Speaker 3: So in the early so this phone call happened in

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Speaker 3: I think nineteen sixty seven, and in seventy two, when

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Speaker 3: Keel was writing The Mothman Prophecies, he sent a letter

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Speaker 3: to Gray Barker saying that, you know, tell me the

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Speaker 3: truth what was really going on with that weird phone call?

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Speaker 3: And Barker never never gave him an answer, and so

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Speaker 3: I am not so sure that he ever figured it out.

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Speaker 3: Though Also if you look at those notes. You know,

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Speaker 3: Keil presents himself in his published writing differently than he

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Speaker 3: presents himself in his private notes and her writings, and

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Speaker 3: so I think, you know, if you look at that

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Speaker 3: initial note, he knew. It's just a question of how

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Speaker 3: thoroughly did he convince himself and how much was he thinking, Oh,

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Speaker 3: like Barker did, this is a tale that I can

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Speaker 3: spin and really hook my audience.

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Speaker 2: The Mothman Chronicles or Mothman Prophecies. I mean, that's a

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Speaker 2: huge book, big movie. I mean, it's a story that

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Speaker 2: lives on and of course Point Pleasant has a Mothman festival. Now.

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Speaker 2: I think they're probably not all that thrilled about the

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Speaker 2: attention that they got years ago, especially with the bridge

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Speaker 2: collapse and loss of life, and that's associated with it,

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Speaker 2: at least in some versions of the story, But they

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Speaker 2: now have learned to embrace it, and it's a big event.

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Speaker 2: I think for that little town. Same thing. I think

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Speaker 2: the Hopkinsville, those weird aliens that it supposedly attacked a

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Speaker 2: cabin out there, I think they have a festival, or

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Speaker 2: did the Flatwoods Monster. I guess eventually over time, towns

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Speaker 2: like that, unities that may not have embraced it. We're

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Speaker 2: kind of embarrassed by that kind of attention, realized that

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Speaker 2: there is opportunity there as well.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. So a good friend of mine, a scholar named

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Speaker 3: Joseph Lacock, who I think has been on the show

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Speaker 3: a couple of times, wrote a really great paper a

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Speaker 3: few years ago about the Mothman and how it shifted

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Speaker 3: from being this spooky story to being a kind of

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Speaker 3: local patron monster of Point Pleasant. And there's been other

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Speaker 3: scholarship on this as well, with people kind of researching

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Speaker 3: how this story becomes a kind of marker of local identity.

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Speaker 3: And yeah, it is really interesting with the Mothman in particular.

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Speaker 3: The thing that really drives at home, both as a

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Speaker 3: kind of thing for the town to pick up and

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Speaker 3: identify itself with and also for the people writing about

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Speaker 3: it to make this a really kind of lasting mystery

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Speaker 3: is that very real designs of the collapse of the

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Speaker 3: Silver Bridge that in which I think forty six people died,

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Speaker 3: and that as a kind of big period to the

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Speaker 3: Mothman story is what gave it a lot of lasting power,

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Speaker 3: because it was something to really, you know, link this

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Speaker 3: story to something very powerful and very real, and so

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Speaker 3: for the town of Point Pleasant, the Mothman then became

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Speaker 3: a kind of sign of resilience, not only for the

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Speaker 3: recovery from that disaster, but the town had a really

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Speaker 3: rough economic time throughout the seventies and eighties, and so

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Speaker 3: this kind of strange figure of the Mothman, which is,

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Speaker 3: you know, something that no other town has, became something

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Speaker 3: that they could pick up and kind of use to

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Speaker 3: kind of rebuild the town in a lot of ways.

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Speaker 2: Have you been to that event?

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Speaker 3: I haven't been to the festival, but I did go

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Speaker 3: to the museum when I was in West Virginia just

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Speaker 3: a few weeks ago. It's about two hours away from Clarksburg,

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Speaker 3: and so all of my research was really focused on,

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Speaker 3: you know, the archive there and places Grey Barker lived,

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Speaker 3: and this is a place that was tied to him,

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Speaker 3: but just a place he visited. So it was always

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Speaker 3: a little too far out of my way. But at

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Speaker 3: this time I knew I had to get there.

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Speaker 2: Oh you're gonna have to go. They could make you

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Speaker 2: like chairman of the parade or something like that. After

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Speaker 2: this book comes out. So Barker, again, he's always got

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Speaker 2: his finger on the pulse of the topic and his audiences.

