CHAPTER 1

Confessions of a Teenage UFOlogist

I BECAME A UFOLOGIST in October of 1960. I was twelve going on thirteen. I was in eighth grade; I’d just become interested in girls. Or rather, I had just become aware of my interest in girls, since I’d previously managed to persuade myself that my fascination with a beautiful, brown-eyed and brown-haired, prematurely voluptuous seventh-grade classmate was pure platonic friendship. (It helped that this girl was also a very nice person. Her name was Barbara.) Anything other than platonic friendship would have unsettled my mother, who was housebound with a heart condition and slowly dying, although I didn’t know that. Or I didn’t know I knew it.

The UFO mystery was at the time a full thirteen years old. It had begun in 1947, the same year I was born. On June 24 a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying from Chehalis to Yakima, Washington, when he spotted nine silvery, glittering objects flying in formation over the Cascade Mountains. He described their motion as “like saucers skipping over water.” The press turned this into “flying saucers” and thereby gave the impression that what Arnold had seen was nine disks, although there’s some evidence that his objects were originally crescent-shaped. Whatever its details, Arnold’s experience attracted enormous attention in what we now call “the media,” and other people all over the United States soon reported flying disks as well. The first of the great “flaps,” or sighting waves, of UFO history had begun.

About two weeks into the 1947 flap, debris from one of the newly named flying saucers came down on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. This was announced proudly by the public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field, who told local press and radio outlets that “the many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday” when the base intelligence office “was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County.” A few hours later the military higher-ups intervened, declaring the debris to be a weather balloon. The incident slid into obscurity, forgotten by nearly everyone.

When I started eighth grade, I’d never heard of Kenneth Arnold. I would not hear about Roswell until many years later. It was a lonely time. My close friends from seventh grade had mostly been assigned to other classes. This included Barbara, who was rumored to have a seventeen-year-old boyfriend whom she planned to marry when he graduated high school. I trudged alone from class to class, amid knots of joking, laughing junior high kids. I tried to hear the jokes and laugh at them too, and thereby incorporate myself into one of the groups. But the speakers were too far away, and I missed the punch lines. Back home my mother was growing steadily, almost imperceptibly weaker. My father, who’d been running on empty for years, grew angrier and more bitter at his lot in life, which I certainly wasn’t making any easier for him. I had no brothers or sisters.

That was when the UFOs entered my life.

There was a science class. There was a boy I’ll call Bryan, the closest I had to a friend in that eighth-grade class. I’d known him from elementary school. He wore glasses, though not quite as thick as mine, and like me had a quiet, reserved air. We gravitated toward each other, and in October 1960 we resolved to write a science paper together. Originally it was going to be on life on other planets, with a chapter on flying saucers and the different ways people tried to explain them. We bicycled to the public library of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and looked up “flying saucers” in the card catalog.

The library had three books on the subject. One of them, as I’ve said, was Jung’s. But the one I read first, that changed my life permanently, was Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, published in 1956 under the respectable-sounding imprint of “University Books.” I took it home and began reading. Pretty soon I was so scared I wanted to hide under my bed.

“THREE MEN IN BLACK”

They Knew Too Much begins with a seven-foot monster “worse than Frankenstein” that was seen to land with a luminescent globe on a West Virginia hilltop one September evening in 1952. The sight of this thing—“from Moon or from Mars / Maybe from God and not from the stars,” as a country ballad of the time had it—frightened the witnesses so badly that “they had to clean one of them like a baby.”

Having thus primed us to expect something fearsome, Gray Barker takes us back to the seriously scary “Shaver Mystery” of the 1940s: the pulp-magazine revelations of the perverted creatures called “dero” who dwell in hidden caves deep within the earth. These dero, degenerate remnants of a race of prehistoric space colonists, get their pleasure from kidnapping and torturing us surface humans. They also “engage in interplanetary traffic with evil beings from other planets”—hence, the strange things seen in the sky. On the truth of these stories, Barker professes a sober agnosticism. They may all, he cautions, be products of the subconscious of Richard S. Shaver, the Pennsylvania man who learned of them from voices speaking through his welding machine. “But if that is so, Shaver has the most remarkable subconscious of any man living on this earth.”2

All this is prelude, however, to the centerpiece of Barker’s book: the “Bender mystery.” Who were the three men dressed in black who paid an unwelcome visit to a Bridgeport, Connecticut, researcher named Albert K. Bender in the autumn of 1953?³ And what had Bender learned about UFOs that the three men were so anxious he not reveal?

Here’s how Barker envisions the scene, putting his eager, captivated reader—twelve-year-old me—into the middle of it:

Three men in black suits with threatening expressions on their faces. Three men who walk in on you and make certain demands.

Three men who know that you know what the saucers really are.

They don’t want you to tell anyone else what you know.

The answer had hit you like a flash, one night when you had gone to bed after running all the theories through the hopper of your brain. You had sat up in bed, snapped your fingers, and said, “This is IT! I KNOW I have the ANSWER!”

The next day . . . you wrote this down and sent it to someone. When the three men came into your house one of them had that very same piece of paper in his hand.

They said that you, among the thousands working on the same thing, had hit pay dirt. You had the answer! Then they filled you in with the details.

After they got through with you, you wished you’d have never heard of the word “saucer.”

You turned pale and got awfully sick.

You couldn’t get anything to stay on your stomach for three long days.

FIGURE 1. The cover of Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (University Books, 1956).

I finished the book scared but also thrilled, energized. I’d found my mission: to walk Bender’s path, to discover the secret of what Barker called “the elusive disks.” For the next five years I pursued that goal.

First through a school club called “the Flying Saucer Investigators,” founded by Bryan and me. A few of our classmates, including two girls on whom he and I had crushes, joined the Investigators. Soon they drifted away—the girls, I suspect, because they were waiting for us to ask them out and we were too shy, or too crippled by circumstances we hadn’t yet understood, to do that. Bryan also lost interest. I was left to “chase the saucers,” as Gray Barker liked to call the activity, all alone.

Yet in another sense far from alone. Over the next couple of years I drifted into a correspondence network that stretched over the country and even overseas. These were people whom I’d never met face to face and about whose lives I knew next to nothing but who were in some ways my best friends. They might have impressive titles like “director” of this or that. But most of them were boys—hardly any girls—much like me. I didn’t yet know the phrase “invisible college,” coined by scientifically inclined esotericists in the seventeenth century and borrowed by UFOlogically inclined scientists in the 1970s. But that was exactly what I felt us to be: a select society of young people who’d turned away from conventional teenage excitements and pleasures to pursue a scorned and unrecognized truth. I lived for their letters.

My adult relatives, teachers, and acquaintances were baffled, often amused. My father was baffled and enraged. Why oh why did a bright kid like me believe in this crap? My reply was to reel off the evidence, the roster of unexplained sightings from Kenneth Arnold onward. So massive was this evidence, so circumstantial and convincing, that to disregard it had to be willful blindness. My arguments, however, made no impact. The blindness was impenetrable.

Looking back, I can see why. An odd thing in the sky that you can’t account for is just that: an odd thing in the sky. It’s not an interplanetary spaceship. I was indeed a bright kid—some might say very bright. I wasn’t a “kook,” unless that jeering, meaningless tag is to be fastened onto anyone out of the ordinary. Yet I was caught up in a delusional system, which I could not recognize as such and which I grew out of when the time was ripe but never explicitly discarded. The blindness was mine. In a smart boy who must have known better, it demands explanation.

“A PECULIAR DISEASE”

Let’s run through the simple answers. I was twelve years old when I read—and was knocked off my feet by—They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. Suburban twelve-year-olds tend not to know very much about the world, and, as is sometimes the case with very bright kids, I knew less than most. Books were the mainstay of my childhood—my comfort, my school. I was naturally inclined to believe in books as kids now do in the internet: if it was between two covers, it had to be true.

Barker’s book offered no obvious clues that it wasn’t to be trusted. The light blue binding of the library copy seemed safe and sober. (It was years later that I saw the lurid dust jacket: a string of yellow disks spinning at you, against the ominous background of three black human silhouettes.) It had a bibliography and an index, the way any book I’d use for a school report might. Its chapter titles—“Flatwoods, West Virginia,” “Brush Creek, California,” “Jersey City, New Jersey”—seemed to root its story in consensus geography and thereby in reality. To my twelve-year-old mind, the imprint “University Books” promised academic respectability.

Then there was Barker’s seductive invitation to the reader. “I have always felt,” he wrote, “if I could organize these 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.” And a few pages later: “My readers seemed to be more than subscribers; they considered themselves parts of a great team that eventually might make sense out of what seemed to be not simple confusion, but often organized confusion.”

If you were invited to be on that team, would you say no?

