Part One: Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

(Read Part Two here).

What

are we to make of the strange case of Whitley Strieber? Already well-known for

his horror fiction (Wolfen, The Hunger,

both made into Hollywood movies), Strieber underwent some

extremely unusual personal experiences back in 1985 and wrote a book called Communion, after which his name

became more or less synonymous with alien abduction. Yet Strieber is far more

than just a man who claims that aliens did some highly strange things to him.

Looking at his work so far, from Communion to The

Communion Enigma: What Is To Come (which

I have not yet read), a picture

emerges of Strieber as the John the Baptist of the alien paradigm — the “chosen

one” of a race of preterhuman, apparently ancient, unimaginably advanced

beings. Crying in the wilderness of 21st century civilization, mocked and

derided by orthodoxy (in this case science rather than religion), he is

nonetheless regarded with awe and fascination by a large number of devoted

followers, all eager to partake of his strange baptism. (Between his website

and his radio show “Dreamland,” Strieber’s followers apparently number in the

hundreds of thousands.)

While many have dismissed Strieber as a

liar, out for a fast buck (Communion was

a best-seller), others, more charitable, merely suggest that he is deluded or

insane. In Communion, Strieber himself claims he was willing, even

eager, to believe his experiences were the result of a brain tumor or some

undiscovered form of mental aberration, but eventually he had to accept that

what appeared to be happening really was happening. Even back in 1986, Strieber

was not alone in his claims of alien abduction. Whether collective

hallucination, hard cold fact, or something that is neither one nor the other,

reports of the phenomena became widespread throughout the ’80s and ’90s

(especially in the US), to the

extent that a Harvard professor, John Mack, even wrote two books about it. Mack

(who died in a hit and run accident in 2004) almost lost his chair at Harvard

as a result of his research, however, and orthodox science continues to regard

the subject as beneath contempt, unworthy even of the time it would take to

contest it.

Strieber started out as a writer of

horror novels, a somewhat dubious pedigree that made it considerably easier for

his debunkers to dismiss him. Strieber, they said, was a spinner of yarns,

pulling the oldest trick in the book and boosting his flagging sales by presenting

his latest yarn as fact. Yet comparing Strieber’s

horror fiction to Communion and

its sequel, Transformation,

one can’t help but be struck by the difference. Strieber’s horror novels are

passable pulp, while his supposedly true accounts are powerfully disturbing;

reading them, there can be little doubt Strieber is sincere in his belief that

these events actually occurred. No less discerning an intelligence than the author

William Burroughs — who was curious enough to pay a personal visit to Strieber in

1989 — spoke out in Strieber’s support. “I am convinced that he’s telling the

truth,” Burroughs said after his visit, “no doubt about it.”[1]

To dismiss Strieber as insane doesn’t

work, either, because there were plenty of other witnesses to testify to the

strange goings-on around his New

York cabin during the period in

which he underwent his experiences. (Ed Conroy even wrote a whole book on his

investigations, called The

Communion Report.) So if Strieber is neither insane nor lying, if what he

says happened actually happened, the question to ask is: how accurate are his

accounts, and why, exactly, did these beings choose a well-known author of horror fiction to introduce their presence to

humanity?

Alien Daze

“Remember

this: earth has given birth to something we call the human mind. But the

visitors view it as a precious resource of innovation and, ultimately, of

ecstasy. They are indifferent to power, but willing to use dark appearances to

give lessons.” –Strieber,

“Summer of Promise, Summer of Danger,” July 12th, 2003.

Rather than trying to sum up Strieber’s

experiences, and his interpretation of them, I will let his words speak for

themselves:

“The close

encounters I had between 1985 and 1994 were scary, but only because they were

so unusual. The people — or beings — I met were complex and, in the end, gentle.

They had a wonderful, subtle sense of humor. There were many personalities

involved, obviously many different individuals. My life with them was

spiritually and intellectually rewarding. They responded with deep

understanding to the path I was on, and worked with me as true masters work with a student on the journey

toward higher consciousness.. . .[i]

This was an extremely subtle,

paradoxical and complicated experience. I encountered many different levels of

being, some of them openly terrible, others more neutral, others sublime. I

have no way of knowing if they were all the same or different creatures

entirely. . . . The message of my contact experience is, therefore, clear: face

the fear and you will get rewarded by breaking down natural barriers to

perception that impede you from interacting completely with the world in which

you live.[ii]”

Having lived with the visitors for many years,

Strieber describes the beings as emanating from

“a world that reaches across space and

time, that penetrates not only this universe and its secrets, but many others

as well, that is ancient beyond belief and, in a way that I can hardly even

begin to explain, impeccable. I’m not saying that they’re pleasant. They’re as

tough as nails, as mean as snakes and as dangerous as plutonium. . . . You

cannot be with them without also being with your own truth. Then you see what

you really are, a little fragment in a vastness so great, so various and so

shockingly, unimaginably conscious that it completely swallows you.”[iii]

This more or less sums up Strieber’s

“objective” (mostly impartial) view of his alleged experiences with the beings:

there is a dark side to them, but one that seems to provide context, or “shading,”

for a far larger experience which includes positive and negative aspects. Overall, Strieber

seems to believe that the effects of his “close encounters” have been

beneficent to him. And although unsure how many different beings — or kinds of

beings — he has interacted with over the years, he is sure about one of them:

“The woman whose portrait is on the cover

of Communion . . . was without a doubt the greatest

master I have ever known. Her being projected devastatingly powerful knowledge. . . . She

has been with me for longer than life itself. I am one of her many projects. In

the world of the soul, she’s rich, on a big journey in the direction of

ecstasy, and seeking to travel there the only way you can, in a great chorus of

free souls.”[iv]

The Dark Side

“Ultimately,

as a species, we have no escape from this. . . . In fact, no amount of struggle

is going to dislodge them. For whatever reason, I think we have been left to

the exploiters and the scum. Who knows? Maybe the good guys gave up or lost a

war. Maybe those of us who got good treatment were simply being deceived.” –Strieber,

“Shedding Light on the Dark Side, Part Two,” December 7th, 2003.

