SPECIAL PRESENTATION: Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf - They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers

Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it, so your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you can save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. America, America, you used to be so fun. Scrolling on. You're fun again today. Carnival is calling. Save up to 40% off your cruise vacation. Offer plastic cruise fairly. Restrict and supply. Visit Carnival.com for details. Ships registry, the Bahamas, and Panama. Hey folks, it's Scott. I'm recording this on December 29th, 2025. Looks like we're in the liminal space between Christmas and the end of the year. That strange time period right before a new beginning. It's like when you've quit your job, but you have to work a few more weeks, even though you're ready to turn the page. Well, Forrest and I are near the end of a two-month break, the first of its kind we've ever taken, after both losing a parent within a week of each other around the end of October this year. The downtime was very much needed, and we're excited to roll out new episodes of our shows, starting with new weekly Dead Letter offices on Tuesday, January 6th, 2026, and a new good old-fashioned Astonishing Legends episode on January 10th. But today, we have another special presentation from the Astonishing Legends Network, a legacy episode of Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf from his second season. If you enjoyed the last episode we shared, you are in for a treat tonight. As many of you already know, Rich is the screenwriter who adapted John Keel's Mothman Prophecies for the big screen, and in this episode of his show, he takes us back to the very roots of that obsession. The episode originally aired in July of 2024, and it focuses on the paranormal touchstone book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, by Gray Barker. This is a seminal work in ufology because it quantified the terrifying concept of men in black for the first time. Although stories about them had been around for a decade or so prior, when Barker published this book, he was the author who coined that term, which became a label for these beings. Subscribers to Rich's show know it's never just a book report. He weaves the narrative of the book into a deeply personal story about his own struggles as a writer, in this case in the late 90s, trying to crack the script for Mothman while holed up in Taos, New Mexico. This is Richard Haddam's storytelling at its best. Trust me, you're going to want to hear the rest of his collection, which with 47 episodes, there are plenty to pick from. The show is now at 330,000 downloads and climbing. If you enjoy this episode of his show, please search for the now award-winning Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. Don't forget to check out the other shows on our network, like The Midnight Library and Scared All the Time at AstonishingLegendsNetwork.com. Forrest and I will be back on the air soon. In the meanwhile, Happy New Year. Here's Rich with They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. Okay. Hey, everybody. Glad you're back. Okay. I'm tired. Last night was the live show and it was great. I'm going to talk about it. I'll talk more about it next week, but we had a ton of fun. If you missed it, I'm so sorry. If you were there, you know what happened. I'll give you the lowdown next week when we run it. But for this week, I want to start out by saying, first of all, thank you to the Patreon members who have joined so far. You guys are great. That was a bigger response than I expected. So thank you. But also, I want to let you guys know that the very first bonus episode is going to run on Patreon on the 21st. So that'll be right in between episodes two and three. You guys will get a little bonus episode on your Patreon feed. And that's going to be a talk I had with Alison Jornlin, friend of Astonishing Legends and friend of Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf. We talk about Linda Godfrey and Monsters Among Us. And we talk about her ghost tour business that's in like 20 different cities. And then, see, she's really smart. I didn't get the genius behind this because I'm like, well, what do you do every day? Like, what's your job? And she's like, well, I'm on the road a lot, just going from city to city, you know, checking in on the ghost tours and setting up ghost tours. And I'm like, wait a second. You're just going. Your job then is to go to a bunch of cities that you want to visit and go to a bunch of places and meet with interesting people who have ghost stories and audition people to be tour guides. And now you've got a reason to go back to those cities because it's all work. And she laughs and she's like, yeah, it's about right. That's what I do. So I'm like, OK, you really have found the perfect job. So anyway, we talk about that. That is super fun. So if you want to hear it, you still have time. Obviously, join Patreon at the $25 level and you will get all the bonus content. And we've got more coming. The plan is going to be at least one a month, probably in the third week of each month. OK, so join us for that. What else? Oh, L.A. Comic Con. I had a great time. Susan Lambert, my wife and producer, did a panel. She hosted a panel with Sharon, her partner on their podcast, L.A. What the fuck am I talking about? L.A. TV. You have no idea how much we partied last night at the live event. OK, let me try this again. I know the name of her podcast. I write the show descriptions. She's been doing it for two years. I know what my wife does. It's not called L.A. TV Ladies. It's called 80s TV Ladies. That's what it's called. And it's good. And you should all listen. Anyway, we did the panel. It went great. A couple of you made it out there. That was really fun. Thank you. It's always nice to meet you guys in the wild. And we had a wonderful time. So if you ever have a chance to go to a Comic