Cover

Communion is the story of Whitley Strieber’s attempt to deal with a shattering assault from the unknown. To all appearances, he and his family have had a series of elaborate personal encounters with intelligent nonhuman beings in his isolated cabin in upstate New York.***At first he thought he was losing his mind. Unconcerned with the whole phenomenon of UFOs and extraterrestrials, he viewed them as a false unknown, easily explainable as misperceptions or hallucinations. But the visitors marched right into the middle of the life of this indifferent skeptic.***Who are these visitors? Where do they come from? Do they represent some as-yet-unidentified, almost beyond comprehension, but essentially human —or are they what they seem to be, visitors of unknown origin?***Whitley Strieber describes the stunning effects of his encounter in the most candid terms possible. Frightened but fascinated, he faces the unknown with clear and open curiosity as he struggles to understand these fierce little figures, whose eyes seem to stare into the deepest core of being, seeking the very depths of the soul-seeking communion.

Whitley Strieber

Communion: A True Story

ePub r1.0

XcUiDi 21-04-2021

Original title: Communion: A True Story

Whitley Strieber, 1987

Digital editor: XcUiDi

ePub base r2.1

On December 26, 1985, at a secluded cabin in upstate New York, Whitley Strieber went skiing with his wife and son, ate Christmas dinner leftovers, and went to bed early.

Six hours later, he found himself suddenly awake… and forever changed.

Thus begins the most astonishing true-life odyssey ever recorded-one man's riveting account of his extraordinary experiences with visitors from "elsewhere"…how they found him, where they took him, what They did to him and why…

Believe it. Or don't believe it. But read it — for this gripping story will move you like no other… will fascinate you, terrify you, and alter the way you experience your world.

When you read this incredible story,

do not be too skeptical;

somewhere in your own past

there may be some lost hour

or strange recollection

that means that you also

have had this experience.

This book is about forming a new relationship

with the unknown.

Instead of shunning the darkness,

we can face straight into it with an open mind

When we do that, the unknown changes.

Fearful things become understandable

and a truth is suggested;

the enigmatic presence of the human mind

winks back from the dark.

WHITLEY STRIEBER

To the ones who have slipped into the mirror

And the ones who reflect it in their eyes

To the ones who must hide everything,

And the ones who lose what they hide.

To the ones who cannot be silent,

And the ones who must lie.

Acknowledgments

I have been privileged to have the help of many accomplished members of the scientific community. I wish to thank Donald F. Klein, MD, director of research at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and professor of psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, for his expert hypnosis. Dr. Robert Naiman was kind enough to provide similar support for my wife. Dr. John Gliedman offered skilful scientific evaluation of my ideas, and his own essential contributions. Dr. David Webb, recently a member of the National Commission on Space and presently professor and chairman of space studies at the Center for Aerospace Sciences at the University of North Dakota, and Dr. Brian O'Leary, astronaut and planetologist, provided insights that combined expert knowledge, healthy skepticism, and a firm adherence to the known, without which I could never have completed my task. Dr. Bruce Maccabee, research physicist with the United States Navy, read my manuscript for its physics content, but any errors in this area remain my own. David M.

Jacobs, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Temple University, was kind enough to offer his comments as well, with special reference to historical background.

I would especially like to thank Budd Hopkins, who has sacrificed an enormous amount of time and effort — often approaching the heroic — for myself and those like me who have been dragged to the edge of reality.

The assistance of the physicians and scientists who have advised me does not imply that they support my conclusions, such as they are, about what happened to me. Their interest arises from a desire to study what appears to be an unknown or misunderstood phenomenon.

To the scientific community, the nature of this phenomenon remains an unresolved question.

The concrete world has slipped

through the meshes of the scientific net.

—ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD,
Modes of Thought

PRELUDE

The Truth Behind the Curtain

This is the story of one man's attempt to deal with a shattering assault from the unknown.

It is a true story, as true as I know how to describe it.

To all appearances I have had an elaborate personal encounter with intelligent nonhuman beings. But who could they be, and where have they come from? Are unidentified flying objects real? Are there goblins or demons... or visitors?