In more recent years, however, Strieber became

increasingly preoccupied with what he has referred to as “the dark side” of the

alien experience. This preoccupation has colored his writings to a disturbing

degree, and at times his morbid fascination with the darker undercurrents of

spiritual experience seems to border on obsession. Strieber hinted at this dark

side from the very beginning (his original title for Communion was “Body Terror”); but his general

take on it was that, whatever darkness or negativity he encountered, it was

sourced in his own fears of the unknown. Over time, however, he began to

present a more traditional picture of evil, and consequently (perhaps

unconsciously), to return to his roots as a horror writer. “Some of them are

not like the woman I met and her staff. Some of them qualify as what we would

call monsters, in every sense of that word . . What is

happening now is absolutely terrifying, so much so that I have kept it to

myself in hopes that I was wrong, or that it would change.”[v]

Two years later, in 2003, he had this to say:

“I’m a realist and what is now real is

that the only thing that appears to be left of the contact experience is the

dark side. So that’s what we have to face now. … In any case, the experience I

had and what happens now seem to me to be very different things, almost as if

somebody good has left and somebody surpassingly evil has remained here. . . .

There are beings here who are hostile to one another, and some who hate us with

a passion so great that it would be considered psychotic if it was displayed by

a human being. There are some in a very complex and parasitical relationship

with our minds, and some of these seem to me to be close enough to the human to

suggest that they are hybrids of some kind. . . . I believe that this presence

is what keeps us trapped here on earth, what prevents mankind from becoming a

cosmic being, and what has been maneuvering us toward the earliest possible

extinction. . . . something so profoundly evil that it is almost beyond

imagination.”[vi]

Apparently not beyond the imagination of

a writer of horror fiction, however, as Strieber’s recent novel, 2012, provided perhaps the most

chillingly convincing depiction of spiritual evil in the annals of occult

literature. So did the shift from the positive to negative aspects of “alien

contact” occur in some actual, objective realm — or only in Strieber’s experience of it?

A Writer Divided

“We

are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as

an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.” –Terence

McKenna

In The Lucid View, I described the many

pitfalls of translating experiences of Imaginal realities

into actual, nuts-and-bolts events and phenomena. The process of transferring

“data” from Imaginal to actual reality is how the elements

of the collective unconscious become conscious, and thereby assume the

semblance of concrete fact. This occurs via individual experiences that

gradually amass and find a foothold in the consensus. Ufos — and

most especially alien abduction — are perhaps the most profound illustration of

this process, and of the dangers inherent within it.

The nature of Imaginal reality is fluid, subjective,

ever-changing. It shifts to suit the needs of the moment, and of the

percipient. The nature of actual reality is fixed, unchanging, objective, a

take-it-or-leave-it, like-it-or-lump-it affair. While actual reality is always

a question of either/or, Imaginal truths

are quite happy to remain in the twilight realm of both/and. In Transformation, when Strieber’s

young son has his own visitor experiences, Strieber asks him if he thinks the

beings are real. His son replies, “They can be.” Just as religious and

political organizations grow increasingly tyrannical, soulless and mechanical

the more established they become, so it is with Imaginal realities. Alien “grays” are

considerably less protean or magical beings than were the faeries of previous

lore. It is as if the same “beings” (aspects of the collective unconscious) are

slowly reduced to an almost physical, literal presence that can be understood,

encapsulated, and restricted by the human mind, and in tandem with its

increasing reliance upon the faculty of reason.

Whether the Imaginal “beings” resent being limited and

literalized in this fashion, and become faintly malevolent as a response, or

whether (as seems more reasonable) they lack qualities of benevolence or

malevolence to begin with and merely reflect back at us our own psychological

tendencies, the fact remains that alien and Ufo phenomena

has always had a sinister edge to it. I believe that this dark edge comes less

from the phenomenon itself than from a distortion

that results from being filtered through the minds of individual

researchers and experiencers. Faery lore was also dark, but dark in a primal,

sorcerous fashion. Ufo lore, on

the other hand, tends to be heavy, oppressive, and laced with despair. There is

a soulless — I might even say sickly — quality to it that results when writers and

researchers suck all the magical essence out of the Imaginal by imposing their own rigid (and

neurotic) personalities onto it. This usually happens without their even being

aware of doing so: it is an unconscious distortion, and it is unconsciousness

that distorts.

The best Ufo commentators — Jung, John Keel, Jacques Vallee,

Robert Anton Wilson, Terence McKenna, Kenneth Grant — have been aware of this

pitfall, and have managed mostly to avoid it. Freely acknowledging the unfixed,

mythical nature of the Ufo beast,

they have treated it accordingly, allowing it to remain an essentially unknown,

possibly even an unknowable, quality. Yet as a general rule (McKenna and Grant

being partial exceptions), these writers have not been recounting their own

personal experiences but simply interpreting data provided by others; hence

they have had the luxury of distance.

