Audio: Pop Apocalypse: Aliens, Eros, and Life After Death - An Interview with Whitley Strieber

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SPEAKER: Greetings, listeners. And welcome back to the Pop Apocalypse. After a little summer hiatus, we, here at the CSWR, are gearing up for a year of events, including this podcast.

Keep an eye on our soon to be redesigned web page for details. And of course, sign up for our newsletter.

For the podcast, you can look forward to interviews this year with the author, Victoria Nelson, the poet, Anne Waldman, the musician, Trey Spruance, and many others. So stay tuned.

Today's guest is Whitley Streiber. For listeners of a certain age, Whitley's name will immediately invoke memories of the 1980s and alien abductions, and for good reason. Streiber's book, Communion, was an enormous sensation. It hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, sold millions of copies, and made Whitley a household name, both for better and for worse.

But Whitley is so much more than this one book. He was already an accomplished and very successful novelist before the events relayed in Communion. He has now written over 30 books. And a number of these books have been turned into films, including the blockbuster smash, The Day After Tomorrow.

He runs the largest web platform devoted to all things alien and paranormal, that's unknowncountry.com. And he is the host of a long running podcast himself, The Incomparable Dreamland.

So if the alien is a new living folklore, and I think it is, then Whitley is this folklore's foremost representative. It is safe to say that Whitley has led a life of high weirdness. The events in Communion are the proverbial tip of this iceberg.

As we will discuss, strange events, ranging from abductions, UAP sightings, that's unidentified aerial phenomena, meditating with non-human presences, telepathic communication with the dead to what Whitley himself calls lurid alien sex are all part of Streiber's strange and wonderful journey on this Earth, and sometimes, beyond.

Even the most quote unquote, "Orthodox" religious scriptures feature individuals being taken up into the sky, strange aerial phenomena, and of course, communication with the dead and hell.

If you take a rubber ball and toss it in any Divinity School library, you're bound to hit at least five books that have angel or demon sex in them. So anyone studying Whitley and the phenomena that he is associated with should recognize these historical parallels.

But what makes Whitley so interesting is that he doesn't go all ancient aliens on us. He doesn't presume what happened to him is exactly the same thing that happened to Enoch or Ezekiel, for example, nor does he use religious explanations from the past to resolve his own dilemmas today. He stays open to various possibilities and asks hard questions.

So without further ado, let's explore some of these questions with the man himself, Whitley Streiber.

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It is our great honor to have the author, Whitley Streiber, on the show today. Whitley, welcome. Where are you calling in from or recording from?

WHITLEY STREIBER: I'm in Santa Monica, California.

SPEAKER: Santa Monica. Sounds horrible. I don't know.

WHITLEY STREIBER: No, it's not horrible. It's [INAUDIBLE].

SPEAKER: Yeah, I know. It's such a wonderful place.

Yeah, so we have a lot to get to over this time frame. So if it's OK, I just want to dive right in.

Given this podcast is affiliated with the Divinity School, I thought it might be helpful to start with your religious upbringing. So I understand you were raised Catholic.

So coming up were you extremely devout and pious, an altar boy thinking that you might go into the priesthood, or were you more skeptical? Were you on the outside or somewhere in between?

WHITLEY STREIBER: Well, I started out very pious. My mother was quite pious. My father, not so much. But my mother was very devoted and very much a part of the church.

My grandfather on my mother's side was the attorney for the Archdiocese of San Antonio. And his father had been before him. And in fact, the attorneys in the family are still in this work.

So I spent a lot of time having dinners with the Archbishop. And I was quite exposed to the church. , I became a little skeptical. I met a bishop, Bishop Levin in San Antonio, and began to be his regular 7:15 mass altar boy. And we had a wonderful time together. We were both terrific jokers. And we used to get the giggles. We had a lot-- we had a lot of fun.

And it turned the mass for me into a joyous occasion. Bishop Levin was a wonderful man. So I used to really look forward to serving mass for him. And-- but then, as I got a little older, the girls in the school, it was associated with the parochial school, began to complain that I was peeking down their fronts when we were giving them communion.

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SPEAKER: Oh, no.

WHITLEY STREIBER: So the idea was that we would put the patent up under their chins. And as I was going along, and we were going along, giving it, we both got the giggles. And the laughter fed on each other. And we were going down the rows, and doing this, and both of us just stifling laughter.

And finally, we rushed back to the altar, turned around. And there was a period of silence while the bishop tried to get himself into a state where he could continue the mass.

So I did not have a bad Catholic upbringing. It was not horrible. And not only that, at the school I went to, which was run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, an order in Canada, who the sisters were chosen because they were sisters who enjoyed little boys. It was called Mount Sacred Heart School. And it's still very much alive in San Antonio.

And the thing about the sisters, there were a number of things about them, they were quite wonderful. First, they were a lot of fun. They were not horrible. There's lots of horror stories, but we-- I did not get exposed to that.

But the main thing I remember about them is that they could really cook.

SPEAKER: Oh, OK.

WHITLEY STREIBER: So the food. Now it's all dead. It's all these mandated federal programs. And they get horrible food in schools. But in those days, the nuns could cook their own. And we had beautiful meals. And--

SPEAKER: Any dish you remember in particular that just you still--

WHITLEY STREIBER: I do remember one in particular, yes. We had chicken-- I believe it was smothered-- yeah, chicken fried steak. Little pieces of-- it wasn't-- they weren't steaks. I mean, there were-- it was a Texas meal. And inside the frying is a very inexpensive piece of meat. So inexpensive, in this case, that it couldn't be cut.

And we complained. And we-- the school made a lot of-- we all made a lot of noise. We couldn't cut our meat. And we made jokes about it. And so forth.

The next day, the meet came again and had been cut into the shape of shoe soles.

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SPEAKER: That's [INAUDIBLE]

WHITLEY STREIBER: What are these shoes soles doing in our food? But that was the tone of the school. And it was also a very good school. And so I had a wonderful time there, frankly. And I regretted leaving it.

And then I went to a Catholic high school, where I also had a wonderful time, and only later found out that some of the dreadful pederastic stuff that went on, went on at that school too. But I wasn't exposed to any of that.

I was-- I said to-- my mother and I were talking about it. And she was saying how shocked she was. And she said, I would assume that you didn't get exposed to any of that because you're so talkative.

I said, no. They didn't come near me. I didn't even know it was happening. Of course, I would have blabbed it all over the place, and including to the Archbishop.

SPEAKER: So as a good Catholic boy, who had been an altar boy, and this close relationship, how does one enter into, as you did in your writing career, horror fiction? Did you just start writing and it came out, hey, this is going in the direction of horror fiction? Or did you set out to write things that could be classified as horror?

WHITLEY STREIBER: I had written seven novels before I wrote The Wolfen, the first novel that was published. And basically, what I was interested in at that point was publishing a novel because I was absolutely possessed to become a writer. I had married my wife, Anne. And she was a complete supporter to the point that she put off having her first baby until I had gotten my writing career going.

She went back to school and got a master's in English literature in order to help me so that I can-- she could be my editor. And so she was the most-- the-- she remains the best editor I've ever had.

And I backed-- I didn't even know horror novels existed. I didn't know I was writing a horror novel. I didn't think about that. I was completely unaware of the marketing of books. I was just trying to write books that I wanted to write.