Con, definitely do it. This one, we walked around on the big convention floor where, like, there's all these booths and individual artists who are either making comic books or stationery or posters or jewelry or various kinds of artwork, puppets, plushies, all kinds of things. And it's just, it's really fun to meet these people and see what they do. And there was a lot of Mothman being honored, I guess, at these, you know, just like in different incarnations. I mean, nothing, you know, not branded. It's not from the Mothman prophecies. But it was just fun to see what people were doing. So anyway, that was really, really fun. Thanks for coming out to see that. And I think that's all. So at this point, let's go ahead and get started. Here we go. They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers by Gray Barker. There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer. Gertrude Stein. When I first discovered Gray Barker's They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, University Books, New York, 1956, I was looking for answers to a lot of questions, and not all of them were about UFOs. I found my copy at the Brodsky Bookshop in Taos, New Mexico, in August of 1997. It was a brand new paperback edition just published by Illuminette Press that July. I'd never heard of it, but the title was amazing, so I picked it up and saw that none other than John Keel had written the foreword to this new edition. This felt incredibly serendipitous since I was in New Mexico that summer for the sole purpose of finally, finally starting to write my adaptation of The Mothman Prophecies. At this stage in my paranormal education, I had read a lot, but this book was different. This book seemed to promise a weird sort of proof of something. Most books made it clear that not enough was known about flying saucers, but this one insisted that some people knew too much. Most of the book centers on Barker's relationship with another UFO enthusiast named Albert K. Bender. And Bender was a deeply weird guy to say the least. Okay, let's start at the end. On March 26th, 2016, Albert K. Bender died in Los Angeles at the age of 94. Now, at the time of his death, the exact nature of what we call UFOs was not yet known. And today, as I write this, on Monday, July 29th, 2024, the exact nature of UFOs is still not known. I'll make a bold prediction. As you are listening to this episode, whenever that may be, the exact nature of UFOs will still be unknown. What's my point? Well, according to Albert K. Bender, he figured out what UFOs were in 1953, over 70 years ago. You heard me. He figured it out. And no sooner had he figured it out, he was visited by three mysterious men dressed all in black, and was ordered to shut the fuck up about it. These men, whoever they were, and wherever they were from, scared the living hell out of him. After his encounter, he couldn't eat or sleep for three days. Bender told his friend, Gray Barker, that, quote, the saucers don't interest me anymore. When Barker asked, is that because you found out they were too ordinary to be interesting, or because what you discovered about them is painful for you to think about? Bender replied, the latter. They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers focuses on Barker's experiences with Albert Bender and several other highly placed UFO researchers of the era as they mysteriously withdrew from the field for reasons of fear and self-preservation. This is a remarkable book because it features the introduction of the, quote, men in black archetype to UFO narratives. And it is also one of the first books to dwell squarely on the concepts of both government conspiracy theories and the occult in relationship to UFOs. But hey, hold up there, hang on. Who were those three men? What did Bender find out about the Flying Saucers? What's the answer? Oh, oh, okay. According to Albert K. Bender, the saucers are from a planet called Kayak. The three men were aliens in disguise. They were here because they needed our seawater for some reason. And they had a local base of operations underneath the Antarctic. There. Happy now? See, that's the thing. When it comes to UFOs or the paranormal, the answers are never as interesting as the questions. And like the lids on every piece of Tupperware I own, they never seem to fit. To be clear, these answers never appear in Barker's book. And that might be the book's greatest strength. Barker's book is all questions, all speculation, all out paranoia, all night long. Gray Barker's book pulls off quite a trick. It convinces you that the only thing scarier than what's inside of a Flying Saucer are the people who don't want you to find out. Now, in the summer of 1997, I was more or less in the exact middle of my career as a feature film writer. Back then, in the 80s and 90s, the life of a screenwriter was very unstructured. You'd finally land an assignment from a studio, and they didn't expect to hear from you again for six months. You could spend those six months any way you wanted, as long as by the end of it, you had a first draft. You could write during the day, every day, or you could write all night, but only on weekends. You could work at a desk, or on your couch, or in bed. You could go to the Bahamas for six months, and write on the beach. You could write only on Tuesdays. You could do nothing for six months, and write the whole thing in 48 hours, just before turning it in. It didn't matter. It was all up to you. Now, this sort of freedom may sound ideal, but a complete lack of structure and accountability is its own kind of prison. At least it was for me. And in my case, I wasn't even being paid. I was in the whole $2,500 of my own money, which I spent securing an option on the Mothman prophecies from John Keel. I had one year to get it into, quote, active development, before the option ran out. My agent told me the best way to do this was to pitch it around town and get someone to pay me to write the script. But for me, I couldn't pitch it until I knew