Strieber has had no such luxury. He has

not only had direct experience of alien abduction, he has been transformed and

to a large extent “created” by it; as such, his position as a “researcher” is

severely compromised. He is closer to St.

Paul, struck blind by a divine presence and instantly converted to its

frequency. Strieber talks a lot about objectivity, but for all his insight and

intelligence, he is clearly a man on a mission (a fact he freely admits). His

mission as ambassador to otherworldly beings is to help humanity prepare for

contact. As such, he is obliged to present these beings as actual, concrete,

literal fact, with nothing airy-fairy, pie-in-the-sky, subjective or Imaginal about them. That such a view is at

odds with the nature of the contact experience is testified by the glaring

inconsistencies of his descriptions, and his own almost constant see-sawing as

to whether the beings are benevolent or not.

At times, Strieber seems like a man

caught in a mental conundrum, trying to talk his way out of it and rarely, if ever,

willing to admit that he doesn’t know what

is going on. Strieber presents so many different points of view, at varying

times on his website and in his books, that it is almost as if there is more

than one of him. Perhaps, in a peculiar way, this is indeed the case?

A Tidal Wave of Novelty & Strangeness

“Do

you see how complex this is? Are you following the forked moral path I am

treading along? How can an ‘angel’ rape and kill? Of course, they must be

demons. I’ve got it all wrong!” –Strieber,

“Shedding Light on the Dark Side, Part Two,” December 7th, 2003.

Although Strieber’s attempts to define the

beings he has encountered are constantly shifting, even contradictory, this in

no way invalidates his experiences; on the contrary, such uncertainty only

confirms that, whatever he has undergone, it is beyond his ability — and maybe beyond anybody’s — to categorize

it. Strieber often seems to be oblivious to how his theories conflict, and even

cancel each other out. Yet paradoxically, that lack of consistency might be seen

as evidence for the veracity of his accounts, because if Strieber were undergoing initiation into an alien

paradigm, we would expect it to confound all expectations.

In Strieber’s first book, the famous

cover image is of a yellow or tan-skinned being and Strieber never once

describes the beings he encounters as gray. Yet he has been repeatedly referred

to as a “gray” abductee and has never corrected this designation. In 2006, he

wrote a novel called The Grays (a somewhat clumsy work with some

remarkable ideas in it), thereby cementing his association with them. But if

the beings he described in Communion are synonymous with the infamous

“grays,” then why the incongruity of skin color? It seems an odd discrepancy

never to have even referred to.

More strikingly, in his 2001 book The Key, Strieber

refers to the beings who visited him in 1985 as “demons.” Yet, in Transformation and elsewhere, he writes of being in

the presence of angels. Strieber’s explanation for this (in Majestic) is that the beings

are empaths,

reflecting back at us whatever we have inside of ourselves.[2]

So then why designate them either way? In The

Grays, Strieber describes the aliens as a dying race with atrophied DNA, using

humans to regenerate their species. At other times, he describes the visitors

as nonphysical beings,

“midwifing” humanity into a new existence beyond the realm of the flesh. Back

and forth he goes, rarely if ever attempting to explain — or even acknowledge — this

polarity of opinion.

It may be deliberate. Strieber may be

leaving it for us to join the dots and crack the riddle without his help; in

which case, he knows exactly what he is doing. Yet I can’t help but suspect

that, in his profound ambivalence, even confusion, Strieber is torn at a deep

level. Strieber’s accounts of the beings in Communion and Transformation are not only terrifying; they are

delightful and enchanting, full of twinkling humor, mischief, and love. They

are the rarest kinds of works: fairy tales for adults. How could the author

reach the conclusion he was writing about demons?

To give an example of Strieber’s

inconsistency that may seem minor but which I think is telling: in Transformation, he describes

how, after the publication of Communion, a bookseller he knew, Bruce

Lee, encountered two apparently alien beings, clumsily disguised in human

clothing, who came into his bookstore. The beings picked up a copy of

Strieber’s book, made a comment

about how Strieber had got some things wrong, gave Lee a fierce stare, and

left. As he recounted it in Transformation,

Strieber was enormously impressed by this event, which he considered tantamount

to proof of the visitors’ physical existence. He expressed admiration for their

sense of humor, and he they had let him know — via a playful piece of

theater — that his interpretation of the events was flawed, but that at least he

had got some of it right. Many years later, at his website in 2004, he

expressed a very different point of view: “as you may remember, two of the

grays showed up in a bookstore with Wm. Morrow & Co. editor Bruce Lee and

let him know that Communion was a load of mistakes. Naturally,

they were lying. It is not a load of mistakes. It is accurate, and people

sensed that, which is why they responded to it.”[vii]

Strieber’s remark is lacking in humility,

but it’s also inaccurate, according to his earlier account at least — in which

the beings didn’t call the book “a load of mistakes” but merely pointed out

that it contained mistakes. The writer seems defensive

and unsure of himself, and to have no qualms about calling his alien

benefactors liars. To add insult to injury, he dismisses the beings as “grays,”

even though one of them — or so Strieber believed at the time — was the same woman

he referred to (later) as “the greatest master I have ever known.” Such

contradictions in Strieber’s writings are legion, but perhaps most glaring of

all are his occasional lapses into political conservatism, such as when he

expressed support for the Iraq war in 2003[viii],

or, even more bizarrely, when he defended President Bush after 9/11 and

declared himself a patriot. In the post (“Conspiracy Theories:

Should We Listen Now?” October 13th, 2001), Strieber indignantly dismisses any

suggestion the Bush administration had prior knowledge of the attacks on the

twin towers (or a hand in them) as a “crazy imaginary conspiracy theory . . .

bizarre and impossible [to suggest] our current president is evil on a Hitlerian scale.” In the same post, without

mentioning David Icke, he derides a belief in Reptilian beings disguised as

world leaders as belonging to the same class of “crazy ideas.”

