By STEFAN FATSIS Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) What angers Whitley
Strieber most is the attitude of UFO debunkers who outright reject
his claims in the best-selling book Communion that he was
abducted by short, stocky, big-eyed humanoids.
Strieber,
the 42-year-old author of pop thrillers-turned-movies The Wolfen
and The Hunger, resolutely denies inventing his 299-page
account of bright lights and midnight visits by alien beings to
his remote cabin in upstate New York.
I believe
I am telling the truth, Strieber said in a telephone interview.
Communion
never demands that you believe in UFOs or that you believe that
the visitors are physically real.
All
it asks you to do is place into question some of the paradigms
about reality and the nature of the mind," he said. I'm
not asking more than that.
Communion, which has sold more than 250,000 copies and
was No. 1 on the New York Times non-fiction best-seller
list for three weeks, details Strieber's reported contacts with
alien visitors in 198586.
In the book,
Strieber says on one occasion humanoids wearing gray body-suits
carried him to a small depression in the woods and later to a
messy chamber. The visitors, he says, physically assaulted him,
inserting a shiny, hair-thin needle in his head and
a long, scaly object in his rectum.
It wasn't
dreamlike in any way you don't get a needle mark in your
head from a dream, Strieber said. I felt like I was
being raped. ... It just didn't strike me as being hallucinatory
or dreamlike in nature.
Co-author
of two books about nuclear war and the environment, Warday
and Nature's End, Strieber said he has received more than
2,000 letters from readers, over half of whom claim some kind
of alien contact.
He is forming
a referral service network of doctors and counselors not
UFO investigators for people who have written to him claiming
paranormal experiences.
People
know that something is going on and it's not understood by science,
Strieber said. The result of this is they're just simply
not going to buy the debunkers. They shouldn't believe them. The
real problem we have now is that the debunkers are frightening
the scientific community into not taking a clear-headed look at
this.
Communion
has been done with a lot of care and a lot of attention to candor,
he added. There's no reason that someone with a good reputation
can't take it seriously and study it seriously.
Many details
of Strieber's alleged encounters emerged during hypnosis sessions
with a New York City psychiatrist, transcripts of which are included
in the book.
Strieber says
he underwent a battery of physical and psychological tests that
showed him to be normal, and also passed two polygraphs. The bottom
of each page of Communion asserts that Strieber's is A
True Story.
I believe
it so completely that I can take a lie detector test and pass,
he said. I cannot be convinced not by myself, not
by a psychiatrist, not by anybody that there is the slightest
doubt this is real.
Strieber,
who includes his wife and 8-year-old son among witnesses to the
paranormal happenings, is writing a sequel entitled Transformation
about subsequent visits.
The author
received a $1 million advance from the publisher for Communion
but said negotiations haven't been completed for the new book,
which details his struggle to come to terms with being the apparent
subject of alien experiments.
Transformation includes one major encounter and
three minor ones with the same humanoids, Strieber said. The sequel
is about his transformation from a frightened victim
to someone who is going to tell it like it was, damn the
consequences.
He said he
no longer fears when he will be visited again.
I just
live my life, Strieber said. When these happen it's
always a little startling. But I don't think in terms of when
it will happen again.
The author
said he had no interest in UFOs until his first encounters.
It just
didn't seem to matter very much, he said. My concerns
were peace and the environment.
When
I was 11 or 12 there were (outer space) movies ... but it wasn't
something that we thought was particularly real. It was science
fiction, but you don't expect science fiction to be real.
(Communion is published by William Morrow) ~
AP 08/07 0818
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Associated Press
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