Beyond Communion | Confirmation | Excerpt from Mike Jarmus Interview with Whitley Strieber

Mike Jarmus Interview with Whitley Strieber
(Excerpt from radio show) 14 February 1999

Mike Jarmus: Let's get to it. Welcome Whitley Strieber.

Whitley Strieber: Glad to be here.

Mike: I'm so glad to have you on. I don't think I've mentioned this actually on the air, but let me bore you again, repeating it for the listeners, that I did one of the first radio interviews with Whitley back in the of when his first book – on these subjects anyway – came out, Communion. And of course, I guess that book cover did more than anything else up to that point to promulgate that stereotypical alien visage, than anything.

Whitley: If it's a true picture than it is acclimatizing us to somebody who looks very different from the way we do.

Mike: Acclimatizing us. That's an interesting way to put it.

Whitley: Well that must be it. I mean, I certainly didn't know I was doing anything like that when I went to the artist. I just wanted to get him to make a picture that looked like what I had seen.

Mike: Right.

Whitley: And it was really at the time more for my own interest than anything. I didn't, I wasn't, the book haven't been sold yet or anything, then. I was just trying to see if I could make, have a picture of this mental image. And he drew it very exactly. Except the mouth is probably a little bit more human than it actually looked. I was sort of going for the way it felt as much as the way it looked.

Mike: Mm hm. And up to that point you were primarily a writer of fiction?

Whitley: Yeah.

Mike: Such as The Wolfen and The Hunger, and Forbidden Zone.

Whitley: At the time I felt I might still be [laughter], in spite of the way it seemed to me. I was not able to prove anything, so I was, you know, I left Communion with a group of questions as to what it may have been, because I was not at all sure.

Mike: I guess plenty of people still think it is fiction, I guess, out there.

Whitley: That shouldn't be, now. It's true that they do but the reason they do hasn't got anything to do with the quality of the evidence that is out there. the evidence is overwhelming that somebody is here and doing something very strange to us.

Mike: You used the phrase a moment ago, you experienced something that you weren't able to prove, and you wrote about it. Next week by guest on the show is Ingo Swann, a name I am sure you know.

Whitley: Yes, I've met him once.

Mike: And in his most recent book, very early on in the book he starts off by saying, “Some of the things I talk about in this book are things that happened to me that I can't prove.” So, it's, you know…

Whitley: Yeah. I sympathize with the position he's in. I know a lot about him. It's amazing how much, you know when you begin to sort of drift around in the “spooky” circles that surround this UFO question and the government, Ingo's name comes up a surprising amount. So, I wouldn't be in the least surprised that what he can't prove is true, because I've heard stories about what happened to him from other people long before he wrote his book. I haven't even read his book as a matter of fact. So he certainly, I can tell you a lot about him, he certainly has been involved with some of the same spooks I've been involved with.

Mike: And we're going to find out all about it next week.

Whitley: He's never told me anything, I was just asked the question. So, I haven't anything to say about him except that.

Mike: I've wanted to have you on the show for quite some time, and a number of people who our mutual acquaintances of ours have said, “Have you had Whitley on?” or “Why don't you have him on?” And of course I say well, I spoke to him many many years ago and I really should, and so therefore when the new NBC special began to be promoted I said, well, if I need an excuse this is it! So I am glad you were able to make it, even through all this difficulty about whether or not you would be here tonight. the program coming up this Wednesday night on NBC TV at eight o'clock eastern time, is Confirmation: The Hard Evidence of Aliens Among Us? – with a question mark, as in the title of your book – which came out when by the way?

Whitley: It came out a year ago, but it's now just come out in paperback. So it'll be in stores in soft cover right now.

Mike: And I must confess that with all there is to read and keep up with in this field, I been behind in your works. I think I just finished The Secret School, as a matter of fact, a few weeks ago. So I'll get on the stick and catch up. But at any rate, the program coming up Wednesday on NBC, Confirmation and it's subtitle, has a number of different segments. In one of them you're talking about your experiences?