Coming from someone who has railed so furiously

against the arrogance, ignorance, derision and dismissal which his own

experiences have met with, this seems an odd position to take. It became even

more peculiar when, without making any overt retractions, Strieber performed a

complete turnaround in the following years. Just six months after defending the Iraq war,

Strieber described the US government as “in effect, the tool of

an occupying power that seeks to sterilize this planet of humanity.”[ix] In late 2005, he admitted how, over

the years, he “began to see government as a machine for the killing of souls.”[x] In “Was 911 a Hoax?” (February 2nd 2006), Strieber finally came clean and

admitted that his dismissal of 9/11 conspiracy theories as “nonsense” had been

premature, and speculated how “I might live in a country run by a bunch of mass

murderers.” Admittedly, this is an example of Strieber admitting his error and

so smoothing out the contradictions in his perception over time. But how many

other contradictions or errors in judgment, perhaps equally obvious to everyone

but himself, has he failed to notice?

That Strieber ever supported the Bush

administration and the Iraq war at all is itself evidence of a drastic split in

his worldview. While on the one hand, he appears to be blessed with a rare

ability to see past the façade of consensus reality and into the abyss beyond, on

the other, he continues to “vote Republican”? To me this suggests that a great

deal of Strieber’s knowledge, insight, and apparent wisdom is largely

theoretical, and that, for all his eloquent explorations into Imaginal realms,

he is still (at times at least) shackled to a distressingly mundane

perspective. Not that this is unusual, and it is perhaps even the rule for

visionary writers and spokespeople. Having profound insights into the hidden

nature of existence doesn’t alter the fundamentals of the personality, nor does

it automatically erase decades of social conditioning. But in Strieber’s case,

the gulf in his psyche seems to be unusually wide. By his own admission, he is

a very ordinary guy (he called himself a “doofus” on one of his audios) who has

undergone a run of truly extraordinary experiences. The struggle to integrate

those experiences without losing his sense of equilibrium (and of identity) in

the process must be immense. One likely result of that struggle might be that

Strieber has clung especially tightly to his old views, as a means to keep

himself from being swept away on a tidal wave of novelty and strangeness.

2012 & the Need for Secrecy

“In

all of this, there is only one thing that we do, and that is that we deny

contact. It is not the visitors who hold back, it is us who make the process

impossible.” –Strieber,

“Christmas Joy: Mankind is Awakening,” December 14th, 2001.

By the time of 2012 (released in 2007), the author seemed

to have stolen a page out of David Icke’s books

and begun writing about Reptilians disguised

as movie stars and leading public figures. 2012 was a dark, intensely disturbing work

that depicted evil as real, terrifying, and blackly understandable. Strieber’s

forecast for the coming apocalypse — the “war of souls” — seemed designed to

reestablish him as a leading spokesperson for the eschaton:

John the Baptist of the Alien Presence. But by now, Strieber’s descriptions of

the aliens (which he called Seraph) were almost entirely negative. There were

no angels to speak of, and — what was even more worrying — no fairies, imps,

goblins, sprites, or trickster spirits. For the most part, the book was

unrelentingly dark (possibly appropriate for the subject matter, and

considering the times), and the spirit of play was almost entirely absent.

If Strieber continues to be unable to

decide whether his nocturnal visitors are angels or demons, it’s hardly

surprising if he feels profoundly ambivalent about his task as bellwether for

the alien paradigm. In his early books, he suggested that, since the beings

appeared to emerge from a nonphysical realm, their reality, for us, might

depend on our belief in them.

In 2012, Strieber stated this

unequivocally: the “aliens” can only enter our realm once they have assumed

sufficient “solidity” via our collective belief, and to emerge from the dark

well of the collective psyche, they require a foothold in our conscious minds. Strieber even stated

that the government cover-up (which he once railed so bitterly against) was a

means to protect the world from that emergence. The day

public awareness of the alien presence reaches consensus, then, alien

“invasion” will not be far behind. Yet for years Strieber has been denouncing

the secrecy and denial shrouding the visitors as the great evil of our times.

Although he has admitted that their undisclosed presence among us would be

catastrophic, he has mostly argued for full disclosure. At times he has even

suggested that awareness of the beings is the only thing that will protect us from them.

“If the people

who know the truth told the

truth, we would, at a stroke, be free. I have written before in these columns

about what they fear — that official disclosure would lead to profoundly

unpredictable and unexpected consequences, even to a change in the nature of

our world. The truth is, if they

had the courage to make the official admissions that would lead the average man

to know for certain that there was a presence here, that presence would become

unable to do its will in our world.”[xi]

So

which is it? Both, or neither? Perhaps his most persuasive theory is that of a complicity of secrecy and denial between humanity

and the visitors, based on a mutual desire to avoid an overly traumatic

encounter. Strieber has suggested, astutely, that most humans would be utterly

overwhelmed by religious awe in the presence of something as utterly

incomprehensible as alien beings.

