I published my first article on UFOs when I was 13 years old. I was in eighth grade at Franklin Delano Roosevelt Junior High School in Bristol, Pennsylvania; I'd gotten hooked on flying saucers, as it was then more normal to call them, a few months before. It all came from reading what in my … [Read more...]
Albert Bender and the “Max Steiner Music Society” – A Life Post-UFO
What sort of man was Albert K. Bender--he who supposedly discovered the secret of the UFOs, for which he was "silenced" in 1953 by the Three Men in Black? Gray Barker, whose They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) gives the classic account of his silencing, describes him in the most … [Read more...]
Gray Barker, Albert Bender – “Men in Black” and the Summer of 1954
"And the summer wore on into August, a summer that was not quite right. There were more freak weather conditions and earthquakes, and in the air were threats of something unknown that was to come. Windshields broke mysteriously from coast to coast. There were hints that astronomers had focused … [Read more...]
Conspiracy Theories and Jesse Walker – I Have Met the Conspirator and He Is Me
Review of Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. HarperCollins, 2013. Conspiracy theories make me nervous. I've been the star attraction in too many of them. Not me personally, you understand. But as a Jew, I periodically emerge as an ex officio plotter against … [Read more...]
The Philadelphia Experiment – In the Gray Barker Collection
“Monday, September 6. Well, I am on the road. … It is not quite the sparkly, sunshiny day I had imagined. It is overcast, drizzly, warm and humid.” Just the sort of day to set forth on a nearly 400-mile drive from North Carolina to Clarksburg, West Virginia, and into the past. It was exactly … [Read more...]