You especially wouldn’t if you were a boy who not long before had been obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, who’d looked to the great detective for instruction in how to solve crimes, how to have near-magical knowledge about everyone you met. Now here was a real-life mystery to be solved, more momentous than any dinky murder. Gray Barker had put forth an earnest call for help. What budding boy-detective could turn it down?

But there’s more. There has to be. Bryan also read They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers; UFOs didn’t go on to dominate his adolescence. There must have been something about the book, and about me, that made me particularly vulnerable to its appeal.

A memory comes to me: Before I’d read more than a chapter or two, I flipped ahead through the book. My eyes fell upon the words

died of a peculiar disease. They seemed to age quickly; girls of twenty soon appeared to be old women.

I remember the thrill I felt as I saw this, my eagerness to read ahead so I would know who these “girls” were, what the “peculiar disease” was that they’d died of. Was there some recognition involved in this excitement? Yes. Absolutely.

My mother: forty-two years old, but I could see her withering away before my eyes, arms and legs spindly, belly swollen like the victim of some African famine. “Could see”—but most of the time I didn’t. I didn’t allow myself to. I knew she’d had a heart attack when I was three. I knew she’d been in mortal danger, hadn’t been expected to live. But that was all past. She was better now. A “semi-invalid,” we called her; she had to rest after every meal, never left the house on her own, needed continual quiet. But she was better now, she told me and I repeated to myself. She would be fine.

Yet she grew worse, imperceptibly from day to day, measurably from year to year.

Now here at last was a book that would explain to me what was happening.

Explain in language that meant something to me. Sure, I knew the reasons: She’d had rheumatic fever as a girl. It had weakened her heart. My birth had strained it further—and this, of course, was why I had no brothers or sisters. She’d had a stroke and then a heart attack and we’d moved to one of those boxy little Levittown houses that sprang up after the war, a one-story house that didn’t have any stairs she’d need to climb. But this was the language of the head, and it meant nothing.

They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers spoke the language of myth, which is the language of the heart.

Whoever or whatever visited Bender had deeply impressed him, and greatly frightened him. Later on, when I continued my investigations into similar avenues, I was to find that for some reason a man will not talk after one of these visitations. When such a person is approached, whoever tells the person to shut up does so in such a way or imparts such terrifying information that the man on the receiving end is scared almost out of his wits!

The dreadful vagueness of that “whoever or whatever”! We too had been “silenced” by a reality too terrifying for either me or my mother to face. I’m quite sure my father knew it. But he wouldn’t speak of it either, at least not to us. The “cover-up” was real, but it had nothing to do with alien objects in the skies. Or everything to do with them. Our skies had been penetrated by the ultimate alien, death, and like the victims of the men in black, we could not talk about it.

Now, for the first time, I’d found a book that spoke the unspeakable.

UFOLOGY

So I believed in UFOs because I believed in the three men, and I believed in the three men because I knew the effects of their presence from personal experience. Outer space, life on other planets, had nothing originally to do with it. Initially I believed that the saucers might come from other planets but that this was improbable. Barker himself had left open the possibility, as per the “Shaver Mystery,” that they’d emerged from some unknown place within this earth. My own feeling at the time was that they were likely to be secret U.S. devices. What counted for me was not their extraterrestrial origin. It was their mystery and their suppression.

Once I’d left the Flying Saucer Investigators behind me and had begun to make my way into the wider world of UFOlogy, I had no choice but to adopt the conventions of that world. I became persuaded: the UFOs couldn’t be of human manufacture. Their aerial feats, like instant acceleration from hovering to zooming at thousands of miles per hour, were impossible by the standard of modern physics. It followed that they had to employ a physics more advanced than our own. Pretty soon I was speaking the party line. There was no doubt at all that our skies were host to visitors from other worlds.

This belief, let it be noted, was less irrational in the early 1960s than it is today. We, like the Russians, were beginning to expand into outer space. Space was the “new frontier,” as President Kennedy called it, and most people assumed that explorations of other planets were about to follow. It made sense that beings from the other planets might be here exploring us. It was still just barely possible to imagine there might be intelligent life on the Earthlike planets Venus and Mars. The problem of how the UFOs managed to cross interstellar space wasn’t quite as acute as it would become a few years later, when no corner of the solar system was left to be their home.

