Whitley Strieber
What have you been doing with yourself, Whitley, in the past few years since you retired from being a public figure in the UFO community?
Whitley Strieber: Well, I hoped I'd retired from more than being just a public figure in the UFO community. I'd hoped I'd retired from the whole thing. What I ended up with was basically living a life with feet in two worlds--my normal life and my life with the visitors, which has gone on and expanded, almost beyond belief. In fact, it's so far beyond anything I had ever dreamed possible.
In what way have you experienced this expansion?
Whitley Strieber: Well, they haven't gone away, basically. My initial thought after I had the "Communion" experience, quite frankly, was that I had been raped, that someone had invaded my house and had attacked me, and that my mind, in its desperate attempt to escape from the fact that I, a man, had been raped, had overlaid this culturally induced alien phenomenon over what was actually a very human experience. And I think that Doctor Klein, who placed me under hypnosis first--the only time--thought the same thing.
He's the head of the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Whitley Strieber: Yes. He's a very well-known hypnotist, who has often been called upon by law enforcement to place witnesses under hypnosis. He is very conscious of the problems of hypnosis with regard to retrieved memory. As Dr. Klein explained, hypnosis does not pen the memory; hypnosis demands a narrative, which is a very different thing. If the person doesn't understand what's happening to him, the narrative that comes out is almost certainly going to be centered around some cultural explanation. Dr. Klein is an expert at preventing that. When I actually went under hypnosis, the narrative that poured out was utterly spontaneous and unstoppable. He didn't even have to intervene once it started, because it was so coherent, but also so strange that it left us both speechless. I do not know what to make of it to this day. Since 1985, I've had nine years--going on ten years--of this experience, and it has turned into an elaborate witnessed, theatrical exposition of a kind of relationship with somebody from another world. It's like some kind of contact would be, but at the same time it's got elements to it that address me and apparently all of the people it touches. It's impossible for me to conceive the experience has something to do with aliens who have arrived here from another planet.
Why do you say that it's impossible to conceive of it in that manner?
Whitley Strieber: Because I've seen it operating from the inside. I have seen what it's like when it enters people's lives and how it changes them. It directs attention to the deepest level of self, and people find themselves redirecting their whole lives as a result of the smallest experience. I had a couple of people at my cabin who came face to face with one of these so-called visitors, and who touched its hands. You would think that they would come away from this experience saying, "Well, I've met an alien." But they didn't come away saying that. One of them, an elderly person, realized that her life wasn't over yet. She completely revised her whole life. She went out and found a husband and had seven wonderful years of marriage that she would not otherwise have had. Another witness changed the whole orientation of her life. I've had other experiences where I saw people in contact with the visitors, who then proceeded to change their lives. In other words, what I'm saying is that it doesn't seem to me that it's an alien-human kind of contact. It seems to be some kind of life-changing experience that apparently involves a level of consciousness that has animation and physical reality--at least at times--that we didn't even know existed.
How can we gauge the level of reality that we're dealing with? How do you deal with it?
Whitley Strieber: It's very difficult to engage it and deal with it. For example, in the experience I referred to a few moments ago, when the lady touched the so-called visitor, she thought it was an animal who had come into the room. Of course, it couldn't have been, because there was no way for an animal to get in. It then went into another room, where it was seen by another individual. It went down the hall and proceeded to wake up two people who were sleeping on a couch. The man sleeping there saw it transform into something with the head of an eagle, which has got all kinds of deep mythological significance for the human species. Then it just disappeared from the face of the earth. The house was so filled with people that night that my son and I had camped out. We were walking back to the cabin around dawn, when all this was happening. We saw this hooded figure--silver and translucent--come floating out of the side of the house, go across the back lawn, where it moved through the woods, carefully avoiding the trees. So it obviously wasn't a ghost, even though that's what it looked like. The people who had seen it turn into an eagle as it left the house, also experienced a flush of heat coming from somewhere. It scared them so badly they jumped out of their beds thinking the house was on fire.
So this was a multiple witness sighting, in a sense, not of a vehicle but of a being.
Whitley Strieber: Of a being that had three or four different states. One was totally physical; it could be touched and had weight and substance. The second state was when it transformed into something completely different, right before witnesses. It then became invisible, and in the fourth state it moved, became translucently visible and left a big burst of heat behind.
