Join us for a talk devoted to the strange-but-true biography of Gray Barker (1925–1984), the colorful founder of Saucerian Books, a central purveyor and promoter of flying saucer and conspiracist knowledge in the mid-twentieth century! Barker— eccentric literary outsider and unreliable narrator of implausible stories—created one of the first flying saucer fanzines, The Saucerian and founded Saucerian Books which, by close of the 1950s, published some of the strangest UFO-related books of the era, with a particular emphasis on flying saucer contactees. Though privately skeptical, he viewed the world of occult believers as a source of ongoing entertainment, and also might have used the perceived eccentricity of flying saucer research, or “ufology,” to obscure his homosexuality from his small-town neighbors. As a mastermind behind the fantastical, Barker’s promotional efforts were the precursor to contemporary conspiracism.