And one night, I used to walk in Central Park. I'm a fairly odd duck in many respects, as I'm sure you must assume. And it was very late. It was well after midnight. And I don't sleep much. I never have.

And so I was paced, as I was walking, ironically, along the literary walk, by dogs, which were walking on the other side of the line of trees and benches. And I didn't worry about walking in the park late at night because any mugger who was out there, looking for somebody to mug would starve to death. There's no one there.

So obviously, it was perfectly safe at that hour, but much less safe earlier. But at that hour, it was completely safe. And so there were the dogs and-- somehow or another, that experience, it wasn't menacing, really. They were a little bit, I think if I'd moved toward them, they would have stood their ground and begun to growl at me. But they were definitely watching me very closely, and not like pet dogs do, more like, I guess wolves would.

And The Wolfen came out of that. And I wrote it and sent it to a new agent because all the agents had-- I tried at all, given me up. One of them even, she got a book of mine. And she wrote me this letter back saying, it was a wonderful book. And it's not quite something that she thought she could find a home for. But if I wrote something else along some lines, and she outlined some ideas, maybe she could succeed.

And so I spent a year writing a new book, and sent it to her, and nothing happened.

One day, a postman came on Saturday morning. This was still when the world was a very human place. And I was in-- we were in New York. And he knocked on our door. And he had my manuscript, neatly in a-- tied up in rubber bands. And it had, on the front page, it had my address. And that's how he had gotten it back to me.

He had found it without an envelope, just thrown into a mailbox. She hadn't liked it, apparently. And instead of sending it back to me or sending me a note, she just threw the whole manuscript in a mailbox.

And so the postman and his wife were my first public readers. And they liked the book very much. And I do too. It's never been published. I've got my-- I've got my drawer, like every writer does. But The Wolfen just came about. And then I discovered it was a horror novel because the editor told me so.

SPEAKER: Oh, interesting. OK. So there's a lot to dig into here. And I think we're going to unpack it as we go. And we will definitely talk quite a bit about Anne, particularly, as we get into Communion Letters, Afterlife Revolution. I mean, it's-- one belongs to the other. You two are so tightly intertwined with all your everything.

WHITLEY STREIBER: Yeah.

SPEAKER: So-- but we have to get into Communion. So we have listeners of all ages. And so listeners of a certain age obviously know what Communion is. It was an enormous sensation. Number one New York Times best seller, sold millions of copies. And it's just-- it was everywhere. And then even people of the next generation will have heard it.

But we also have a number of just college students, who may be completely unfamiliar with Communion and the stories within it.

WHITLEY STREIBER: Yeah, I understand.

SPEAKER: Yeah, so do you want-- could you give us just an overview of December 26 and what happens thereafter?

WHITLEY STREIBER: I'll give you an outline of what happened.

SPEAKER: Yeah.

WHITLEY STREIBER: A March of 1984, we buy a house in the country. Well, I become terrified. Not in New York, where we live in the village, and there's plenty of crime all around us all the time, but out in the country where as Anne, who called the sheriff, finally, to find out the crime rate in the area, and he said, there is no crime rate here. That's why we've only got two people in our office. And so she said, why are you so scared? And this fear developed more and more intensely.

And then in October of 1985, there was an incident that I didn't-- understand, this is coming in a life that I'd been fascinated by flying saucers when I was a child, and apparently, had a lot of-- I wrote a fact fiction book about it called The Secret School, contemplating what might have been in my childhood. Although, looking back on it, I think the book is mostly fiction, actually. And the-- and I say in the book, it's a work of the imagination.

In any case, at that time, I had no interest, whatsoever, in UFOs or anything like that. So what happened in October, we had a couple of friends, Jack Sandulescu and Andy Gottlieb, at the cabin.

And in the middle of the night, this horrendous light woke me right up. It was just pouring in the windows, like the sun was not just up, but bright as the Dickens. I jumped up because I couldn't think of any light that bright, except if the roof was on fire.

And I started to run down stairs to go to the stove and to go outside to see if that was correct. And the light went out.

And then I-- my son-- there was also a huge bang. And my son, who was six or seven at the time, started screaming. And so I ran down to help him. And on the way down, Jack or Annie was standing in their doorway of their bedroom downstairs. And I told them, it's all right, just go back to sleep. And I went and comforted my son.

And after that, I was incredibly disturbed. I bought a shotgun. I bought a pistol. I began to drive a van, nuts because she-- I began to deteriorate mentally very rapidly, without any explanation or understanding why because if you looked at the incident through the eyes I had then or we all had then, it was just a funny thing that happened that had no explanation and didn't seem worth thinking about. Maybe some kind of atmospheric phenomenon or something.

But I-- and I bought an alarm system from RadioShack, and installed it. I couldn't even sleep for a minute in the cabin without the alarm system armed. But I didn't want to abandon the cabin. For some reason, I began compulsively going back again and again, and taking my family. And Anne was delighted because she loved the cabin, and so did our son.

Then December of 1985 comes along. It's late in the night. The night after Christmas. It's been a lovely day after Christmas. We eat beautiful leftovers from Christmas dinner. We go on a little walk. It's a beautiful snowy evening. It's just the most lovely, peaceful time you could imagine.

I noticed noises in the middle of the night. And I wake up. I open my eyes. And boy, I'm not in my bedroom. I'm staring at what looks like an insect about this far from me, only its head is as big as mine. And it has big black eyes.

And there are other dark blue figures darting around in the background. And I closed my eyes. I opened them again. I decide, it has to be a nightmare. And I try to bring my bed back around me, to make my world reappear.

And I'm not in a bed, I'm in a cot. I'm in what, initially, a round room. And it crossed my mind, have I been taken from the house? Am I in a tent? Where am I?

And follow very traumatic events. I was very forcibly raped. Semen was extracted from my body, because the rape was done with a device that causes sexual-- a sexual-- an erectile response. And if this is used to this day in animal husbandry, but in those days, it was also used for people who were sexually dysfunctional, men who couldn't-- we now use Viagra for.

And I wasn't normal. I mean, there was no reason for me to have anything like that. And I-- it was appalling. The whole event was just shocking as hell.

And then the next day, I was quite traumatized without knowing why. I didn't remember it very clearly. I just remembered something-- some kind of a ruckus during the night. And I thought I'd seen an owl because of these big black eyes that had been staring at me.

And so I said to Anne, I think there an owl got into the house during the night. And she said, Whitley, that's impossible, which was true, there's no chimney. There was no-- all the windows were closed. It was winter. So there was no way anything could get in the house.

And evening fell. And I'm telling you, the sense of vulnerability and fear grows with the setting of the sun, like nobody's business. And I had, at that point, post-traumatic stress disorder, but I didn't have any idea what that was.

There followed a period of weeks that I struggled to try to figure this out. I went to the doctor. I wrote a short story called Pain, which was very strange for me. I'm not, at all, into S&M or anything like that. It was a masochistic story about this devastating angel who burns the sin out of this man.

And Anne said, Whitley, this is very weird, this story. This is really beyond anything I've seen from you. I said, I don't know why I wrote it. It's published, you can read it.

SPEAKER: Yeah.

