The Secret Terror Among Us-An Introductory Farewell to My Friend Gray Barker On September 6, 2004, Yushchenko became ill

after dining with leaders of the Ukrainian secret police. Unlike other social or political engagements, this dinner did not include anyone else on Yushchenko's team. No precautions were taken regarding the food. Within hours after the dinner, Yushchenko began vomiting violently. His face became paralyzed; he could not speak or read. He developed a severe stomachache and backache as well as gastrointestinal pain. Outwardly, Yushchenko developed what is known as chloracne, a serious skin condition that leaves the face scarred and disfigured. By December 2004, doctors had determined that Yushchenko had been the victim of dioxin poisoning. The ultimate postmodern novel. Gray Barkers work is an act of literary self-creation. If the postmodern novel troubled the notion of authorship, of intertextual relations, and of the margins between text and context, then the Gray Barker archive is the most extensive, successful, and aporetic postmodern novel ever written. Individual texts in the archive present complex interplays of truth, interpolation, and invention. At the same time, the archives insertion into public memory and the space of debate causes a seismic disturbance in the very concept of the archive. By definition, UFOs are a question of evidence. We seek evidence of their existence, but also find that all evidence produced poses questions on the nature of evidence itself. The Gray Barker archive presents no end of evidence, presents the author as trickster, and presents text asa self-reflexive and pastiche. The Gray Barker Project My friend Gray Barker, the author of this work, published it in a spiral-bound, very limited edition shortly before his rather bizarre death. Gray was born in 1925 at Rifle, Virginia, and died in 1984. Like many of the heroic researchers who branched out from general UFO studies to the infamous Men in Black (he coined the term), his life was cut short. He published a variety of books on the subject, including: Gray Barker's Works They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) Gray Barkers Book of Adamski (1965) Gray Barker's Book of Saucers (1965) Gray Barker's Questions and Answers About UFOs (1967) The Silver Bridge (1970) Gray Barker at Giant Rock (1976) A UFO Guide to Fate Magazine (1981) Gray Barker's UFO Annual (1982) The Year of the Saucer (1983) MIB: The Secret Terror Among Us (1983) After the Philadelphia experiment (1984)

Gray was a more mysterious fellow, and more complex, than even his closest friends may have realized. Was he a prankster? A folklorist living in the mythos? A serious UFOlogist? A cynical trouble maker? Ive heard and read comments by his friends that could lead in any of these directions, or all of them. Like I said, he was a complex man. Thus, his greatest work, The Silver Bridge went largely unrecognized for what it was, while he was best known for his first, They Knew Too Much About the Flying Saucers. His specialty was the Men in Black cases in fact, he coined that term. In M.I.B. The Secret Terror Among Us first published by New Age Press the year before his death, and after he had already become mysteriously ill with a then virtually unknown condition, Gray moves away from the poetry of The Silver Bridge back to a more melodramatic documentary record of the whole range of MIB cases. But this is not just an extension of Grays earlier Works. He reveals a knowledge of the occult and metaphysical connection among the UFO and MIB phenomena that is at the level of only a few others before him Meade Laynes BSRA, and, much later, John Keel and Jacques Vallee. Ten years before my Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts devoted a key chapter to The Men in Black and Their Magical Origin (IllumiNet Press, 1994), Gray devoted a key revealing chapter in the present volume to The Brothers of the Shadow. As he notes therein,
Any writer expressing pat explanations has just never studied occult tradition, in which the MIB are firmly established. As military secret weapon theories can never explain UFOs, which have been seen from the dawn of recorded history, the CIA could not be responsible for the MIB who have, down through the centuries, meddled into our affairs, and, just as they do today, scared the living daylights out of us!

Though I had read most of the corpus of Grays many books, I confess that in the middle 1980s I was involved deeply in a secret society of supposed occultists so deeply that the first time around, I missed this one, went on to write my own take on UFOs and the MIB a decade later, and only much more recently was asked by the new publisher to review and develop an introduction to this most excellent book. Gray was far ahead of his time and it is no accident that The National UFO Conference named its Lifetime Achievement Award after him, first given to Grays good friend and mine Jim Moseley. Gray closed the book with his customary good humored suggestion, Pull the covers up more tightly around your neck, dear reader..If you dont know too much, there is nothing to worry about. OTHERWISE THE MIB WILL GET YOU IF YOU DONT WATCH OUT! A year later he had past on. He is missed, but not at all forgotten. Allen H. Greenfield, May 27, 2009.