Dr. Greenfield in Cleveland pix by Prof. Halperin June 2015
MORE EARLY PIX FROM THE NUFOC
REMEMBERING THE REAL GRAY BARKER
Allen Greenfield’s unedited introductions to The Silver Bridge and Men in Black: The Secret Terror Among Us.
MY ORIGINAL UNEDITED INTRODUCTIONS TO THE NEW EDITION OF THE SILVER BRIDGE & M.I.B.
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION OF THE SILVER BRIDGE
I first met Gray Barker at the Second National UFO Conference in Cleveland, Ohio in 1965. The year before, at the first of that long-running annual event which I had co-founded with Rick Hilberg and the late Al Manak, Jim Moseley had said, to nobody in particular as I recall, “We’ve gotta get Gray to come to one of these things.” He was indeed an honored guest from then on, and it was to Jim Moseley that the first Gray Barker Lifetime Achievement in UFOlogy Award was eventually given, in Atlanta in 1995.
By then Gray had long passed from these shores, leaving us with an extraordinary legacy of wild rumor, exotic folklore, poetic license and mysterious fact that remain the puzzle that was and is UFOlogy.
Gray got his one and only best-selling book early in his career. He had been a member of the first UFO club, Albert K. Bender’s International Flying Saucer Bureau, and was himself starting his own long-running Saucerian Bulletinn and publishing house, Saucerian Publications when Bender was mysteriously forced out of UFOlogy – he said – by three men in dark clothing, supposedly government agents. Later the story moved to these visitors being UFOnauts, but at the time, we now know, the CIA had indeed recommended a certain amount of mischief in private UFO societies after the 1952 wave of UFOs over Washington, D.C. had compromised national security (or so it was said at the time. The story might have died with a very frightened Bender were it not for Gray’s explosive and – more importantly – entertaining book about the Bender case and related matters, THEY KNEW TOO MUCH ABOUT THE FLYING SAUCERS.
The men in black did not start with Bender or Barker. As early as 1947 the famous Maury Island case involved such mysterious visitors, and, indeed, the “man in black” shows up in medieval occult lore – as the devil himself! But Barker’s exposition of this case put it on the UFOlogy radar, and there it has remained to the present day.
Gray Barker was born in Rifle, VA in 1925, but is best known for his many years in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he was a first-on-the-scene investigator of the Flatwoods Monster Case, and, much later, the Mothman cases. A college graduate majoring in English, and film distributor for many years, Barker had a flare for extracting the folklore from UFO lore, and the UFO lore from the rich folkloric tradition indigenous to this part of the country. He also had an intimate knowledge of the people of poor Appalachia; devout, superstitious at times, genuine and honest at their core—yarn spinners and straight-dealers rolled into one. He incorporated this into all of his work, and this is often completely misunderstood in this regard by both his supporters and detractors.
I met Gray in his “middle period” after Flatwoods and Bender, but before the Mothman scare that led to the volume presently under consideration. Once we were having a dinner meeting in an Atlanta restaurant, with Moseley and local fans, and someone brought up “what Barker really believes”. I looked at Gray, slyly.
“I think I know.” I said, smiling. “On one level, Gray is the staunchest believer in some of the most bizarre stuff in UFOlogy, the champion of the Weird.” But,” I continued, “that isn’t the real story. Under that, is Gray the cynic, who believes none of it, and is yarn spinning merrily away.” Gray was poker faced, but obviously interested. “However, we’re still not there, because, way down deep,” I looked him square in the eyes, “ Gray Barker believes all of it – the men in black, the space people, the saucers, the monsters, all of it.”
Gray was amused, I think, but he remained poker faced. “I believe,” he said, after a long pause, “in everything, and nothing.”
We will pass lightly over the conventions, the Moseley-Barker merrie trickster phase the over-serious take overly seriously, through the brief stint as editor of Saucer News. Suffice to say that one can pretend to be an investigator in a lab coat behind a glass wall and an investigator of the UFO mythos, or one can get one’s hands a bit soiled and become part of the mythos. Gray chose the latter course, as the chapter is this volume on “The Recorder” intimates.