At first, I thought I was losing my mind. But I was interviewed by three psychologists and three psychiatrists, given a battery of psychological tests and- a neurological examination, and found to fall within the normal range in all respects. I was also given a polygraph by an operator with thirty years' experience and I passed without qualification. I had been indifferent to the whole issue of unidentified flying objects and extraterrestrials; I had viewed them as a false unknown, easily explainable as misperceptions or hallucinations. Now what was I to think?

The visitors marched right into the middle of the . life of an indifferent skeptic without a moment's hesitation.

Later I found a large number of people who have had experiences similar to mine. Most of them were mentally stable. They did not cluster in any particular population group, but formed a cross section of American society. I have met, among many others, a scientist, a policeman, and a federal officer who have had encounters.

In my case there were witnesses, and physical aftereffects that are hard to ignore. Either what is happening is that visitors are actually here, or the u man mind is creating something that, incredibly, is close to a physical reality. Whatever it is, it is not presently understood by science.

I know how it feels and looks to be with these visitors. I know how they sound when they talk and what it looks and smells like in their places. I know how they act and how they appear. I may even know something about why they are here and what they want from us.

Seeming encounters with nonhuman beings are not new; they have a history dating back thousands of years. What is new, in this latter part of the twentieth century, is that the encounters have taken on an intensity never before experienced by humankind.

What happened to me was terrifying. It seemed completely real. It was in clear, normal memory. Most of it was already present in my mind before I was hypnotized to aid recall.

There has been a lot of scoffing directed at people who have been taken by the visitors. It has been falsely claimed that their memories are a side effect of hypnosis. This is not true.

Most of them started with memories and undertook hypnosis to attempt greater recall.

Scoffing at them is as ugly as laughing at rape victims. We do not know what is happening to these people, but whatever it is, it causes them to react as if they have suffered a great personal trauma. And society turns away, led by vociferous professional debunkers whose secret fears apparently close their minds. Other, more responsible scientists are very legitimately concerned that serious pursuit of an answer to the enigma of unidentified aerial objects and possible visitors may lead science into study of a false unknown.

At least from a behavioral point of view, however. this can no longer be considered a false unknown. Something is happening, and intellectually well-grounded people need not shun it. Instead, the unknown can be faced with clear and open curiosity. When this is done something strange happens: The unknown changes. The enigmatic presence of the human mind works back from the dark, and a little progress toward real understanding is made.

I suffered with this experience. Others suffered, and are still suffering. It is essential that effective support be developed to aid those who have it. The scoffing has to stop. I am ashamed to say that I have done it myself, in the past, at least vicariously. As far as "UFOs"

went, I was with the skeptics.

I look up toward the night sky, visible through two high arches above my office windows.

Almost all the way to the top of the arches the clouds glow with Manhattan's light. At the pinnacle there is darkness, and it draws me. I'm not only scared and upset, frankly I'm also curious. I want to know what's going on out there. As I watch, the night sky grows a little darker.

People who face the visitors report fierce little figures with eyes that seem to stare into the deepest core of being. And those eyes are asking for something, perhaps even demanding it.

Whatever it is, it is more than simple information. The goal does not seem to be the sort of clear and open exchange that we might expect. Whatever may be surfacing, it wants far more than that. It seems to me that it seeks the very depth of the soul; it seeks communion.

ONE

When I had journeyed half of our life's way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,

for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

that savage forest, dense and difficult,

which even in recall renews my fear;

so bitter — death is hardly more severe!

But to retell the good discovered there,

I'll also tell of other things I saw.

—DANTE, Inferno, Canto I

THE INVISIBLE FOREST

First Memories

December 26, 1985

My wife and I own a log cabin in a secluded corner of upstate New York. It is in this cabin that our primary experiences have taken place. I will deal first with what I remember of December 26, 1985, and then with what was subsequently jogged into memory concerning October 4, 1985. Until I sought help, I remembered only that there was a strange disturbance on October 4. An interviewer asked if I could recall any other unusual experiences in my past. The night of October 4 had also been one of turmoil, but it took discussions with the other people who had been in the cabin at the time to help me reconstruct it.