And moved through a wall...
Whitley Strieber: And moved through a wall. I'm talking about six witnesses who saw this happen in a logical sequence. My point is that this happened to these people and to me in our real world. How do you explain that? It doesn't dovetail with any kind of alien hypothesis that I know of.
I think we are looking at the edges of something that is on the same continuum as human reality but which reflects this reality in a different way. There are points of reference throughout the whole sequence that relate to physical reality in one way or another. Even the transformation of the being from one form to another may have more to do with a perceptual transformation than a physical one. It could be that the man in the cabin saw something he had not expected to see--something he did not believe he could see--and so he jumped to mythological references deep within his own inner psyche. Maybe it always does this. Maybe that's why the gods of the past looked the way they looked. In other words, when people's inner references tell them they see something so outside of reality that their minds can't grasp it, after a few seconds the mind literally transforms that into something that makes sense on a very deep level.
Something that makes sense archetypally. Of course, one thinks of the visual representations of the Egyptian gods, one thinks of Horus, of Anubis.
Whitley Strieber: Well, not only Horus and Anubis--the eagle image crosses every culture. I don't think we have a name for what this is. I don't think the name "alien abduction" describes it any more adequately than the phrase "the god Horus." I think that what we're looking at when we look at the UFO phenomenon may more properly be thought of as a rather potent modern folklore. These alien beings have the same impact on our cultures that the old gods had on the cultures of the past. My guess is that people actually did see those gods and did interact with them in the ways they describe. We're not looking so much at mythological dreams as at an attempt to interpret this level of reality in a way that was meaningful to their minds.
Would you give us your current perspective on what happened at Roswell, New Mexico in July of 1947, an event which you investigated in the course of writing your novel Majestic?
Whitley Strieber: Let me first go backward a little bit. In September of 1994, the Air Force released an explanation of Roswell. They explained that the debris found at Roswell was part of something called Project Mogul. Project Mogul was the Air Force's attempt to use sound waves to detect the presence of nuclear explosions coming from the Soviet Union by sending very sensitive instruments up on balloons. They recently claimed that what had happened was that a Project Mogul balloon had crashed, and they had covered it up by passively allowing the public to let itself believe this whole UFO story. That's the official explanation for Roswell.
However, there is an enormous problem with the explanation and with the data they produced, which I've read. Their explanation barely mentions the presence of Colonel Jesse Marcel on the scene, and this is important. Colonel Marcel was the officer--then Major Marcel--who was originally sent out to pick up the debris. He brought the debris back to the base, after first stopping and showing it to his son, who is still very much alive. After he completed his tour of duty, Marcel was posted to another assignment--Project Mogul. Marcel became involved in interpreting the data from Project Mogul, and at the time he was at Roswell, he was already aware of the existence of the Project Mogul balloons, because his job was to know about all objects in the air around Roswell. He was in charge of airborne security for that base, and it was a very sensitive base. It was the only operational atomic bomber wing in the world at the time.
In 1979, Colonel Marcel, now long retired, learned that he had maybe only a couple of years to live. At that point, the colonel made a number of videotapes in which he described the Roswell debris in detail. He said that, among other things, it has the consistency of the tin foil you find inside a cigarette package, but you could not fire a .45 through it, you could not bend it and you could not burn it. The Air Force's so-called study did not refer to Colonel Marcel's videotaped interviews in any way. Without even addressing the existence of Colonel Marcel, who was an expert both on the debris and on Project Mogul--I have to be frank--the Air Force is probably lying. They have to explain Colonel Marcel away somehow, and they can't do it, so they just ignored his existence.
The reason I became so interested in Roswell developed after I read a book by Charles Berlitz and William Moore in which a reference is made to a Dr. Saurbacher, an engineer who had written a letter saying that he had worked with the debris and didn't understand what the secrecy was all about; it was obviously from an alien spacecraft. That was his attitude. He was very plain-spoken in the letter. In the summer of 1986, after my own experiences and while I was working on Communion, I phoned Dr. Saurbacher. He told me he had worked with a team that had looked at that stuff very carefully, and it wasn't until the mid-sixties that powerful enough microscopes were developed to discover the source of its strength. It turned out that it was actually welded--he said "machined"--at the molecular level. I then sent Dr. Saurbacher a complete description of my own experiences by UPS overnight. A couple of days later, UPS phoned me to tell me that Dr. Saurbacher was dead. He had fallen off of his yacht and drowned.
