In 1954 nine-year-old Whitley Strieber entered an “Unknown Country” where missing time, ghostly apparitions and visitors claiming to be from outer space are the norm. Many of these childhood memories remained veiled behind a wall of amnesia until much later, though snippets of his bizarre early life experiences stayed within conscious memory.
Those memories, and particularly his later “abduction experiences” made famous in his book Communion, would solidify and popularize an emerging mythos: The aliens are here. They are gray. They need to manipulate our genetic material. They are scary as hell but we should love them. The world as we know it is about to end.
Originally, I started writing an article about how Strieber was one of the disinformation artists tasked with spreading the “meme” of the little gray men. But as I looked closer, it became very clear that something else was going on. For example, there were many Nazi scientists relocated via Project Paperclip to air force bases in San Antonio, a fact I learned from Strieber’s own website. And that Strieber claimed to have some memories of more earthly, MKULTRA style abuse at one of these airforce bases I also learned on his site.
But one thing Strieber has not written about is that during the years of his “secret school” experiences as a child, one of the central scientists in MKULTRA was stationed at Lackland Airforce Base just ten miles or so from the location of Strieber’s childhood home and the “Olmos Basin” area of San Antonio that figured prominently in his experiences. As we saw in the last post, this mind control guru was named was Louis Jolyon West, and he just so happened to have an abiding interest in all of the sorts of things Strieber had experienced there. Or, at least, in the ability to INDUCE such experiences.
The one aspect of Strieber’s writings that led me away from considering him to be a disinformation artist helping to spread the myth is that, despite the message he believes the aliens have for us, which combines the now familiar messages offered by other “space brothers” with Strieber’s own Catholic and Gurdjieffian (if that’s even a word) spiritual beliefs, the incidents themselves don’t support this message. In fact, the incidents he undergoes don’t even support the alien abduction hypothesis. Sure, there are grays, but there are all sorts of other beings, and plenty of humans involved as well. How about, for example, his vision of a blue crystal, several hundred feet tall, hovering over his upstate New York cabin. I am drawn to such details as this because, if his goal were simply to fabricate a story of alien abduction, so many of these details just seem bizarrely out of place. Why include them unless he believes them to be true? It’s possible that Strieber is just THAT sophisticated and can see “smart guys” like me coming from a mile away. Maybe the hints at MKULTRA abuse as a child he has offered on his website (we’ll get to that in a bit) are simply to add a protective layer of plausibility in case the original alien stories break down under scrutiny. It’s possible. I’m not nearly as clever as I think I am, but I’m at least clever enough to know that there are other people out there smarter and more sophisticated than I.
But I don’t think that this is the case here. As a narrative, whether to fool us into believing in alien abductions or simply to tell a good story, Strieber’s writing is just a mess. It is illogical with far too many loose ends (despite his attempts to make sense of the experiences via his own belief systems). Yet we know Strieber can write a coherent scary story as he did before Communion with Wolfen and The Hunger (the movie version starring, I might add, the “Man Who Fell to Earth” himself, David Bowie).
So let’s have a look at some of Strieber’s story.
One thing that struck me throughout Communion and the book about his childhood experiences called Secret School is that despite Strieber’s having come to “love” his abductors, these alien beings were scary as hell. They have, from his description, no redeeming values whatsoever. They invaded his body and his mind, showed him scary visions designed to test his fear response and implant the idea that the world is about to end (though, as always, HOW the end is coming is constantly changing…with several different versions of apocalypse offered in Communion alone), and generally treated him like a lab rat. And it is the fact that he has come to love them that was my first clue. Why write about aliens who are so incredibly scary when you’re trying to convince us they are benign? It sounded to me like the famed “Stockholm Syndrome”, the alleged psychological mechanism which got Patty Hearst to embrace her captors in the “Symbionese Liberation Army”. All experts on Hearst, including the experts who testified at her trial, accept that Hearst was a mind control victim. The only question was whether there was any government connection. And since these same experts were also MKULTRA scientists…well, that’s another story that will have to wait.