This part of my narrative, covering December 26, is derived from journal material I had written before undergoing any hypnosis or even discussing my situation with anybody.

When I was alone, this is what it was like.

Our cabin is very hidden and quiet, part of a small group of cabins scattered across an area served by a private dirt road, which itself branches off a little-used country road that leads to an old town that isn't even mentioned on many maps. We spend more than half of our time at the cabin, because I do most of my work there. We also have an apartment in New York City.

Ours is a very sedate life. We don't go out much, we rarely drink more than wine, and neither of us has ever used drugs. From 1977 until 1983 I wrote imaginative thrillers, but in recent years I had been concentrating on much more serious fiction about peace and the environment, books that were firmly grounded in fact. Thus, at this time in my life, I wasn't even working on horror stories, and at no time had I ever been in danger of being deluded by them.

We were having a lovely Christmas at the cabin in late December 1985. On Christmas Eve there was snow, which continued for two more days. My son had discovered to his delight that the snow would fall in perfect crystalline flakes on his gloves if he stood still with his hands out.

On December 26 we spent a happy morning breaking in his new sled, then went cross-country skiing in the afternoon. For supper we had leftover Christmas goose, cranberry sauce, and cold sweet potatoes. We drank seltzer with fresh lime in it. After our son went to bed, Anne and I sat quietly together listening to some music and reading.

At about eight-thirty I turned on the burglar alarm, which covers every accessible window and all the doors. For no reason then apparent, I had developed an unusual habit the previous fall. As secretly as ever I made a tour of the house, peering in closets and even looking under the guest-room bed for hidden intruders. I did this immediately after setting the alarm. By ten o'clock we were in bed, and by eleven both of us were asleep.

The night of the twenty-sixth was cold and cloudy. There were perhaps eight inches of snow on the ground, and it was still fang lightly.

I do not recall any dreams or disturbances at all. There was apparently a large unknown object seen in the immediate vicinity at approximately this time of month, but a report of it would not be published for another week. Even when I read that report. though, I did not relate it in any way to my experience. Why should I? The report attributed the sightings to a practical joke. Only much later, when I researched it myself, did I discover how inaccurate that report was.

I have never seen an unidentified flying object. I thought that the whole subject had been explained by science. It took me a couple of months to establish the connection between what had happened to me and possible nonhuman visitors, so unlikely did such a connection seem.

In the middle of the night of December 26-I do not know the exact time-I abruptly found myself awake. And I knew why: I heard a peculiar whooshing, swirling noise coming from the living room downstairs. This was no random creak, no settling of the house, but a sound as if a lame number of people were moving rapidly around to the room.

I listened carefully. The noise just didn't make sense. I sat up in bed, shocked and very curious. There was an edge of fear. The night was dead still, windless. My eyes went straight to the burglar-alarm panel beside the bed. The system was armed and working perfectly. Not a covered window or door was opened, and nobody had entered-at least according to the row of glowing lights.

What I did next may seem peculiar. I settled back in bed. For some reason the extreme strangeness of what I was hearing did not rouse me to action. Over the course of this narrative this sort of inappropriate response will be repeated many times. If something is strange enough, the reaction is very different from what one would think. The mind seems to tune it out as if by some sort of instinct.

No sooner had I settled back than I noticed that one of the double doors leading into our bedroom was moving closed. As they close outward, this meant that the opening was getting smaller, concealing whatever was behind that door. I sat up again. My mind was sharp. I was not asleep, nor in a hypnopompic state between sleep and waking. I wish to be clear that I felt, at that moment, wide awake and in full possession of all my faculties. I could easily have gotten up and read a book or listened to the radio or gone for a midnight walk in the snow.

I could not imagine what could be going on, and I got very uneasy. My heart started beating harder. wasn't settled back anymore; I was sitting up, a question just forming in my mind. What could be moving the door?

Then I saw edging around it a compact figure. It was so distinct and yet so completely, impossibly astonishing that at first I could not understand it at all. I simply sat there staring, too stunned to move.