WHITLEY STREIBER: In fact--

SPEAKER: It's a great story. The Janet story, right?

WHITLEY STREIBER: The Janet character, yeah. And so I went to the doctor. And he was the first sane person who said, Whitley, it sounds like you're telling me you're taking aboard a flying saucer by a little man. And I thought, holy moly, it does sound like that. It hadn't occurred to me when I was telling him the story of what it actually was. I was even saying.

And he said, I think we need to do a battery of tests. And I said, yeah, I think so. And so we did MRI. We did temporal lobe epilepsy, which is a disease that causes a lot of hallucinations. The battery of psychological tests. General health checkup. A test, he examined my rectum and found that it had been damaged. It was torn.

And I decided, I could not believe this. I didn't-- still, the idea of aliens hadn't come into my mind because it just wasn't there. It wasn't--

But my brother had sent me this book called Science and the UFOs for Christmas. And he was into UFOs. And I described the experience to him. And he said, well, why don't you read the book? And I said, because it's nonsense, Richard. I'm sorry.

I didn't say it that way. It was more polite. He's a sweetheart. He's very wonderful guy. But his taste in literature and mine were not the same.

And so I finally did read it. And damned if I didn't come across, in the back of the book, a story about an alien abduction that was very like what happened to me. I remember, it was very much like what happened to me. And there was a researcher there called Budd Hopkins.

And I met Budd. Anne and I went and met Bud, with her still thinking it's absolutely nonsensical. There couldn't be anything like this could ever happen.

And he wanted to hypnotize me, which scared the hell out of both of us because he was an artist. In fact, a very good artist and well known in New York for his artwork. But I didn't see any diplomas on his walls that had anything to do with hypnosis or psychiatry or anything.

He proceeds to get me into touch with probably the best forensic hypnotist who was then practicing, Dr. Donald Cline, who was the head of the New York State Department of Psychiatry, and had, at that point in his life, 72 cases that he had solved using forensic hypnosis.

After Communion came out, there were all kinds of stories in the media about how hypnosis is nonsense, it doesn't work. And that's kind of a meme now. But in fact, under the-- in the right hands of a skilled professional who knows what they're doing, it can be very effective. And it was effective in Don Cline's hands.

And what emerged were very different from what Dr. Cline and I suspected. It was exactly what Budd Hopkins had expected. And I, at this point, had read only that one description, which is only a couple of paragraphs. It's an outline. And it didn't describe what the beings looked like or anything like that.

And Hopkins had very intelligently isolated me and told me not to read anything more at all about the subject. And-- but this is where it started. Eventually, I had to face the fact that whatever it was, it was real, real in some strange way that I have to be honest with you, I don't think we've pinned down even yet. When I wrote-- go ahead.

SPEAKER: Oh, and I was just going to say, certainly not. There just-- and we'll definitely circle back in when we get to them in the recent hearing, there's just never been the work necessary in order to really try and understand what's happening here. So--

WHITLEY STREIBER: That's correct.

SPEAKER: Yeah. But so as you're figuring it out, what made you decide to write a book about it? What made you decide, I'll-- as I'm figuring all this out, and I'm processing this, and write about your hypnosis, and thinking through hypotheses, what drove you to write Communion?

WHITLEY STREIBER: Well, what happened was this. I got into-- began to get in touch with UFO researchers. Budd Hopkins was very helpful to me. He was a sweet man. And we had a falling out later, but it was my fault and his misunderstanding, which is usually how those things happen. I always regretted it. But I couldn't change his mind.

In any case, he introduced me to a number of people, including a UFO researcher called Stanton Friedman. And at that point, I was trying to find some kind of physical evidence beyond-- I mean. I had obviously been raped by somebody.

At one point, we got the Criminal Investigation Division involved. But they were helpless because there was no evidence except the injury. In other words, there was nothing-- there was no forensic evidence, nothing. And I-- the faces I could describe, obviously, weren't going to be found because I mean, these-- they were not going to go find people like that in a mug book. So there was no-- that was a dead end.

But in any case, I-- I had this-- the sense of something deeply wrong. And I didn't know where to take it. I did not know where to take it.

I went to a couple of meetings with Budd's friends, the other people who had had the experience. They were very nice, but they seemed to be-- they were connecting dots with their imaginations. In other words, they were generating internal folklore. I didn't want to do that.

And I tried to understand it in another way. And Stanton-- I said to Stanton Friedman, I want to know if there's any material evidence of the existence of these beings, of these aliens, that's because that's what I then thought they were. And they must have left something behind. And he said, well, I'll introduce you to a Dr. Robert Sarbacher, who is a metallurgist who has worked on materials that were found at Roswell, New Mexico.

And so I telephoned Dr. Sarbacher. And he was very open about it. And in fact, letters from him about this can be found on the internet. He had no security clearance. He didn't keep anything secret, and didn't understand why it should be kept secret.

And he said to me, why don't you write all of this out and send it to me? And so I sat down. The next few days, I wrote the whole story, in short form, obviously, not as a book. I had not yet thought of a book. And I overnighted it to him via UPS Overnight, which was a new service then.

FedEx was in business, but UPS was the one that we could easily get to at our cabin. They would pick up at our cabin.

So I used them. In the next day, a man calls me from UPS. He's-- It turns out he's the agent who was delivering this package. And he says, I'm sorry, but this recipient has died. And I thought, my God, how could that be? And he said, we will return the package to you.

Dr. Sarbacher, the UPS man said he fell off his boat and died. He apparently lived on a yacht. He was very wealthy, obviously, from all of this metallurgy work he had done in the world and all of his patents and everything.

And it was chilling, frankly, because I was already being told by people like Stanton Friedman that this was the most classified thing the United States has. And now years later, I sat there, watching the David Grusch hearing before the Congressional Oversight Committee. And when I saw him saying people had been murdered, I thought, I was right to be scared.

I think when you look at Dr. Sarbachers's death certificate, it says, died of natural causes. And he was an older man. The writing never came back to me. It never reappeared. And I wrote it again. And it became Communion.

SPEAKER: I hadn't made the connection between what Grusch said and that particular incident before you just mentioned it, that is haunting.

WHITLEY STREIBER: When you're in this head, you're going to make that connection very quickly.

SPEAKER: Yeah, I could imagine.

WHITLEY STREIBER: Because I don't understand, A, he is playing with fire without knowing it, because it is, in fact, at that time, the biggest secret the United States possesses. And now he's talking to a writer who might write about it. And they just-- I think they killed him, frankly. I don't-- I think it's too much of a coincidence.

SPEAKER: And the last time you saw him, he was healthy, fine--

WHITLEY STREIBER: I didn't see him.

SPEAKER: Person.

WHITLEY STREIBER: I only talked on the phone. He was perfectly fine. He sounded strong and normal.

SPEAKER: X. So the--

WHITLEY STREIBER: At the time, it scared me so badly. I didn't put this whole story in Communion. I was very cagey about it, because I thought, at the time, he had been murdered. And so did Budd. And so did Stanton Friedman.

SPEAKER: Oh. So the trauma of December 26, everything around that, it's harrowing, right? But after you publish it, and you-- I'm sure, as a bestselling horror writer, bestselling writer, you knew, OK, people are going to read this. But you did not know how many--

WHITLEY STREIBER: No.

SPEAKER: --given you put your address in the back of the book.

WHITLEY STREIBER: Right.

SPEAKER: And--

WHITLEY STREIBER: [INAUDIBLE] suggestion. Fortunately, I did that.

SPEAKER: Yeah. And fortunately, for humankind, for now at Rice, et cetera, but you started to get letters and some letters. And eventually, you got what, half a million letters, somewhere in there?

WHITLEY STREIBER: Probably around half a million over the next five years, yeah. And they poured in at first. For the first year, the first six months, especially, the postman were bringing them in great bags up and pouring the bags out on our living room floor. Mountain.

And I was totally overwhelmed, I could not even begin to imagine how we would deal with this because these letters, obviously, had people's names and addresses. And if you opened one, you would read this intimate account of some kind of a close encounter, rarely an abduction like I had. They were just extraordinary accounts of these unbelievably complex unusual experiences that people were having, apparently, in droves.

And I said, Annie, I can't deal with these letters. And she says, well, I can. And she bought-- basically bought a letter opener, hired a secretary, and started in. Now the secretary was herself.

And I said to Anne, well, I'll call manpower. We'll get in a secretary. She said, no, I'm going to find my secretary right in these letters. And I thought, how strange. What an odd way of doing it.

But not an hour later, she comes into my office with this letter and says, this lady is going to be my secretary. And I look at it. It's a lady letter with a long complex experience of a life-- a remarkable experience, in fact.

And she-- it's beautifully written. It's a lovely penmanship. But she says she's an actress and singer. So I said, she doesn't-- is she-- how do she's a secretary? Because she says here, she's an actress and a singer. She says, well, have you ever heard of her? I said, no. She said, well, that handwriting is the handwriting of a professional.

And so she called her up. She turned out to live down the street from us, which is why Anne had pulled the letter out in the first place, that and the handwriting did it. And she was Anne's secretary for the next 15 years. Her name was Laurie Burns.

And together, Anne and Laurie created this catalog of the letters. And they're-- now they're housed at Rice University in the Authors of the Impossible archive, about 30,000 of them. These are the ones with a rich, complex story. A lot of them are just very brief and, thank you for the book or that sort of thing. She didn't keep those because there was no room. We couldn't do it.

And we kept those letters. They were totally ignored for years. We kept them in plastic boxes very carefully. When we lost our cabin and left New York for the last time, we took them with us to Texas, where we-- I had a little condo. And we kept them always. We never lost them.

Those letters turn out to be the first testament of contact with something. And now we're having to try to get serious about what that something may be.

SPEAKER: So what was that-- so you described your experience with December 26, but especially after, just struggling what happened and trying to make sense of it physically, et cetera. And it felt, as I understand it, except for, of course, Anne, very alone. Right?

And then you just get this deluge of letters. So what was that like to be able to look into that mirror?

WHITLEY STREIBER: I was shocked beyond belief. Anne took it in her stride. She-- Anne seemed to-- I think Anne was really the master of the whole thing. I mean, she-- once she heard the story, she-- I finally sat down with her.

I talked to a friend, a dear friend to this day, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. And I said, Timothy, I've had something odd happened to me. And I don't know how to tell Anne. She-- he says, well, what was it? And so I told him the story. And he said, well, just tell her. Anne's very resourceful. She'll figure it out. She'll figure out what it is and also how to take-- how to handle it.

And I had thought I'd tried to drive her away. I thought I was going insane. I thought I was going to end up in a mental institution and her unable to divorce me and trying to raise a little boy without any decent income-- a source of income or anything.

And so I had-- we'd fought. I mean, I'd-- I was just in a absolutely traumatized state. And so I sat down with her and she began to tear up because she thought I was going to say we're-- we've got to get a separation, I can't handle the marriage, because there have been so much friction because of this.

Instead, I told her the story. She listens. And she says, oh, thank God. I thought you were going crazy.

SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE]

WHITLEY STREIBER: She remembered it slightly differently. She remembered saying, oh, thank God, now I don't have to get a divorce. But whichever one she said, they both had the same effect.

We looked at each other for a second, burst out laughing, and threw ourselves into one another's arms, because I realized, boy, I don't just have a wife, I have a fabulous human being here. Anyone who could handle that.

She made me a writer. She's-- she did all of this. And she titled the book too with the title is Everything. It is the essential meaning of contact, that one word. I was going to call it Body Terror because I'd felt so frightened and so utterly-- it was like a physical terror. It was unbelievably intense.

And she said to me one night, almost as if she was asleep, in a kind of a funny voice, she said, Whitley, you should call the book Communion because that's what it's about. And that is what it's about.

And we have to find our way with this phenomenon. It would be nice to find out whether or not the UAPs and the close encounter experience are connected. We don't even know that because they go on and on about how these people jabbering away about how the UAP images can be questioned, et cetera, and so forth.

That jabbering has been going on for 80 years. And there are-- it's not just a few images. Someone in the media might grab five or six images and say, these are the unexplained ones. There's thousands of unexplained images from all walks-- all different walks of life, including, apparently, many that are held classified that we haven't even seen yet. So yes, the UAPs are real phenomenon and a very mysterious one.

But is there a connection between them and these experiences? That's what we don't know. We don't know what these experiences are. But they are extremely varied. And they are, of course, generating a modern folklore of alien contact.

By a folklore, I mean, in this case, people experience something they can't explain. The human mind, being what it is, it tries to come up with an explanation. And it will draw, in order to do that, on its knowledge base, in the-- and usually, that's a mythological knowledge base, like the fairy folk, which could be the visitors in another form back from the 19th-- 18th and 19th centuries.

When people saw them, these-- there's a little one of the lullabies of that era of the 18th-- 17th century, I guess. It's go away [INAUDIBLE] fairies. Come down bunny angels, because they recognize them as being very much like what we see now. And then of course, we tinker belled them to death. And they-- the real ominous creatures of the more distant past disappeared.

Now we're in a new era science fiction is talking about aliens and so forth. There are images appearing in the late-- in the 1940s on-- in various science fiction magazines and so forth, oddly enough, of black eyed creatures. And before you know it-- and then my book comes out. And before you know it, people are putting two and two together with what information they have available.

And since the truth has been held from them and denied them, they are making up a folklore. And that's where we are now. We have a huge folklore of alien contact. We have UAPs floating around that we don't understand-- the significance of which, we don't understand, whether they are devices or projections of some-- from some other reality or what they are, we don't know.

Apparently, according to David Grusch, there are intact ones. And I heard that from General Arthur Exon back in 1988. So I believe Grusch is quite correct.

And General Exon, who I-- let me explain him very briefly. He's a friend of the family. And after I published Communion, my uncle, who was his close friend, told me that he and General Exon had been at the Air Materiel command under General Twining when this debris and the bodies were brought in from Roswell.

And he told me that there were bodies and that there was debris. And he-- so now David Grusch is saying there are bodies and intact disks. And General Exon said there was at least one intact disk still to that day in 1988 at Elgin Air Force base in Florida that he knew of. And he had apparently seen them. And he had held one of the bodies in his hands, in his arms.

So I think that's all real now.

