This was an enjoyable and well written book in which Barker recounts some of his experiences as a busy person in the flying saucer world.

He has his own newsletter/magazine, The Saucerian, and is thus connected with people around the globe who publish and contribute to similar periodicals.

The accounts he presents of other people's UFO stories are invariably interesting and seem to be straighforwardly told by sound-minded and unbiased observers.

At times he strays into hollow earth lore and is very impressed by the idea that the accumulation of ice in Antarctica is going to cause the Earth to "capsize" and flash freeze everything in an extinction-level event. He is also persuaded that this has already happened in the planet's past.

These diversions are indicative of Barker's apparent tendency to be a little less skeptical and less logical than he should be. And while Barker found the thought terrifying, it goes without saying that nobody worries about too much ice building up anywhere on the planet anymore.

But all of the UFO stuff in here is great. And Barker also gets into detail about the famous "men in black" who visit these UFO investigators and scare them into total silence and discontinuation of their work.

They don't visit Barker, or at least he doesn't say that they do in the book, but some of his colleagues have this experience and Barker shares their stories along with other information he was able to gather.

As usual, nothing in this book is verifiable or "evidence" of anything, but it is very interesting nonetheless.

It's also a window into some very curious people engaged in a fascinating hobby in a near but also so distant time and place.

UPDATE: I've been reading a biography of Gray Barker and while this book is already not exactly straightforward, it turns out that all of Barker's work has layers of sincerity and falsehood, pranks and reportage, manipulation and self-promotion.

While his interest in the subject certainly seems to be genuine, his motivation is often purely profit-driven as well as using this eccentric but harmless pursuit as cover for being a gay man in mid-century West Virginia, something that was essentially illegal.

It's a fascinating but ultimately depressing story, intertwined with an under-examined printing renaissance as important in its way as the invention of the printing press itself.

The first line is "There are no such things as flying saucers".