It sounds very sinister, unfortunately.
Whitley Strieber: I'm afraid it does. I looked into Dr. Saurbacher's death and it was allegedly an accident.
In any case, I became very interested in the Roswell incident, because my now-deceased uncle, Colonel Edward Strieber, was at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio when the debris was delivered there, after first being transported from Roswell to Fort Worth, headquarters of the Eighth Air Force. My uncle introduced me to his best friend, Arthur Exon, who is now a general. General Exon was involved, in my opinion, in some way in receiving the debris. He was aware that the debris had been discussed at the highest levels of government and that a specific decision had been made by President Truman to keep it secret. That was the source of the whole coverup and the backpedaling by the Air Force. General Exon later gave interviews to individuals within the Congress who have been trying to crack the intelligence community's secrecy, which extends illegally even to Congress. General Exon and I had extensive private conversations. His cousin, incidentally, is Senator James Exon, who has also been extremely interested in the UFO field. So I think the two cousins have been talking over the years. In any case, my uncle assured me, without disclosing anything he was legally obliged to withhold, that there was really something to look for in the Roswell incident. That's why I did the research and wrote the book.
In Majestic, your protagonist is an agent of the CIA who becomes the principal malefactor of the coverup, even though he also comes to have a series of remarkable experiences with the visitors himself. Was there a reason for your choice of the central character?
Whitley Strieber: Air Force personnel indicated to me that there was an individual within the Central Intelligence Agency who had engineered the whole thing. This individual had been terrified from the beginning and had frightened the president and his advisors into making a coverup. The concern was that the Air Force will eventually have to take the fall, and they don't want that to happen. They were trying to use me to get the Air Force's hidden viewpoint across, which is that the cover-up was rammed down their throats by the executive branch and the Central Intelligence Agency.
So what you're saying, in essence, is that the cooperation you received from people in the Air Force was motivated by their interest in defending the honor of the Air Force.
Whitley Strieber: Well, preserving its integrity. One of my sources--whose name I've been asked to keep to myself--felt that when the real story becomes public, it's going to create a tremendous break in confidence on the part of the people. That's the reason it has been held secret so effectively for so long. As a result, the people have been denied a chance to address this phenomena in any reasonable way through their social, scientific and cultural institutions. So where do they face it? In their own backyards in the dark of night, in a state of complete ignorance and confusion. We've been able to give much less to our side of our relationship with the visitors than we otherwise could have. This is such a fundamental lapse on the part of government, such a deep fundamental failure, that my source said he thought we'd end up with a second republic. That was quite a profound statement.
I think the government became aware that there was someone who was keeping themselves very hidden by 1945. By 1947, on the night that the crash at Roswell took place, the Air Force was testing secret high intensity radars in that area. The combination of the radars and a heavy electrical storm brought down this device, which was somehow connected to magnetism. They had only debris. I've never been able to find anything that indicated the presence of bodies. I had positive confirmation of the existence of the debris, but not of the bodies. In any case, they also had clear gun camera photography taken by planes that were being ferried back and forth to Japan in 1946. I'm aware of that because a reader wrote me to say that he had been on these ferry missions, and they had often seen these craft coming in and had photographed them. He said he never heard any more about it after the photography had been sent to higher headquarters.
In July of 1994, a brief document from the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field was declassified. This document claimed that in 1947, they had been wind tunnel testing the shapes of flying saucers, based on witness reports at Wright Field, which was definitely where this all was taking place. There's no question that the document exists. It's simple to authenticate, because its declassification trail can be traced. The fact that it was declassified is interesting, because the declassification is in connection with the Project Mogul investigation, which led to the false debunking of the Roswell incident by the Air Force.
So you are saying that this document is further proof that the government was aware of this phenomenon?
