Tag: ufology

Gray Barker, the Men in Black, and North Carolina Amendment One

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By David Halperin

You are David Halperin.

It’s 1960, and you’re twelve going on thirteen, and although you’ve noticed for a while now that there are exciting differences between girls and boys, it’s only recently you’ve begun to grasp that this fact might have some relevance to you.  Your mother is sick with heart disease—slowly dying, though no one in your little suburban home dares to talk about that.

You and a friend are doing a project about flying saucers for science class.  You go to your local library and check out a book you’ve never heard of, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers by a man named Gray Barker.  It looks like any book you might find in your school library.  It’s got an index, and even a bibliography, the entries composed the way you’ve been taught bibliography entries ought to be.  You take it home and begin reading.

Soon you’re riveted with fear.

You read about a seven-foot monster “worse than Frankenstein,” with glowing green face and red eyes, that landed on a West Virginia hilltop in 1952.  You read about a Connecticut man named Albert Bender, who in 1953 solved the flying saucer mystery and was visited by three men in black, who terrified him so he never would reveal the awful secret he’d discovered.  You pray God to protect you from all these horrors, seen and unseen; and it never crosses your mind to doubt what you’ve read, partly because it’s written in a LIBRARY BOOK and you trust library books, but also because you know first-hand that life has secrets and shadows so dreadful no one will speak of them.  You see them every day, as your mother withers away. Continue Reading →

"The Myth is the Mystery":Reflections on Annie Jacobsen's Area 51

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by David Halperin

1.

Why, folklorist Thomas Bullard has asked, are UFOs in this country “at once so popular and so despised?”  It’s a good question; the hubbub over Annie Jacobsen’s best-selling Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is the latest demonstration of how good it is.  “Oh, I’ve got to read that book,” a waitress said when she saw me with Area 51, and from our conversation it became clear that it was the Area 51 of UFO legend, not the real Area 51 of Cold-War dread (to which most of Jacobsen’s book is devoted) that had drawn her interest.  UFOs, a.k.a. “flying saucers,” have zoomed around our cultural skies for more than sixty years.  They’ve survived innumerable debunkings, their fascination undimmed.  Evidently they’re saying something, communicating something, that needs to be heard.  What?

This is the real “UFO mystery.”  It’s a cultural, a psychological, even a religious mystery, the sort of thing a religious studies professor like myself might well take an interest in.  I can’t claim personal immunity from the subject.  Back in the 1960s I myself was a teenage “UFOlogist.”  I believed fervently in UFOs, though not necessarily (at least at first) that they came from outer space.  I thought solving their mystery to be the greatest and most important challenge facing the human race. Continue Reading →

“The Myth is the Mystery”:Reflections on Annie Jacobsen’s Area 51

Posted on by

by David Halperin

1.

Why, folklorist Thomas Bullard has asked, are UFOs in this country “at once so popular and so despised?”  It’s a good question; the hubbub over Annie Jacobsen’s best-selling Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is the latest demonstration of how good it is.  “Oh, I’ve got to read that book,” a waitress said when she saw me with Area 51, and from our conversation it became clear that it was the Area 51 of UFO legend, not the real Area 51 of Cold-War dread (to which most of Jacobsen’s book is devoted) that had drawn her interest.  UFOs, a.k.a. “flying saucers,” have zoomed around our cultural skies for more than sixty years.  They’ve survived innumerable debunkings, their fascination undimmed.  Evidently they’re saying something, communicating something, that needs to be heard.  What?

This is the real “UFO mystery.”  It’s a cultural, a psychological, even a religious mystery, the sort of thing a religious studies professor like myself might well take an interest in.  I can’t claim personal immunity from the subject.  Back in the 1960s I myself was a teenage “UFOlogist.”  I believed fervently in UFOs, though not necessarily (at least at first) that they came from outer space.  I thought solving their mystery to be the greatest and most important challenge facing the human race. Continue Reading →