“That’s the problem that the visitors are

having here. If they intervene openly, our culture totally refocuses itself

toward them and all human innovation stops. We end up locked in a state of

profound disempowerment that will take many generations to recover, and that

will leave a permanent scar. The visitors cannot reveal themselves to us. We

must reveal ourselves to them.”[xii]

Yet in 2012,

Strieber presented the invasion as a satanic emergence and nothing short of global

apocalypse. There was little if any mention of a positive or divine alien

presence. Had Strieber’s allegiances shifted to the dark side also? Why was he

so busy writing books to persuade people these beings were real if he firmly believed they

were evil and that our belief in them would only empower them? To his credit,

Strieber raised the question himself, indirectly, by including a thinly

disguised self-portrait in the novel — Wiley Dale, a horror writer who has

written about his own real-life alien encounters — and then revealing him as a

Reptilian in disguise! Having thrown the reader for this tangential loop, he

then revealed that Wiley was one of the “good” Seraph (Reptilians). With almost

sinister cunning, Strieber toyed with his readers’ fears and doubts and created

a shifting, kaleidoscopic meta-fiction of parallel universes in which life

imitates art and fiction bleeds into fact, a world where nothing is quite real

and reality is like nothing we had ever imagined before. Yet if, as a writer,

Strieber is comfortable enough with his own ambivalence to play mind games with

his readers, one can only suspect that he is wrestling with far deeper doubts

at a personal level. Who can blame him? If he were not, we would be forced to

doubt either his sanity or his authenticity.

2012 was an intensely personal work that

revealed a depth of psychological self-exploration extremely rare in genre

fiction. It revealed so much about its author, in fact, that it took the reader

beyond mere darkness into chthonic realms of madness worthy of Edgar Allan Poe.

Were it not so lucidly composed and so finely balanced a work, one might

suspect it was the creation of a madman (albeit an inspired one). Was Whitley’s sanity hanging in the

balance? Based on the kind of experiences he has had, and the kind of knowledge

with which he lives on a daily basis, it would probably be stranger and more

worrying if his sanity were not in question. Which raises the peculiar possibility

that Strieber’s weakness may be that he is not insane enough. There can be little

doubt that the burden of knowledge (and foreknowledge) weighs heavily on

Strieber’s spirit, and that it may be threatening to crush the “play” out of

him. Through it all, he has remained stubbornly lucid and reasonable, a

writer’s prerogative perhaps, but not necessary an advantage when navigating

the sorcery kingdoms. In such realms, the stronger and more durable the

intellect, the likelier it is to bring about the traveler’s eventual downfall.

The Pinchbeck Debate

“Our

species is in the process of making a deeply spiritual decision about whether

to enter the cosmos or go extinct.” –Strieber,

“Communion 20 Years On,” 26th December,

2005

In 2007, Strieber got into a heated debate

with the writer Daniel Pinchbeck (2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl),

whom Strieber invited onto his radio show “Dreamland.” The argument centered around Strieber’s

conviction that humanity was about to undergo a massive “dieback” as a result

of its aberrational activities on the planet, and Pinchbeck’s assertion that

Strieber was projecting a negative scenario because of his own personal hang-ups.

Pinchbeck then suggested that Strieber was unwittingly being controlled by

alien beings “that do not have the best interests of the human species at

heart.” Reporting on the event later, Pinchbeck commented: “On a subliminal or

subconscious level, Strieber appears to have made a Faustian pact with these

Mephistophelean entities, and unfortunately he is helping disseminate their

negative and destructive frequency into human culture and consciousness, at

this point in time.”[xiii]

Although Pinchbeck mostly kept his cool

(and had the dignity to apologize), Strieber became indignant and professed to

have been wounded in his “very being” by Pinchbeck’s attack.[3]

It struck me at the time that, after two decades of being heckled by doubters

and mocked and reviled by the mainstream media, Strieber should remain so

deeply vulnerable to criticism. Pinchbeck’s perspective was easy to understand,

and was probably one that was shared by plenty of people who took Strieber’s

claims seriously enough to be disturbed by them. Strieber has admitted to

having been implanted by the beings, and has eulogized over some of the “siddhis” which he has

developed as a result of the implant — powers that include interdimensional travel, time travel, and reading

people’s minds. If such accounts are even half true, Strieber’s capacities

verge on the Ubermenschian.

Yet his public persona, as evidenced by his radio show and many of his

interviews, is at times rather unsettling, for me at least.[xiv]

I had been reading Strieber’s books for many years before I heard him on

“Dreamland”; if I’d heard one of his shows before discovering his work, it’s

quite likely I wouldn’t have bothered to look at it. Strieber often comes

across as emotional, brash, facile, and even somewhat embittered, qualities

that belie the depth and perspicacity of his writing (as did his rather

hysterical behavior with Pinchbeck). So evidently, there is far more to

Strieber than meets the eye — or the ear.

Whether Strieber is being controlled,

and whether the forces controlling him are benign, is, as already touched upon,

a question that need concern Strieber far more than the rest of us, and one

which is finally beyond the scope of this piece. It also makes no difference to

the quality of his writings, which can be judged on their own merit and

meaning. What seems to be to be both more relevant and easier to determine,

however, is Strieber’s own character and integrity. This relates to the

question of how fully he embodies his teachings, and therefore how much we, as

readers, should value them. If Strieber doesn’t walk his talk, we should

naturally be less inclined to put stock in what he says. Astral Ubermensch or

not, if Strieber lacks the equanimity to deal gracefully with attacks like

Pinchbeck’s, it suggests that alien initiation and a vast storehouse of

esoteric knowledge have given him little by way of inner peace or detachment.