All these years later, David Grusch comes out and says all the same stuff in public. Come on, I think it's real. And I think it's going to be a tremendously difficult task for everyone, especially those of us who consider ourselves intellectuals, to deal with this, because it's so threatening.

It's deeply threatening in ways that we don't recognize on the surface. But under the surface, you see all of these things flying around, you see what people are describing. You realize that there's someone here with rather breathtaking capabilities and probably extraordinary knowledge. And they won't deal with us. They won't engage with us directly. And that's going to be a tremendous sticking point.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER: I want to drill down into this a little bit, but in reference to the Afterlife Revolution because we're talking about these non-biologic entities. This is one of the things that came up and holding these things in the arms.

But one of the things that Anne was very forward about finding in the communion letters is that whoever these visitors are often appear with the deceased, with the dead, to a point where, at times, it's difficult to separate the two. Is there some continuity between the visitors and the dead? Is-- what's the preposition between them? Do they come with? Are they as? What have you?

And then in 2015, very sadly, Anne passes away. And-- but your communications with her, as we learn in the Afterlife Revolution, don't stop, right?

So I guess the way to start this thread is, how did you begin communicating with Anne after her passing? How soon thereafter? What was it like?

WHITLEY STREIBER: On-- Anne died on August the 11th, 2015 at 7:15 in the evening. 9:30 that night, I was sitting in my chair in the living room, sadder than I knew anyone could possibly be. I had lost this enormous presence in my life, the most-- the love affair was so profound. And so completely all encompassing.

At 9:30, the phone rang. And I thought, oh, my God, I'm going to take a call. I looked at it, and it was Belle Fuller, one of Anne's friends. And I thought to myself, I can't just ignore Belle. Belle knows Anne is sick.

And I answered the phone and she said, Whitley, something very strange just happened. I just heard Ann's voice in my head, telling me to call you. Is she all right?

And I said, Belle, I'm so sorry to say that Annie passed away hour and a half ago. And she said, well, Whitley, I don't know how to tell you this, but I think she's still here. And I thought, oh, I can't deal with this right now. And we-- I was very sweet to her, but I hang up fairly quickly.

My kids took me out to the Ritz Carlton in Palm Springs the next day, just to get out of the house. And so we were there. And they took a hike up in the hills. And I went up in the hills with them. But at the time. I had an unfixed bad knee, and I couldn't really hike very much.

So I was sitting on a bench, and my cell phone rings again. This time, it's another friend from Georgia, Claire Henry, the wife of a man called William Henry, who we'd been friends for years, the three of us-- the four of us.

And she says, Whitley, something very strange just happened. I just heard Anne's voice, as clear as a bell, like she was talking to me right in my ear, right beside me, say, call Whitley. And I had been thinking at that moment-- both times, I had been thinking, Annie, if you still exist in any way, please let me know.

And I'm fairly thick about these things. I'm pretty-- I mean, the ridiculous thing is that a person like me, who was a secular skeptic before this all happened to me, would end up in this boat.

So but I'm not stupid. And I decided that there's something to this. This is twice. And it kept happening, not the same form, but it kept happening. It happened with about five or six-- five other six other friends.

And I thought to myself, Annie is still there. She's still here. And she began to talk to me then. And that's how the whole Afterlife Revolution book started. This is essentially a book that was written by the two of us together after she died.

And I decided that this is to a person who's really was very problematic about whether or not the soul even exists. And-- but now I'm not. I know it does. And I know it persists after death because of my relationship with my wife now, which is eight years.

We've gone on in the friendship, and the love, and the merit. She has worked on my books, all of my books, for eight years. And I've decided-- I-- now I wear her ring in mine because I've decided that we're still both together, but we're just down to a single body.

And you know, we have to wrap our heads around the fact that there is something more than the physical being. And that's going to be particularly difficult for most of us in the secular-intellectual community of the Western world because we have rejected that knowledge. That is rejected knowledge among us because we can't detect this in any way. Or perhaps it's that we don't want to. I'm not sure which is the correct answer.

But we have rejected it. Now, it's going to come back to us because the other thing we discovered-- getting back to the other part of your questions. Anne said this-- she came out of her office one day, and says, Whitney, is that something to do with we call death? Because so many of the letters would mention the dead people, dead friends and relatives with the visitors. and in fact, that happened at the cabin.

She used to pick people from the letters and get them to come up to the cabin because she felt that these were people who were authentic and therefore, they might see something. And most of them were authentic in one way or another, but the ones that seemed authentic to her and that were having repeat experiences were the ones she would ask to come up to the cabin. And quite often, they did have usually, very complex experiences involving more than one person. So they weren't like isolated experiences, where a person comes in anticipation of something happening. And it does happen.

And it's essentially a confabulation. There may be an element of confabulation there. Probably is. But the multiplicity of witness makes it more difficult to just brush it off that way. And what would happen often is the dead would come with the visitors or before. And when they came before, Annie would say to me, we'll have a visit tonight.

Now, why is this? I think the answer is pretty simple. It is this way because we don't know what in the world is going on here. That's why it is but--

SPEAKER: Solid answer.

WHITLEY STREIBER: Yeah.

SPEAKER: Appreciate that.

WHITLEY STREIBER: I think that's the only honest valid answer because when push comes to shove, because of my wife's presence in my life, the intimacy of it and the extraordinary complexity of the editorial relationship that has developed, I do personally believe that she still exists.

But if you asked me to say to you with unequivocal authority that she exists outside of me, that I can't do. I think she does, and there's been plenty of manifestations around here there. They happen on a very regular basis, and a lot of them are very hilarious and very Anne-like.

So I think she does exist. I think this is real, but I won't assert it as a belief. Instead, what I always like to do is to remind myself of one of the things that she taught me after she died, which was, the human species is too young to have beliefs. What we need are good questions.

[LAUGHS]

I think that's so ironic that I would learn that from a person after they died in under circumstances that urged the closure of that question, but they urge it prematurely.

SPEAKER: Interesting. So I have a follow up, which I hope is a good question even if we can't sort of answer it as we go here. But one of the things that happened in the aftermath of the communion night is you had this very intense, erotic, difficult and ultimately, awakening relationship with one of the visitors, right? The one that ended up on the cover of the original communion that struck so many people.

WHITLEY STREIBER: Right.

SPEAKER: And over the course of your writing, you've put forth many different hypotheses. There you go. Yeah, and while we're looking at photos, I wanted to ask is, behind your head, is that Anne?

WHITLEY STREIBER: That's Anne behind the head.

SPEAKER: Interesting. Yeah.

WHITLEY STREIBER: The painting beside it is called Symbols For Speed, and it's one of her favorites. She collected art on a small scale because we couldn't afford to collect it on a big scale, but that's one of her favorites. That's why it's there.

SPEAKER: Got it. So you put forth a lot of hypotheses about this visitor. You know, and you relate it to the goddess Ishtar and you go on.

WHITLEY STREIBER: Yes.

SPEAKER: But one of the most interesting-- as a religious historian, that's fascinating-- is that it's a deeper level of Anne in some way. Like there's this sort of-- yeah, this different dimension. So how do you relate that hypothesis that you had while Anne was alive to now, having this sort of relationship with her after death? Is it something that feels a bit more enticing as a hypothesis, or is it something that doesn't seem to add up in the same way?