Whitley Strieber: Yes. By 1948 they had a substantial number of witnesses from all over the world. They had gun camera photography from the arctic circle missions, which revealed certain things about the operation of these vehicles, such as their speed, turning radius and apparent reference to the magnetic field of the earth. They also had debris of some sort. In other words, they had enough to conclude that an alien intrusion was taking place. I don't necessarily think that was what was happening, but they had enough evidence to make that conclusion. A huge influx of witness material developed over the following years. In September of 1952, there was a vast sighting of UFOs over Washington, DC. They were seen by the general public, recorded on radar and film and were observed by professionals both in the air and from the ground. Yet, incredibly, it was all pushed under the rug. It is absolutely extraordinary that happened. That kind of debunking is hard. It took an effort. You had to twist the arms of people in the newspapers to get them to say that it was all flocks of birds, or whatever they used to explain it away. Still, through all these years of sightings and witness phenomena, I don't think there was very much contact between government personnel and so-called aliens. There were probably interactions along the lines of the bizarre experiences that I have described, enough to cause them to form an opinion based on a great deal of fear.
Another thing that happened in the early fifties was the development of a project that later turned into Project Aurora. This project was based on developing a craft that could rival the intruders' craft in performance. If the Air Force was to fulfill its basic mission of protecting our air space, they needed devices that were capable of functioning in the same way that the UFOs did. They basically described what these flying saucers could do in the air, and the objective was to build something that could do that or better, but in the air--not as a spacecraft. Project Aurora went through a number of different permutations. By the early eighties, you find Project Aurora based in the Tennessee Valley area, drawing enormous amounts of electricity from the Tennessee Valley Authority.
I interviewed people who lived in the area where this was taking place in the early eighties, and they reported seeing balls of light floating across the fields in the area, as well as what they described as flying saucers glowing in the air above them. In other words, their descriptions very much dovetail with descriptions of what people now report seeing at Area 51 out in Nevada, which is interesting since Project Aurora was moved to Nevada in the late eighties.
The Project Aurora aircraft can fly at seven times the speed of sound. It has a completely new concept in terms of propulsion devices, which is based not on alien technology but on something that we have developed novelly, from seeing what these flying saucers could do. I think the Project Aurora craft will be declassified very soon, probably over the next few years. It will then be pointed to as the explanation for all the UFO stories reported over the thirty years of its development. They're going to try to explain away all of the UFO stories, over all of that period of time, as being Project Aurora aircraft, and therefore avoid admitting that there's been a cover-up of their awareness of the presence of strangers here. It is hoped the revelation of the aircraft will be the final burial of the whole UFO phenomenon. I should point out that this is being done to protect the integrity of the government, particularly of the secret government.
The difficulty that I have with this is that, essentially, it is a lie. But the greater lie is the fact that the same people who are responsible for the lie don't understand the nature of the experience at all. My own relationship to the experience has convinced me that it is deeply involved with being human. This is not unconscious debris, but something above what we call consciousness. The human mind seems to exist in some way on a hyperphysical and hyperdimensional level, perhaps even a hypercognitive level. What is happening is that the barriers between this hypercognition and normal cognition are falling, and we're finding that there is a physical evolution of humankind that exists at this hyperphysical or hypercognitive level. What we were seeing that day in my cabin was something that was essentially human in its origin, but not human in the way we ordinarily think. For example, it is not, at this point in history, bound to the surface of this planet. It is human in the sense that it is part of a very large-scale spectrum of being, of which we are also a part. What's happening is that our secret grovernment is accidentally denying us access to the higher levels of the spectrum of being. If everyone can't grow together in our self-understanding, no one can. As a result, everyone--the whole system--stays grounded where it is.
What I'm looking forward to, is seeing the nature of human experience change as our consciousness rises toward this hypercon-sciousness, and we begin to understand this higher level of physical being. In the past ten years, I have touched these beings myself. I became a believer as I began to get an inkling of some of the perceptual problems involved in this. When I witnessed them turning into other things, I was able to detect the failures of my own perception taking place. So I went back to my most basic instincts of touch and smell. I have been physically close enough to them to hold their hands. At one point, one of them physically climbed on me. There's a lot of human affect about them, no matter how strange they look. But at the same time, there are certain forms--like the form I had on the cover of Communion--with huge eyes that also have a profoundly alien affect to them. And yet, at one point there was what I would describe as passionate love being expressed toward me by something that had that form. I find it very difficult to believe that such love could exist across the gulf between two species as different as we looked.
