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This Is a True Story | The Poetry Foundation

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Gray Barker helped create UFO mythology from his home in rural West Virginia. In his poems, he channels the repression and paranoia that stalked postwar America. Art by Anthony Gerace. Ufology has always been fundamentally about authenticity: the video, the photograph, the classified text—the document, the actual thing. The search for extraterrestrial life involves scrutinizing blurs on images, assessing the credibility of witnesses, and peering through hoax, fabrication, psyop, and counter-psyop to get to the verifiable and undeniable. The real. This is why Gray Barker’s legacy in ufology remains unstable at best. On the one hand, he sits at the crossroads of nearly all of the major UFO stories of the second half of the 20th century: the Men in Black, the Mothman, the Flatwoods Monster, the Philadelphia Experiment. Even if you’ve never heard of him, his work was the source material for a great deal of the popular culture you’ve consumed. On the other hand, while he dedicated his life

Ufology has always been fundamentally about authenticity: the video, the photograph, the classified text—the document, the actual thing . The search for extraterrestrial life involves scrutinizing blurs on images, assessing the credibility of witnesses, and peering through hoax, fabrication, psyop, and counter-psyop to get to the verifiable and undeniable. The real . This is why Gray Barker’s legacy in ufology remains unstable at best. On the one hand, he sits at the crossroads of nearly all of the major UFO stories of the second half of the 20th century: the Men in Black, the Mothman, the Fla

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