But why didn’t our extraterrestrial visitors land and declare themselves, with the take-me-to-your-leader speech beloved by cartoon artists? Why had they spent the past fifteen years showboating in the sky, then zooming back to wherever they called home? We UFOlogists had our replies ready. These usually involved the prediction that there was bound to be some dramatic denouement—a public contact or, God forbid, a mass invasion—within the next year, or two, or three. The UFO books of the 1950s and 1960s are filled with such prophecies. We didn’t yet have the burden of explaining why, after decades passed, nothing of the sort seemed to happen.

It was possible, too, that the UFOs had established local bases—on the far side of the moon, say, which until the mid-1960s had been largely hidden from human eyes. From there, going at or near the speed of light, they could travel in the blink of an eye to McMinnville, Oregon, or Farmington, New Mexico, or Tremonton, Utah, to name a few localities where they’d been seen or even photographed. But what would a spaceship be doing in such places? That was part of the mystery our “invisible college” had set itself to solve, through careful gathering of sighting data, plotting it on maps, studying the timing of the great UFO flaps. This was what “objective UFO research” was about, and if there was any reason a junior high or high school student couldn’t do it as well as a university professor, I didn’t see what that was.

I did find time for other, more conventional interests. I wrote for the junior high newspaper and afterward the high school literary magazine. I played on the chess team, which technically was a sport although not the kind that got you any great kudos in my high school environment. What I didn’t do, and which made me increasingly an oddity among my classmates as the years passed and I moved from one grade to the next, was go out with girls.

The official reason for this was that there weren’t any suitable girls for me to go out with. Our school was overwhelmingly non-Jewish, and the few Jewish girls weren’t (supposedly) the kind who might be drawn to an eccentric intellectual like me. The real reason was that my mother’s illness broadcast a continual unconscious SOS for me not to abandon her. True, I couldn’t save her from the death she must deep down have known was coming. But I could at least stick by her and not shift my attachment to some younger female, while she told herself (and once or twice me) that although I was intellectually advanced way beyond my years, I was socially kind of retarded and hadn’t yet gotten interested in girls. I nodded in agreement, although I knew how false this was, and I dressed in clothing that did not become me—checkered, dull-colored flannel shirts predominant—and told myself I was too ugly for any girl to like me. When an intelligent, warmhearted, strikingly attractive redhead announced before an entire class that she’d go out with me if I asked because I had “personality,” I heard her words and afterwards remembered them. I understood their meaning in the English language. They made no emotional impact whatever.

Meanwhile there were the UFOs.

UFOlogy has been aptly called “the last great public investigative enterprise wherein the gifted amateur is not at any disadvantage.” I was gifted, and I longed to make my mark. At the end of the summer of 1963, I got my chance. The director of an organization to which I belonged, the New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena (NJAAP), retired from the field, as many of the UFOlogists of the time did, to go to college. I was then a rising junior with two years of high school left to go. I stepped in to take his place.

At its height, NJAAP had a membership of about two dozen. They weren’t just in New Jersey, however, but all over the country; we may even have had one or two members overseas. So at age fifteen I was director of a national, if not an international, scientific organization and, in my eyes, had come a long way from the Flying Saucer Investigators. In the course of my eleventh-grade year, I produced almost single-handedly three issues of the mimeographed NJAAP Bulletin and mailed them out to my subscribers. I’m proud to say they represented the highest standards of scientific UFOlogy, such as these were.

It was in the spring of 1964, when I’d already put out two issues of the bulletin and was beginning to plan the third, that the UFO world unexpectedly erupted.

On April 24 of that year, a New Mexico police officer named Lonnie Zamora claimed to have seen an egg-shaped metallic object resting at the bottom of a ravine near the town of Socorro, and beside it two figures looking like small boys in coveralls. The object took off with a “very loud” roar, leaving four imprints, asymmetrically placed, with one of the markings set off in good Jungian fashion from the other three.4 It was hard to imagine any natural phenomenon that could have left those markings. Zamora could have made them, but that would mean he was a hoaxer and a liar, and nearly everyone who knew him thought him a solid citizen and an upright lawman.

Socorro’s importance went far beyond the incident itself. For the first time in years the media took notice of UFOs, and soon another nationwide flap was underway. For us UFOlogists, it was a dream come true. Over the past three and a half years, whenever I’d tried to talk with people about UFOs, I’d have to field some remark like “It seems that a few years ago they were seeing a lot of those things, but now they don’t see them anymore.” I would assure the other person that it wasn’t true, that the UFOs hadn’t vanished, and I’d start reeling off recent sightings to prove the point, whereupon he or she would get bored and change the subject or just walk away. Now the UFOs, bless their hearts, had made my argument for me.