The John Keel book, “The Mothman Prophecy” is a reporter’s look at the events in West Virginia in the late 1960s, though grantedly by a rather offbeat reporter. The volume you hold in your hands is another story.
Shortly after the central famous cases in West Virginia of the Mothman variety, culminating in the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge, Gray sent me a curious manuscript for my opinion as one of the ‘deep thinkers’ in UFOlogy, and – to put it mildly – this wasn’t John Keel’s “The Mothman Prophecy”. Not even vaguely. It was, like all of Gray’s books, docudrama, on the border between real events and the mythos generated by those events, and one amazing book. I read it and reread it. Wow, I thought, this is it! The real thing. I proofread it for Gray, and wrote the original introduction, which was not equal to the book itself, in 1970. It brought hardly a ripple.
In a sense, this strange and exceptional volume is closer to the emotional-mood-laden gothic imagery of the film “The Mothman Prophecy” than the Keel book of the same name. Barker captures the numinosity and sheer weirdness of events that are like dreams with a strong dose of aboriginal Appalachian folklore laced with the sexual undertones of the firebrand preachers painting verbal images of Hell that will haunt their parishioners in an eerily erotic way. Gray saw this in the whole Mothman cycle and told me so. A careful reading of the book reveals this, and hints at the key to the UFO mystery thereby.
In the end, one must have the energetic popular reporter’s accounts of a Keel, the skeptical investigation of the true believer in 19th Century Science, and the mythos of a Gray Barker (as if there were another) to fully appreciate what Mothman represents, and, indeed, what the entire mythos of UFOlogy leads us to.
You are at the threshold of the Matrix. To get beyond this introduction, you need to decide on the red pill or the green pill, and get ready to descend down the rabbit hole into the real world.
Have an enlightening voyage, or put the book fown and go back to sleep.
Allen Greenfield
April 11, 2008
Gray Barker’s BOOKS & MONOGRAPHS
They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956)
Gray Barker’s Book of Adamski (1965)
Gray Barker’s Book of Saucers (1965)
Gray Barker’s Questions and Answers About UFOs (1967)
The Silver Bridge (1970)
Gray Barker at Giant Rock (1976)
A UFO Guide to Fate Magazine (1981)
Gray Barker’s UFO Annual (1982)
The Year of the Saucer (1983)
MIB: The Secret Terror Among Us (1983)
After the Philadelphia experiment (1984)
See Also
The Wright Field Story (attributed to Jim Moseley)
Flying Saucers & The Three Men (attributed to Al Bender)
[pix courtesy of UFO Wizard Elder Rick R. Hilberg]
The Secret Terror Among Us-An Introductory Farewell to My Friend Gray Barker
“On September 6, 2004, Yushchenko became ill after dining with leaders of the Ukrainian secret police. Unlike other social or political engagements, this dinner did not include anyone else on Yushchenko’s team. No precautions were taken regarding the food. Within hours after the dinner, Yushchenko began vomiting violently. His face became paralyzed; he could not speak or read. He developed a severe stomachache and backache as well as gastrointestinal pain. Outwardly, Yushchenko developed what is known as chloracne, a serious skin condition that leaves the face scarred and disfigured.
By December 2004, doctors had determined that Yushchenko had been the victim of dioxin poisoning. “
“The ultimate postmodern novel. Gray Barker’s work is an act of literary self-creation. If the postmodern novel troubled the notion of authorship, of intertextual relations, and of the margins between text and context, then the Gray Barker archive is the most extensive, successful, and aporetic postmodern novel ever written. Individual texts in the archive present complex interplays of truth, interpolation, and invention. At the same time, the archive’s insertion into public memory and the space of debate causes a seismic disturbance in the very concept of the archive. By definition, UFOs are a question of evidence. We seek evidence of their existence, but also find that all evidence produced poses questions on the nature of evidence itself. The Gray Barker archive presents no end of evidence, presents the author as trickster, and presents text as a self-reflexive and pastiche.
” The Gray Barker Project”
My friend Gray Barker, the author of this work, published it in a spiral-bound, very limited edition shortly before his rather bizarre death.
Gray was born in 1925 at Rifle, Virginia, and died in 1984. Like many of the heroic researchers who branched out from general UFO studies to the infamous “Men in Black” (he coined the term), his life was cut short.
He published a variety of books on the subject, including:
Gray Barker’s Works
They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956)
Gray Barker’s Book of Adamski (1965)
Gray Barker’s Book of Saucers (1965)
Gray Barker’s Questions and Answers About UFOs (1967)
The Silver Bridge (1970)
Gray Barker at Giant Rock (1976)
A UFO Guide to Fate Magazine (1981)
Gray Barker’s UFO Annual (1982)
The Year of the Saucer (1983)
MIB: The Secret Terror Among Us (1983)
After the Philadelphia experiment (1984)
Gray was a more mysterious fellow, and more complex, than even his closest friends may have realized. Was he a prankster? A folklorist living in the mythos? A serious UFOlogist? A cynical trouble maker? I’ve heard and read comments by his friends that could lead in any of these directions, or all of them. Like I said, he was a complex man. Thus, his greatest work, “The Silver Bridge” went largely unrecognized for what it was, while he was best known for his first, “They Knew Too Much About the Flying Saucers”. His specialty was the Men in Black cases – in fact, he coined that term.
In “M.I.B. – The Secret Terror Among Us” first published by New Age Press the year before his death, and after he had already become mysteriously ill with a then virtually unknown condition, Gray moves away from the poetry of “The Silver Bridge” back to a more melodramatic documentary record of the whole range of MIB cases.
But this is not just an extension of Gray’s earlier Works. He reveals a knowledge of the occult and metaphysical connection among the UFO and MIB phenomena that is at the level of only a few others before him – Meade Layne’s BSRA, and, much later, John Keel and Jacques Vallee. Ten years before my “Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts” devoted a key chapter to “The Men in Black and Their Magical Origin” (IllumiNet Press, 1994), Gray devoted a key revealing chapter in the present volume to “The Brothers of the Shadow”. As he notes therein,
“Any writer expressing pat explanations has just never studied occult tradition, in which the MIB are firmly established. As military secret weapon theories can never explain UFOs, which have been seen from the dawn of recorded history, the CIA could not be responsible for the MIB who have, down through the centuries, meddled into our affairs, and, just as they do today, scared the living daylights out of us!”
Though I had read most of the corpus of Gray’s many books, I confess that in the middle 1980s I was involved deeply in a secret society of supposed occultists so deeply that the first time around, I missed this one, went on to write my own take on UFOs and the MIB a decade later, and only much more recently was asked by the new publisher to review and develop an introduction to this most excellent book.
Gray was far ahead of his time and it is no accident that The National UFO Conference named its Lifetime Achievement Award after him, first given to Gray’s good friend – and mine Jim Moseley. Gray closed the book with his customary good humored suggestion, “Pull the covers up more tightly around your neck, dear reader…..If you don’t know too much, there is nothing to worry about.
“OTHERWISE THE MIB WILL GET YOU IF YOU DON’T WATCH OUT!”
A year later he had passed on. He is missed, but not at all forgotten.
Allen H. Greenfield, May 27, 2009.
ANNOUNCING 2015 CSU/NUFOC REUNION
From co-founder RICK HILBERG – I’m happy t
o finally provide you with the final details for the
2015 CSU/NUFOC REUNION
. Bob Easley and I took our good old time to make sure that we got the best possible venue and time that will be attractive to our attendees. I will post something soon on Facebook and hope that you can come up with something more professional ( Hey, I’m just about totally ignorant about how computers and the Internet work – just one step above old Jimbo) that I can in turn share so as to direct people to the special page that you’ve set up.