On the contrary, they seem to have unbalanced him to a disturbing degree. At

base of this, I think, is the degree to which Strieber has assumed personal responsibility for communicating what he believes to

be information of vital importance to the evolution, even the survival, of the

race. Such a personal stake in being “the one” who delivers this vital

information may be both the cause and the effect of a psychological imbalance

in Strieber, and imbalance which, if we are to be fair to Strieber himself,

must throw into question everything he has had to say until now.

In short, how reliable is a witness who

is clearly strongly invested in making us believe his version of events?

Whitley & Mind Control

“I

have really and truly been outside of mankind, insofar as I have treated with [sic]

nonhuman intelligent beings. I have seen what they are, and therefore now see

my own kind to a degree as an outsider.” –Whitley

Strieber, “Communion 20 Years On,” 26th December, 2005

Somewhere around 2003, Strieber introduced an

astonishing new element into his personal saga, one that both deepened and

darkened the waters while at the same time offering a profound clue to understanding

them — and perhaps even the key to the mystery. The revelation centered on

Strieber’s buried memories of having suffered traumatic abuse as a child at the

hands of the US government. Strieber reported at his

journal: “I strongly suspect that the United States has for years been

experimenting on children, among other things subjecting them to extreme trauma

in order to split their personalities and create secondary personalities who

can be accessed by controllers and used as agents, but without knowledge of the

first personality.”[xv]

A few months later, he added more

background:

“Recently, the Central Intelligence Agency

released another 18,000 declassified documents about its mind control

experiments, which included an attempt to induce multiple personalities in two

19 year old girls. Before the 1973 Congressional investigation that led to the

disclosure of the CIA’s notorious MK-ULTRA mind control project, [CIA director]

Richard Helms destroyed thousands of documents. My belief is that what he

destroyed was documentary evidence of such experiments being performed on much

younger children.”[xvi]

There is a great deal of evidence that such

experiments occurred (and may be still occurring), and Strieber’s claim to have

been part of them, to have suffered abuse expressly intended to create

sub-personalities through trauma, opens a whole new can of worms regarding his

other experiences. According to Strieber, the “visitors” were actively involved

in his life from an early age, and selected him at least partially as a result

of the ritualized and systematized abuse he suffered as a child. “They took

advantage of a devastating intelligence program that was leaving some children

emotionally maimed, but was also opening the minds of others to new

possibilities.”[xvii]

What I wish to suggest is that, as a

result of this early trauma (to say nothing of possible later traumas at the

hands of nonhuman

agencies), Strieber may have experienced a splintering of his psyche that to

this day has not fully healed. Without doing him the disservice of premature

psychiatric labeling, it may be that he is not fully cognizant of the multiple

portions of his psyche, and that, through the act of writing, he is attempting

to bring those fragments into harmony. This would explain the many contradictions,

the endlessly see-sawing points of view, the abrupt shifts from guru-like

wisdom to childish and petulant ego assertions, and so forth. If Strieber is seen to be literally divided, his writings become a

painfully honest, both inspirational and infuriating description of the attempt

to come to grips with the broken shards of his psyche as he struggles to put “Whitley”

back together again. As accounts of the slow and agonizing process of

individuation by which we seek to arrive at the totality of ourselves, his

writings may be some of the most profound on offer in twenty-first century

literature, even if not quite in the way in which Strieber intended.

Is “Whitley Strieber” — the writer-merely

the dominant personality that has taken charge of a multitude of selves, at

least one of which is an alien being (“the greatest master I have ever known”)?

If so, it may be through the act of writing that Strieber manages to maintain a

semblance of order, integrity and coherence. It may also be that his dominant

ego-self is only partially privy to the wisdom and insights of those “alien”

selves that are considerably more enlightened than he is. The dominant position

of his everyday ego, then (always an extremely precarious thing), would depend

on a sense of consistency and continuity which writing, above all, could provide

him with. The price of that literarily imposed order, however, would be that

Strieber remained fragmented. So for all the knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual

insight which his writing contains, Strieber may be the very last person to

benefit from it.

The Gray Agenda and Whitley’s Mission

“No

doubt, I won’t be believed, and that’s all right, because, in a sense, it

leaves me free in ways that belief would not.” –Whitley

Strieber, “New Thoughts,” 10th Sept

2005

Strieber’s contention is that a small number

of the children who were subjected to government mind control and abuse were

selected by the visitors (for their own mysterious agenda), and that he was one

of the chosen.

“There were only a few thousand of these

children worldwide, but they were enough to form the nucleus of what is

essentially a communications device made up of human minds that has been, in

effect, ‘implanted’ in our culture. It takes the form of millions of close

encounter witnesses whose experiences are brought into focus by these few

thousand, who comprise the great majority of the witnesses who speak out

publicly about what has happened to them.”[xviii]

In such a scenario, Strieber becomes beyond

doubt the most vocal, well-known, and influential of the “witnesses,” placing

him at the very heart (or head) of the “communications device” which he describes.

He becomes the human avatar of the visitors.