Months and months later, I discovered that another person who has had the visitor experience first encountered it through the medium of this same peculiar figure rushing toward her in exactly the way that this one now rushed toward me.

Before I narrate those next few seconds, though, I would like to give an exact description of how the figure looked to me. First, I will describe the physical conditions under which I was seeing it. The room was dim but not dark. The burglar-alarm panel alone emitted enough light for me to see. In addition, there was snow on the ground and that added some ambient light. Had it been a person king into the room, I could have trade out his or peek features-clearly.

This figure was too small to be a person, unless a child. I have treasured the approximate distance that the top of the head was from the ground, based on my memory of the figure's position m the doorway, and I believe that it was roughly three and a half feet tall, altogether smaller and lighter than my son.

I could see perhaps a third of the figure, the part that was bending around the door so that it could see me. It had a smooth, rounded hat on, with an odd, sharp rim that jutted out easily four inches on the side I could see. Below this was a vague area. I could not see the face, or perhaps I would not see it. A few moments later, when it was close to the bed, I saw two dark holes for eyes and a black downturning line of a mouth that later became an O.

From shoulder to midriff was the visible third of a square plate etched with concentric circles. This plate stretched from just below the chin to the waist area. At the time I thought it looked like some sort of breastplate, or even an armored vest. Beneath it was a rectangular appliance of the same type, which covered the lower waist to just above the knees. The angle at which the individual was leaning was such that the lower legs were hidden behind the door.

I was quite shocked, but what I was seeing was so strange I had to assume that it was a dream. Maybe this is why I continued to sit in bed, taking no action. Or perhaps my mind was already under some sort of control.

In any case, I sat there frightened but unable or unwilling to deal with what I was observing My mind explained my vision to me: Despite my full wakefulness, it must be a hypnopompic hallucination. Such phenomena sometimes occur as one drifts between waking and sleep. I assumed that some minor disturbance had awakened me and I was experiencing such an illusion, and never mind the fact that I felt fully awake.

Because of its isolation, the house not only had a burglar alarm but contained a shotgun, which was not far from the bed at the time. Was that why the thing behind the door was wearing a shield, if that was indeed what it was? I have subsequently wondered if an earlier reconnaissance of the house might not have taken place and revealed the presence of the weapon?

The previous July we'd had an experience that should be reported here. I was reading at about half past eleven at night, when I distinctly heard footsteps-normal, human-sounding footsteps move stealthily down our front porch to the area where I had just had a motion-sensitive light installed. The peculiar thing about these footsteps was that they came from the pool area and moved toward the road, the opposite of the direction that they would have come if it was a prowler from the road. At the time, I thought to myself that I would take the gun and go downstairs if the light came on.

No sooner had I thought that than it did. I dashed downstairs but saw nobody even though the light was still on. As it was attached to a fifteen second timer, I found this startling. I had gotten out onto the porch in no more than ten seconds, and there was no place for an intruder to hide between the house and the road, not in that short time.

A careful investigation, shotgun in hand, uncovered nothing. I had been certain that I would see whomever it was running off. At the time I even entertained the notion that they must have jumped onto the roof. but there was nobody there.

Subsequently the light never worked right, although it was in good order earlier that very evening. In September I took the bulbs out. Later in the fall the unit was replaced.

The next thing I knew, the figure came rushing into the room. I recall only blackness after that, for an unknown period of time. I don't remember falling asleep or lying awake. What I do remember is far, far more disturbing. My next conscious recollection is of being in motion. I was naked, with my arms and legs extended. as if I had been frozen iii mid-leap. I was moving out of the room. There was no physical sensation at all, not of being touched. not of being warm or cold. I could feel myself as a shape and a mass. but not in terms of sensation. It was as if' I had become profoundly paralyzed. Although I wanted desperately to move, I could not.

Because of my state of apparent paralysis, I am afraid that I cannot report that I was floating along on some magical pallet or a flying carpet. It could easily be that I was being carried. In any case, I was at this point in a state of panic. (gone was any fleeting thought of dream or hallucination. Something was hideously wrong, so wrong that my mind went blank.

I couldn't think. Even if I had been able to make a sound, which I doubt, I couldn't try.

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