The first encounter Strieber relates in Communion is one that was recorded in his journal contemporaneous with the event and was not a memory recovered via hypnosis. And it’s an odd one. After hearing some noises in the house and yet inexplicably settling back into bed without investigating, he saw a figure in his bedroom. It was small enough to be a child but that’s the only way it resembles the classic grays.
It had a smooth, rounded hat on, with an odd, sharp rim that jutted out easily four inches on the side I could see. Below this was a vague area. I could not see the face, or perhaps I would not see it….I saw two dark holes for eyes and a black downturning line of a mouth that later became an O.
From shoulder to midriff was the visible third of a square plate etched with concentric circles. This plate stretched from just below the chin to the waist area. At the time I thought it looked like some sort of breastplate, or even an armored vest. Beneath it was a rectangular appliance of the same type, which covered the lower waist to just above the knees. (Communion, pp. 12 – 13)
From there begins a somewhat more classical abduction experience. After blacking out he found himself naked, frozen as if in “mid-leap” and being moved out of the room. He doesn’t suggest that he was floating. “It could easily be that I was being carried.”
He found himself in the woods. To his left:
…was a small individual whom I could see only out of the corner of my eye. This person was wearing a gray-tan body suit and sitting on the ground with knees drawn up and hands clasped around them. There were two dark eyeholes and a round mouth hole. I had the impression of a face mask. (Communion, p. 15)
The beings will take on a more fully alien appearance later in the story, but at this point, he saw someone in a “body suit” and wearing a “facemask.”
Our thesis here is that Strieber is the victim of a mind control experiment of some kind, likely one that began in his childhood. We’ll examine his childhood experiences in the next post.
But even here, Strieber gives us a variety of hints that this experience has mind control elements involved. For example, when the first being approached him in the bedroom, he stayed in bed and took no action. As he says, “…perhaps my mind was already under some sort of control.” (Communion, p. 13.) And later, while sitting in the woods,
“I felt that I was under the exact and detailed control of whomever had me. I could not move my head, or my hands, or any part of my body save for my eyes. Despite this, I was not tied.”
Strieber then felt himself being rapidly drawn into a ship or room of some kind hovering above the woods. While terror is a natural reaction to such an event, I thought his specific description of terror was important:
The fear was so powerful that it seemed to make my personality completely evaporate. This was not a theoretical or even a mental experience, but something profoundly physical.
“Whitley” ceased to exist. What was left was a body in a state of raw fear so great that it swept about me like a thick, suffocating curtain, turning paralysis into a condition that seemed close to death. I do not think that my ordinary humanity survived the transition to this little room. I died, and a wild animal appeared in my place. (Communion, p. 16)
He realizes that much of what happened in that room has been lost to amnesia.
This might be terror amnesia, or drugs, or hypnosis, or even a doses of all three. There is one drug, tetradotoxin, which could approximate such a state. In small doses it causes external anesthesia. Larger doses bring about the “out of body” sensation occasionally reported by victims of visitor abduction. Greater quantities can cause the appearance of death – even the brain ceases detectable function.
This rare drug is the core of the zombie poison of Haiti, and little is known about why it works. It is also the notorious “fugu” poison of Japan, found in the tissues of a blowfish, which is an esteemed if deadly aphrodisiac. (Communion, p. 17)
His suggestion of tetradotoxin is interesting but likely erroneous. The out of body experiences, “dissolution of the self” and (assuming these experiences did not literally happen) hallucinations, seem more characteristic of ketamine, which was of interest to MKULTRA researchers (and fed regularly, as we’ll see sometime later, to Ira Einhorn, a seminal figure in the development of “New Age” thought until the mummified remains of his girlfriend turned up in a trunk locked in his closet. ) LSD is also a possibility, and certainly a drug of interest for our Dr. West, stationed nearby Strieber when he was a child.
Scopolamine also comes to mind. Researched by MKULTRA scientists (specifically under project CHATTER which searched for “truth drugs” for interrogation) the drug creates hallucinations, paralysis and dissociation and also results in amnesia when combined with morphine.
I also think of this reference to a lesser known drug from Colin West’s book, Bluebird, which quotes from an untitled an undated document from the MKULTRA files:
For instance, Metrozal, which has been very useful in shock therapy, is no longer popular because, for one thing it produces feelings of overwhelming terror and doom prior to the convulsion.