A year or so previous to this

revelation, in 2005, Strieber made the following admission: “I have failed to

link us to the visitors. I have failed to break the bondage of official

secrecy, or to save the souls of the keepers of the secrets. I have failed to

raise the eyes of the average man.”[xix] Despite this sense of failure,

Strieber did not give up. In 2006, coincident with the release of The Grays (which he claimed the visitors helped

him to write), he posted the following statement:

“I will be frank with you about what I am

trying to do with my life: I am trying to create a relationship between us and

the grays. Right now, we do not have a relationship, for two reasons: our

attitude toward them is dysfunctional; and they do not know how to reach into

our culture without destroying it. My ambition is to make the relationship fruitful,

and to enable them to interact with us openly without wrecking our lives.”[xx]

Then in 2007, Strieber made what was in

many ways his most revealing observation, at least in respect to his own work

with, or for, the visitors:

“They will not at first address the

species’ various religious ideas except in very general terms, by communicating with us in triads,

with a positive thrust and a negative thrust, leaving us to evolve the message

by reconciling its two parts. I know that this is very, very different from

the way we communicate, but it works and if they do show up it will become

familiar enough.” [My italics.] [xxi]

So is Strieber, with his constant

pendulum-like swings from a positive to negative “thrust,” making us familiar

with the visitors preferred method of communication? Is he adhering to their

strange truths about good and evil being not a matter of either/or but of both/and? And could this make

the disorientation, fragmentation, and conflict which Strieber displays in his

attempts to come to grips with his experiences an integral part of the meaning

which “the visitors” wish to communicate to us?

Strieber believes the visitors

intervened to rescue him from abuse at the hands of malevolent government

agents. “[T]he close encounters were real . . . they involved literally

breaking through into another level of reality in order to escape the hell I

was enduring in this one. Modern research suggests that parallel universes may

be very real, and that they may exist all around us.”[xxii]

As Strieber sees it, he escaped the clutches of evil by literally taking refuge

in another reality, which is what abused or neglected children do (it’s called

fragmentation). And since those memories remained buried, under the domain of

another aspect of his psyche, is it fair to say that Strieber also created a

parallel self by which to enter his

conjectured “parallel universe”? I am not suggesting that the psychological

theory explains away the mystical one — on the contrary — what I am suggesting is

that both versions may be equally accurate.

Psychotherapy would say that Strieber’s psyche splintered into multiple selves

and that he fled into fantasy to escape an unpleasant reality. Strieber would

argue that his soul journeyed into other worlds and encountered nonhuman intelligences

there. The two interpretations — while apparently at odds — may simply be two ways

of describing the

same event. Whether Strieber is an enlightened soul-traveler or a paranoid

schizophrenic would depend on whether or not he succeeded in integrating the

various fragmented aspects of his psyche, and in claiming the knowledge and

power which his experiences made available to him.

As Strieber writes, “it is the

foundation of all of my life at the edge of reality, and that I am presently in

the process of rediscovering it [sic], and perhaps learning how to link my

lives in different realities so that I can have a single, integrated set of

memories that includes everything that I have done and known in the years of my

life.”[xxiii] This

implies that Strieber’s experiences — if fully understood — have the potential to

blow open the whole mystery-conflict of subjective/objective, inner/outer,

actual/Imaginal, and to map the process of psychic

individuation by which the two worlds (and the countless aspects of the human

psyche) can be bridged, and so unified into a single, continuous whole, the

creation of a soul-body continuum.

As it happens, this is exactly what

Strieber claims to be doing: “I’m always getting

people asking me not to write fiction. But it is through the fiction that I can

gain access to the memories of the reality I have lived. My fiction, I think,

contains a secret history of a secret life, and, when it is all written, will

be a map, if read with objectivity and knowledge, for journeyers between the worlds.”[xxiv]

Agent Provocateur in the Dream

“Too

much importance is given the writer and not enough to his work. What difference

does it make who he is and what he feels, since he’s merely a machine for the

transmission of ideas. In reality he doesn’t exist — he’s a cipher, a blank. A

spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the

information across the border, back into death. Then he can be given a mythical

personality.” –Paul

Bowles

When it comes to understanding the question of Ufos and alien abductions — and specifically “the

grays” — the essential thing to remember is that none of this is what it seems. And although Strieber has himself been

at pains for years to convey this very idea, for all of that he seems unable to

resist the urge to talk and write about the phenomena as if it were, finally,

apprehensible to reason. Strieber argues against simplistic, literal-minded,

“good or evil, angel or devil” interpretations, even while many of his comments

are either damning the beings as demons or advocating them as angels.

Apparently, this is all part of the aliens’ chosen method of presentation: a

positive perspective (Imaginal), followed by a negative one (actual), leading

finally to a synthesis of both. Yet unless I have simply failed to see the

method to his madness, Strieber follows this approach in such a haphazard,

slipshod fashion that at times he seems unaware of what he is doing. It is

almost as if he was following a hidden program, and that, in order to be

effective as the scribe and spokesman for the visitors, he had been left in the

dark until he achieves a synthesis of his various, fragmented selves.

