If you were to give a party, Robert Barry is someone you might want to invite.
Barry is a 52-years-old Pennsylvanian with the deep baritone voice of a radio announcer, which is what he has been for much of his life. Today, he is general sales manager of Red Lion radio station WGCB.
But Barry's hobbyhorse, which he says is close to becoming a full-time job, is flying saucers.
Or, as they are more properly called, Unidentified Flying Objects.
You get him started and Barry can go on for hours, reeling off one eerie and intriguing saucer story after another. He gathered them during the 17 years he spent intensively investigating UFOs since he was news director of an Olean, N.Y., radio station and became intrigued by a UFO landing in Texas.
And last year, Barry teamed up with an old associate and fellow spellbinder, the Rev. Carl McIntire of Collingswood.
Unbeknownst to many, McIntire has been a somewhat unlikely believer in flying saucers since the early 1950s when the pilot of an airplane on which he and his wife were travelling spotted a saucer and took some very clear photographs of it. And McIntire somehow found within confines of his rigid Presbyterian theology room for the belief that the UFOs are manned by alien, intelligent beings come to snoop on earthlings.
So McIntire, who has devoted most of his life to ferretting out strange and alien menaces of earthly origin which most cannot see, and Barry, who is religiously a fundamentalist Christian, formed the Twentieth Century UFO Bureau.
In a few short months, the Bureau produced a 32-page illustrated booklet, "Visitors from Outer Space", free to anyone writing the UFO Bureau, Collingswood, N.J. 08108. A press run of 10,000 almost exhausted, a second publication is now being prepared and a book is in the planning stages. Furthermore, Barry has travelled as far as Toronto, to give elaborate slide presentations and seminars which regularly draw standing-room-only audiences.
It's obvious why, because Barry brings some pretty convincing — and intriguing — evidence and witnesses to his programs.
For example, there's the former Air Force man who was one of more than a dozen Air Force witnesses to a UFO landing on Mitchell Air Force Base in New York State in 1956.
This man, whom I interviewed last October, was returning to the barracks about midnight. He had just passed a hangar when the whole area lit up bright as day, the light drawing 10 to 12 other men out. The ship was the saucer-shaped kind, with portholes, and it kept getting brighter until the portholes could no longer be seen.
I sat there until finally, it silently lifted up, slowly, hovered a while and then shot straight up until it disappeared.
It had not been tracked by radar when it landed, probably because it came in too low, but it was tracked when it took off
, Barry relates.
Another sighting particularly impressed Barry, because he was one of the persons who saw the objects.
It was in Olean in 1958, on the occasion of a birthday party we were having for my 13-year-old daughter in our back yard.
At the time I was news director of station WMNS and also the town's Civil Defense director. At about 9 p.m. the phone rang. It was someone who said there was an airplane in trouble coming to Olean and we should watch for it.
No sooner than I had told my wife about the call here came three tremendous, round UFOs right overhead — they were a brilliant white and absolutely silent, travelling northeast, towards Buffalo.
After they had passed over our house, they came to a stop and hovered, and shot out red fireballs which went out before they touched ground. After they shot out the fireballs, they started again and continued out of sight .
Barry admits he does not know where the UFOs come from, but he's convinced they are solid, metallic and directed, if not manned, by intelligent, extra-terrestrial beings.
He relates them to Biblical prophecies of the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ, such as Luke 21:11:
And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs
shall there be from heaven.
Scientists believe there are 100 million inhabited planets in our Milky
Way galaxy alone, and there are untold number of galaxies,
Barry says, cavalierly
mixing science and myth. Perhaps these UFOs are manned by beings who come from similar
worlds to ours, or worlds where there is no sin. Because God tossed Lucifer and the fallen angels down here where we
are, the earth, not up there in the heavens, is the logical place for sin to be introduced.