In no particular logical order here goes:
It will be held on Friday June 19th through Sunday June 21st, 2015 at the Crowne Plaza Cleveland Airport 7230 Engle Road Middleburg Hts.,OH 44130. Contact information: 440-243-4040 or www.crowneplazacle.com. (The website has a good overview of just how great this facility is.)
The room rates ( good through June 4th ) are only $107.00 per night for this four star hotel.
That weekend was the same for the 1965 Congress here in Cleveland. Somewhere I have an invitation for the 1965 event that I will dig up and use with my Facebook page posting about the event.
Here’s the agenda:
FRIDAY 19th – Cocktails at 6:00 p.m. followed by dinner. This will be held at our private dining room at the Buccis restaurant located in the hotel. Buccis is one of Cleveland’s top fine dining restaurant chains, and we will have a limited menu of their top dishes to choose from.
SATURDAY 20th – Our day long meetings in our own private meeting room with times to be set by us. Hey, come up with a suggestion for times, but we have the room ALL day. We can obviously fit in breaks, lunch and dinner. Folks can dine in the Buccis located in house or try several others located within easy walking distance from the hotel. Obviously coffee and soft drinks and water are available at the hotel at all times.
SUNDAY 21st – A farewell brunch starting at 9:00 a.m. at the Buccis private room. Those folks that aren’t heading home can linger and”chew the rag” or head downtown to the Great Like Science Center, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Steamship W.G. Mather Museum or maybe take in a ball game. The Hotel shuttle bus can drop folks off at the nearby RTA Rapid Transit station for the drip downtown and pick them up when they return.
TO BEGIN WITH, IT ALL STARTED WITH AN EXCHANGE ON FACEBOOK…
Here’s what Wikipedia says about the NUFOC; albeit a bit dated:
National UFO Conference
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The National UFO Conference (NUFOC) is an annual conference held in Hollywood,California. The conference is based in San Diego, California. Its stated mission is “to present top researchers in the field of ufology who will share their ongoing and current research.” The National UFO Conference is the longest active conference in the United States presenting information on the UFO phenomenon. The conference was started in 1963.
History
In 2004 James W. Moseley retired as the NUFOC’s Permanent Chairman and Lisa Davis became the Executive Director.
In 2004 Ms. Davis decided to keep NUFOC in Hollywood. She believes that expanding contacts within the entertainment community will greatly assist in raising public awareness of the phenomena. “I took over directing the National UFO Conference not for monetary gain, but rather to advance awareness of the phenomena.” Lisa has had a fascination with astronomy since childhood. Her research has covered many different aspects of philosophy, religion, science, medicine, and the paranormal. One of Lisa’s goals is to bring the UFO/Abduction scenario into the mainstream public awareness in a professional and practical manner. Ms.Davis has been very active in ufology since 1997. In 2005 she was asked to relieve Rob Baldwin of the San Diego UFO Society, also one of the longest running organizations in ufology that continues to hold local meetings.[1]
Lisa was interviewed by FATE magazine on “Looking Ahead: UFO Trends for 2006” in Fate Magazine’s 2005 UFO Special where she was listed as one of the top 100 UFO researchers in Ufology today. Lisa was also interviewed by UFO Magazine for the November 2005 issue. She has also appeared on the History Channel show UFO Files “UFO Hunters” and in “Fastwalkers” Mankind’s most carefully guarded secret revealed! A feature film documentary.[2]
Conferences
- NUFOC 42: Hollywood, CA – September 2–4, 2005
- NUFOC 41: Hollywood, CA – October 29–31, 2004
- NUFOC 40: Hollywood, CA – 2003
- NUFOC 39: Kings Island Resort and Conference Center (Cincinnati, OH) – September 28, 2002. Organized by Kenny Young.
- Speaker list: Rick Hilberg “Ufology: The First 30 Years”, Don Weatherby and Wendy Ban of OHMUFON “MUFON’s WUFOD”, Jerry Black “Credibility In Ufology”, John Timmerman of CUFOS “The Media and UFO’s”, Derrel Sims “Alien Abductions”, Stephen Bassett “The Politics of Disclosure”.