But terror, anxiety, worry would be valuable for many purposes from our point of view. (from Bluebird, p. 39)
Yeah, there are people who really think like that, and though it’s hard to accept, is it any harder to accept than the idea of aliens farming humans for eggs and sperm?
Strieber can’t get a good visual lock on the beings, as they always seem blurred when he attempted to look directly at them. A “tiny, squat person” approached with a box, within which is a thin needle which the being “proposed to insert” into his brain.
The idea of alien implants did not originate with Strieber so if he’s fabricating this story, or delusional, he could be incorporating previous such accounts. Still, it is important to note that from the fifties, scientists such as Jose Delgado were implanting electronic devices in animals and in people, as we saw in the previous post. While Delgado publicly said that ethical considerations and limits to technology would limit the ability to control humans via such implants, the level of control he gained over animals in his experiments is chilling. He could “steer” cats in whatever direction he wanted, or instantly switch them from docile to hostile with the push of a button. And this was in the fifties.
Interestingly, one of Strieber’s most recent newsletters contained a link to an article about very earthly implants in humans. I don’t know about the reliability of the article, but it does show that Strieber, once again, has some level of awareness that such things are certainly being done by humans. Here is a quote from Delgado as mentioned in the article linked in Strieber’s newsletter:
“Autonomic and somatic functions, individual and social behaviors, emotional and mental reactions may be evoked, maintained, modified, or inhibited, both in animals and in man, by electrical stimulation of specific cerebral structures. Physical control of many brain functions is a demonstrated fact. … It is even possible to follow intentions, the development of thoughts, and visual experiences,” wrote Dr. José Delgado in the book Physical Control of the Mind in 1969. At that time Dr. Delgado was a Professor of Physiology at Yale University, where he developed techniques for electronically and chemically influencing the brain. He has published more than two hundred scientific works and is a well-known authority in neurology and behaviorism.
In the preface to the book, it is written that Dr. Delgado, “… shows how, by electrical stimulation of specific cerebral structures, movements can be induced by radio command, hostility may appear or disappear, social hierarchy can be modified, sexual behavior may be changed, and memory, emotions and the thinking process may be influenced by remote control.”
In footnote 5 of that article, the author quotes John Lilly as cited in Martin Cannon’s The Controllers.
“Dr. Antoine Remond, using our techniques in Paris, has demonstrated that this method of stimulation of the brain can be applied to the human without the help of the neurosurgeon; he is doing it in his office in Paris without neurosurgical supervision. This means that anybody with the proper apparatus can carry this out on a person covertly, with no external signs that electrodes have been used on that person. I feel that if this technique got into the hands of a secret agency, they would have total control over a human being and be able to change his beliefs extremely quickly, leaving little evidence of what they had done.” — John C. Lilly, M.D., 1953: The Scientist, John C. Lilly, M.D., Berkeley: Ronin Publishing, 1988, page 91. In The Controllers, Martin Cannon, Aptos, CA: Davis Books, 1990, pages 13-14. [6]
This quote is significant not just for what it says, but also because Strieber is the one who linked to it. How seriously he has considered the idea that most if not all of his experiences were due to MKULTRA style manipulation is not known. At the moment, your humble author does not have much “juice” and so inquiries about such matters tend to go unanswered. However, I have been in contact with a friend of Strieber’s who confirmed one element of Communion for me and has relayed word back to me from Strieber that until he knows more about who I am he doesn’t want to engage in direct dialogue. That’s unfortunate, but it is probably the best course of action for Strieber when people like me contact him out of the blue. I expect that comments will be forthcoming as I have a feeling this article is going to be more widely linked than the previous ones.
Strieber was then injected with the implant which resulted in a “bang and a flash”. He says he noted that there were four types of “beings” on the ship. There was the robot type that was in his bedroom, some small dark gray or blue beings with more human features and two sizes of grays, one of whom he experienced as a female and was drawn to rather inexplicably.
And then, the anal probe. It has become almost a cultural standing joke but given that sexual abuse is one surefire way to induce dissociation (especially in children and obviously this experience occurs well into Strieber’s adulthood), this description is chilling.
