Whitley Strieber's Journal
Published on the Communion Homepage
© 1998 Whitley Strieber

Whitley Strieber's Journal

Items are listed in reverse date order, latest entry first.

The Author Tour Is Over
Journal Entry 7/10/98

Thank you so much, everybody who jammed the bookstores for me. It was so damn wonderful to see you and be with you. I only wish that I could be personal friends with every one of you. Thank you for caring.

I am now working on a television special for the fall. There were virtually no reviews of Confirmation, except for a nasty attack on me in the New York Review of Books. This attack did not even refer to the content of my book. At the same time, Sarah McLendon of the McLendon News Service has once again released an amazing press release stating frankly that there is a great deal of secrecy and conspiracy surrounding the UFO issue. For the first time, I have come to suspect that this may actually be true. It is just very hard to believe that there would be no reviews, not unless somebody very powerful had engineered it.

In a normal situation, my book would have been reviewed. But it is as if, since it presents evidence that cannot be sensibly disputed, it is simply being ignored. It is hard not to see intention in this somewhere. In addition, the eerie ad hominem attacks have extended onto the internet, with a Mr. Black of whom nobody has ever heard demanding that I release results of my lie detector tests, something that I did ten years ago, as documented in Ed Conroy's book Report on Communion. Although this man claims to be a UFO researcher of 30 years standing, I can't seem to find any publications credited to him, nor any other researchers who know him. In addition, he seems singularly uninformed about my credibility and credentials.

In fact, mine is among the very best close encounter cases ever documented, with over a dozen named witnesses, medical reports, lie detector test, and most recently a carefully documented attempted implant removal.

So, what is Mr. Black up to? Maybe he is spreading disinformation. By questioning me as if I had never offered any documentation he creates the impression that my case is without support, which simply is not correct. Clever propaganda, nothing more.

I also note that the recent attack by CSICOP on Dr. Peter Sturrock and his very distinguished panel had a quality almost of crazed hysteria. I believe that the skeptics are losing, and that they know it. As this becomes more and more obvious, the fact that they are really religious fanatics disguised as scientists will become more obvious.

Meanwhile, one thing remains true: every day that this society stays passive to the presence of the visitors, more implants are going in to people. So who is really behind government secrecy, scientific insanity and public passivity. Clearly, whoever it is, they serve the cause of the visitors.

Whether that is for good or evil, I suspect that we will soon find out.

Next Journal Entry: my first new encounter in well over a year, and this time I was able to take some notes.

Tales of My Author Tour: Speaking at the Pentagon Bookstore

On May 11, 1998, I was scheduled by my publisher to give a short speech and autograph books in the Pentagon Bookstore. When I arrived, I was disappointed to find that the public could not get in. At the same time, this also meant that my audience would consist exclusively of Pentagon employees, which was quite interesting to me. I wondered what sort of people would show up to hear me.

As I prepared to speak, I looked around at my audience. A number of them were in Air Force uniform. The others were all in civilian clothes. I did not see any uniformed Army or Navy personnel. Two of these Air Force officers, a man and a woman, sat on a couch directly in front of me. They glared at me with fixed expressions of hate. When I began to speak, they ostentatiously picked up newspapers and read them in my face.

At the back of the small crowd, three more uniformed Air Force personnel stood alternately listening and chatting among themselves. I could not tell their mood. But the two directly in front of me never softened their expressions in any way. In fact, they looked almost paralyzed with hate. In my memory of six author tours on the UFO subject, I do not recall seeing such expressions on any other faces. To my eye, they were not sane expressions. Frankly, they were frightening. I don't see why Air Force personnel would hate me. My book Majestic lays the blame for the cover-up at the feet of the intelligence community, not the Air Force. In general, my books do not attack the military.

Could it be that they were fundamentalists? Lately, some fundamentalist leaders have been making statements to the effect that people who believe in aliens should be stoned to death. Maybe that's what brought this hatred out. It is certainly true that the combination of fundamentalism and the military or federal enforcement groups is worrisome, and that concern goes far beyond UFO issues. It used to be that Protestant America worried about Catholic politicians submitting to Papal authority. Now, there is a very real concern that people in powerful positions within the government may try to evolve policy or act according to the instructions of politically active fundamentalist leaders.

But I have no proof that these two people were fundamentalists. They were, however, scary. It is not pleasant to be hated for no apparent reason, especially not by people in uniform.

By and large, the crowd was pleasant enough. They asked, I must say, excellent questions. The whole event will appear on C-Span, so look for it. In my lecture, I say that I don't think that there is a government coverup, and I don't, certainly not the kind of coverup that is usually imagined. I DO think that there are a lot of secrets being kept about the UFO issue, but I suspect that they are also being kept from Congress and the White House. Thus there may be illegal activity relating to this subject within the military and the intelligence community, but I would be surprised if there was any flow of knowledge into and policy back from the elective government. So all the secret keeping is simply criminal activity, and any alleged classification of it is unlikely to be legally constituted.

I say this because I am aware of the efforts made by various congressional committees with a right to know to ferret out these secrets. One aide told me that he felt sure that there was a coverup, but within the military, not the elective government. He gave me an interview for Breakthrough. Also, the GAO report on Roswell generated at the request of Congressman Steve Schiff of New Mexico claimed that records essential to the investigation had been lost or destroyed, probably illegally.

What we need, I feel, is a far-reaching effort by the elective government to regain-or assert for the first time-control over this issue. Only if that happens are we going to learn what is really known within the military and the intelligence community. I suspect that it is more than the mainstream press believes, but less-shockingly less-than most conspiracy theorists suppose.

Rosie O'Donnell

It's May 7, 1998, and I am sitting in a friend's house in New York City a day after taping the Rosie O'Donnell show. At the moment, the show is going to air on July 20, but that may change. When the date is firm, it will appear in my schedule.

Ever since Rosie sent me a letter about her experiences years ago, I have counted her among the celebrities that I couldn't talk about but wished I could. But what she says on her show has changed all that. When the show airs, this country is going to be amazed by one woman's courage, strength of character and sterling honesty. It will be a moment never to be forgotten.

When we were together, I felt the same bond that is often so strong with other close encounter witnesses. She is just like the rest of us, full of questions that really need to be answered, but that can't be answered definitely, not yet.

I was quite inspired by her, and left with renewed determination to build the Communion Foundation to the point that it is supporting work that is strong enough to be reported in the peer-reviewed scientific press. No matter how the chips may fall, what is going to clarify all the questions that surround close encounter is good, strong science. I don't really have a desired outcome--aliens or not, it doesn't matter to me. What I want is that the answers we come up with be right.

Seeing a celebrity of Rosie's stature willing to declare herself on behalf of the close encounter witness is just wonderful. I hope that others will be doing the same soon, following her lead. And then will come the scientists, willing, I hope, to do the work needed to shed the light on our problem that is so needed by us all.

Life Magazine Article

In the fall, I worked on a feature for Life Magazine with a distinguished photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Tim has been a friend for many years, and was the first person outside of my family who I told about my close encounter experiences. We went to New York, Denver, Ventura, Glenrock, Wyoming and Gulf Breeze to take pictures of UFO and close encounter witnesses. I was to write a narrative of our journey and tell a little bit about what the people had experienced.

Incredibly, during the last few minutes of our last shoot in Gulf Breeze, a UFO showed up. It appeared first in the northern sky, about twenty degrees above the horizon. It was a clear night, and the object was about the size of Venus on the horizon. It was glowing ruby-red. As we watched, it slowly ascended the sky, making an occasional brief motion in one direction or another.

Before going to Gulf Breeze, I had made it my business to research what kind of aircraft I might see in connection with the naval air station at Pensacola, and I was aware that some Naval helicopters have a pair of red running lights on the base of the fuselage. So I expected that we would soon hear the sound of a helicopter.

The object came directly overhead and remained stationary just below the constellation Pleaides for three and one half minutes. At no time was there any sound. I watched the object for a timed minute and did not observe any deviation in its motion relative to visible stars. Motionless this total is not possible for an airborne vehicle. Therefore it seems possible that this object was being held aloft by some means that did not rely on air for support. I felt that it was genuinely unidentified.

Unfortunately, the staff at Life never much wanted our story, and the new editor said that the magazine was read primarily in the "Bible Belt" and that its readers would object to our story on religious grounds, so it was canceled.

I certainly wasn't surprised. The New York media is nothing if not out of touch with America. They are bone-ignorant about the UFO situation but believe themselves to be entirely well-informed. The sub-editor I dealt with held the whole subject in contempt.

Other Florida Sightings

That sighting began a series of sightings in Florida that has been quite amazing. To date, there have been over three hundred, I understand. A few days after we had ours, a witness took a video of a daylight disk that was shown on local TV. When we were at the annual Project Awareness conference in March, a UFO was videotaped from the porch of a cafe where Anne and I and some friends were having coffee with Alien Agenda editor Jim Maars.

