Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Gray Barker of Braxton, West Virginia
If you follow the Elk River up into central West Virginia, you eventually reach a little place called Riffle. It is the kind of rural crossroads that rarely appears on national maps, a handful of homes and hollows near the point where Braxton, Gilmer, and Calhoun counties almost touch. From that ordinary setting came one of the most influential mythmakers of the twentieth century, a man whose stories helped give the world the Men in Black, shaped modern UFO folklore, and carried a Braxton County imagination into films, paperbacks, and festival t-shirts across the globe.
Gray Roscoe Barker was born at Riffle on May 2, 1925, and spent his childhood in a Braxton County culture that prized storytelling, gossip, and tales of the strange. After graduating from Glenville State College in 1947, he taught school for a short time in Maryland, then moved to Clarksburg, where he made his living booking films for small theaters and drive-ins around north central West Virginia. In his spare time he read science fiction and collected strange news items, especially anything that hinted at visitors from elsewhere.
In the early 1950s, mysterious lights and a towering figure seen on a Braxton County hillside gave Barker his opening. By the time he was finished with the Flatwoods Monster story, he was no longer just a small town theater man. He had become one of the central promoters of a new kind of folklore that mixed rural hauntings, Cold War anxiety, and the possibilities of outer space.
From Riffle to the Flatwoods Monster
Barker’s interest in unidentified flying objects sharpened in 1952, when people in Braxton County reported a glowing object in the sky and a towering, inhuman figure near the community of Flatwoods. Working in Clarksburg but still rooted in Braxton County, he drove back toward his home region to interview witnesses and gather details. He described a “monster” with a strange, hooded shape and burning eyes that stalked a hillside above the town.
Barker wrote up the incident for Fate magazine in an article titled “The Monster and the Saucer,” published in January 1953. The Flatwoods piece gave him his first national audience and showed how he liked to work. He treated local people as serious witnesses, folded their accounts into a dramatic narrative, and connected a rural scare story to a wider world of flying saucers.
Around the same time he was filing stories for local and regional newspapers. A 1953 piece, “Believes in Flying Saucers,” in the Nicholas County News Leader, shows him already performing the role he would keep for decades: the West Virginia man who took saucer reports seriously and made them entertaining enough that editors kept saying yes.
They Knew Too Much and the Men in Black
Barker’s most famous idea grew out of a friendship with Albert K. Bender, founder of the International Flying Saucer Bureau and publisher of the newsletter Space Review. When Bender abruptly shut down his organization in the mid 1950s, he claimed that mysterious “men in dark suits” had warned him to be silent. Barker seized on that detail.
In 1956 he published They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers through University Books. The book dramatized Bender’s story into a chilling account of three ominous visitors who supposedly appeared unannounced, dressed in black, and hinted at terrible consequences if Bender continued his saucer work. In Barker’s hands those visitors became more than anonymous government men. They became nearly supernatural figures with strange eyes and unsettling powers, part secret police and part ghost story.
Writers and scholars now generally agree that Barker’s book is the key reason the Men in Black became a recognizable part of UFO lore and eventually a mainstream pop culture franchise. Later histories of the phenomenon, from Allende letters to Hollywood films, trace their lineage back to the way Barker told Bender’s tale and to the eerie atmosphere he built around those three men. In West Virginia’s own reference works, he appears not just as a writer but as the figure who carried Men in Black stories from rumor into print.
Clarksburg and Saucerian Publications
Success with They Knew Too Much encouraged Barker to turn his side interest into a business. Working out of Clarksburg, he launched The Saucerian in 1953, a mimeographed fanzine that soon became The Saucerian Bulletin and then a more polished magazine, The Saucerian Review: A Report on Flying Saucers. He used these periodicals to share sightings, print letters, and comment on the latest rumors in the flying saucer world, all while cultivating a global network of correspondents.
By the late 1950s Barker had expanded Saucerian Publications into a small but influential press. From his Clarksburg office he sold books by other saucer writers and issued his own titles, including Gray Barker’s Book of Flying Saucers, Gray Barker’s Book of Adamski, Bender Mystery Confirmed, and The Strange Case of Dr. M. K. Jessup. Saucerian also produced UFO guides, roundtable discussions, and later annuals that tried to summarize each year’s strangest stories.
This was a very Appalachian kind of enterprise. Barker worked from a small city, used low cost reproduction and mail-order advertising, and relied on the same frugal, do it yourself habits that sustained church newsletters and community papers across the region. The subject matter was wild, but the business model would have looked familiar to anyone running a rural weekly or a denominational magazine.
At the same time, Saucerian was part of a broader boom in independent paranormal publishing. A detailed bibliography of occult and fantastic beliefs now lists Barker as author or editor on dozens of books and pamphlets, from The Silver Bridge to collections of saucer columns, Bigfoot stories, and conspiracy themed anthologies. Gabriel McKee’s recent study The Saucerian, published by MIT Press, argues that Barker and his press were central purveyors of mid century UFO and conspiracist culture, using small scale printing and reprinting to circulate stories that mainstream houses would not touch.