WHITLEY STREIBER: The connection between Anne and the being that I encountered that night is a very interesting question in my mind. It's one I'm still exploring. So I'm not entirely prepared to make any assertions about it. But the reason, I think there is a connection-- and Jeff Kripal explores this quite brilliantly in The Supernatural, the book we wrote together.

The reason I think that there is a connection is I was so embarrassed after my first sexual encounter with this being. I mean, here I am, a person. I regarded myself perhaps, foolishly as a normal person. And not only am I having these bizarre experiences then, I start to have lurid alien sex out of a Z-grade science fiction story.

It was just shocking, but the thing is it wasn't vague. It was completely-- I was in this state of mind when it happened. And not only was I in this state of mind, it was despite the appearance of my sexual partner. The most intense sexual experience I'd ever had in my life. And yet, not with my wife.

And I thought to myself, the next morning-- and I was still spent. I had had sex all right. And got up, and I thought, she didn't have sex last night. I could tell it immediately. She didn't. Therefore, whatever happened to me-- I don't know what to think, and I don't know what to say because I did have sex last night. And I do remember it vividly.

And finally, I told her. And she was completely at ease about it. I was so ashamed, and I said, I couldn't. I had no way to excuse myself because this had happened. And she said, well, she did it to you. You couldn't stop her, which was true enough. I woke up in the middle of the act, lying under her with her sitting on.

And then it went on. They became much more. And I'm a very conservative person sexually. I don't-- despite the nasty things that have been insinuated about me because I wrote the story, Pain, I'm actually a very conservative sexually. I don't fool around, and yet with this being, I did fool around in all kinds of exotic ways. And I couldn't stop it. Couldn't prevent it.

And I told Annie everything. And she was just completely at ease with it. She thought it was fine. Then something else happened. This entity started going to our boy, who was then 9, and going into his room. And her presence in the house was pretty open.

In other words, you would glimpse her, but you wouldn't necessarily see her for more than maybe, a half a second when she was in the house, but you knew she was there. She made no secret of it. And I began to worry that she was engaging with him in an inappropriate way.

And one night, he went with her. And I had the experience of standing in my front yard looking up at this big star in the sky, knowing that he was there and not here. And it was horrendous. And then he proceeded to write these lovely little poems the next morning. "Reality is God's dream," and all of these things he became very different child.

But we sent him to summer camp because we were concerned. We didn't think that it was appropriate at all for a child to have a relationship like this. And he had been at camp about a week when the camp director telephoned us and said that not to worry, Andrew is back, but he disappeared.

And of course, I was shocked. I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, he was playing soccer, and he suddenly disappeared from the field in the middle of the field. I said, do you see-- did he walked away or ran off? He said, no, no, he disappeared, Mr. Streiber. He was suddenly gone. And then a few minutes later, he came back. He was there again.

We went and got him because I said to Annie I said, I think she's warning us that if we don't bring him back here, she's going to take him. And so we did bring him back. He has no memory of any of this. But years later, and now, he's in business. And he's got a big career going. And suddenly the camp puts a video of their big campfire story up on the internet.

And it's the story with his name of this event. And he calls me up, and he says, dad, have you looked-- look me up on the internet and see what you see. And so I look him up, and I see this. I thought to myself, oh-oh. He said, dad, get that taken down right away. And so I call the camp counselor. And I said, listen-- camp director. I said, he's going to sue you senseless if you don't get that down by the end of the day today and never put it up again because it was his life.

I mean he doesn't talk about this. He has a different life, a different career. If he remembers things he says not, he says he does not. He's outside this world. Very intentionally, raising a lovely family and trying to live a normal life. And that was not on the cards, but it means that something happened.

SPEAKER: It's also just-- I hadn't heard this before. It's pretty strange for a camp to advertise, hey, a kid got abducted here. Right? Like you're not going to say--

WHITLEY STREIBER: They didn't think of it that way. He literally dematerialized. He was standing there one moment, and then the next moment, he wasn't there.

SPEAKER: And this is just to make sure I'm in the time frame, you are still living in upstate New York at this point when he's 9?

WHITLEY STREIBER: We're back and forth to the cabin at that time, and it's summer. And so we're there the full time, but here's the interesting part of this. It never crossed either of our minds to stop going to the cabin. To sell it. To quit. We didn't want to quit.

And this is characteristic of this whole community of close encounter witnesses. They'll tell you these horrifying stories. And then you'll say, well, do you want them to leave you? Get out of your life? Oh, no. No, I don't. There's something. There's some kind of a disconnect going on, and I am experiencing it because they're still in my life. And I'm glad of that.

I know a lot of people who have them in their lives heavy duty like I do. And they just finally moved to the forest, or the desert, or out into the countryside, and basically, close the door behind them, and become completely oriented toward the visitors because it's hard with them. But it's also incredibly fruitful. There's something deeply satisfying about the journey with them as hard as it is.

SPEAKER: Yeah, it reminds me of Rudolf Otto's, "mysterium tremendum et fascinans." Right?

[LAUGHS]

Like it's terrifying, right? It's mysterious. It's holy other. It can break you, but it's fascinating, right? There's an allure to it. You can't really-- there's a spell there, and you're under it, and you just want to know more and experience more and become closer to them. Yeah. So--

WHITLEY STREIBER: Curiosity is more powerful than fear. If it wasn't, I don't think we would be human. I don't think we would even exist anymore.

SPEAKER: So this sort of tangents into something I had always wanted to ask. Why do you think it started to happen to you personally? Right? Like what was it about the cabin and you that drew this in? And I kind of want to touch on you, both in Afterlife Revolution, in Communion and in many places in your work. You talk about your experiences with the Gurdjieff work.

WHITLEY STREIBER: Of course.

SPEAKER: Right. And I understand it you've been practicing the sort of sense meditation or some form of Gurdjieff work since 1970?

WHITLEY STREIBER: 1969.

SPEAKER: '69. My goodness.

WHITLEY STREIBER: April '69. I do it every day to this day with a group of people. We do it every day at 1 o'clock Pacific time. And if anybody is interested in joining, by the way, you can just write me at whitleystreiber.com. And you can do it with us as long as you make a commitment to do your best to be there every day.

Many of the people in the group have been doing it for years. Most of them are close encounter witnesses. And it's free, of course. I mean, n one charge for that. So there is and was a grammar in the relationship with the visitors that mirrors the Gurdjieff system very, very nicely.

And I can't tell you that it's like that for me because they are tailoring our relationship to my own spiritual practice or that they started with me because they thought I would understand things because of my spiritual practice. And the practice specifically is this.

The Gurdjieff-- GI Gurdjieff was an Armenian mystic, who moved to Moscow, and Saint Petersburg, and then to Berlin and then to France during living in the time of the Russian Revolution and the First World War. And then after-- dying in 1947.

He brought to the world a group of ideas, which he expressed very ineptly but very it convincingly, in a complex novel called, Beelzebub's tales to his Grandson. And it's a delightful read. And it all of his ideas are expressed in it in various oblique ways for the most part.