…two of the stocky ones (whom he had just “sensed” were part of what he called a “good army”), drew my legs apart. The next thing I knew I was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long, narrow and triangular in structure. The inserted this thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the time I had the impression that I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger.
Only when the thing was withdrawn did I see that it was a mechanical device. The individual holding it pointed to the wire cage on the tip and seemed to warn me about something. But what? I never found out. (Communion, p. 21)
It is characteristic of such tales that aliens advanced enough to travel from distant stars to earth have medical technology that is so incredibly primitive and needlessly painful. Even a full colonoscopy is not as traumatic as this technique experienced by Strieber. I think the description of the experience as “rape” is an apt one, though once again, one is struck by his determination to see the aliens as “good.” It is doubtful that advanced aliens would need such crude techniques to acquire the specimens they seek.
Finally, Strieber awoke with only a memory of having watched a barn owl outside his window. He notes that he has learned that such “screen memories” of animals are common among abductees.
In the following days, his physical condition deteriorated. The next day he suffered from extreme fatigue and chills as if from a fever. This is of interest because at high doses, scopolamine can produce fever. Strieber’s psychological condition deteriorated as well, as he became irritable and short-tempered and paranoid, worrying about “toxins” in his food. (Of course, given the likelihood that he had been drugged, such a fear would be “rational paranoia”.) Here are some other side effects of scopolamine that seem relevant to his experience:
In rare cases, unusual reactions to ordinary doses of scopolamine have occurred including confusion, agitation, rambling speech, hallucinations, paranoid behaviors, and delusions.
In fact, at one point Strieber reports a conversation with a neighbor in which he complained to the neighbor about seeing snowmobile lights in the woods. He had seen no such thing and knew it even as he said the words. The conversation bothered him because “it seemed so nonvolitional, almost as if I had been talking against my will.” (Communion, p. 23).
Here he describes his mental state in the days after the event:
I had a feeling of being separated from myself, as if either I was unreal or the world around me was unreal (in psychology these feelings are known as depersonalization and derealization and are sorts of dissociative states which can also be induced by various drugs.) … In the ensuing days, I experienced more bouts of fatigue. I would be working and suddenly would get cold and start to shake. The I would feel so exhausted that I could not go on, and crawl into bed quivering and miserable, sure that I was coming down with the flu. I took my temperature during one of these experiences and found that it was 96.6 at the outset and 98.8 at the height of the “fever.” Afterward, it dropped to 97.0 (scopolamine also has fever reducing effects though evidently only if there is already an elevated temperature.)
Nights I would sleep, but wake up in the morning feeling as if I had been tossing and turning the whole time. I ceased to dream, and sometimes had difficulty closing my eyes. I felt watched, and kept hearing noises in the night….
My disposition got worse. I became mercurial, frantic with excitement about some idea one moment, in despair the next. I was suspicious of friends and family, often openly hostile. I came to hate telephone calls. I could not concentrate even on light television programs….I could no longer follow my own thining, let alone that of the authors who interested me. (Communion, p. 26)
It would be a fair criticism of my thesis to say that many of these symptoms could come about simply as the result of the trauma he experienced due to the “abduction.” That’s true to an extent, but Occam’s razor says we should consider earthly explanations first.
Strieber also mentions that in January of 1986 there was a UFO sighting in the area. It’s unclear exatly what area he meant, as his cabin is in upstate New York, and Middletown, in which the article about the sighting appeared, is much further south toward NYC. One of the habits Strieber has which inclines one to believe his story is a hoax is to mention a fact which confirms his story as if he were unaware of it before his abduction experience. In this case, beginning in 1982, there was a massive wave of UFO sightings in the Hudson valley area, of which the event Streiber read about in the January 3, 1986, issue of Middletown, New York, Record article would be but one example. There were so many sightings that a book was written about it, Night Seige. We’ll come back to the Hudson Valley sightings later as it seems very likely to me that this was one of the areas selected for “field testing” the reaction of people to UFO’s by staging fake UFO waves. These field tests have likely been going on since the fifties. This project was discovered in papers found by Jacques Vallee while looking in the files of J. Allen Hynek. Hynek confirmed the story and was (or pretended to be) angry that it was true. Hynek, however, was co-author of Night Seige not having read the book yet, I don’t know if he mentioned this government project. But whether this UFO wave was real or an elaborate hoax, it seems unlikely that Strieber could have been completely unaware of it.