Not that I had the leisure to enjoy this vindication. I remember the spring of 1964 as a frantic nightmare, with nights spent at my typewriter pounding away obsessively at an English paper that had gotten out of hand and was more than three hundred pages long when I handed it in two months after the April deadline. When I wasn’t doing that, I was winning a summer trip to Israel in a Bible contest but also twice failing my driver’s exam—a double defeat that left me for years convinced I could never learn to drive. I pined for my old crush of the Flying Saucer Investigators days, whom I still adored but who was and would forever be unavailable to me—although in retrospect I can see I was the one who’d made myself unavailable to her. I kept up with my UFOlogy, telling myself that five hours of sleep were plenty for a night and that my mother, skeletal now apart from her swollen belly, wasn’t any sicker than she’d ever been and probably was improving, even as it was plain that she had no strength left, that she couldn’t go twenty feet into the backyard without assistance, that a minor fall would leave her with a garishly colored, hideous bruise that persisted for weeks, and in short that her life was a fragile thread about to be snapped. On July 5, I mailed out the third and as it turned out final edition of The NJAAP Bulletin, twenty-seven single-spaced pages long, its feature attraction “A Chronology of the 1964 Flap,” listing ninety cases from April 24 through June 8. This “chronology” was later reprinted, with attribution but without permission, in a pulp magazine called Flying Saucers.5 This was the high-water mark of the national attention gained by NJAAP, which has since vanished from the collective memory of UFOlogy without even a footnote to mark its existence. Two days after sending out the bulletin, exhausted, I boarded a post-midnight flight from the newly renamed Kennedy Airport to Tel Aviv. When I got home eight weeks later, my mother was dead.

AFTERMATH

In theory, nothing had changed with her gone. The UFOs were still zooming around up there, except on occasion, as in Socorro, when they touched down, presumably to gather soil samples or the like. One UFO, in fact, landed in September of that year in a clearing in the woods near Glassboro, New Jersey, reachable from Levittown by bus. As at Socorro, it left holes in the ground as a sign of its presence: three small ones arranged in a very rough triangle, plus a fourth, larger, central hole. A high school senior now, I conducted an investigation and prepared to write a monograph on the landing. It was too large and complex an issue to be covered in an article for The NJAAP Bulletin.

I never wrote that monograph, beyond a table of contents and a few pages. Nor did I produce any more NJAAP Bulletins. If my UFOlogy was an elaborate way of coping with and perhaps warding off my mother’s impending death, it would make sense that the spirit would go out of it once she died, and that was precisely what happened. I still went through the motions, but I barely had the energy to sustain the correspondence network that had once been the joy and solace of my life. When, in January, a New Jersey college student came forward to announce that he and two friends had dug the holes at Glassboro, set off gunpowder in them, and scared a couple of local kids into thinking a UFO had landed, I didn’t believe his confession. He just wanted attention, I argued, plus the money he thought he could extract for his story from some Philadelphia newspaper. But I couldn’t convince anyone else, even my fellow UFOlogists, and eventually I let the subject drop.6

Meanwhile my life was changing in ways I wouldn’t have expected. My mother’s death had been, in a sense, the end of my world. I grieved her and missed her terribly. But in some ways life was better now. My father and I grew, I wouldn’t say closer, but more amicable. For years he’d carried on his back a sick wife, as well as a peculiar son whose obsessions he could make no sense of. The first burden, at least, he was now relieved of. And I’d become rather less peculiar, both in his eyes and perhaps also in reality. Early that winter I unburdened myself to a boy named Stephen, who was sort of a friend and who was soon to become a much better one, of my bitterness and sorrow that I was never invited to parties. The birthday parties of my childhood had long since petered out, replaced by teenage parties from which I was excluded. Stephen listened, and a few weeks later, lo and behold, I started getting invited to parties. Turned out I hadn’t been excluded at all. It simply hadn’t occurred to anyone that I might be interested.

So I began to catch up with the life I’d missed. At one of those parties I found myself on a couch with a girl and tried necking with her. She pulled away, but what the heck, I’d tried. A few months later I did find a girlfriend. She wasn’t Jewish; my mother wouldn’t have approved; my father didn’t care. I faced the fact that no further issues of The NJAAP Bulletin would appear and refunded my subscribers, all twenty or so, the balance of their subscription money. One of them wrote to me, sending in appreciation of my honesty the gift of a cigarette lighter with my signature, “Sincerely, Dave Halperin,” imprinted on the side. I never took up cigarette smoking, but I kept the lighter. I have it to this day.

