Whitley Streiber's "Communion"

So I just found this book at my local Goodwill store. I can’t even believe that I’ve never come across this series of books, and apparently, there’s a movie, too, that I’ve never heard of or seen.

So now I’m a bit more than halfway through it, and it’s kind of blowing my mind. This guy claims to have been visited- he doesn’t come right out and say they were aliens, only “visitors”, but we all know they’re aliens- many times in his life. His stories are corroborated (in my mind, anyway) by lie detector tests and hypnosis. They are also very similar in details to other people stories over the years. It’s pretty crazy. I still can’t believe I’ve never heard of this before. I think I almost believe in aliens now.

Thoughts? (About the book, not about me believing in aliens.)

This book was HUGE when it came out and must have launched a thousand talk show episodes: Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo, etc., all did UFO abductees. There was a slough of copycat books on the same topic, and of course the Christopher Walken movie.
It culminated in Harvard psychiatry professor who wrote a book about his work with UFO abduction survivors. He was humiliated by Carl Sagan and other skeptics who proved how acritical he was with a plant who convinced him she was an abductee.
UFO abduction is on a rosary string with reincarnation and ESP and ancient astronauts in topics that become huge for a season.

I remember reading (some of) that book when I was a teenager, many years ago. For whatever reason, it freaked me right the hell out (and I like creepy stuff). I didn’t finish it.

I’m guessing if I read it now I probably wouldn’t have the same reaction but I’m not going to test that hypothesis.

The UFO craze also inspired the movie Fire in the Sky, which was based on another abductee book, and though a corny movie has the most creepy alien abduction flashback scene ever committed to film. I saw that movie when I was 12 or so and it freaked me right the fuck out.

I guess I was too busy being a teenager/young adult when the book came out to pay attention to it. And I have always thought the same about UFO abduction, and I am the most skeptical of skeptics, normally, but reading this book is kind of starting to freak me out.

What about the book freaks you out so much?

Neither lie detectors nor hypnotic trances are very well known to be reliable as determiners of the truth of people’s claims. (Well known not to be, in fact.)

I thought this was common knowledge at the SDMB.

IIRC You’re wrong on that point. He speculates often on just who THEY are. He never settles on one explanation.
The whole history of UFOs and alien abduction is facinating stuff. Have you heard of Betty and Barney Hill? Majestic 12? Bud Hopkins?

I recommend the movie (it stars Christopher Walken). I also recommend The Fourth Kind. It’s about a psychiatrist in a small Alaska town who comes to believe that THEY visit her and her patients often.

Lie detectors are crap polygraph - lie detector - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com Even if they did work, they would only settle the question of whether Strieber was being consciously deceptive. If he was just crazy, the polygraph would show nothing.
Hypnosis to recover repressed memories is crap repressed memory - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com

I’ve never wanted to waste time reading it, but I had gone through UFO crazes before this one so I knew it was bull. The same night paralysis that leads to abduction beliefs led to belief in incubi and succubi in the Middle Ages.

There is a ST:TNG episode, fifth season or later, which crewpeople (including Riker, I think) get abducted by aliens from another dimension. Awful.

Missed the edit window Have you read Strieber’s other stuff? I’ve read his stories Pool (I think that was the title) and Through The Open Doors (about the life and mostly the death of Jon Neumann). Very, very good stuff.

ETA

Voyager I hate hate HATE it when people ascribe the whole phenomenon to sleep paralysis. That would explain people waking to feel paralyzed and seeing THEM in the room. It utterly fails to explain the long, drawn out reports of abductions, sightings of UFOs etc. These people are likely just crazy. But, sleep paralysis is not an explanation and nobody who’s done their research would think it is.

Prior publication, Streiber sent the manuscript around the New York publishing houses as a science fiction novel and never claimed it was anything else. Someone evidently he say it was a true story and it got published.

I suppose it’s just the outright terror that he describes feeling that freaks me out. I am quite sure that I’ve never been visited by aliens or anything, so it’s not that, nor am I afraid of being visited by them in the future. The way he describes his own feelings and as empathetic as I am- those two things apparently don’t mix. It would help if I read this thing with the conviction that it was fiction… but then it’s not as interesting, is it?