When Strieber is in negative mode, he

seems wholly convinced by his own rhetoric, and as such, is entirely

convincing. Ditto with his positive mode. The result is that his writings are

alternatively disorientating, confounding, oppressive, uplifting, lucid,

obtuse, a mixture of profoundest insights with garbled nonsense, all presented

with more or less the same degree of sincerity and zeal. In his last work (The

Active Side of Infinity), Carlos Castaneda described himself as “an agent

provocateur in the dream.” The author Paul Bowles, perhaps for similar reasons,

once defined the writer as “a spy sent into life by the forces of death.” I can

think of no two better descriptions of Strieber than these. After following his

work (off and on) for over twenty years, he seems less like a man to me than a

living, breathing fairy tale, an eerie, unsettling amalgam of diverse

perspectives and outlandish tales, both of this world and the other. A sort of

Frankenstein’s monster, he appears both soulful and freakish, a miracle and an

aberration, a mind as brilliant as it is confused. Like a golem created by

incomprehensible forces, he acts as a host intelligence for alchemical

mysteries, mysteries which he brings across the border, into the land of the

living, yet apparently without ever fully comprehending them himself.

As such, the strange case of Whitley Strieber

must remain, for now, unsolved.

For Part Two of this article click here.

[1]

Burroughs to Victor Bockris: “I was very interested in his first books and I

have convinced that this was somehow very authentic. I felt that it was not

fraud or fake. . . . On the basis

of that I wrote a letter to Whitley Streiber saying that I would love to try to

contact these visitors. . . . I had a number of talks with Streiber about his

experiences and I was quite convinced that she was telling the truth. . . . The

strange thing about him is that this part of his face (from the forehead to

below the nose) has a sort of mask like effect.” Bockris: “Does he have a tranquil presence” Burroughs: “No it’s not

very tranquil at all although it’s not disquieting. In the first place he’s a

man with tremendous energy and always busy. Since I’ve seen him he wrote a

whole book, Billy, which is now going

to be a motion picture and soon. He’s always working, always busy, and walks

around the property, a very active person you know, quite clear, quite

definite. He seems a very hospitable and sensible person. I can’t say that I

experienced anything. And he told me this: when you experience it is very

definite, very physical, it’s not vague it’s not like a hallucination, that

they are there, is I didn’t see anything like that.”

See http://www.interpc.fr/mapage/westernlands/dr-burroughs.html

for the full interview.

[2]

“These others — who appeared to us as aliens — are empaths, but not because they

lack experience. They have returned to the forest, they are not men, they are

beyond that. . . . In the sight of God they are almost angels. . . . We called

them terrible. . . We achieved absolute terror. . . . We have by our lies

created the impression that an excursion of the pure is an invasion by monsters

from the depths of our own psyche. . . . In the eyes of the others we who met

them saw ourselves. And there were demons there.” Majestic

[3]

Strieber: “We’re not friends anymore and we never will be. We never really

were. . . But nevertheless, I literally really could not disagree with you more

profoundly as you propose what looks to me like a kind of a miserable fascism

on the human spirit and a future that is enormously dreary even in the unlikely

event that it should unfold.” Pinchbeck: “By the way, Whitley, I just want to

say that I’m capable of having an argument with somebody and profound

disagreements with somebody and still considering them friends.” Streiber: “I’m

telling you right now when you attack my very being and my spirit by saying

that I’m in league with evil entities, as you did say, that’s not, it’s not possible to maintain a friendship

under those circumstances. Because this is so outrageously untrue For those of

you who are subscribers to this website, who listen to our meditations and who

are involved in this you’ll know how unfair and outrageous this attack that

this man carried out on this radio program. It’s just disgusting, and ignorant,

absolutely ignorant, but I don’t want

to go on about it.”

[i]

All quotes in this article are from “Whitley’s Journal,” at

www.unknowncountry.com. This one is from “The Coming of the Dark Side and How

We Can Defend Ourselves,” September 7th, 2002.

[ii]

“Shedding Light on the Dark Side,

Part Two,” December 7th, 2003.

[iii]

“Communion 20 Years On,” 26th

December, 2005.

[iv]

“Christmas Joy: Mankind is

Awakening,” December 14th, 2001.

[v]

“Christmas Joy: Mankind is Awakening,” December 14th, 2001.

[vi]

“Shedding Light on the Dark Side,”

December 3, 2003.

[vii]

“Journey to Another World,” March 12, 2004.

[viii]

“The Coming War,” 10th Jan, 2003

[ix]

“Summer of Promise, Summer of Danger,” July 12th, 2003.

[x]

“Communion 20 Years On,” 26th December, 2005.

[xi]

“The Coming of the Dark Side and

How We Can Defend Ourselves,” September 7th, 2002.

[xii]

“Communion 20 Years On,” 26th December, 2005.

[xiii]

A partial transcript of the discussion can be found at http://2012.tribe.net/thread/3a164efb-2bbb-4a46-9ec9-51e5020ea319

Both writers reported on the incident. Strieber’s “War in Dreamland” can be

found among his journal entries at his site; Pinchbeck’s can be found at his

blog, at www.realitysandwich.com

[xiv]

I am thinking particularly of his appearance on “The Veritas Show,” with Mel

Fabregas, June 26th, 2009.

[xv]

“The Boy in the Box,” 14th March, 2003.

[xvi]

“The Capture House,” October 11th, 2003.

[xvii]

“The Capture House,” October 11th, 2003.

[xviii] “Communicating with the Grays,” 7th

June 2006.

[xix]

“Communion 20 Years On,” 26th December, 2005.

[xx]

“Communicating with the Grays,”

7th June 2006.

[xxi]

“Are They Coming and If So, What Do We Do?” March 30th, 2007.

[xxii]

“The Capture House,” October 11th,

2003.

[xxiii]

“The Capture House,” October 11th,

2003.

[xxiv]

“The Capture House,” October 11th,

2003.