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Speaker 2: So along come these contact ease at dam Ski, Manger, Truman, Bethum,

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Speaker 2: people like that who say, yeah, I met aliens, I

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Speaker 2: got on their ship, I flew to Venus kind of stuff,

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Speaker 2: always with these exotic names for the aliens that they meet,

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Speaker 2: and Barker, it sounds like from your book that he

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Speaker 2: went back and forth on how legit he thought these

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Speaker 2: things were. But eventually he goes to these big events,

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Speaker 2: the Giant rat Rock convention, and as a speaker at

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Speaker 2: some of these events share that part of the story

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Speaker 2: with us.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: So yeah, the contact ease, the kind of canonical first

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Speaker 3: one is Georgia Damski, people who claim to have met

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Speaker 3: friendly space space beings, you know, humanoid beings, often from

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Speaker 3: Venus or elsewhere in our own solar system. And these

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Speaker 3: stories became really popular in the early and mid fifties.

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Speaker 3: In particular, there were dozens of them, but they were

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Speaker 3: not well regarded within what we might call the mainstream

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Speaker 3: of the UFO world, and they were considered to be

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Speaker 3: kind of hucksters and con men, and there was a

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Speaker 3: real emphasis among a lot of groups like NICAP and

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Speaker 3: civilian saucer intelligence to kind of maintain a kind of

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Speaker 3: ideological purity and what we might say, this kind of

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Speaker 3: focus on only reliable witnesses, you know, you know, people

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Speaker 3: like police and pilots. But that's a constructed idea of reliability.

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Speaker 3: Barker didn't really care about that. These were all part

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Speaker 3: of the same story. To him, this kind of this

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Speaker 3: big cultural story of flying saucers, and the weirdest parts

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Speaker 3: and the silliest parts were every bit as important as

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Speaker 3: the kind of kind of more sober and reliable kind

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Speaker 3: of aspects of it. So he thought these stories were

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Speaker 3: fun and so, and he knew that people would would

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Speaker 3: buy them. His target audience was really anything with flying saucer,

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Speaker 3: and you know, people who would buy anything with flying

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Speaker 3: saucer in the title. And so this was really part

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Speaker 3: of the story for him, But that made him a

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Speaker 3: bit unpopular with with a lot of the more serious investigators.

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Speaker 2: Did he speak at the events like Giant Rock or

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Speaker 2: just went there? I think as you described one scene

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Speaker 2: where he and Moseley are selling books. But was he

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Speaker 2: a speaker.

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Speaker 3: He was a speaker at least one of them. He

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Speaker 3: went two or three times there. I know he spoke

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Speaker 3: at least once I think he was presenting on the

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Speaker 3: Men in Black. Other times I think he was mainly

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Speaker 3: there to sell books, but also just to be there

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Speaker 3: to kind of connect with people. But it was expensive

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Speaker 3: to get to the desert of California from West Virginia,

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Speaker 3: and so he couldn't make it happen too many times.

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Speaker 3: And once, if we're to believe the numbers in his letters,

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Speaker 3: he made a total of I think twenty five dollars

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Speaker 3: in book sales at one of the later ones, And

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Speaker 3: so it was not a money making trip for him.

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Speaker 2: And what do his private papers and letters say about

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Speaker 2: his take on a Damski and others.

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Speaker 3: Of his ill Yeah, I mean I think he did

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Speaker 3: not think that this was a real physical event, Adamski's

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Speaker 3: meeting with a spaceman, and I think that was generally

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Speaker 3: the case with most of the contact ease. But he

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Speaker 3: always maintains a question mark of you know, could it

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Speaker 3: have been, you know, an astral experience or you know,

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Speaker 3: some kind of you know, other other dimensional encounter. And

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Speaker 3: I'm never sure how much he is presenting that as

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Speaker 3: you know, cover for this being something that the rest

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Speaker 3: of the Flying Saucer world thought was silly and how

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Speaker 3: much was an authentic, you know theory, because these were

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Speaker 3: kind of ideas that were coming to importance in the

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Speaker 3: sixties and seventies, with people like John Keel and Jacques

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Speaker 3: Valet emphasizing, you know, the possibility of of some kind

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Speaker 3: of other dimensional visitation. And so I don't know if

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Speaker 3: if that was something that Barker believed, you know, with

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Speaker 3: with kind of my my scare quotes from earlier on

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Speaker 3: that word, or or if it was maybe just a

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Speaker 3: way to kind of keep the mystery going.

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Speaker 2: Government cover up issue pop up. Of course, in during

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Speaker 2: Barker's life, I guess the MIBs sort of play a

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Speaker 2: role in that in the views of some people, I

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Speaker 2: want to get into government cover up parts. And also

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Speaker 2: you had mentioned how the weirdest parts of these stories

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Speaker 2: are just as important to Barker. That sort of touches

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Speaker 2: a nerve with me in the sense that some very

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Speaker 2: weird things happen in association with UFO cases that might

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Speaker 2: otherwise seem pretty credible except for the weird details that

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Speaker 2: pop up almost as if it's on purpose.

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