to a moral certainty that I could write it. And for that, I was going to have to figure out the whole movie first, beginning, middle, and end, scene by scene by scene. At that point, I truly had no idea what the actual story of the movie would be, and no real confidence that anyone would ever share my fascination with the subject matter. I would somehow have to make my fascination contagious by crafting the perfect pitch, a prospect so daunting it left me paralyzed with anxiety, depression, and self-loathing. I was getting nowhere. That's when I came up with the idea of spending August in Taos, New Mexico. My wife Michelle and I and our one-year-old baby Owen were in the middle of a long, hot Los Angeles summer. The notion of picking up and getting away to really anywhere besides our own house seemed thrilling. Michelle and I loved New Mexico. So I decided to justify the trip by promising myself that I would figure out the entire movie during our three-week stay. Michelle and Owen could spend the days sightseeing around town or driving down to Santa Fe or hanging out with the grandparents, Ron and Barbara, who had a small house there. I'd spend the days working. It would be almost like a vacation. For them, at least. And I figured if anywhere on Earth could put me in a Mothman state of mind, it was Taos. So on our first day there, while I was wasting time and avoiding work, by wandering through the Brodsky Bookshop, which, by the way, is amazing and you should make a trip to Taos just to check it out. I bought a copy of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers and brought it back to the house we were renting at the end of a dirt road called Wisdom Way, a little dog-legged cul-de-sac off Blueberry Hill Road. I started reading the book that day and I started having nightmares that night. Before I tell you about the nightmare, and it's one I can still remember vividly 26 years later, let me tell you about reading the book that day. Gray Barker is a terrific writer and he was also, eventually, a good friend of John Keel's. I think Keel was a better writer, but Barker has a similar style. He gives you the facts, but he wants to draw you in. He is haunted by his subject matter and he wants you to be haunted too. Here's how he starts the book. Quote, There are no such things as flying saucers. The government has told you that. President Eisenhower himself stated that to his knowledge, no one was coming here from another planet to pay us a visit. If you believe President Eisenhower and government announcements, you have no fear of being frightened by this story. Read it on a stormy night or in the middle of a graveyard if you wish. Your equanimity will not be challenged. Unless you don't believe President Eisenhower and government announcements. In that case, you just might be scared. Two things are accomplished in these opening lines. Barker deftly suggests a government conspiracy and you're in on it before you even know it. Of course you don't believe President Eisenhower and government announcements. So now you know you're going to be scared and you know you can't trust the government. And most important of all, you know Gray Barker doesn't trust the government either. So now you're a team and he's your team leader. If the government isn't telling you the truth, then by the transitive property of paranoia, Gray Barker must be telling you the truth. We're halfway through page one. Then Barker talks directly to you and literally asks you to put yourself into the story of the Flatwoods monster sighting. A group of people in Flatwoods, West Virginia see a fiery ball of light disappear over a hill into the woods. They go to investigate, quote, put yourself in the shoes of a housewife, a teenager, or a 10-year-old boy and walk over the hilltop into the unknown. When you look over the top of the hill, several things happen all at once. You see a fiery something totally outside your experience. And as you puzzle for a moment, focusing your eyes on the unknown, you fail to see the horror approaching you from the left. The story is no longer about someone else who saw Flying Saucer Land, saw the monstrous thing come out of it. It's about you. It's all happening to you. And you're so glad it is. Because why else are you reading this book? You want to know what it's like to have this kind of experience. And now Gray Barker is insisting that you know what it's like. He's not letting you off the hook. The implication is clear. Just because this particular incident didn't happen to you? Something just like it could anytime, anywhere. Some readers at this point might unconsciously be feeling a little abducted. Some readers might be saying, whoa, slow down. Don't just start throwing aliens at me, Gray Barker. Buy me dinner first. But it's too late to turn back now. And Barker wants you to feel that too. Feel like maybe you bit off more than you can chew. Curiosity killed the cat. And if you're not careful, it could kill you too. That's the theme of the book. Be careful of the answers you seek. You just might get them. And you might not like them. We're on page two. I'm obviously not going to go page by page, but I want you to see what Barker is doing and the skill with which he's doing it. And I also want to praise him for writing a book that's fun to read. It's no easy feat, especially in this genre, that seems to make people write very dull books on this very serious subject. In fact, there's even a book by Frank Edwards called Flying Saucers, Serious Business. And I'm going to read from the book jacket because it's amazing. It's like a sticker on a prescription bottle. Here's what it says. Quote, WARNING! It's in all caps, so it must be important and true. Unidentified flying objects can be harmful to human beings. Do not stand under a UFO that is hovering at low altitude. Do not touch or attempt to touch a UFO that has landed. In either case, the safe thing to do is to get away from there quickly and let the military take over. There is a possibility of radiation danger, and there are known cases where persons have been burned by rays emanating from UFOs. Oh my God. Do not make eye contact with the UFO. Do not taunt the UFO. UFOs may cause memory loss, numbness, skin rashes, shortness of breath, suicidal thoughts, diarrhea, depression, headaches, tooth decay, and death. Ask your doctor if UFOs are right for you. Gray Barker is taking the subject matter seriously, but he's also not asserting that he is an authority on the subject. The book is really about his beginnings as a UFO investigator. It was published in 1956, less than 10 years after Kenneth Arnold's Mount Rainier sighting began the modern UFO era. So the field was relatively new in the mid-50s, and there was a feeling that in short order the answer to what these things were would present itself and then we'd know. Figuring it out and discovering the answer is very much what guided UFO research of the time. It was only later in the 1970s that investigators and writers became more philosophical about the problem and began to discuss it more in terms of what the experience of seeing a UFO was. The idea that there might be a clear, logical answer to the problem was starting to fade. Gray Barker got involved in the UFO mystery when the Flatwoods Monster sighting occurred more or less in his backyard in rural West Virginia. Now, I'm not going to go into the Flatwoods Monster here. We'll have a link to it in the show notes. You can go investigate it on your own. But the important thing to know is that Gray Barker saw a small newspaper article about it on the morning of September 15th, 1952 and was intrigued. Because he was a writer and he lived close to the spot where it happened, he reached out to Fate Magazine to see if he could make a few bucks by interviewing the witnesses. The editor at Fate responded with a telegram that said, quote, Story probably hoax, but investigate rigorously. Don't speculate. Simply state facts. Three or four pictures up to 3,000 words Monday deadline. And with those words, Gray Barker embarked on his new career as a UFO investigator. And according to this book, he came to regret it almost immediately. My nightmare that first night in Taos was brief and to the point. I'm at the rental house on Wisdom Way. Michelle and Owen are there. The grandparents, Ron and Barbara, are there. And weirdly, my mom is there. And all of these people, more or less at the same time, begin having seizures as if their bodies were suddenly puppets being controlled by some invisible force. Jerking, lurching, twitching spasmodically. All of them hideously energetic and mobilized towards some unknowable purpose. That's it. That's the dream. Usually when you try to describe a nightmare, the essential terror of it dissolves the moment the words leave your mouth. But it's been over 25 years, and this one still bothers me intensely. I woke up the next morning to the sound of my alarm at 6 a.m. Who sets an alarm when they're on vacation? Me, that's who. Remember, I'm not on vacation. Can't just lie around in bed. Gotta be productive. Stay focused. Pull on my shorts and sneakers and get out onto Blueberry Hill for a morning run. I head south toward Nighthawk Trail, where Rick and Jerry live. Rick and Jerry are friends of ours through Michelle's mom, Barbara. We've known them for years. Even got married at their other house in Running Springs near Lake Arrowhead, California. Anyway, their place is three miles away. I barely make it. Running is a new thing for me. It's harder than it looks. Maybe it's the elevation. I have coffee with Rick and Jerry, and then Rick offers to give me a ride back to my house. But that wouldn't be fair. I've promised myself I'm going to run both ways. But Rick says he's going into town anyway. Sure, it's in the opposite direction, but still. Maybe I look tired or stressed out. Maybe the shadow of the nightmare is still hovering behind my eyes. Either way, I don't turn him down. When he drops me off back at our place, it's time to get to work on the Mothman prophecies. I set up in an empty room at the end of the hall, using a too-tall nightstand as a desk. None of these rooms have a proper desk. I could use the kitchen table, but at that point in my life, I needed complete solitude to write. Creating was an intensely difficult, delicate, private thing. For me, gearing up to work always felt like having an awkward conversation with someone I didn't trust. I had to get myself into a certain mood. I had to get myself into the right frame of mind. I needed energy and enthusiasm, but not too much. Or I overbalanced into anxiety, bordering on panic. The amount of coffee I consumed factored into this tricky equation. Now, I only had one cup with Rick and Jerry, but I could feel my heart racing. Did they use an extra strong kind of coffee in New Mexico? Was I exhausted from the run? Was my blood sugar low because I hadn't eaten? Oh, maybe I should go out to breakfast. I could swing by Michael's kitchen, get some eggs with red and green chili sauce, maybe some bacon, maybe some blue corn pinyon pancakes. Yeah, maybe that's what I needed and then, then I could get to work. Writers are known for procrastinating, but this was something different. I'd had trouble starting projects in the past, but nothing like this. The very thought of even starting to think about this project was bringing me to my knees. Why was this one so hard? Back then, in the summer of 1997, John Keel felt like my own personal discovery. I'd never heard of him. No one I knew had ever heard of him. I felt like I'd come upon some ancient philosopher who was really onto something that history had somehow forgotten. And now I had a chance to bring him and his theories out of obscurity and introduce them to the world. I wanted everyone to feel what I felt when I first read the Mothman prophecies just a few months before. I wanted them to feel like the walls of their world were coming down. I mean, that's what everyone wants, right? And they'd have me to