65 HS1-834228961 62-HQ-83894 Serial 403

Some items in the FBI’s long-running flying saucer file, 62-HQ-83894, are reports and memos. This one is a book jacket. Serial 403 consists of the front and back flaps of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers by Gray Barker, published by University Books of New York at $3.50. No covering note survives in the released pages to say who sent it to the Bureau or why it was filed.

What the jacket promises

The blurb sets out the book’s claim: that leading civilian researchers who challenged official denials that saucers came from space had been silenced one by one after visits from three men in dark suits. Who the visitors were, it says, nobody knows — government agents, men from outer space, or someone else.

The flaps present Barker as a sober businessman who ran a film booking and buying agency in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and who became interested in 1952, when a saucer allegedly landed near his home and he found the frightened witnesses convincing. They also mention that he published a saucer periodical, The Saucerian, and quote H. G. Rhawn, owner of the Clarksburg News, who carefully disclaims belief in saucers but says the subject deserves investigation.

Why the book mattered

Barker’s book is widely credited with launching the “men in black” theme in UFO lore. Its central story concerns Albert K. Bender, whose own book on the “three men” turns up for sale in a 1966 saucer-club magazine elsewhere in the same FBI file, Serial 449. The 1952 West Virginia landing the jacket alludes to is generally identified as the Flatwoods case, which Barker investigated at the time. The jacket itself is advertising, not evidence.