The Silver Bridge, Mothman, and an Appalachian Disaster
In December 1967, the Silver Bridge that carried U.S. Route 35 over the Ohio River at Point Pleasant collapsed during evening rush hour, killing forty six people. Engineers eventually blamed a failed eyebar and heavy loads, but locals also remembered the strange winged figure that people in Mason County had been reporting in the months before the disaster.
Barker folded those elements together in his 1970 book The Silver Bridge, published through Saucerian Books. He recounted Mothman sightings, reproduced witness voices, and followed them right up to the moment of the bridge’s collapse. Where an engineer’s report might have ended with metallurgy and maintenance schedules, Barker’s narrative left readers with a lingering unease about what the creature meant and why it appeared when it did.
Later writers, especially John A. Keel in The Mothman Prophecies, would make Point Pleasant world famous, and the town now hosts a Mothman festival, museum, and statue. Yet Barker’s book came first and remains a crucial early link between an Appalachian industrial disaster and the “high weirdness” that has grown up around it. For West Virginia, The Silver Bridge stands at an odd crossroads where infrastructure failure, local grief, and imaginative folklore all share the same printed page.
Hoaxes, Tall Tales, and the Question of Truth
From the beginning, Barker understood that the flying saucer world rewarded dramatic writing as much as sober documentation. Friends and critics alike have painted him as a man who delighted in turning rumors into elaborate stories, and sometimes in creating the rumors himself.
Jerome Clark, a leading historian of UFO beliefs, described Barker as a collector of “tales, rumors, reports, dreams, and lies,” someone who realized the mystery would probably never be solved and instead treated it as material for storytelling. At the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library, which now houses the Gray Barker Collection, staff openly characterize him as a well known hoaxer whose pranks still spark debate long after they have been exposed.
Two of those hoaxes have become legends in their own right. The so called Straith Letter, sent on forged State Department stationery to contactee George Adamski in 1957, appeared to offer official backing for Adamski’s claims. Barker and fellow ufologist James Moseley produced it as a prank but kept quiet about their role for years, even as the letter triggered investigations and speculation. In the 1960s they also staged the Lost Creek saucer film, having an assistant dangle a ceramic model in front of a car while Barker filmed and Moseley later screened the footage on lecture tours.
John C. Sherwood, a younger writer who worked with Barker and later wrote about him in Skeptical Inquirer, recalled how Barker encouraged him to strip explicit disclaimers out of a fictional piece and to add fake documents so readers would be more likely to accept it as real. For Barker, the line between fact and fiction was often something to be blurred for effect.
This raises questions for anyone who wants to use his work as historical evidence. Barker’s letters, business records, and interviews can tell us a great deal about how UFO stories circulated and how a small press operated in the mid twentieth century. His books, however, mix firsthand testimony with rumor, embellishment, and occasional invention. The historian’s task is not to treat them as simple reports, but to read them as artifacts of a particular time, place, and imagination.
Gray Barker in the Archives
After Barker’s death on December 6, 1984, at a hospital in Charleston, his papers and much of his library were acquired by the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library and placed in the “Gray Barker Room” at the Waldomore, a historic building near downtown. The collection includes correspondence with figures such as George Adamski, Howard Menger, and James Moseley, Saucerian business records, contracts, clippings, and a large run of Saucerian and other UFO publications.
For researchers interested in Appalachian print culture, those files show how a West Virginia based operation bought, sold, and traded books about everything from hollow earth theories to cryptozoology. For historians of belief and skepticism, they document how stories moved between fans, authors, magazines, and small presses.
Beyond Clarksburg, Barker’s books and ephemera appear in the West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University, which actively collects Saucerian Press titles. The West Virginia Encyclopedia, West Virginia Public Broadcasting, and the Braxton County Convention and Visitors Bureau have all published concise biographical sketches that emphasize his Braxton County origins, Glenville education, and role in shaping UFO lore.
On the scholarly side, Jerome Clark’s UFO Encyclopedia, James R. Lewis’s UFOs and Popular Culture, and Gabriel McKee’s book The Saucerian all place Barker within a larger story of American occult and conspiracist publishing. Together with skeptical accounts by Sherwood and memoirs by Moseley, they provide a rich, sometimes conflicting picture of a man who was at once believer, trickster, and businessman.
A Braxton County Legacy
Today, Riffle is still a quiet bend in the road, and Clarksburg is still a regional hub along Interstate 79. Yet the stories Barker nurtured have long outgrown the hills that formed him. Men in Black films, Mothman festivals, and endless online debates about UFOs and government cover-ups all carry echoes of the books and magazines that once left his Clarksburg post office in brown envelopes.
For Appalachian history, Gray Barker matters not because he solved any mystery in the sky, but because he shows how a rural storyteller and small press operator could shape global popular culture. He turned Braxton County monsters, Ohio River tragedies, and whispered rumors into a print universe that connected Riffle and Clarksburg to Los Angeles, London, and beyond.
