Gray Barker was born in West Virginia in 1925. He lived there his whole life, working mostly in movie theatre and drive-in promotion, booking and management, though also in cinema equipment and, at one point, picking up a job with United Parcel Service.

Movies were a passion and so, too, was the world of UFOs and adjacent interests (Hollow Earth and New Age occult ideas, for example). He occupied himself professionally with those, too, as writer, editor, promoter, publisher, lecturer, etc.

McKee has done an astounding job of presenting a coherent, compelling and convincing portrait of Barker, using a wide array of sources, including police and court documents relating to the difficulties of being gay in mid-century West Virginia.

Even more compelling is McKee's construction of Barker's activities as part of a narrative or metanarrative tradition and how this relates to human consciousness and our societies and customs.

All of this is accomplished with a sure hand and a light touch. The reader will never get bogged down in academic jargon or slog through paragraphs of boring theoretical suppositions.

Gray Barker has achieved a kind of immortality, thanks to the Men in Black, and he himself was fairly ambiguous about "belief". Much of what Barker wrote was not true and he knew it not to be true. He perpetrated frauds and hoaxes, intentionally, often in collusion with others, and he could be amused by as well as sympathetic to those storytellers who believed the tales they told.

The interest in the saucer scene was a useful cover for his sexual activities, since it marked him in his small town as an eccentric sort of guy who might as well be an unmarried loner who spent his time with another guy with the same hobby.

And ultimately Barker seems to have decided that the real issue is a kind of freedom of expression, freedom to think, to dream, to write, to publish, to question and to investigate.

With a bit of work, definitely with a bit of work, you could make him into an American hero.

This is a fantastic book that I think would be interesting to almost anyone, regardless of their interest in UFOs and the like.

It's just brilliant.

The first line is "Against a grainy, green-gray background the oblong, silvery object seems to hang motionless".