But out of that and out of his relationship with other people like P.D. Ouspensky and Maurice Nicholl and others, a practicum was evolved, which is basically about the fact that in our normal state of mind we are asleep. And that is defined by the fact by our attention is always being taken out into the world by the world.

In the Gurdjieff system, you learn to hold some of your attention back and self observe. And this, over years, develops into a kind of what he calls self remembering, which is very hard to put into words, except to say that when you do begin to have moments of this, it's extraordinarily exquisite. It's like living in a very gentle and profound truth with oneself.

So one of the practices in the foundation is the practice of strengthening the attention by intentionally taking part of it. Letting the thoughts flow and taking the parts of the attention onto the body part by part, foot, or upper leg, and then holding the attention partly on the body, while the thoughts flow and the impressions come in. Not by breaking anything by stopping the flow of thoughts so that the attention is divided. And this, over time, creates it makes it very much stronger.

Now, what does this have to do with the visitors? There were a couple of instances, where I had very direct communications with them in the early days, especially. I wish it was still true now, but now, they're much more oblique and also, get angrier when I don't figure things out than they did then. They were very gentle then, but now, they're not.

So in any case, ask them why they came. And the answer was we saw a glow. And at the time, I thought, hmm, must have been the glow of cities and so forth. But then Annie passes away. And they had been trying-- there had been a period in the late '90s just before we lost the cabin, mid-'90s, that someone would come and materialize physically like an ectoplasmic being or a man.

You could see him. He'd sit in the foot of the bed. And they would-- he and some others would wake me up at 3 o'clock in the morning by pushing me on the shoulder and getting me to meditate at 3:00 AM. And then we'd left, and that ended because I don't want to get up at 3:00 AM unless I have to. And although now, I do it every night and have been ever since the event I'm about to describe happened.

I went to one of William Henry's events in Nashville when it was just a couple of months after Annie had passed away. In fact, I think it was September or October. And I did it to just to get away and to be with people I loved and to have an experience. William is a wonderful raconteur, and he is a brilliant insights into the mystical significance of a lot of the old master paintings. And so when he does one of these-- he's also on ancient aliens and things, but this part of his life is different.

And he will do a lecture on the paintings and show you just one of these beautiful paintings after another, and explain the mysticism and the esoteric significance of the paintings. And wonderful experience. So I was there, and we were having a break. And suddenly, a woman walks up to me and says, Mr. Streiber-- the typical thing. Mr. Streiber, the strangest thing just happened to me. I'm hesitant to tell you. And I thought, how could anyone be hesitant to tell me something strange?

But she's thinking that I'm going to think she's stranger than me. [LAUGHS] So I said, oh, go ahead and tell me. And then it starts again. I just heard your wife's voice in my ear. And she said, tell Whitley that I can see him, and he's sitting in the chair. That meant when I was doing the sensing exercise. And I put two and two together. And I thought, my God. It wasn't the glow of cities that they told me about so long ago.

And of course, that's why they came when they came because they came when I was doing the sensing exercise. They could see me when I was doing the sensing exercise. They could see this structural change in the attention. And she can too. And then when I got home, somebody started blowing in my face, pinching me, wiggling my nose, wiggling my ears and at 3 o'clock in the morning just like they had at the cabin all those years before.

And it was obvious to me that it must be Anne. And especially because it would kiss me sometimes. Just very dry, gentle kisses that actually contained a sort of breath as well. And so I do it every morning at 3:00 AM to this day. I've been doing it every night at 3:00 AM. I do it at 3:00 AM, at 11:00 PM, at 3:00 AM and at 1:00 PM.

And if I don't do it at 3:00 AM for a couple of nights, basically, whoever it is and I assume it's Anne, gets angry and gets after me. And I start to get the little nudges again, but they're not so pleasant. They're not. They're more than little nudges. I'm definitely waked up, so I live in this world. This is my life.

I live in the world in which there are invisible presences that are directly involved in my life. And I think it all comes back to basically the grammar of the Gurdjieff work fitting this in some way that made it possible for the relationship to deepen and extend.

SPEAKER: Yeah, and that was so well done. Thank you. It struck me as what you were learning from Anne about what it takes to basically, remain conscious after death and become one of the ones, who is able to consciously direct back and forth-- is tied into, not just the Gurdjieff work. You can do other things. But it is that harnessing of attention, right? And that--

WHITLEY STREIBER: Yeah, two things are critical. The harnessing of attention and the learning, the ability to move the attention out of the ego, and to see the ego from outside because the sensing exercise is an exercise in moving attention. The next step is self-observation. That is to say seeing the self from outside.

And then later, self-remembering, which is seeing much more than the self in the moment. It is seeing the whole journey from the outside, and it's a beautiful journey to have a life. That's all I can say about self-remembering.

SPEAKER: Let's segue to your most recent book, Them. I had read it and had questions. And then the David Grusch House Subcommittee meeting happens on July 26 and discussion of UAPs and non-biologic entities. So I wanted to ask you.

You've done a whole podcast episode on this, so we're not going to go fully in depth. But when you were hearing them talk, how did you sort of read what was happening there in terms of everything you'd put forth in them? All right? What was the--

[LAUGHS]

WHITLEY STREIBER: It was like listening to a reading of my book.

SPEAKER: Yeah.

WHITLEY STREIBER: You know, the second part of the book. The first part of the book is a deep analysis as deep as I could go. Analysis of 11 different close encounter experiences, which there are three things about them that I chose them for. One is the fulsomeness of the description of the experience. Two is in general, the multiple witness quality of it.

And three is the high level strangeness because I think that one of the characteristics of this whole thing is that we're going to have to get used to-- in order to study it successfully, we're going to have to get used to the fact that a lot of it reads very, very, very strange. So strange that your initial reaction is, that couldn't possibly happen. It's much stranger than what happened to me for the most part.

But that we've got to get back. We got to remember Anne. "The human species is too young to have beliefs. So what we need are good questions." We got to form good questions around this, and we haven't done that yet.

What was the second part of the question?

SPEAKER: Oh, how does your book speak to? What happened at the July 26 meeting?

WHITLEY STREIBER: And then as I watched the David Grusch hearing, I already knew what Commander Fravor and would say and so forth the two pilots but I had not heard David Grusch before, and I thought to myself, my God. It's my book. All the things in it because I've known these things for years.

I mean, it's a kind of almost an open secret that we have bodies, and we have craft. It's an open secret. And inside the intelligence community, I'm very close to that community in many respects. And so it wasn't surprising to me.

And the shooting war that goes on, which is possibly the most absurd and inappropriate thing the human species has ever done. I mean, they came from the beyond, and what did we do? We start shooting. That's all real. And a lot of pilots have lost their lives because you shoot at somebody, they'll shoot back at you almost always.

And in order to protect themselves, which by the way, means that they are vulnerable. And that's why we have, I think, we have some craft. Some of them crashed on their own, and some of them-- it's because of hostile action on our part. Anne used to say, you know, Whitley, I worry about going up in these things. They seem to be dangerous. And this was before we knew. We knew about the Roswell Crash only in those days and then the Aztec Crash.

But in a way, I was heartened by David Rush's comments and in a way, frightened, because he mentions things like murders. And I think to myself, yes. And I have had-- when I was writing them, I felt so threatened that I left the country to finish the book. And fortunately, I have friends abroad, and I ended up writing the book at their kitchen table with the dogs and the teenagers rock and roll, blasting away, and the dogs capering around.