In that sense, Gray Barker from Braxton, West Virginia, stands alongside ballad singers, local newspaper editors, and community preachers as one more example of how mountain places generate stories, send them outward, and then watch as the world sends those stories back in altered form.
Sources & Further Reading
Barker, Gray. They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. New York: University Books, 1956. https://www.amazon.com/They-Knew-About-Flying-Saucers/dp/151503898X
Barker, Gray. The Silver Bridge. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1970. https://www.amazon.com/Silver-Bridge-Gray-Barker/dp/1517692172
Barker, Gray. Gray Barker’s Book of Saucers. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1963. https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Barkers-Book-Saucers-Barker/dp/1499105142
Barker, Gray. Gray Barker’s Book of Adamski. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1965. https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Barkers-Book-Adamski-Barker/dp/1499105118
Barker, Gray. Bender Mystery Confirmed. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1962. https://www.clarksburglibrary.org/barker-collection
Barker, Gray. The Strange Case of Dr. M. K. Jessup. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, circa 1963. https://www.clarksburglibrary.org/barker-collection
Barker, Gray. Gray Barker at Giant Rock. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1976. https://www.clarksburglibrary.org/barker-collection
Barker, Gray. A UFO Guide to Fate Magazine. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1981. https://www.clarksburglibrary.org/barker-collection
Barker, Gray. MIB: The Secret Terror Among Us. Jane Lew, WV: New Age Publishing Company, 1983. https://www.clarksburglibrary.org/barker-collection
Barker, Gray. “The Monster and the Saucer.” Fate 6, no. 1 (January 1953): 12–20. https://www.fatemag.com/post/the-monster-and-the-saucer
Barker, Gray, ed. The Saucerian Bulletin. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Publications, 1953–62. https://www.clarksburglibrary.org/barker-collection
Barker, Gray, ed. The Saucerian: A Report on Flying Saucers. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Publications, begun 1956. https://www.clarksburglibrary.org/barker-collection
Clarksburg Harrison Public Library. “Gray Barker UFO Collection.” Waldomore Archives, Clarksburg, WV. https://www.clarksburglibrary.org/barker-collection
Moore, Merle. “Gray Barker.” e WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council, last revised February 16, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/324
“Gray Barker, a Braxton County Legacy.” Braxton County Convention and Visitors Bureau, March 10, 2019. https://braxtonwv.org/gray-barker-a-braxton-county-legacy/
Plein, Stewart. “Gray Barker and The Men In Black: They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.” WVU Libraries News Blog, May 25, 2021. https://news.lib.wvu.edu/2021/05/25/gray-barker-and-the-men-in-black-they-knew-too-much-about-flying-saucers/
“May 2, 1925: Flying Saucer Investigator Gray Barker Born.” West Virginia Public Broadcasting, May 2, 2017. https://wvpublic.org/may-2-1925-flying-saucer-investigator-gray-barker-born/
“Gray Barker.” Wikipedia. Last modified December 26, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Barker
Sherwood, John C. “Gray Barker: My Friend, the Myth Maker.” Skeptical Inquirer 22, no. 3 (May–June 1998). https://skepticalinquirer.org/1998/05/gray-barker-my-friend-the-myth-maker/
Sherwood, John C. “Gray Barker’s Book of Bunk: Mothman, Saucers, and MIB.” Skeptical Inquirer 26, no. 3 (May–June 2002). http://www.csicop.org/si/show/gray_barkers_book_of_bunk_mothman_saucers_and_mib
McKee, Gabriel. “A Contactee Canon: Gray Barker’s Saucerian Books.” In The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape, edited by Darryl V. Caterine and John W. Morehead, 275–88. New York and London: Routledge, 2019. https://archive.nyu.edu/handle/2451/63886
McKee, Gabriel. The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049542/the-saucerian/
Lewis, James R. UFOs and Popular Culture: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Mythology. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC CLIO, 2000. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ufos-and-popular-culture-9781576073759/
Moseley, James W., and Karl T. Pflock. Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave Robbing Ufologist. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002. https://books.google.com/books/about/Shockingly_Close_to_the_Truth.html?id=cZoMAAAACAAJ
Harvey, Austin. “The Real Men In Black: The Quasi Government Agents Who Silence Witnesses Of Alleged Alien Encounters.” All That’s Interesting, May 9, 2023. https://allthatsinteresting.com/real-men-in-black
Sablich, Justin. “The UFO Sightings That Launched ‘Men in Black’ Mythology.” History, August 23, 2018. https://www.history.com/articles/men-in-black-real-origins
“Who Are the Real Men in Black?” HowStuffWorks, September 21, 2023. https://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/men-in-black.htm
Coon, Ralph, director. Whispers from Space. Documentary film. Last Prom and Ideoactive Releasing, 1995. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361119/
Wilkinson, Bob, director. Shades of Gray. Documentary film. 2009. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1504700/
Author Note: I first met Gray Barker in Saucerian paperbacks, clippings, and archive finding aids long before I traced him back to Riffle and Clarksburg. I hope this piece helps separate the man from the myths while showing how one Braxton County storyteller carried Appalachian UFO lore far beyond West Virginia.