The Silver Bridge

FOREWORD TO THE 2008 EDITION

I came across Gray Barker’s
Silver Bridge
during a flurry of synchronicities in the early 1990s that also caused me to read John Keel’s book
The Mothman Prophecies: An Investigation Into the Mysterious American Visits of the Infamous Feathery Garuda.
I waited many weeks for one of the few remaining copies of
Silver Bridge
to be delivered to my local library. I was intensely interested in Gray’s take because I was one of those original witnesses Keel and Barker were going around trying to interview in the late 1960s. I happened to grow up in Mound, WV (now N. Charleston), and was 7 years old when the Birdman - later called “Mothman” - was first spotted. While Mothman became famous for his visits to Pt. Pleasant, he also buzzed Charleston’s State Capitol dome, Sunrise Museum, and Union Carbide plant - where I glimpsed him. Later, in 1973, I saw what seemed to be a shadowy echo of Mothman emerge from a tree. The location was right where one of my best friends had seen a vision - in 1967 - about an attack on NYC in 2001 that would “start WWIII.” According to my friend, the Birdman had suggested we build a shrine and stand in a certain spot in order to “see the future.” I was dubious, of course, but my friend soon proved his case by daring me to stand in a spot near his front door. When I accepted the dare, I indeed saw brief, flickering images of the same vision. As one might expect, I was shocked and horrified. My pal later moved away, but I never forgot the incident.

As a witness, I was chilled to the bone when I read Keel’s weird, scary Mothman tale, for I then knew that the memories I had of odd childhood events were accurate. However
The Silver Bridge
was just as chilling for me, because Barker often utilized the point of view of a young boy, longing to know Mothman. And that was me! Even today,
The Silver Bridge
takes me back to my experiences in a very real way. Ironically, the chapters many consider to be hokey or contrived - like where Barker asks us to see things from Mothman’s point of view - are the ones that affect me the most. In many ways, I am still that “Mothboy,” searching for hope, dreaming of flying. Gray’s understanding of the inner states of witnesses was uncanny. It’s as if Barker came into contact with this phenomenon himself He
knew.
He understood its human quotient. Many researchers toil for decades without realizing that our collective unconscious may be involved. Barker grasped this possibility instantly, and expounded upon it in an elegant, nuanced way.

While it is true that Keel, myself, and others sense that “Mothman” may actually be the Garuda, an archetypal, crime-fighting birdman sending psychic messages to humans in order to stop global catastrophe, that doesn’t paint the whole picture. The birdman also sends us key, intimate messages about our personal lives. It is within this private realm that Gray, ever human and caring, timelessly shines.

Andy Colvin

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2008 EDITION

I first met Gray Barker at the 2nd National UFO Conference in Cleveland, Ohio in 1965. The year before, at the first meeting of that long-running annual event (which I co-founded with Rick Hilberg and the late Al Manak), Jim Moseley had said, “We’ve got to get Gray to come to one of these things.” Gray was indeed an honored guest from then on, and it was to Jim Moseley that the first “Gray Barker Lifetime Achievement in Ufology Award” was eventually given, in Atlanta in 1995.

By then Gray had long passed from these shores, leaving us with an extraordinary legacy of wild rumor, exotic folklore, poetic license, and mysterious fact - puzzle pieces of what was (and still is) ufology.

Gray got his one and only best-selling book early in his career, after being a member of the first UFO club, Albert K. Bender’s “International Flying Saucer Bureau.” Gray was starting his own long-running
Saucerian Bulletin
and publishing house (Saucerian Publications) when Bender was mysteriously forced out of ufology - he said - by three men in dark clothing, supposedly government agents. Eventually, the story morphed into these visitors being “ufonauts.” We now know, of course, that in 1952 the CIA had recommended that a certain amount of mischief be introduced into private UFO societies following the wave of UFOs over Washington, D.C., which had compromised national security (or so it was said at the time). The story might have died with a very frightened and silenced Bender were it not for Gray’s explosive and entertaining book about the Bender case,
They Knew Too Much About the Flying Saucers.

Of course, the Men in Black did not start with Bender, or Barker. As early as 1947, Seattle’s famous Maury Island case involved such mysterious visitors, and the “Man in Black” repeatedly shows up in medieval occult lore - often, as the devil himself! But Barker’s exposition of the Men in Black put them on the ufology radar and into popular imagination, where they have remained to the present day.

Gray Barker was born in Rifle, Virginia, in 1925, but is best known for his many years in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he became the first investigator on the scene of the famous Flatwoods Monster and Mothman cases. A college graduate majoring in English, Barker had a flare for extracting the folklore from UFO lore, and the UFO lore from the rich folkloric tradition indigenous to the Appalachian Mountains. Being a local film distributor for many years, he also had an intimate knowledge of the people of Appalachia who, because of their long-standing need to survive in the face of incredible hardships, tend to exhibit an unusual mix of sarcasm, superstition, honesty, dry (and often black) humor, practicality, naivete, and dramatic theatricality. In essence, they can be yarn spinners and straight-shooters rolled into one. Gray incorporated all of these tendencies into his work, often causing it to be misunderstood by both supporters and detractors from “the big city.”