- NUFOC 38: Originally scheduled for Austin, Texas – September 14–16, 2001. Canceled and merged with Pat Marcatillio‘s “Annual UFO/ET/Alien and Abduction Congress” in New Jersey, October 6–7, 2001.
- NUFOC 36: Seven Oaks Hotel and Conference Center (San Antonio, TX) – September 25–26, 1999.
- Speaker list: Walt Andrus “The Disappearance of Frederick Valentich in Australia”, Joe Firmage “The Truth & ISSO”, Jim Moseley “Weird Personal Experiences of a Skeptical Believer”, Patrick Huyghe “The Alien Horde: A field Guide Approach to the Unknown”, Kevin Randle “The Abduction Enigma: A Scientific Analysis”, Karl Pflock “Behind the Flying Saucers: A New Twist on Aztec”, Constance Clear “Abductees: Human Ambassadors or Lab Rats?”, Whitley Strieber “Why Do We Deny It?”, Tom Deuley “MJ-12 & El Indio-Guerrero Crash”, Linda Corley “An Intimate Conversation with Major Jesse A. Marcel, Sr.”
Footnotes
References
- Lisa Davis Bio, “About Us”
- National UFO Conference Canceled
- The 36th Annual National UFO Conference
- The 39th Annual National UFO Conference
External links
Of course we all know that this was the end of the line for a long long run.
Here’s an illustrated account from fellow-convention founder Rick Hilberg:
THE NATIONAL UFO CONFERENCE
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL UFO CONFERENCE (NUFOC)
(Written for the 38th annual NUFOC, canceled due to the events of 9/11/2001)
by James Moseley
Taken at the what would become the National UFO Conference in 1965 in Cleveland, Ohio at a Holiday Inn. L to R: David Halperin, Dale Rettig, Jim Moseley and Michael Mann. Courtesy Rick Hilberg.
The National UFO Conference was organized in Cleveland, Ohio in the year 1964. The co-founders were Rick Hilberg of Cleveland, who remains very active in Cleveland ufology; Al Greenfield of Atlanta, Ga., who now writes on more esoteric subjects; and Al Manak of Cleveland, who died recently.
The original title of the organization was the Congress of Scientific Ufologists, but within a few years we realized that this was a pretentious title, and we therefore changed it to the present one. From the beginning, the main purpose of the NUFOC was to hold an annual meeting or convention. Outside speakers were booked for these conventions, but there were also smaller side meetings at which actual ufological research was done.
From 1964 through 1970, Al Manak was the Permanent Chairman of the organization. There was also a small governing body which is still called the Permanent Organizing Committee (POC), the membership of which has changed from time to time over the years, to reflect whether or not its members maintained an active interest in the UFO subject.
At present, the members of the Permanent Organizing Committee are: Jim Moseley; Rick Hilberg; Karl Pflock; William Moore; Al Greenfield; Antonio Huneeus, Curt Sutherly; Timothy Green Beckley; Tom Benson; Matt Graeber; and Tim Brigham. All of these people are well known in ufological circles for various important contributions they have made to the subject.
In 1971, Jim Moseley became Permanent Chairman of the NUFOC, and remains so till the present time. He had been a speaker at all the previous conventions, but was not a founder of the organization. He has continued to be a speaker at every convention but one, over the intervening years up until the present. Moseley has also been on countless radio and television shows over the years, and was a speaker on the U.S. college lecture circuit from 1966 to 1974.
Since the 1960s, the NUFOC has stopped doing actual UFO research on an organizational level, and is simply devoted to staging a convention somewhere in the United States each year. There is always a Local Chairman, who undertakes the financial risk and takes care of the many details involved with planning a convention. The Local Chairman does this with whatever degree of help and advice he chooses to accept from others, including but by no means limited to Moseley and the other members of the POC. This year’s Local Chairman is Miles Lewis, who will hold our 38th annual convention in Austin, Texas, on the weekend of September 14th-l6th -as explained elsewhere in more detail.
