Answers to Various Questions

Whitley Strieber to All on 11/19/94 at 10:42

Answers to various questions. The book is now called Breakthrough: The Next Step. The title was changed by the publisher because I have proved the existence of the visitors and they felt that this was a big breakthrough. I am trying to make sense of things, but that is really, really going to be hard. Every time I 'get it' the thing simply cranks up to a new level of strangeness. I'm rapidly running into major language problems--having experiences that our language is not prepared to express.

The book also explains various things, such as the government involvement in the phenomenon, why all the secrecy, and what such things as black helicopters are doing. I have also proved that I have been seriously and illegally persecuted by people claiming to be government agents, and have other witnesses speaking out about this in the book.

I was going to upload chapters of the book, as I previously announced, but there was a meeting among some UFO investigators in early October in New York where methods of creating a false impression that they had themselves written my uploads previous to my placing them on Compuserve was discussed. This was reported to me by a friend who was invited to the meeting. (The do not know of the friendship.) While theft of copyright like this is really impossible, they could cause me a lot of trouble and cast all kinds of public doubts on my veracity, which was their intention. So I will wait until the book is between covers before doing anything more with it online.

What I am hoping to do is to use the book as a springboard for weekly online q & a sessions.

I no longer have access to my postal mail, which is now being methodically intercepted from the Village Postal Center, the private postal service I use in Manhattan. For security reasons, I send myself three letters a month disguised as reader letters. In October, the first three letters failed to arrive. I then sent a total of six more. None arrived. In addition, I received only a smattering of regular reader mail, which has run in the hundreds of letters a month for years. As additional proof, CS member David Pursglove sent me mail correspondence on October 1 which he is inquiring about online. I never received it.

I live inside a kind of envelope, if you don't mind the pun, of persecution and investigation. It is entirely illegal, whether being carried out by government types or private individuals.

I have a great deal about it in the book.

Whitley Strieber to John C. Williams on 11/20/94 at 09:59

I have a friend who is a security-cleared congressional staffer. He made the air force take him on a tour of Area-51 and CLAIMS that he could not find the hangar where the UFO remains are kept, even though he had them overfly him according to grid-co-ordinates provided by Bob Lazar. But he also tried to convince me at one point that Area-51 activities have been moved to northern Canada! So what does yours truly think? Somebody is really working overtime to hide what is going on out there. My uncle, recently deceased, Colonel E.M. Strieber, was at Wright Field when the Roswell debris was delivered in 1947, and may have been more involved than that. He was certain that the whole story was real. As far as what the devices may actually look like, I have no idea.

Whitley Strieber to Allain Beaulieu on 11/20/94 at 10:03

No, the media will have fun with me. 60 Minutes won't be going on any blood trails. They are absolutely committed to UFOs being a fake and a subject for laughter, and will continue to suppress the truth because they have been committed to lying about this subject for two generations. They cannot afford an about-face any more than the government and scientific community. Unless the visitors prove their presence indisputably (if they can) the whole establishment infrastructure will continue to deny.

Whitley Strieber to Myrel Johnson on 11/20/94 at 10:07

It's quite clear that the government doesn't undestand what is going on. This is why they are so full of fear about the visitors. Regarding mail, one reporter who investigated me had his mail opened also, but he was informed of it and told it was part of an official investigation. He received his mail opened and resealed with green stickers, and anything about UFOs was delayed a month.

Whitley Strieber to Jim Swinny on 11/22/94 at 10:45

Listen, you might think you're joking, but I have a number of letters from people who have seen these little figures described as aliens in trees, including one from a family who watched them all one afternoon! As far as men in the woods are concerned, where I live, a little man in black clothes (natch!) has been seen running through the woods by many of the people who live in the area. He is about four feet tall, and carries a small black case. If chased, he will take off at impossible speed.

Whitley Strieber to John Relton on 11/22/94 at 10:48

The first memory I had after my encounter of December 26, 1985 was that I had seen an owl. I think that this is because of the big eyes. Another man that lives nearby encountered a four foot tall owl in his living room in the middle of the night. He went after it with a houseshoe, whereupon it turned into a bird of paradise and disappeared. What was he on? Nothing, apparently.

Whitley Strieber to All on 11/22/94 at 10:35

Appropos of persecution, etc., my security system recorded an unauthorized ent ry into my house on May 21, 1994, that resulted in the theft of a 5,000 check and the placement of a virus on my computer system. The New York State CID wouldn't investigate because they said there was insufficient evidence of a breakin! On November 10, 1994, another intrusion took place. This time the system was tripped and the sheriff sent a car. But the gate, which is on a code, would not work and they didn't come in. When I got home, I found that the entry had tripped movement detectors all over the house. File drawers in my office were opened, and there had been six failed attempts to get past Norton Disklock (which I installed in June) and enter my computer.

I do not know who is doing this, but it has also involved agents questioning business associates about me on airplanes, flashing badges that look official but cannot be read. They have been very pleasant but very persistent in asking about what I am doing.

I have committed no crimes. All I do is sit here and write. It is beginning to feel an awful lot like living in a police state, I must say. Comments? Thoughts?

Whitley Strieber to John Relton on 11/22/94 at 10:39

I wanted to know if I had temporal lobe epilepsy. If so, maybe it could have caused hallucinations intense enough to explain the visitor experience. But the tests were negative. However, TLE is notoriously hard to diagnose because there has to be active testing during a seizure. My brain proved to be extremely stable electrically, though, so the TLE diagonsis is improbable.

For an interesting take on the relationship between Hindu mythology and modern visitor/UFO lore, read Alien Identities by Richard L. Thompson.

Whitley Strieber to Dean Miller on 11/22/94 at 10:27

A month after Communion was published I got hit with an IRS audit so stringent that my accountants, who have been in the business for thirty years, had never recorded one like it. They started out by claiming that all transfers of cash from savings to checking were new income, and forced me to prove that it wasn't! The audit went on for five months. In the end, I got a sixteen dollar refund over the three audited years.

Compilation of public posts written by Whitley Strieber to various recipients, November 1994.
© 1994 Whitley Strieber
In September 1994, a discussion forum on Compuserve was created called Communion, a subsection of the New Age: UFO forum. These posts are probably from this forum.