Gabriel McKee’s The Saucerian opens not with a sighting but a misrecognition. “That’s definitely a UFO,” says a bored voice on a 2015 cellphone video. The object is, by definition, unidentified. But it is also, by cultural training, entirely recognisable. This paradox of the unknown rendered familiar, even kitsch, is the atmosphere in which McKee situates Gray Barker: the trickster-publisher who helped seed the American conspiracist unconscious, not by uncovering truths, but by telling stories too seductive to disbelieve. McKee, an historian of religious subcultures, has written not a biography in the conventional sense, but a kind of bibliographic séance. His subject is less Barker the man than the circuits of paper, ink, mimeograph and distribution that carried the gospel of the weird across Cold War America.
Print Worlds
Gray Barker was many things—queer, closeted, rural, broke, gleefully unserious. But he was above all a printer. From his West Virginian home, he ran Saucerian Books, a zine-and-paperback outfit that, between the 1950s and the Reagan era, published some of the most outlandish tales in UFO lore: the Men in Black, the Philadelphia Experiment, telepathic Venusians and flying saucers trailing ectoplasm. He was a hoaxer, yes, but not a cynical one. Barker belonged to a tradition of playful anti-epistemology. A figure closer to the showmen of Victorian spiritualism or the Situationists of 1968 than to the Substack conspiracists of the present. His sin, if it was a sin, was to know exactly what he was doing.
McKee’s central insight is to treat UFOs as literary objects. The flying saucer is not primarily a matter of empirical data or testimony; it is a story, mediated through form. Zines, cheap paperbacks, margins, typefaces, catalogue blurbs and mail-order ephemera: the infrastructure of belief is as important as its content. The UFO is not out there but in here, on pulp paper, between staples, riding the postal service. The narrative structure of the phenomenon emerges from the material forms in which it circulates. In the 1950s, with offset printing and duplicators newly available to the eccentric and the fringe, flying saucers became reproducible in more ways than one.
McKee is deft in tracing how these narratives layered up. He distinguishes between micronarratives (individual accounts), narratives (shaped stories), metanarratives (interpretive frameworks), and the macronarrative—the total world-building project of American UFO lore. Barker’s role was less that of witness than mythographer. He took fragments and spun them into story cycles, not to resolve them, but to ensure they kept spinning.
Faith Economies
In this sense, The Saucerian reads like a prequel to the world I explored in my review of Marc Jacobson’s Pale Horse Rider, his study of William Cooper. If Cooper, the paranoiac preacher of Behold a Pale Horse, baptised a generation of American reactionaries into the faith of conspiracism, then Barker helped write the liturgy. Where Cooper raged, Barker winked. Where Cooper saw apocalypse, Barker saw the potential for a joke. But both men worked within the same economy of belief: one in which the absence of trust—especially in state authority—became the condition for imaginative elaboration. The flying saucer, the fake moon landing, the black helicopters circling in the desert: all are scenes from a broken narrative order.
The real subject of The Saucerian, then, is not UFOs but the political function of the unknown. McKee draws on Mark Featherstone’s account of conspiracy as a dialectic between fact and fiction, a tension sustained until the myth implodes. Barker’s genius was to keep that tension unresolved. He gave readers just enough coherence to believe, just enough absurdity to doubt. It wasn’t theology he offered, but mood: what I’ve elsewhere described as paranoiac realism, a form of narrative production suited to a culture drowning in secrecy and contradiction. In such a world, even a hoax has the ring of revelation.
This insight feels particularly acute when considering the way the American state now plays at conspiracy. The Trump administration proved adept at reviving the lab-leak theory of COVID-19, not as science, but as theatre, narrative warfare against public health institutions and epistemic trust itself. Likewise, the slow-drip release of the JFK files served not to resolve old questions but to dramatise their persistence. The spectacle of disclosure was the point. The state no longer suppresses conspiracy theories; it performs them. Trumpism borrows the structure of the Barker hoax and drains it of humour, flattening play into menace. What once felt camp now curdles into resentment.
Closet Codes
There is another arc to McKee’s study that remains partially submerged. Barker, closeted for most of his life, operated in a subculture already attuned to secrecy, performance and misdirection. The UFO mythos wasn’t just an outlet for conspiracist thinking. It offered a structure of feeling for the queer subject. Men in Black, mysterious codes, hidden knowledge and cosmic riddles: the machinery of UFO culture is also a metaphor for the closet. McKee notes Barker’s use of second-person narration, an address that draws the reader into complicity without ever stating the terms. It is the voice of implication, of things felt but never confirmed.
To read Barker’s work as mere hoax is to miss the queer tactics at play. He didn’t debunk the paranormal so much as inhabit it, parody it, build it up only to wink as the scaffolding swayed. His pulp covers, breathless blurbs and typographic flourishes belong to a camp aesthetic. A sensibility that treats belief not as falsehood but as style. He turned fringe publishing into a kind of queer world-building, less interested in truth than in possibility. There is a sense throughout McKee’s book that Barker believed just enough to keep the machine going, but never enough to surrender to its logic. He played the believer while knowing that playing was itself the point.
McKee is not especially concerned with these resonances, and his focus remains squarely on bibliography and textual form. This, too, is a missed opportunity. The period in which Barker operated—the Cold War, the red scare, the professionalisation of secrecy. Was also one in which real structures of state power remained opaque, menacing and deeply heteronormative. To live outside those structures required invention. Barker’s books were one such invention. They sold mystery, but also offered an escape from the demand for truth. He was, in the end, not so much a fraud as a fabulist, one who understood that in a world built on lies, the fiction might be the only thing that still tells the truth.
That Barker helped build the scaffolding of postwar conspiracy culture should not disqualify him from serious attention. We may have a complicated relationship with conspiracy, especially on the Left, at once wary of its proximity to fascism, but alive to its resonance as a distorted form of critique. The conspiracist impulse is not always reactionary. It can be, and often is, a misrecognised materialism. A folk response to real experiences of dispossession, deceit, and elite impunity. It asks, albeit in the wrong register, the right question: Who is doing this to us? What Barker did, knowingly or not, was give aesthetic shape to that question. He turned suspicion into a genre. He made the unseeable not only visible, but printable.
In the end, there is something in the form that still calls to us. Even now, the state speaks in euphemism and silence. Capital appears everywhere and nowhere. Tech moguls cloak power in libertarian mysticism. The Left needs its own mythographers. Not to peddle fantasies, but to account for the lived texture of political unreality. Barker understood, perhaps before most, that narrative is infrastructure. The flying saucer, the spectral agent, the redacted file: these are not merely delusions. They are attempts, imperfect, sometimes deranged, often compelling, to map a world structured to be unreadable. In that sense, the conspiracy theorist and the Marxist share at least one conviction: that reality, as it is presented, is not to be trusted.
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