Three weeks ago I put up a post entitled “They Knew Too Much … ,” in which I described how taken I was with Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers when I made the book’s acquaintance at the age of twelve-going-on-thirteen. So much so, that I immediately became a believer in UFOs and formed a tiny club called “The Flying Saucer Investigators.” And went on to devote myself to “UFOlogy” for the rest of my teen-age years.
Now I’m asking: why did the book have that effect on me?
In part, surely, because it was so captivatingly written. Not great literature, I’ll grant. But melodrama, superbly done, in a voice just calm and dispassionate enough that you could imagine Gray Barker a fair-minded, frankly puzzled witness to the extraordinary events he narrates. Extraordinary–and extraordinarily mysterious. Everyone loves a mystery.
I certainly did. A year or two back, Sherlock Holmes had been my hero. After him, Ellery Queen. I devoured the Ellery Queen novels one after another, with a Sherlock-Holmes-style pipe empty and unlit between my teeth, trying to figure out whodunit before Ellery did. Remember the “Challenge to the Reader” that came near the end of each book? You, the reader, now have all the evidence; you can identify the murderer, etc. etc. etc. I loved that part.
Gray Barker issued a similar “challenge to the reader.” To help solve a real-life mystery, more momentous than any plain old murder or jewel theft.
“The Bender mystery is not solved,” Barker wrote on page 129, referring to the mystery of who were the “three men in black” who’d terrorized Bridgeport UFOlogist Albert K. Bender into silence, and what the awful secret was that Bender had discovered but was forbidden to reveal. “I have collected reams of notes about it. I could write two books like this one filled with theories and data I cannot publish here because of space limitations and other reasons.”
(That vague, ominous “and other reasons”! A classic Gray Barker touch—the great mythmaker at his best.)
“I have always felt if I could organize those notes into some kind of readable whole and distribute these findings widely, somewhere there would be someone in whose mind they would sound an inspired tinkle. One little idea from a reader may be the final key to unlocking the entire mystery. Then someone, who has had a similar experience, may read it and realize someone else had the same troubles. He may talk.”
Could I, an almost-thirteen-year-old just starting to notice the girls in his eighth grade classes, be the one granted the “inspired tinkle”? Why not? Certainly I was bright enough.
How could I resist the challenge?
And so I typed out for myself Barker’s transcript of an interview allegedly conducted with Bender on October 4, 1953, not long after Bender’s “silencing.” (Back then there were no such things as photocopy machines. And I couldn’t have afforded to buy the book.) I studied it like a scripture. Looking back, re-reading the six-page interview—today I do own the book—I can’t decide whether it really happened as Barker describes or whether Barker invented the questions and answers out of his own head.
Q. When did the three men visit you?
A. I can’t answer that.
Q. Who were the men?
A. I can’t answer that.
“I can’t answer that” is Bender’s standard answer. But every now and then he lets drop a vague hint, of something so ominous it almost gave me goosebumps.
Q. Do you think it will be safe for me to go on the skywatch tower alone at night?
A. It would be safer (Roberts believes Bender probably meant to say it would be safer on the tower than it would be on the ground). …
Q. In that case I’ll buy myself a good gun.
A. That won’t help you much.
Q. Can it be stopped by a bullet?
A. I can’t answer that.
At the end of the interview, an exchange that is classic:
Q. You said the three men who paid you the visit were pretty rough with you. Can you tell me just what you meant by that?
A. They were not too friendly.
Over and over I read these words. I discussed them with my fellow “Flying Saucer Investigators.” (At its height, the club had about eight members, most of them inactive.) The “inspired tinkle” never came.
But was I perhaps the “someone who has had a similar experience” to Bender’s? Maybe. Just maybe. And perhaps in that similarity lies the secret of the power of Barker’s book.
I’ll come back to that in my next post.
