David Halperin - Journal of a UFO Investigator

Many have helped me along this road. First and foremost, my wife, Rose Shalom Halperin, my earliest and in many ways my best reader, who saw the first sentences of the first draft (long since discarded) in January 1997, and said, Its good. Keep going. And I did keep going; and when I grew discouraged with the length of the journey and its difficulty, she was there to encourage and sustain me. This book, and my life as a writer, I owe to her.

My friend and former colleague, Professor Yaakov Ariel of the Religious Studies Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, read an early draft and gave me encouragement and valuable suggestions. He drew upon his experience growing up in Jerusalem, in the Abu Tor neighborhood along the old border (before the 1967 war) between Israel and Jordan, to show me how I might handle the end of what is now Part Six; his comments inspired me to locate a crucial scene at the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu. Novelist Lee Smith, with the warm generosity that has always been characteristic of her, read part of that draft and gave me her feedback and encouragement, along with my first guidance into the unfamiliar world of the publishing business.

Several years later, novelist Ann Prospero read part of a later draft that had been much revised and tightened but was still far too long. She said, Youve got two stories here, and they keep getting in each others way. The UFO story is the more exciting of the two. Keep it; get rid of the rest. I did as she suggested. Thus was born Journal of a UFO Investigator in its present form.

Novelist Peggy Payne was book doctor to an early draft, and Im indebted to her for the care and sensitivity she poured into this task. I am indebted to the writers group established in 2001 by Charity Terry-Lorenzo, which has helped me over the years with one novel after another. The membership of the group changed over the years; those who worked with me on Journal of a UFO Investigator were Mike Brown, Vicki Edwards, Sylvia Freeman, Bryan Gilmer, Jessica Hollander, Jennifer Madriaga, Susan Payne, Dave VanHook, and Robin Whitsell. Im grateful to them all, and most especially Bryan and Dave, who, even after we were no longer in the group together, generously read complete drafts of the novel and gave me their invaluable criticism and warm encouragement. So did novelist Joyce Allen and my friends Elaine Bauman and Jonathan Tepper.

My current writing group, under the incomparable leadership of novelist Anna Jean Mayhew, has given me the most immense help with this and other projects. Its members have included Gabriel Cuddahee, Ron Jackson, Deborah Klaus, Kathryn Milam, Susan Payne, Elizabeth Schoenfeld, and Sarah Wilkins. Special thanks to Gabe, who gave me the title for Part One, for which Id searched for many months.

Danny Shapiros story owes a great debt to the mythmaker extraordinaire of Clarksburg, West Virginia, Gray Barker (1925-1984), and his forgotten 1956 bestseller They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The three men in black may not have been Barkers inventionthere probably is a nucleus of fact in the story of Albert K. Benders frightening brush with mysterious visitors in the fall of 1953. But it was Barker who gave the legend its powerful and enduring formulation. He did much the same for the Shaver mystery that unfolded through the second half of the 1940s on the pulp pages of Amazing Stories magazine, with its Elder Gods and dero and underground caves. A few years after the publication of They Knew Too Much, Barker moved on to promoting the legends surrounding the death of Morris K. Jessup (1900-1959) and their link to the ever elusive Philadelphia experiment.

(The second of the two quotations at the beginning of chapter 4 is adapted from Shavers story Thought Records of Lemuria, in the June 1945 issue of Amazing Stories, the first from a column of Barkers in the June 1957 issue of Flying Saucers magazine, reprinted in 2003 by Rick Hilberg. The Shaver quotation on page 73 is in fact Barkers formulation of Shavers ideas: They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, pages 62-63. The passages quoted by Rochelle and Julian on page 63 are from an actual letter sent to Jessup in 1956 by the eccentric drifter Carl Allen, and the description of the moon-tower picture on page 125 is inspired by a cover illustration drawn by Albert Bender for the November 1953 issue of Barkers The Saucerian. Other details of the Gypsies book are my own invention.)

The best exploration to date of Barkers enigmatic life and tangled motivations, his real sincerity and freewheeling approach to truth, is Robert Wilkinsons brilliant 2009 documentary film Shades of Gray. Barkers papers are housed in the Gray Barker Collection of the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library. There, doing research for this book in September 2004, I was welcomed and given every possible assistance by curator David Houchin.

Dannys experience in the Philadelphia Library, in chapter 5, draws upon an incident reported by folklorist Peter Rojcewicz in Journal of American Folklore, vol. 100 (1987), pages 148-161. Others whove inspired this books treatment of UFOs include the late Karl Pflock, whose Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe (2001) is the definitive account of the Roswell legend, and Jerome Clark, my friend from the distant days when I was myself a teenage UFO investigator. In his magnum opus The UFO Encyclopedia (1990-96, second edition 1998), Jerry has gifted us with an inexhaustibly rich source of knowledge, which no one with the smallest interest in UFOs or UFO belief can afford to do without.

The North Carolina Writers Network, through its annual conferences, helped me learn that literary agents are not necessarily figures of dread. Through its critiquing service, it allowed me to make use of the book-doctoring of poet and short story writer Ruth Moose, who gave me the right feedback at the right time.

And speaking of agents ... Im lucky to be represented by one of the finest, the supremely savvy and sensitive Peter Steinberg. Not only did Peter find a splendid home for my bookits his genius, for taking a story and making it better, that I have to thank for three plot alterations that raised the novel to an entirely new level. For all the good things that have happened to this book, Im deeply grateful to him, his wonderful assistant Lisa Kopel, and his overseas colleagues at Intercontinental Literary Agency (Sam Edenborough, Tessa Girvan, Nicki Kennedy, and Jenny Robson). Also to Bill Martin and Beverly Swerling Martin of Agent Research and Evaluation, whose expertise first guided me in Peters direction.

At Viking, Ive been blessed with two of the finest editors I can imagine. Kendra Harpster, who shepherded the manuscript from acquisition to production, persisted in asking exactly the right questions of the book and refused to be contented with any answer that did not move it toward becoming all it could be. Josh Kendall has taken it from there, bringing his panache and sound judgment to the books benefit in a multitude of ways. Thanks also to Amanda Brower and Laura Tisdel, for their careful reads and penetrating suggestions, and to Maggie Riggs, Joshs tirelessly helpful assistant. And to Carolyn Coleburn, Gabrielle Gantz, Alex Gigante, Pearl Hanig, Daniel Lagin, and Jennifer Tait.

I thank novelist Philip Gerard, for a conversation more than six years ago which helped me see unrealized potential for the book. I thank reference librarian Barbara Harris of the Roswell (New Mexico) Public Library, who helped me research the history of the town and the air force base when I visited Roswell in September 2006; and the staff of the Free Library of Philadelphia, who helped me get the details of the library scenes just right. I thank writers Paul Cuadros, Alison Hill, Jake Horwitz, John Kessel, Duncan Murrell, James Protzman, John Reed, Howard Schwartz, Daniel Wallace, Allen Wold, and the late Professor Martin Lakin; readers Ayesha Coleman and Benjamin MacLeod; and our family friends Shirley Bullock, Gina Mahalek and Jackie Wilson, Steve Eubanks and Steve Mullinix, for help that they themselves know best. And I thank our beloved community of faith, the Eno River Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (ERUUF) of Durham, North Carolina, which has given Rose and me a place of worship and inspiration, amply fulfilling for us the promise of one of our favorite Unitarian Universalist hymns: