Beyond Communion | The Key | Encounter of June 6, 1998

Encounter of June 6, 1998
Whitley Strieber's Journal (posted July 19)
© 1998 Whitley Strieber

It had been twenty months since my last encounter. When we lost our cabin in upstate New York, my thrilling life of weekly and even daily encounters ended. In the years in the little condo in Texas-- hard years of poverty and struggling to make ends meet-- I had only two encounters. For the whole first year, I would meditate night after night. I grew angry, I became bereft. I would wake myself and my wife up crying in my sleep.
     Then I pulled myself together and went on with my work. I have understood that I am a soldier in a fearsome war, the war for the human soul. Because I am on the side of the good and the free, it is my destiny to be despised, persecuted and hated. But every brutal act against me is actually a medal of honor pinned to my chest. Realizing this, understanding it, has made me also understand why one of the visitors once called me “the luckiest of the lucky.”
     I had completely given up the idea of ever having another encounter when I had the best, the most incredible, the most stupendous encounter of my life. It was truly a marvel, and it has left me in a kind of spiritual whirlwind. What an extraordinary event.
     I was in a hotel room in Toronto, on the very last night of my Confirmation author tour when I was awakened at three a.m. by a knock at the door. Absurdly, I leaped out of bed thinking that I had fallen asleep and left the room service waiter at the door! I rushed over yelling, “I'm terribly sorry.”
     When I threw the door open, a man in a dark colored suit came hurrying in. He was short-- maybe four and a half feet tall-- and had a rather pointed face. But he was a man, a human being, by anything that I could see. I rushed along behind him, totally astonished. I was completely normal. No altered state.
     We talked for about half an hour. When I asked him where he was from, he said, “Toronto.” I asked him if he was a human being. He said that he was, but that he did not pay taxes. I asked him if he had ever lived off planet. He said that there is a higher world, and we can sometimes gain the right to enter it in life.
     Gently, he told me that our world is “irretrievably lost.” He said, “the ones to whom you pay your taxes will be dragged in the streets before this suffering is ended.” What suffering? “You will see the signs in fire. Your planet's life has turned a turning in its path. There will be a great extinction here.”
     Every word he uttered contained whole vast oceans of other words and meanings that came flying into my mind as he spoke. I grabbed a yellow pad and took notes.
     I asked if the visitors would intervene. No. If they would take anybody off the planet. He only stared silently at me. His face seemed-- hungry? Sad? I really do not know how to interpret it.
     There emerged an incredible promise: that an ancient path would again emerge. And suddenly I knew who this man was. Since I met one of them in 1971, I have known that there was an incredible secret group in this world, who knew the true path of the human soul. He told me then I would one day play a part in inducing this hidden path to resurface. He taught it to me, and I committed it to memory. I asked what I should do with it? He only shook his head.
     I met this man on a path in Central Park. I was an innocent young man, just 27 and newly married.
     Just before he left, the man in Toronto had me drink a fluid. He reminded me that I had taken this same drink as a child. He said that it contained the structures of my life, up until that night. He was here to give me the second cup, which would contain everything from June 6 until my death. He told me when and how I am to die, but he also said, “if you value your sanity, you will never utter this.” I can certainly see that. But I sense the truth of what he said, and I think that I have gained the peace of a dying man.
     I have also gained a mission: our world is going to go through a time of great agony. I can tell you this: many of the people who now hold sway over us are going to end up despised by a thousand future generations. Their names will echo in the ages as the names of the blackest demons of hell.
     At the same time, there is going to be a path found through the maelstrom, and the ones on the path will bear children, and the children will survive, and mankind will go on. But barely. Just barely.
     He told me what would happen, and told me each sign to watch for. Horrifically and incredibly, two of the signs occurred within a month of the meeting: “great fires” and a “plague of cold water in the western sea.”
     I came home from my author tour to a city blanketed in smoke from the huge fires that swept southern Mexico and Central America. Then I discovered that the strongest La Nina on record was literally killing sea life in the Pacific with cold water.
     But I also learned what this means for the future, and what we can and must do to save some part of our species as we slide into the chaos that is coming.
     I have always been too arrogant to believe in the coming of “the millennium.” I have always fallen back on elegant theories about a “change of mind” masquerading as visions of coming doom.
     He did not give me visions. He read me chapter and verse. And then he gave me to understand all the missing pieces in the magnificent story about the hidden path that I was shown in 1971.
     So my next, and quite possibly last, book will be based on this encounter. As soon as I finish The Edge, I will start writing it. A book about the hidden meaning of mankind. Oh, what a meaning we have.

The more implants get removed and convincing UFO footage appears, the more concrete the visitors become. But is this good? If we become absolutely convinced that they are real, will that be the trigger that brings them pouring into our lives?
     I don't know, and I don't want my work to be part of the catalyst for this. So I want to remind you: I myself am unsure of even my most concrete encounters. I don't know what to believe, and neither should you. We are hungry for answers, but this is a situation which demands that we keep the questions alive.
     After all, I am a highly imaginative former horror novelist. Who knows what a mind like mine might dream up? All I can say is this: I believe myself. But I don't want that to convince YOU. You weren't there, you didn't see. So don't believe me. Listen, observe, and keep the question.
     That said, my last journal entry concerns an encounter I had on June 6, 1998, my first since October of 1996. I stated that the encounter was with what appeared to be a human being, and that he told me that we had crossed the line with the environment and it was going to collapse.
     He also told me a lot of other things that were equally provocative, and I have been furiously researching ever since, attempting to determine the level of truth that was involved.
     In addition, when I was with him, I remembered a similar meeting at the age of nine, and one in 1971 when he taught me a new way of approaching the Tarot that has nothing to do with fortune telling.
     He was a wise man. Very peaceful and sad-seeming. But I have three questions about him: was he real, was he alien or human, and was he telling me the truth?
     This gets me to the real point of this entry, because I obviously cannot answer a single one of those questions, not if I want to be honest. I am not even sure that I would want to be able answer in such a way that all doubt would be removed. (To understand why I am so concerned about this, pick up a copy of the anthology Revelations, and read my story entitled “The Open Doors.”)
     As things get more and more concrete, with scientists saying that UFOs might be real and implants coming out of people, I think that we need to be REAL CAREFUL with the truth, more careful than ever before. So I want to restate something I have said many times, but which can never be said enough: I do not know if my experiences are real. As vivid as they appear to me, their origin remains a mystery. And this includes even the most vivid of the experiences. ~