thank. Well, John Keel, sure, but me too. Central to all of this was that I was in awe of John Keel, what he'd lived through and how he wrote about it. He had lived a life so different from my own, traveling the world with little more than a typewriter and a toothbrush. This was an Indiana Jones-style fantasy for me. John Keel had seen things. He knew things. So, of course, I wanted to impress him. I wanted to tell his story and I wanted him to be proud of me. I wanted to be important to him, as important as he was to me. There was so much writing on this one project. In ways both literal and figurative, I could not afford to screw it up. By the end of that first week in Taos, I had not written a single word. In fact, after the third day, I had stopped even trying. I was feeling too left out of all the fun. Michelle and Owen and Ron and Barbara and Rick and Jerry were out shopping and sightseeing every single day, going to movies and bookstores and galleries. That wasn't fair, was it? I mean, this whole excursion was my idea. Maybe I needed to have a little bit of a vacation and then I wouldn't feel so deprived and then I could calm down and get some work done. Yeah, that made sense. Plus, as any writer can tell you, even when you're not writing, you're still working. Ideas are boiling around in your subconscious, like some basement factory, preparing thoughts and inspirations, getting them ready to send up stairs. I could feel it happening. I could feel the churning, twisting energy vibrating throughout my body. Sure, maybe it was fear. Maybe it was even closer to terror. After all, we were almost broke. By October, we would essentially be out of money. But that was okay because it was only August. September is when I would be out pitching, right? All I had to do was write a pitch that was guaranteed to sell. I'd start on Monday. And I do. As soon as Michelle and Owen leave to go hang out at Ron and Barbara's, I go to that back bedroom. I open up my laptop, a compact Armada, which of course in 1997 had no Wi-Fi or internet connection of any sort. I stare out the window at a field of sunflowers, vivid and three-dimensional in the sunshine. Storm clouds roll toward me in the distance over the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and I spiral down into my shame hole. I absolutely cannot do this. I will not succeed. I'm just not good enough, and I will be punished for my failure. My failure will be humiliating and complete. Other people will live my dream, and I will be forced to watch them in shame. Terror rolls through my body in great waves, because even though I can't do this, I have to. It's impossible, but I have no choice. It will be agony, and it will end in obliterating failure. How can I tell John Keel's story? How can I do it justice? How can I make him proud of me? I can't. And that is the problem. Just when I can't get lower, cannot feel any worse. I begin to write. That night, we celebrated my first full day of real work by splurging on dinner at Lambert's, which at the time was pretty much Taos' only fancy restaurant. It was just grown-ups tonight, Rick and Jerry and Michelle and me. Owen was staying with his grandparents. We toasted my victory with margaritas and we ate and drank late into the night as a summer storm raged outside. It was one of those magical nights that seems to go on forever, carried on a wave of excitement and good feelings about the future, and I was going to need all the good feelings I could get because I hadn't actually done any work that day at all. My total output in seven hours was ten words. The Mothman Prophecies based upon the book by John A. Keel. Bolded and underlined. After that, I just stared out the window past the sunflowers, silently tracking the progress of the oncoming storm. Later that night, buzzing on tequila and espressos, I sat up reaching Gray Barker's book some more and in retrospect, this was a mistake. The meat of the story starts in chapter 5 when Gray Barker meets Albert K. Bender. We are told that Bender is smart and impressive and exudes warmth and good humor. We're also told that he isn't prone to wild thinking or flights of imagination. He sounds like a steady, stable guy and an ambitious one. At 31, he's running his own UFO investigation organization, the International Flying Saucer Bureau, or IFSB, with regional managers across the Northeast and connections to similar outfits as far away as New Zealand and Australia. Barker starts out being extremely impressed with Albert Bender, his intellect and industry, and his ability to stay grounded while investigating some of the strangest UFO encounters anyone has ever heard of before or since. which makes it all the more unnerving when less than a year later, Bender withdraws completely from the field of UFO investigations and is too terrified to explain to anyone exactly why. Gray Barker first hears about Bender's mental and emotional breakdown third-hand through a friend at the IFSB named Dominic Lucchese. Lucchese tells Barker that apparently, two things happened to Albert Bender in rapid succession. First, he figured out what the saucers were. He wrote up his theory and mailed it to an unnamed person. Then, almost immediately, he was visited by three men dressed in black who had his written theory in their hands long before it could have arrived at its intended destination. Were these government agents? Were they intercepting and reading all his mail? What the fuck was going on? The three men confirmed to him that he had indeed figured out the mystery of the saucers, and then they threatened him into silence. One of the most chilling parts of the book is chapter 8, in which Barker, along with Lucchese and a third friend of theirs, Augie Roberts, are able to finally question Bender in person. It plays out like a bizarre court case where the witness keeps pleading the fifth. Bender responds to their questions with the words, I can't answer that almost 20 times in the course of just a few pages. Here's some examples. Question. Who