No, I’ve not read his other stuff, as his genres don’t tend to be my usual. I do recognize his name, though, and his books/movies The Hunger and Wolfen. Once I’m done with this book, I probably will finish out the series and move on to some of his other stuff if it interests me.

I haven’t really explored the subject enough to speak about others who claim this, but Streiber doesn’t seem to be crazy. That’s the thing.

It blew my mind too, the whole series. Either he experienced some high strangeness, or he’s just a great bullshitter! Either way, found them to be fascinating reads. Loved Communion, Transformation, Confirmation, the Secret School, and the Key.

Disclaimer, I have not read his books.

But I readthis article, and if these descriptions of what he writes in his books and claims to be autobiographical are accurate, he does not come across as “all there” to me. According to the author:

He describes aliens as having a sort of parasitical telepathy with us, and that some “hate us with a passion so great that it would be considered psychotic if it was displayed by a human being” and that they are essentially what is keeping us trapped here on earth instead of being “cosmic beings” whatever that’s supposed to be.

He is inconsistent in his description of what the aliens are and what their purpose is. At times he describes them as physical beings trying to revive their own species using humans, and others as non-physical beings trying to bring humans to a higher plane of existence.

He described, in different books, encounters with aliens as being visited by demons and as angels. Meaning, he described the exact same events as if he had changed his mind as to what they were.

He claims to have an implant by the aliens, and to have powers like telepathy and time travel and interdimensional travel.

He claims to have recovered memories of being abused by the Government in a secret mind-control experiment as a child: “I strongly suspect that the United States has for years been experimenting on children, among other things subjecting them to extreme trauma in order to split their personalities and create secondary personalities who can be accessed by controllers and used as agents, but without knowledge of the first personality.” And this is why the aliens came to him, instead of other people.

Then there’s this bit, which I’ll just quote 'cause it’s kinda hard to do justice to:
“If Strieber continues to be unable to decide whether his nocturnal visitors are angels or demons, it’s hardly surprising if he feels profoundly ambivalent about his task as bellwether for the alien paradigm. In his early books, he suggested that, since the beings appeared to emerge from a nonphysical realm, their reality, for us, might depend on our belief in them. In 2012, Strieber stated this unequivocally: the “aliens” can only enter our realm once they have assumed sufficient “solidity” via our collective belief, and to emerge from the dark well of the collective psyche, they require a foothold in our conscious minds. Strieber even stated that the government cover-up (which he once railed so bitterly against) was a means to protect the world from that emergence. The day public awareness of the alien presence reaches consensus, then, alien “invasion” will not be far behind. Yet for years Strieber has been denouncing the secrecy and denial shrouding the visitors as the great evil of our times. Although he has admitted that their undisclosed presence among us would be catastrophic, he has mostly argued for full disclosure. At times he has even suggested that awareness of the beings is the only thing that will protect us from them.”

And keep in mind, all of this is from an article that is very much trying to convince skeptics to take Streiber seriously.

Some of that does indeed sound like the rantings of a paranoid schizophrenic. I haven’t encountered that sort of thinking yet as I’m only in the first half of the first book. I may have changed my mind regarding his mental state by the time I am finished with them, so we shall see.

IIRC Strieber does sound sane in Communion. It’s the rest of the series where he sounds nuts. Interestingly, Strieber says he wrote Communion with THEIR approval and help, but that he did the rest of the books on his own.

Sorry to be a buzzkill but I’m a little surprised anyone would be into aliens now. There was a certain cultural wave that peaked around 1993, where actual intelligent people would whip themselves into a frenzy of anticipation that aliens or worse were among us and about to take over (Janet Reno was usually supposed to be in on it somehow). People would use grassroots methods to pass around text files and homemade pamphlets quoting this guy and other authors such as Linda Moulton Howe. It’s kind of interesting from a sociological point of view, but I thought the internet pretty much killed this stuff off.

I can’t put my hands on it, but in the last couple of years I read a very respectful but thorough debunking of this case. The author of the debunking did a lot of foot work examining records, visited the site, and interviewed people who the book claimed were witnesses.

The long and short of it is evidence he claims in the book simply doesn’t exist and people he claims were witnesses say they didn’t see what he said they did.

Draw your own conclusions but don’t take everything he says at face value.