Customer Reviews

They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers

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Considering the reputation of the author as a bold-faced hoaxer, this book is still considered to be the one that started it all-Flying Saucers, Men-in-Black, Lemuria-it's all here. Although many current researchers and Roswell-philes may be quick to discredit and sweep Barker under the carpet, They Knew Too Much is still an integral part of the canon.

I saw an advertisement for this book in a local newspaper and decided to purchase it.

While the book initially grabs you and pulls you in, towards the end you have read some of the most outlandish theories, over-dramatic musings, simpleton ways of thinking about the whole 'saucer' phenomenon.

It is a relatively easy read both in length and style and I'll have to admit it did hook me. But did it hook me because of the mystery of UFO's or because some of the explanations about UFO's and their relationship with humans, the earth, our world governments, conspiracies, religion are so wacky it was enticing to read what the author would say next.

It did present one or two theories that I did find very interesting and even plausible, and it did lend much more mystery to the Men In Black. Just who are these dark dressed men who answer nothing and interogate the victims of UFO incidents,then scaring them half to death.

This book is classic for the pulp science fiction readers of the late 40's and early 50's where science was mysterious to the common man. But now in 1999 it is really hard to believe (and embarrassing to know) that we as a society actually thought this way.

It was a half-century ago when my mother and I entered the dark,dusky interior of an old used bookstore on Market Street, in downtown St.Louis Missouri.

I was about ten years old, but I already had a burning interest in Flying Saucers, as most people called them back then.

It was a hot topic, and Saucer sightings were in the news all the time. I ate up every book and story I could find about these strange objects in the sky.

Then I saw a blue copy of Gray Barker's "They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers", and mom let me buy it.

This book hooked me for a lifetime wanting to know everything about UFO's.

Finally, I saw one myself, in September of 1969, with three witnesses...a red glowing, silent egg-shaped light no more than 500 feet above us. It stuck around too, while we got out of the car and gazed upon it in silent wonder.

This glowing thing was a UFO in the strictest definition, but I have no idea what it was or where it came for, but it behaved like it was intelligently controlled, and it was very scary!

Back to Mr. Gray's book...skeptics nowadays say it was bogus from the start, but it's a great read, and like another reviewer said, it does belong in the canon of UFO literature.

I hope all of you reading this review gets to read this book and enjoy it as much as I did!

Allegedly, this is the book that launched the myth of the Men in Black, back in 1956 (the author does not capitalize or use the acronym).

It is a readable book, but not a good book. It has an easy journalistic style, very matter-of-fact, but with oddly interpolated melodramatic and exclamatory phrases! To remind you to be frightened, I presume.

The major weakness is the lack of info about UFOs. The few short case studies are nothing but a prelude to a lengthy investigation of how a few saucer magazine publishers got spooked into voluntarily shutting down (or so they claim -- several people in the book were still active in the following decades, according to the Skeptical Inquirer).

But it is interesting to read a front-line report of fringe phenomena where the protagonists TRUST the government and are not necessarily paranoi; when UFO tracking was a gee-whiz science hobby fuelled by intellectual curiosity and not a delusion about one-world governments or the occult.

Not a good book, but fun to read about a phenomenon before it became a phenomenon.

For me this was a great book to read. It captures views about flying saucers as those views existed back in the 1950s. I can almost imagine myself walking into a drug store back then and paying my 60 cents to buy this book.

The author published a magazine or newsletter caller 'The Saucerian' and the readers got directly involved with trying to figure out what flying saucers really are.

According to Wikipedia this book contains the first references to the so called 'Men In Black'. These are the characters who visit people who 'know too much about flying saucers'.

That same Wikipedia article suggests that Barker didn't really believe the things he wrote about flying saucers. I don't know if that is the case but the book captures the atmosphere of the strange flying saucer phenomenon as it existed at that time.

This subject of intimidation by the MIB is very interesting. Based on other books I have read they do more than just threaten people.

Richard Dolan gets into this subject in this book:

UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Coverup, 1941-1973

An author like that could probably create a great book dedicated to just this one subject of people being threatened, murdered, etc., because they knew too much.

It appears that the threats and potential violence against people who had knowledge about the flying discs goes back to when the phenomenon first started.

Kenneth Arnold was supposedly in danger at some point from the government spooks according to Dolan. Arnold thought of the term 'flying saucer'.

The nurse at the Roswell base who had witnessed the autopsies died mysteriously.

Many other witnesses for the Roswell incident report being threatened.

Morris K. Jessup.

It's a long list.

Based on what I have read the MIB sometimes appear as human beings, sometimes as robots or other things.

Jeff Marzano

Secret Life: Firsthand, Documented Accounts of Ufo Abductions

Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a UFO

Top Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 and the United States Government's UFO Cover-up

Ufo...Contact from Planet Iarga

Secrets of the Unified Field: The Philadelphia Experiment, The Nazi Bell, and the Discarded Theory

Missing Time

During the summer of 1955 I was staying with my grandparents in Mt Healthy, Ohio, in and around the greater Cincinnati area the locals were seeing UFO's and little green men. That's when they advertised the book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers and at twelve years old and being freshly introduced to the UFO scare I naturally bought the book. Over the years I misplaced my original book and so with this opportunity to purchase this reprint I now have the opportunity to enjoy it all over once again. The one thing I remember most is that this is the first time the Men in Black are mentioned and since then they have popped up in other writings as well as on screen. I haven't finished re-reading it but so far I have enjoyed it as I did back then in the summer of !955.

I am the author of an article for Skeptical Inquirer about Gray Barker, who was my first publisher. My further research for a new article indicates that Gray didn't even believe much of the story he had related in "They Knew Too Much ..." Consequently, read this book with a jaundiced eye!

...

This book is filled with outlandish stories that, somehow, caught the public's eye in the 1950s. Barker had a reputation for purposely mixing fact with fiction; as long as it made a buck he was happy. His section on the Men in Black, for example, was mostly made up by him. The magazine Skeptical Inquirer exposed his MIB hoax in its May/June 1998 issue.