Date undetermined, but evidently this is a form letter sent to people who had written to the author in advance of Breakthrough. Note the working title of Breakthrough was Beyond Communion.

WORD FROM WHITLEY

Dear Reader:

I would like to thank you for taking the time and effort to write me, and to tell you a little bit about what happened to your letter, and what's been going on with me.

First, I read your letter personally, and if it contained a description of experiences that was appropriate, it was then placed into the database of the Communion Foundation. This database is made available only to academically qualified scientists and doctors, and only with their written agreement to keep the names in it confidential.

In 1995, I am going to publish a new book about the visitors. The working title is Beyond Communion: The Coming Moment of Contact.

The reason that I'm going to do this is that there have been urgent changes. I understand why we cannot yet have permanent contact with the visitors in the physical world, and what we need to do to change that. In the months between August of 1993 and January of 1994, I had dozens of encounters, leading up to one that came within inches of permanent contact.

I feel that we're right on the razor's edge, and I'm hoping that the new book will enable us to make the breakthrough we've all been struggling toward for so long. I've discovered, also, that everybody is equal in this: my letters tell me that nobody is being singled out, nobody is special. Everybody reaches about the same level of contact at the same time so when one breaks through to a new level, it's because everybody else is also ready.

To answer a few commonly asked questions:

1. The Communion Letter is no longer published. I published twelve issues over two years, and back issues are not available.

2. On my last television appearance, 1 said that I didn't think that the visitors were aliens. but that didn't mean that I thought they were some sort of dream. They are the most complex phenomenon humanity has ever encountered, and labeling them just pushes them away. What the visitors are is unknown, and we are never going to move this ahead unless we can learn to face them with empty minds.

Again, thanks for writing me. I'm sorry that I couldn't answer you personally, but I get around five hundred letters a month.

– Whitley Strieber