We were later informed that the tape was actually being made while we were in the restaurant. Oddly, I had just told Maars that I had a feeling that there would be a daylight sighting. Unfortunately, we did not see the tape being made and they have not submitted it for analysis, so I don't know how to comment on it any further.

Pat Robertson Threat

Since Pat Robertson suggested that people who believe in aliens ought to be stoned to death, there has been a slight but worrisome increase in my security problems. Heretofore, I have never experienced any sense of threat at all, except at the end at our old cabin in upstate New York. Unfortunately, since I have the only easily recognized face in the field, Robertson might as well have suggested that I, personally, be stoned to death. The irony, of course, is that I am still not a "believer." Until there is scientific proof, I don't see why we should burden ourselves with beliefs about anything. But the combination of all the media attention and the vivid nature of my own reports has certainly created an image of me as the number-one UFO believer.

What I Believe

What I believe is that human science has the capacity to study, identify and benefit from the UFO and close encounter reports, and the materials being generated. On balance, I think that there is probably another intelligence involved with us, but I do not know its origin. I would not be too surprised to discover that it was something very much stranger than aliens from another planet. The intrusive nature of the implant phenomenon worries me. I want to believe that this is all to the good, but it's not easy, given that this seems such a terrific invasion of privacy.

I can see the outlines of what might be an organized program that has three parts:

1. It is designed to study us and possibly extract something from us along the lines of sexual material or dna.

2. It is generating questions that will have the effect of waking us up. It does this by the ceaseless process of UFO sightings, and the pressure that the close encounter experience puts us under. Whether intentional or not, the provocative nature of these two activities is slowly awakening in mankind a desire to solve this problem.

3. It is creating deep resistance. This runs so deep, indeed, that most of us in this experience suffer great persecution if we "come out" publicly. I have personally suffered the ugly combination of people being really nasty to me out of jealousy over my supposed success while at the same time having financial problems because I abandoned my thriving writing career. The belief is that the UFO books make scads of money and that anybody with a mean streak can safely indulge it at my expense. The truth is that I have all of the problems attendant on celebrity but none of the perks.

The Environment

Fires and Nature's End

Yet another Nature's End prophecy came true. If you read my books, you'll note that many of the prognostications in the book have proven accurate. This is not to say that Jim Kunetka (my co-author) and I have some sort of prophecy bone. Except for a few rather weird coincidences that I have commented on elsewhere, our ideas in that book were based on scientific research.

The burning of the tropical forests was a feature of Nature's End, with an especially vivid account of a fire in the Brazilian Matto Grosso. In February of 1998, fires began in the Matto Grosso. Meanwhile, massive fires in Indonesia have sent a pall of smoke thousands of miles. It is as if a fire in Montana was so unimaginably huge that it was covering St. Louis with a smoke pall.

Unfortunately, you can't get Nature's End in the stores anymore, as it is out of print. So look for it in a used book store. It is surprisingly accurate, for something written twelve years ago.

Ocean Currents

Our lives depend upon the flow of the ocean currents, which distribute heat and cold around the planet. The most important of these currents is probably the Gulf Stream, in that it keeps the Northeastern US, eastern Canada and parts of Northern Europe, especially the British Isles, much warmer than they would otherwise be.

Warming of the waters in the southern hemisphere threaten ocean circulation, which is powered by the difference in temperature between water near the poles and water closer to the equator. The more even these temperatures become, the more likely it becomes that the currents will get less powerful.

Should the Gulf Stream collapse south, the British Isles will experience a severe change in climate and could even become uninhabitable, at least by as many people as are there now.

The Power of Prayer

I am growing more and more interested in what prayer does and how it works. I enjoy praying. I want to worship. But why? What is it that impels so many of us to worship? When I was younger, prayer was always a chore. Over the years though, it has become a pleasure for me. I can think of few things I would rather do that sit out on the porch and pray. Is it just getting older that does this, or does an adverse life lead to a closer connection with deity? When I see all the storm and struggle in the world, I wonder why they don't just relax and pray? I suppose that the mystery of it lies in the fact that belief is in the head, while faith is in the blood. I don't really have a believer bone, but my faith is so deep that it seems to me that it goes even deeper than I am.

What do I have faith in? That which makes it so enjoyable to pray.

This is the beginning of an ongoing journal. It will be added to periodically, but not on a fixed schedule. ~


Whitley Strieber's Journal
Published on the Communion Homepage
© 1998 Whitley Strieber