![]() ![]() Barker’s sense of Alienation and isolation from his neighbors living deep in Appalachia in the last century long before stonewall, long before any battlecries for civil rights would explode into the fold at the height of the 60’s. I think however, one can see why Barker may have been bitter toward his neighbors when we consider the man he was.īorn in 1925, Barker grew up in the last century in Riffle, Braxton County, West Virginia.Ī homosexual one can only sympathize with Mr. Disdain for his neighbors, for his home, all motivated by a life of alienation. ![]() Behind the magic, his book was in a way, antisocial. For the sake of his grift Barker exploited the pain, terror and fear of Point Pleasant and dipped it all in powdered sugar and sold it all in heaping diabetic servings to the masses while he laughed and mocked and patted himself on the back because he got away with it. It has all the charm of a tipped gravestone washed in the scent of teenage urine. It’s truly painful to see Barker title his book “The Silver Bridge”. He defiled a true story with his fanfiction. He saw opportunity in the obfuscation and mythologizing of wounds freshly bleeding in the minds of the people of Point Pleasant, sprinkling magic and “cute” stories of men in black befriending little boys whose “charms” were over-described in the fashion of Nabokov’s Lolita for the sake of “wonderment”and “whimsy”, adding ridiculous inner monologues to real people as if they were fictional characters, all while the frostbitten souls of those who died on that fateful winter’s night still cried out from the depths of The Ohio River. Like a starving buzzard, Barker saw opportunity in the fear of his neighbors. Much like the Brothers Grimm, Barker was moreso interested in folklore, fairytales and flights of fancy that sold bunk-books moreso than cataloguing data in regards to the phenomena, while one could say that is the nature of fortean literature, this was something far more tasteless. But behind closed doors, in cigarette smoke-filled rooms over drinks and behind the backs of his neighbors Barker would laugh and mock, mock all who had experienced the wonderment, terror and mystery of the phenomena, writing little sing-song poems about how “ufo’s are a bucket of shit” like some horrid malevolent homunculus from a Brothers Grimm Tale. ![]() Barker, a writer and West-Virginian local was not an experiencer himself, though at the time he was able to convince those around him that he was a sincere researcher… no, THE BEST researcher in town when it came to the phenomena. When observing the phenomenon in places and times such as Point Pleasant, WV in 66–67 there is a great secret danger in the way humans approach their encounters with the otherworldly and that danger comes with people like Gray Barker. ![]() Simply saying what happened (he of course omitted many things from his books because he found that they would rob credibility from his already incredible collection of experiences) and stuck as closely as he could to pure data. Folk such as Knapp, Von Daniken, Heinrich Himmler and his Ahnenerbe and yes!! Gray Barker of course and many more paid shills, grifters and other ilk. Like any man interested in the “unexplained” or whatever you want to call it, I’ve gotten used to encountering a plethora of work from some of history’s greatest bullshit artists. ![]()
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