Gray Barker UFO conspiracy theorist

Tales of alien sightings and government cover-ups have captured American imaginations for decades - but few with such global appeal as the Men in Black.DAVID CLARKE introduces the ufologist who popularised these shadowy space-age legends

- By DAVID CLARKE

One night in 1953, three mysterious men sporting black suits reportedly arrived uninvited at the home of Albert K Bender in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The menacing trio, who reportedly identified themselves as agents of the US government, threatened Bender with prison if he told anyone about a secret he had discovered – information relating to the source of the flying saucer mystery. They scared him so badly that he was physically sick for three days.

Bender was no mere disinterested civilian. An obsessive ufologist, he was the founder of the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), the world's first civilian UFO investigation club. Shortly after that ominous visit, and on the orders of those 'secret agents', he shut down the IFSB.

At least one person was both disappointed and intrigued by this development: Gray Barker, only recently recruited as the IFSB's chief investigator and a contributor to its magazine, Space Review.

"He was 6ft 4ins tall, with a gentle southern accent and a sly sense of humour," recalled his friend John Keel, a fellow investigator of UFOs and monster stories. "And it can truly be said that he knew too much about flying saucers."

It was Barker's exploration of the 'men in black' (latterly abbreviated as MIB) that had a long-lasting and global impact on ufology and wider popular culture.

Born in West Virginia in 1925, in his youth Barker worked in the theatre industry, then began publishing, writing and editing stories about UFOs, monsters and the paranormal. He graduated from Glenville State College in 1947 – the year in which the phrase 'flying saucers' was coined to describe a formation of strange batwing-shaped objects reported by a private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, in Washington state. Arnold's sighting was quickly followed by the Roswell incident, when wreckage of a flying object was recovered from the desert in New Mexico.