were the three men who visited you? I can't answer that. Were they from the government? I can't answer that. Do saucers come from space? I can't answer that. Are the saucers real? Are they made from something solid? I can't answer that. Who was the person you sent your theory to before the three men visited you? I can't answer that. Is the flying saucer going to be a help to the world? Answer. It's going to be both good and bad. Are the saucers going to harm us in any way? I can't answer that. This conversation between four friends took place on October 4th, 1953 in Albert Bender's home. Barker and Lucchese and Roberts continued probing, hoping their friend would slip up or at least reveal enough clues for them to understand what was really going on. But with every answer, or non-answer, the more shrouded and scary things got. Question. Does the government know about the saucers? Answer. They have known what they are for two years. Question. Will they tell the people what they are? Answer. It has got to a point where they will have to. Question. Do we have any defense for it? Answer. No. In that case, I'll buy myself a good gun. That won't help you much. Question. Do the three men know about us, Gray, Lucchese, and Augie? Answer. They had all your addresses and details about you with them. Question. What will happen to the world when the people find out about the saucers? Answer. There are going to be quite a few changes in all things. Question. Will it affect all of our lives? Answer. There will be changes in everybody's life. Question. Are you making any long-range plans, save for about five years from now? Answer. Yes. Question. So the world isn't going to come to an end. But Bender doesn't answer this question, and his calm smile fades away. This is pure, high-octane paranoia fuel. Someone knows something the government knows, but they're too afraid to talk about it. I could feel my gut churning as I read this 44-year-old interview. Clearly, the government had decided not to tell the people what they knew. Why not? What changed? What new factors came into play to keep us all in the dark? Lightning flickered in the distance, and the rumble of thunder grew muted as the storm dissipated to the south. I fell asleep on the couch in the living room at 3.30 a.m. and dreamed dark, crowded dreams where words were spoken too quietly to hear, and people moved in shadow and never revealed their faces. I woke up feeling weak and depleted. Michelle stayed in bed all the next day feeling even sicker than I did. Writing wasn't an option. It was my turn to take care of Owen anyway. So we left the house so Michelle could rest in peace. We didn't really go anywhere. There was nowhere to go. We just drove. Owen usually slept in the car, but that day he just screamed and screamed. I turned on the radio and tuned it to the station KTAO, broadcasting from Blueberry Hill, the world's only 100% solar radio. Maybe the noise would put Owen to sleep. We heard Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind, The Freshman by The Verve Pipe, Where Have All the Cowboys Gone by Paula Cole, More Than This by 10,000 Maniacs, and Building a Mystery by Sarah McLaughlin, which became my theme song that summer. I drive aimlessly for five hours. We drive through Sonic Burger and I eat a cheeseburger and Owen eats the fries. He finally falls asleep with his mouth full of food. I try to let creative thoughts sneak into my mind, but I'm really just trying to beat back the pounding dread and pressure that is with me all the time. Do I really want to write about this stuff? Do I really want to dwell in this fucking fear and paranoia? I don't have a choice. I have to. I said I would. My agent expects it. John Keel expects it. I've told people I'm doing it. Now I have to do it. We get back home and somehow Michelle is still asleep. But Owen is now wide awake and crying. And it's only three in the afternoon. I just want this day to end. And it will not end. There are so many days that feel like this. I should be writing. I should be writing. I should be writing. When will this day end? I fall asleep with Owen on my chest at 9pm and wake up at 1.15am disoriented and terrified. Michelle was only awake for a few hours. Now she's back in bed, asleep. I put Owen down in his bed and miraculously he stays asleep. But adrenaline and fear and self loathing are already pumping through my body. I'm exhausted and wide awake. For some reason, I find that I'm overcome with the compulsion to get into my car and drive to the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. This bridge spans the Rio Grande, 650 feet above the river, and there is absolutely no reason for me to go there. In fact, going there at this hour feels like trouble. The only reason someone would go to that bridge in the middle of the night is to jump. I don't want to jump. If Michelle wakes up and I'm gone, I'll get in trouble. I go anyway. I park on the side of the highway and walk out onto the bridge. No one is there. At least no one I can see. It's long and it's dark, but the sky is bright and clear and the gorge below is black and it feels like I'm walking out into empty space. I'm afraid a police car will pull up. I'm afraid someone crazy will pull up. I'm afraid that I am alone. I'm afraid that I'm not. I walk to the middle of the bridge and then I stop and lean on the cold steel railing and look north. huge gusts of cold wind blast up from the darkness of the gorge. I can feel the bridge swaying beneath me. I can hear a thousand tons of metal breathe in a high shriek and breathe out a low howl. This is crazy. What am I doing here? The cloudless sky is filled with stars. Are some of them moving? Stop worrying. Everything is going to be okay. You don't need to worry about Michelle. She's not waiting up for you like your mother. No one will even know you ever came here. You're allowed to do whatever you want. You don't need to ask permission. You're a full-grown adult. You're 31 and you're not in trouble. But