Tim Beckley, Rick Hilberg and Jim Moseley.
Over the years, the NUFOC has held its conventions in cities in all sections of the United States, including: Cleveland, Ohio; New York, N.Y.; Charleston, West Virginia; Atlanta, Georgia; San Francisco, Ca.; Burbank, Ca.; Tucson, Arizona; Phoenix, Arizona; Miami Beach, Florida; Tallahassee, Florida; Minneapolis, Mn.; Bordontown (near Trenton), N.J.; San Antonio, Texas; and Corpus Christi, Texas. Many smaller cities, especially in Ohio, are also included in the long list. Some cities have hosted our conventions more than once.
Most of these conventions have drawn about 150 to 400 paid attendees, but the one in New York City in 1967 was much larger. A total of about 8,000 people attended the four public sessions. This was probably the largest indoor UFO convention ever held. The enormous attendance was made possible by the fact that UFO sightings in the state of Michigan in 1966, usually called the (alleged) “marsh gas” sightings, caused a huge amount of interest nation-wide in the subject of UFOs. This peak of interest has not been seen since, with the exception of the focus on the 1997 50th anniversary celebration of the “Roswell Incident”, in Roswell, New Mexico.
Most, but not all years since 1964, the NUFOC has given an award to some leading ufologist whom we consider to be outstanding. This has variously been called the Robert Loftin Meorial Award, the Ufologist of the Year Award, or the Lifetime Achievement Award. Recipients include: John Keel; Gray Barker; Rick Hilberg; Stanton Friedman; Dr. J. Allen Hynek; Timothy Green Beckley; Jenny Randles; Antonio Huneeus; Tom Benson; Dr. Frank Stranges; Jerome Clark; Karl Pflock; Whitley Strieber; and Walt Andrus, who is the recently retired International Director of MUFON.
Jim lecturing at the 2002 NUFOC.
The National UFO Conference welcomes all reasonable ufological views, though the members of the Permanent Organizing Committee tend to be relatively conservative in their outlok on the subject. “Saucer Smear,” published since 1954 by Jim Moseley, is not an official publication of the NUFOC, and represents only his own relatively conservative views, laced with a strong dose of sarcastic humor.
Some corrections and clarifications from Rick Hilberg
Jim omitted the name of one of the founders, namely Dale Rettig. Dale was a very active ufologist back in the early 1960s and ran an Illinois based UFO organization that had a very fine for the time, almost professional looking newsletter. Most ufozines of the time were either run on Ditto machines ( remember those purple pages? ) or maybe a mimeograph. Offset printed publications were quite scarce, although I did start doing my “original” UFO Magazine by offset as early as 1964. Anyway, Dale, Allen Greenfield and I were the principals in a group called the American UFO Committee back in 1963 ( It was group that combined three organizations that we each were the heads of into one fairly large national group.), and it was at this time that Greenfield came up with the seminal idea of holding a serious, non contactee gathering in 1964 and seeing if it would take hold. As an aside, the idea of a serious gathering may have been the result of a conference call that I sponsored in late 1962 where I got some of the more active serious ufolk together to talk about more cooperation to streamline the gathering of data regarding the phenomenon. Greenfield has said on several occasions that this may indeed have been the case.
Allan Manak was the chairman of a very active local Cleveland UFO group at the time and he came right on board with our idea and made his organization the the local host, and also made sure that we got lots of local publicity. Without his tireless work there probably would have been no annual gatherings of the CSU/NUFOC after 1964. And Al did serve as chair until late 1971, and not 1970 as Jim stated.
Jim and Al Manak at the 1994 NUFOC gathering in Cleveland.
NUFOC had a pretty good run, but from the beginning we really stressed the cooperation angle and although several joint projects were done over the years ,most of the participants still clung to their pet projects and individual organizations. It really took a monolithic group such as MUFON to come along several years later and hold annual meetings for its members to attain a consistent following and thereby prosper.
Rick’s Pictures and comments – first draft
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NATIONAL UFO CONFERENCE MEMORIES 