Here’s what Strieber says about it:
The headline (in the ) called the appearance a hoax, but according to the story, local people who had witnessed the event doubted that. ONe man, however, claimed that he had seen the things fly over a brightly lit local lprison, and in the light he saw planes. A follow-up story on January 12 expanded on the hoax hypothesis.
My wife showed me the article and told me, “You said this would happen. You were talking about this last week.” I did not remember the conversation…” (Communion, p. 27).
He later goes on to discuss the Hudson Valley wave which he discovered upon “further research.” The book Night Seige was released at about the same time as Strieber’s book, so it’s not surprising that the book itself is not mentioned, though he did find a New York Times article which discussed Phillip Imbrogno, who would co-author the book with Hynek. While I am not assuming that Strieber is a hoaxer, this tendency to give a “gee whiz, look what I found out” about information that could be construed to have inspired the details of his stories and which was readily available before his own alleged incidents is a troubling one. In fact, just after the experience described above, Strieber sat down to read a UFO book featuring the details of a similar encounter, a book which had been given to him months previously and had been sitting in his cabin all along. So, while I think hoax is not the answer here, I mention in the spirit of objectivity, and it can’t be ruled out.
We conclude this section by noting that the next step for Strieber, after these memories began to emerge, was to contact Budd Hopkins, the famed UFO abductee researcher (and hypnotist) to help him sort out these memories. Hopkins reassured him that these memories were being experienced by others as well. Eventually, Strieber would seek out an objective third party, psychiatrist Donald Klein, to overcome the amnesiac barrier via hypnosis, though Hopkins would be present at these session. In addition, there are further sessions with Budd Hopkins alone. Given my opinion of Hopkins, this is troubling. However, recordings of the two sessions with Klein and evidently one session with Hopkins are available in audio on his site.
In 1986, Whitley Strieber conducted two hypnosis sessions with Dr. Donald Klein. These sessions have recently been provided for our subscribers to listen to. Now, we offer one of the “lost” session that Whitley did with Budd Hopkins in April of 1986, some time after his last session with Dr. Klein.
This hypnosis session reveals Whitley at his most vulnerable, when he was desperately struggling with what had happened to him, and, above all, trying to understand the messages that his contact experiences were bringing him.
Listen to Whitley in a deeply private moment, struggling with information that, to this day, he has never revealed.
He talks about a trip through Europe in the summer of 1968, and a meeting with a young woman that, as they traveled from Florence to Rome, became stranger and stranger.
Finally, when they are in the crypt beneath the Vatican, he begins to speak of something “so secret” that is happening there.
Listen to this powerful and provocative tape, but be warned, it is as frank as it is mysterious.
I thought I was a subscriber but I am unable to access the subscriber portion of the site. It may that I am merely subscribed to the newsletter. Currently, new subscriptions are not being taken as they update their system, but as soon as I can I will listen to these audio recordings to sort out how much of his recalled material came through his work with Klein (who diagnosed Strieber with temporal lobe epilepsy, a not particularly satisfying hypothesis, though we will see that states very similar to TLE can be induced electronically, which may provide some further clues) and how much throught Hopkins. Given that his sessions with Hopkins take him into the Vatican vault (?) I wonder whether we are moving more into traditional conspiracy lore and away from whatever “real” experiences Strieber has had.
That said, Strieber’s “journey” through Europe and a variety of other details of his story which point much more directly to Langley than a planet orbiting Sirius, will be the subject of part two of this investigation. In part three, we will examine Strieber’s alleged childhood experiences. Assuming that these incidents, which occurred much earlier but were not recalled fully until after Communion, are not simply fabrications, delusions or implanted memories during his hypnosis sessions, they may very well be key to understanding Whitley and his desire to make all of us believe that the end is near for Planet Earth.