of course, I am in trouble. I am gambling my future and my family's future on a book filled with dark nightmares and fantasies. A book with no structure, no story, and no answers. I did this. This is all on me. This is my gig. And when it goes wrong, there will be no one to blame but myself crushing me, taking care of Michelle, taking care of Owen. I have to save them. I have to succeed. I have to sell this pitch. Then the pressure will ease because I can't take this, this grinding pressure. I can't take it anymore. I pray to God in the dark night, please, please let me be the person I think I can be, the person I've always wanted to be. I want to be a writer. I want to be a real writer. It's all I ever wanted. Please help me. God, please help me. Help me breathe. If I can breathe and keep breathing, then maybe, maybe I can do it. When I get home, it's almost three in the morning. Michelle is waiting up for me, sitting alone on the couch in the living room in the dark. She is holding something small and white in her hand. She doesn't even ask me where I've been. She just looks at me and says, I'm pregnant. Gray Barker is shocked to see that the final issue of Space Review, the IFSB newsletter, contains a statement of importance from its publisher, Albert K. Bender. Quote, The mystery of the flying saucers is no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by orders from a higher source. We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but because of the nature of the information, we are very sorry that we have been advised in the negative. We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious. And as it turns out, Bender wasn't the only one suddenly going quiet. from all over the world, Barker heard from former colleagues who were suddenly giving up their research into UFOs after being ordered to by a mysterious trio of men all dressed in black. One of them, John Stewart, an ufologist from New Zealand, wrote to Barker describing his frightening experience with the men in black and ended his letter with the dire warning. For God's sake, Gray, be careful. The next day, I sat staring at my field of sunflowers. I noticed for the first time that among those flowers, there were hundreds of bees going about their work. Sometime in April, if everything went as planned, Michelle would give birth. I would be the father of two. That was real life. There was nothing more real than that. But my life and John Keel's life could not be more different. He was never married. He had no children. He traveled the world and experienced all kinds of supernatural phenomenon. Not me. How was I supposed to write about him? Especially since he'd already written about him and better than I ever could. I thought about John Keel. I thought about the first time I ever spoke with him just a few months earlier. My agent had contacted his lawyer and said I was interested in adapting the Mothman prophecies into a feature film. Keel insisted on speaking to me personally first and a phone call was arranged. What struck me that day was how normal he sounded. He was soft-spoken and sardonic and the conversation drifted all over the place from movies to TV shows to UFOs to atomic testing in West Virginia to Whitley Streber to something he called the Keel Curse wherein as soon as he began to investigate something it would turn up in the news usually with tragic overtones. The subjects kept changing and I tried to keep up. I began to get the feeling that this phone call was a kind of a test a way for him to figure out who I was and if he could trust me. And of course that's exactly what it was. Apparently he'd had some brushes with Hollywood in the past all of them bad. The most upsetting one involved a low budget production company that decades earlier had actually commissioned a script and was about to start filming a movie based on the Mothman prophecies without ever contacting him at all. His lawyer found out about it and shut it down but it left a bad taste in Keel's mouth. Still he didn't seem entirely against the idea and after about an hour we finally began to talk about his time in Point Pleasant. His tone changed and he grew more serious. Quote It was very grim and terrible what happened to those people. He was referring to everyone in the town who had paranormal experiences those that got weird phone calls saw the dancing lights were visited by the men in black and those who saw Mothman. Quote I knew people who died on that bridge that's why I tried to make the book light and a little funny when I could to balance it out a little because it was all really quite grim. Now I understood why he was testing me because for him this wasn't just some book about the supernatural he wrote to pay the rent. He lived it and he wanted to make sure that the story of these people people he knew people who died would be told with a measure of seriousness and respect that it wouldn't just be another dumb horror movie. It was these moments in our conversation that haunted me while I sat in that back bedroom staring at the sunflowers. And that's when I slowly began to realize that the story could not literally be about him. and it couldn't be about the real people who lived and died in Point Pleasant. It would have to be its own thing. Thematically and philosophically it would be true to its source but for it to work as a story I was going to have to move away from any literal retelling of events. As this idea sank in I could feel colors seeping back into my world. The fog lifted the walls dissolved I began finding my way into the story. The only way I could tell the real story was to change it. The only way I could tell the truth was to lie. And that is the day John Keel became John Klein. And that is the day when I knew he would have to be married and his wife would have to die. The story couldn't just be about people haunted by UFOs and men in black and mothman. It had to be about something we're all afraid of. Something we all know is true. Death. What would fuel John