And I did fine anyway. I can close myself off in my own little world. I don't need-- it doesn't have to be quiet outside me. But I had to leave because this apartment was broken into, my website was hacked in a particularly sinister way. And I felt very threatened very threatened. And I just left.

And I would assume that I could have been threatened just as fully abroad, but it felt safer, especially because I was in a very ordinary family home with a lot of people around me and a lot of action. And a lot of fun. It's a very happy family.

I think that one thing that David Gersh said that has not left my mind is this. He said that he had had something happen with him and his wife, and it was very disturbing. I think they're close encounter witnesses. The two of them. I know many people in the intelligence community.

I always say to them, when you look at this stuff, expect it to look back at you because it will. And they get involved in this, and it's so cool. They're dealing with this amazing secret. And next thing you know, the visitors are in their bedroom or in their child's bedroom. That happens too.

SPEAKER: Yes.

WHITLEY STREIBER: And of course, they don't get told that, and the pilots don't get told it's dangerous. They just are sent on combat air patrol. And when they open they do their job and lock in on some one of these devices and engage in and fire their missiles, the next thing they know, they've got a terrible headache. And you do an MRI scan, and you find that parts of their brain have been demyelinized. And two weeks later, they're dead.

That's exactly the same. It's a more powerful version of Havana Syndrome because the Havana Syndrome has been back-engineered by somebody in my opinion and is being used in these situations. Perhaps, just tested on these diplomats. I don't know. But it's extremely ominous because it's a horrible weapon. And then in them, I go into exactly how it works. It's not a secret. It's very well known-- how it works.

SPEAKER: Now, that is harrowing. Harrowing.

WHITLEY STREIBER: Yeah.

SPEAKER: So from Communion on, sort of reluctant hero, you've become, in many ways, a central figure in all of this. In the UAP dialogue. In the abduction literature. You have the largest website devoted to this with Unknown Country. You have Dreamland. I mean, you're as plugged in as anybody has ever been into all this.

So you may-- this is a good question. It may not have a good answer yet, but I'd be curious. What does a more responsible, rational and humble approach to this phenomena look like, particularly at the government level, right? So as distinct from what we saw on July 26.

WHITLEY STREIBER: Humble is the right word. We have to accept the fact that we don't know what this is. We have bodies. We have devices. We have materials. But we still don't know what this is. This is a big, old universe. And just the part of it we can measure contains 2 trillion stars, and God only knows how many planets.

Of course, we contain one 1 trillion synapses. So we're actually half the size of the universe-- each one of us. So that means to me, we can get there. We can do this. But we have to-- the government has got to find some way of dealing with this. I sent them to all of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

I'm going to send them to a number of congressmen as well. I sent one copy to Steven Schiff because I think he's likely to be back in the Senate. And these people-- I didn't get any responses, and I don't expect to. But they need to become acclimatized to the fact that whatever this is, there is also this community of people, who are having experiences so strange that these experiences might be related.

They might be related. And if they're not directly related, they are indirectly related. And we're going to have to get our minds around the fact that somehow or another, there is a coherent consciousness outside of the body with unknown implications. I don't think at any time in our history, we have ever really address that in a practical, useful way.

It has always been mythologized and confused until finally, we broke the religious dictatorship that had oppressed the Western world for a 1,000 years during the Enlightenment. And now, there's a great fear in science that if we were to acknowledge the existence of this other aspect, that whole dictatorship would be re-empowered. And they would be saying, yeah, see? You have a soul, and we've got the answers.

We got to get to a point, where it's, yeah, you have a soul. Nobody has any answers. They-- these strange presences have something to do with this. Maybe, the materials and the refers darting around are connected in some way. It's a whole, big puzzle, waiting to be solved.

The only way to do that is to take as much information as possible out from behind closed doors and put it in a public space because then at last, the public level of the academy and the sciences will be able to deal with it and bring a little light and rationality to what is now a very chaotic situation that is greatly confused by a lot of public folklore. Some of which may be true, and some of which may not.

SPEAKER: Thank you so much for that. That was a perfect answer and an ideal way to come in for a soft landing for the end of this episode.

So Whitley Streiber, thank you so much for coming on. It's been an honor and just a treat to be able to listen to somebody, who has had an unbelievably rich life go through so many episodes. So thank you.

WHITLEY STREIBER: They told me at the first, you're the luckiest of the lucky. And I thought, they're nuts.

[LAUGHS]

SPEAKER: What do you mean by luck here? Yeah.

WHITLEY STREIBER: I understand. That is exactly what I am, and I'm very grateful for it.

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SPEAKER: Well, I hope you all were buckled up because that was one wild ride. Whitley Streiber is nothing, if not a gifted raconteur. And his stories can be horrifying, exhilarating, mysterious and wonderful, sometimes, all at once. It was an honor to have him on the show.

And Whitley, if you're listening, thank you.

For the outro, I want to tag certain works in religious studies that are taking the living alien folklore seriously. Even the most skeptical people must admit that the pervasive cultural fascination with all things alien and UAP is worthy of study. Over 50% of US adults claim to believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life.

The half a million letters to the Streibers after Communion was published attest to just how many go beyond mere belief, to claiming some sort of real interaction with this extraterrestrial or extra-dimensional life. As Whitley mentioned in the interview, 33,000 of those letters are now housed at Rice University in Houston at the Archives of the Impossible.

This archive is open to scholars. And there are even grants available to travel and research those archives, which in addition to the Communion letters, includes the papers of Jacques Ville and several others.

Speaking of Rice, Whitley Streiber and Rice Professor Jeffrey Kripal co-wrote an incredible book, The Super Natural which is two words-- sorry. Three words, if you include the definite article, The Super Natural. The book performs the dialogue between experiencers and religion scholars, though one can only hope becomes more common. It's a sizzling book on its own merits, but it also makes an ideal book to introduce students to the theories and methods used in the history of religions. Granted, unbiased.

An older but still invaluable study of the UFO as folklore is Thomas Bullard's The Myth and Mystery of UFOs. Now, while Bullard doesn't ascend to the dizzying theoretical or speculative heights of say, Jacques Ville, his comparative eye, both for the ancient world and care for the modern alien and UAP materials, remains a benchmark in the field.

A much more recent book, offering a reading of the UFO is modern folklore is Diana Pasulka Walsh's American Cosmic. Pasulka offers a brilliant ethnographic study of scientists, tech wizards and many others that helps illuminate the mechanisms of belief in extraterrestrials and refers that are at work in America today. It's published by Oxford University Press. It's a stellar piece of work.

And last but not least, any list of disciplined researches into the UFO phenomenon has to include David J. Halperin. Halperin had a successful career studying what we might call Mystical Judaism while at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His Seeking Ezekiel, for what it's worth, is still one of the great psychoanalytic historical studies I've ever read.

But after retirement, Halperin started to write about his long standing personal interest, UFOs. The book, Intimate Alien, The Hidden Story of the UFO is at once a detailed history of UFOs and a personal book about how the fascination with all things alien can lead one into the study of mystical religions.

And so with that, we come full circle. So until next time, everybody. Stay weird.

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