I met Gray in his “middle period” after Flatwoods and Bender, but before the Mothman scare that led to the volume presently under consideration. One time we were having a dinner meeting in an Atlanta restaurant, with Moseley and local fans. Someone brought up the question of “what Barker really believes.” I looked at Gray, slyly.

“I think I know.” I said, smiling. “On one level, Gray is the staunchest believer in some of the most bizarre stuff in ufology. He is the “Champion of The Weird.” “But,” I continued, “that isn’t the real story. Under that is Gray the cynic, who believes none of it - who is yarn-spinning merrily away.” Gray was poker-faced, but obviously interested… “However, we’re still not there,” I said, looking him square in the eyes, “because way down deep, Gray Barker believes all of it: the Men in Black, the space people, the saucers, the monsters - all of it.”

Gray was amused, I think, but he remained poker-faced. “I believe,” he said, after a long pause, “in everything, and nothing.”

I see no need to dwell on the Moseley-Barker “merry trickster” phase, where the two had minor fun with overly serious researchers. Suffice to say, one can pretend to be a UFO investigator - in a lab coat behind a glass wall or computer keyboard - or one can roll up one’s sleeves, get one’s hands dirty, and become a living, breathing part of the mythos. Gray chose the latter course, as the chapter “The Recorder” intimates.

The John Keel book,
The Mothman Prophecies,
is a reporter’s look at the events in West Virginia in the late 1960s, by a rather offbeat reporter. The volume you hold in your hands,
The Silver Bridge,
is another story altogether. Shortly after the famous West Virginia Mothman cases and the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge, Gray sent me a curious manuscript. He must have considered me to be one of the “deep thinkers” in ufology… Immediately, I could see that it was not written in Keel’s style - not even vaguely. It was, like all of Gray’s books, a form of docudrama, on the border between real events and the mythos generated by those events. It was one amazing book. I read it and reread it. “Wow,” I thought, “this is it! The real thing…” I proofread it for Gray and wrote the original introduction, which was nowhere equal to the book itself.
The Silver Bridge
brought hardly a ripple in 1970, although it has since become well known and highly collectible, due its rarity and - at a deeper level - its incisive look at the psychological underpinnings of paranormal phenomena.

In a sense, this strange and exceptional volume is closer to the emotional mood and gothic imagery of the
The Mothman Prophecies
film than even the Keel book of the same name. Barker deftly captures the numinosity and sheer weirdness of those dreamlike events, examining what it must have been like to grow up in mist-shrouded hills where good and evil struggle for men’s hearts and minds - and where so many things are “off-limits” to the ordinary. One gets a strong dose of conspiracy and grassroots folklore, laced with the sexual undertones of firebrand preachers painting verbal images of Hell designed to haunt their parishioners in an eerily erotic way. Gray saw these paradoxes in the whole Mothman cycle, and told me so. A careful reading of
The Silver Bridge
reveals a respect for the power of the psyche, and hints at an essentially human key to the UFO mystery.

In the end, one must have both the objective, skeptical accounts of a Keel and the subjective ruminations of a Gray Barker to fully appreciate what Mothman represents, and to see where the entire convoluted web of “ufology” leads.

You are at the threshold of The Matrix. To get beyond this introduction, you need to decide on the red pill or the green pill, and get ready to descend down the rabbit hole into the “real” world. Have an enlightening voyage… Or, put the book down and go back to sleep.

Allen H. Greenfield
April 11, 2008

A REMEMBRANCE OF GRAY - by Jim Moseley, 2002

The people-and-persons side of ufology is much more entertaining - and maybe even more important - than UFOs themselves. Those drawn to saucers - believers and skeptics alike - have always been a remarkable bunch of characters. Many are highly credulous, easy targets for practical jokes and tales of conspiracy, cover-up, and assorted weirdness. For better or worse, both Gray Barker and I quite happily took advantage of this, frequently as partners in crime. I leave it to others to ponder the whys behind our actions. Whatever the psychology involved, we truly enjoyed ourselves. My devilish adventures with Gray were some of the best times of my life. Gray was my good friend from the time we met in early 1954 until his untimely death in 1984 at the age of 59. He was a complex, private person, and I’m quite sure I knew him better than anyone else during his adult years. He should have lived forever, but he didn’t. I still miss him.

Gray was reviled, laughed at, or ignored with difficulty by most Serious Ufologists but genuinely revered by hosts of Believers. With his
Saucerian Bulletin,
Gray set a never-since-equaled (even by me) standard for ufological reporting - that is, the spinning of brilliant saucer yarns in good, entertaining English that excited and titillated the reader. Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, he got a real kick out of saucers, compiling many “contactee” books - and some even more far-out than that - under his Saucerian Press and New Age Books imprints. He also wrote about a dozen very humorous monographs, of which, as far as I know, I have the only existing copies. Like the so-called MJ-12 documents, some of these were “one copy only” productions, while others were distributed only to a tiny inner circle of friends. All offer wry and cutting commentary on ufology and life in general. They were marvelously written but, it seems, too pointed and unconventional for even such an iconoclast as Gray to publish more widely.