Klein in my story is not just the desire to know what's happening in Point Pleasant. Investigating those mysteries would really be a way for him to deal with his overwhelming grief. After all, what happens after we die? What if John Keel hated it? What if in changing the facts and changing him into a completely fictional character, he felt more betrayed than he had with the last Mothman movie? It was a chance I was going to have to take. They knew too much about flying saucers is considered by most to be Grey Barker's last real book. The ones after it were filled with too many known inventions, too many liberties with real people and events, too many lies. Barker's legacy today is that of a writer who never failed to entertain and never let facts get in the way of a good story. In the epilogue to his book, Grey Barker admits that he does not have the answers to the questions about what the UFOs are or who the men in black are yet, but he hopes the publication of the book will stir things up and that once this information is before the public, answers will come. The answers never came, and when Albert K. Bender finally revealed everything he knew in his own book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, the answers were less than satisfying. Barker continued to write about UFOs and even published a book called the Silver Bridge, which was his own account of the Mothman sightings in West Virginia that he investigated along with John Keel. But he no longer doggedly searched for answers. He was happy to report and publish the strangest stories he could find and leave it to others to sort out the truth from trash. They're still sorting. And for a book as boldly titled as They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, the truest thing Gray Barker ever did was to show us how we didn't and still don't know anything at all. I sent John Keel a finished draft of The Mothman Prophecies four months later in December of 1997. He didn't much like it. But he was too polite to come right out and say so. In fact, I don't think he really came around on it until Richard Gere was cast to play him. He got a real kick out of that. But we kept in touch. And four years later, when he told me he was coming out to Los Angeles in February of 2001, I knew I had my chance. I invited him to dinner at my house. And he accepted. It was a surreal night for me. I can only imagine what it was for him. Michelle cooked him a low sugar dinner. At that time, he was carefully regulating his sugar intake. Not exactly Indiana Jones anymore. And he got to meet my kids, Owen, who was four years old, and Spencer, who was almost three. Spencer, our son who was conceived on that trip to New Mexico, had the unerring timing to be born a month before his due date, on March 25th, which also Kiel's birthday. John got a kick out of that too. After dinner, Owen, who had been strangely quiet most of the night, walked over to where John was sitting, leaned against his knees, and asked him with great solemnity who would win in a fight, a dog or a bear. With equal gravity, John told Owen that a bear would have the natural advantage, but for one thing, a dog protecting his owner fighting. Owen was duly impressed, and so was I. But Owen wasn't done. What about a dog and a shark? Kiel looked him in the eye and said, it all depends on how well the dog can swim. As this discussion was going on, Spencer made his contribution by jumping up and down on a nearby chair dressed in nothing but his diaper and happily screaming, John Kiel, John Kiel, John Kiel! I've often wondered how Kiel ranked that night against, say, exploring the cursed tombs of the pharaohs in Egypt or hunkering down in the TNT area outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mothman. Before he left that night, we talked outside on the patio under an incredibly clear winter night sky. The stars overhead were almost as bright as the lights of the San Gabriel Valley spread out beneath us. We were talking about the movie, which was still in the middle of filming, and how a large audience might react to the story of the Mothman and the questions it raised. Get ready for the crazies, he said. He assured me that once the movie came out, every kind of weirdo imaginable would find me, seek me out, hunt me down, because I would be the new teller of the tale, and thereby the man with the answers. But of course, I didn't have any answers. I knew I'd never get another chance like this one, and after all, isn't this why I'd invited him here in the first place? I was in such a place of confusion in my life, but asking him questions about marriage wouldn't make any sense, so instead, I asked what I really wanted to know. What's the truth? After a lifetime of investigating the paranormal, what have you learned? What is the answer? He looked at me from the darkness, then reached into his pocket, and silently handed me a small piece of paper, his business card. I turned it over, and in the faint starlight, read the words on the other side, John Keel, not an authority on anything. Thank you for joining me on Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf. Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf is presented by Astonishing Legends, 134 West, and Summerland Entertainment. Executive Producers, Scott Philbrook, Forrest Burgess, and Susan Lambert. Our Associate Producer is Tess Feifel, and our Sound Designer, Engineer, and Editor is Kevin Ducey. Artwork is by Tommy Beaver, Website is by Kayla Lord, and our music, as always, is by Nima Kazaruni. Please join us next time when we do our live show. You guys will hear it. If you were there, if you weren't there, you're gonna hear it. The book is called The Mammoth Mountain Poltergeist by Jenny Ashford and Tom Ross, and you're gonna get to hear the recording we made that night, live music and all, so please join us for that. Until then, be safe and be well, find the light in the dark, and we'll see you again soon. 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