My entry to UFOlogy was a sudden conversion. My exit was a process far more gradual. There wasn’t any one morning when I woke up and realized it wasn’t true; we aren’t being visited by beings from outer space. Active interest faded long before belief.

I went off to college in the fall of 1965, a little over a year after my mother’s death. The following summer I exchanged letters with one of my most valued UFO friends, a wonderful, peppery lady of about sixty named Isabel Davis, whom I would occasionally visit in New York City. In my letter I explained why I was retiring from UFOlogy. There was no question, I wrote, that UFOs were real and probably extraterrestrial. But how was it possible to discover anything about them? Whizzing through the skies or briefly landing, they were inaccessible to us, beyond our scrutiny. I’d long since outgrown Gray Barker, with his tales of hilltop monsters and men in black. His claim that Albert Bender had somehow solved the mystery and that any of us might hope to do the same—which was what had gotten me into UFOlogy in the first place—was, to say the least, improbable. There was no adequate method, I wrote Isabel. Research was hopeless. We would learn the truth about UFOs at the initiative of the UFO beings themselves. This might happen tomorrow, or it might take another thousand years. Meanwhile there were other things to do with one’s time.

Isabel wasn’t persuaded. Like me, she may have had her own unconscious motives for continuing not only to believe but to search. It would be futile and unseemly to speculate about her reasons now that this fine, intelligent woman has, like so many of the old-time UFOlogists, departed this life. Our correspondence ended amicably; I never saw her again. I immersed myself in the studies of classical and Semitic languages that would eventually lead me, by a crooked and wandering path, back to UFOs.

FAST-FORWARD

. . . to 1987. I’m nearly forty years old, a tenured professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I’m in a bookstore on Franklin Street, across from the campus. Prominently displayed on one table are several stacks of a hardcover book called Communion, by one Whitley Strieber. A face stares up at me from the book jacket.

It’s a face I’ve never seen before, though all of us will see it many times in the years to come. Shaped like a light bulb, as light bulbs used to be. Dominated by two slanted, enormous, anatomically impossible eyes: almond-shaped, black, without iris or pupil or any visible lids, each with a gleam of white amid the blackness and just the hint of a split running from end to end. I’ve never seen anything like this—not in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T., not in the UFO literature of my youth. I have no idea that this face and the being to which it’s attached will become an icon, a cultural staple, instantly recognizable when used in cartoons and comic strips, taking its place in three-dimensional miniature on the dollar-store racks at Halloween time, alongside the plastic witches and ghosts and spiders that are the traditional, time-honored inhabitants of the boo-I-scared-you gallery.

I open the book; I flip through it. I can’t make much of it. It’s not a UFO book, at least not the way I’ve always known UFO books. And since when do UFO books get this kind of VIP treatment from bookstores? “That book started to sell,” the publisher will recall a year or two afterward, “the minute it appeared on the bookshelves; no reviews, no appearances, nothing. And we had word from the bookstores that Communion, with this strange picture on the cover, was selling.” I don’t know that yet, of course. Nor do I know Communion will spend thirty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sometimes in the top nonfiction spot, or that Whitley Strieber was given a million-dollar advance for it. I, at any rate, am not one of the buyers. It doesn’t fit into any of my categories of what books, even UFO books, ought to be. Anyway, I’m a busy professor and UFOs aren’t my thing anymore. I snap the book shut and walk out of the store.

Notes

2. On Shaver and the “mystery” to which his name is attached, see chapter 7.

3. And yes, the Men in Black movies of 1997, 2002, 2012, and 2019 (“Here come the Men in Black / The galaxy defenders; / Here come the Men in Black / They won’t let you remember”) are rooted in the mythos created forty years earlier by Gray Barker. We’ll come back to this in chapter 6.

4. We’ll explore the Jungian concept of the quaternity, the 3 + 1, in the next chapter.

5. See chapter 7 for more on Flying Saucers magazine and its place in the publishing activities of Raymond Palmer.

6. I couldn’t have guessed that my Glassboro adventure would have a surprise sequel fifty years afterward that would help me understand the events, famous by then, in Roswell, New Mexico. See chapter 8.