I know I must be speaking in riddles for people who are outside of this experience, and I can't help that. What I can say is that over the past ten years I've received a hundred and thirty thousand letters from people who had this experience, and they are nothing like what is being described by the UFO community, which is basically about people being abducted aboard a flying saucer, put on a table and given strange medical examinations. Instead, the letters I got portrayed this as essentially a vast, immensely subtle, immensely complicated theatrics of hyperconsciousness trying to penetrate to our level of reality. It is something knocking at the door, something trying to get us to move up, to wake upand to come up in scale. My feeling is that authorities, groups and all of that kind of stuff is not helpful. When the authorities try to impose themselves on the experience, all they do is narrow it to their belief system. In other words, it gets filtered through what they expect. It can't be like that. It's got to be between the individual and whatever this is, so that it gets narrowed through everybody's experience, without the need for anybody telling anyone what to do.
This appears to be the chief difficulty you encountered after you published Transformation. You were accused of being a cult leader and of distorting the experience. All kinds of accusations were leveled against you. I understand that in your new book, you take these issues by the horns. Could you talk about that?
Whitley Strieber: Yes. Well, I was accused of being a cult leader. I don't know, but in order to lead a cult you have to have one, and I don't have one. I took pains to sort of withdraw from public life and become a hermit for a long time and prove, by the theatrics of my own life, that it wasn't true. It ain't there.
If I'm not mistaken you gave a speech at the Young Men's Hebrew Association in New York in October of 1989 in which you said that you weren't going to make public declarations about UFOs anymore. I remember that coincided with the release of my book, Report on Communion, so when my book came out I was speaking essentially on my own about you, and you had retired.
Whitley Strieber: That's right, because this whole thing is much bigger, much more human and much more important than is reflected in the thinking of people within the government and the UFO community. I had to get out of that vortex. They definitely were going to try to chew me up, because they saw I was trying to release this and get it into the minds and hearts of everybody, so people can do with it what they will. The powers that be didn't like that. That is the release of the virus as far as they are concerned, because when that happens, people will have direct reference to something that is far beyond the whole structure of authority that we have created to organize our society. What would that mean for the structure of authority in our society? It means that over the next one- or two-hundred years--and I believe it's absolutely inevitable it will happen this way--society is going to completely recast itself as a reflection of hypercognitive thought. What that will mean, I have no idea. If what has happened to me is any reflection of what's happening to other people, it isn't going to be familiar. The hundred thousand-plus people who have written to me describe what I would call life-opening experiences--experiences which inspire remarkable changes of being. That is what they are about, and I've had intimations that there are people in this world who have taken this very far, much further than I have.
Yes, you've indicated to me that you feel that this can create, to use the term you initially used, a sense of communion among people that obviates the need for spoken language as we know it.
Whitley Strieber: Yes. Well, I think that there's a supermind, and I think the physical level of humanity is entering the supermind, and I think there are a lot of people who have entered into it and who are part of it. I'm not. I think a lot more people are going to be. I think, for example, that if someone were to claim they were operating from the supermind, they could be easily tested, because they should be able to absolutely and clearly describe exactly what was going on in your mind as it was happening. It would not be a matter of channeling and all of that stuff. There would be absolute proof available. If you were thinking the words, "Wherefore do you come from?", they would be able to say to you, "You are thinking `Wherefore do you come from?'" If someone makes that claim, to be in touch with consciousness in that way, and cannot read your thoughts, they are lying.
I take it that in your new book, which from its very title,
Breakthrough, refers to this process of changing our relationship to one
another and the cosmos, that you feel it is now possible for people to empower
themselves and take this on themselves, that people need nothing except the
understanding and the insight to do it.
Whitley Strieber: They need to be breathing, and they need to have some idea of what they might be doing, and I think that's all. They don't need any authorities. They don't need any leaders. They don't need any gurus. They don't need any groups, any organizations or any permission at all. It's there; it's available; it's at hand. The book is simply taking off a padlock and throwing it away, so that they can open the door and do whatever they want to, out in the backyard.