Whitley: Well no, not really. We go into some material about implants, which by the way some of the major news media in their usual effort to lie about this subject as much as possible, have implied – as in People magazine – that the implant surgeries are a recreation. They are not a recreation, it is a real surgery. it's an actual surgery that takes place.

Mike: And this is surgery by Dr. Leir?

Whitley: it's by a surgeon who worked, a specialist who removed the object from the hand. But Dr. Leir organized the surgery.

Mike: Oh, I see. Dr. Leir is not the actual surgeon performing in the film.

Whitley: No, he isn't actually performing it.

Mike: Alright, thanks for clearing that up, because he's going to be with us in the second hour of the show tonight for another visit with me here on the program. So the program will deal with the question of the so-called or alleged alien implants?

Whitley: I'll let Roger Leir fill you in on that, because it's a… I can tell you about my own implant experience though.

Mike: You have something in your ear, I believe?

Whitley: Yes I do. I did and I do. I had the experience of -- I've been very nervous about it ever since it came into me in May of 1994 because it was put in by people. I saw them as they came into the room. I was blacked out as they approach the bed. But I could easily identify these people. I saw it was a man and a woman, I saw them very clearly. And there may have been someone or something else with them, but there were two people clearly.

Mike: You were immobilized?

Whitley: I was unable to… well, yes. I had set up in the bed, or partly set up in the bed. The reason this happened was I heard something that woke me up. It was a May evening, it was warm and the windows were open in the house. Some of the bedroom windows looked out on the deck where there was a swimming pool, and the other part looked out on the gravel driveway of the cabin I used to have back then. I heard crunching of gravel, like a car in the driveway…

Mike: Hm.

Whitley: No sound of an engine, though. And it really woke me right up because this had a locked gate and we were way out in the middle of nowhere, with one phone line, and just a pair of hedge clippers would have isolated us from the rest of the world. At that point there had been enough of a number of very sinister things happen out there in terms of intrusions, and I was really nervous. I was just sleeping almost with one eye open. And when I heard that noise I really reacted immediately. My thought being to get the light that surrounded the house flipped on and to get the shotgun out from under the bed right away. However, as I sat up I heard a voice in the backyard say very clearly, a male voice say, “Condition Red.” Just like that. I looked across the room – I mean I was literally, I didn't turn at all, I was just staring in that direction, and there was a woman standing in the door way of the bedroom. And I thought, oh God, it's happened. They're in.

Mike: They're finally going to just get you.

Whitley: Us. And I felt that, the thought that went through my head was thank God it's just me and Anne, and that our son would live. Because I was assuming that I had been invaded by crazies who gotten past the alarm system somehow. It was an awful fear. Just awful.

Mike: I can imagine.

Whitley: They came hurrying forward, then I blacked out. But I wasn't – it was like twilight sleep. I couldn't move, I couldn't see, but I could feel pressure. I could feel then turn me over on my side, I could feel pressure against the side of my head, and I heard a voice speaking to me almost continuously - though I do not recall and have not been able to recall what was said. The next morning I woke up. After this ended, it ended with me going into a deeper sleep. I never regained consciousness again during the night. As soon as I woke up I told my wife the whole story because we'd made a habit at that point, and we still have, of if anything unusual happens in the night to either of us, even if it is just a strange dream, we record it first thing in the morning.

Mike: Mm hm.

Whitley: I then went out to examine the situation in the house because if someone had intruded I thought the alarm system would have registered the time that it had been turned off. However, the alarm system was still armed. In other words, it had never been turned off. So I thought well, I said to Annie maybe it was a dream. Maybe it was just a very vivid nightmare. And I felt, well, that sort of dismissed it as far as I was concerned. I went out to get, start to go out to get the newspaper, and the alarm box that you turn off the system with, one of the boxes was in the garage and I planned to turn it off there. So I opened the door, stepped into the garage, and the garage door behind my car was wide open despite the fact that the alarm system was still armed! I was flabbergasted. I disarmed the system, got in the car and backed it out, and I hadn't been in the car for, oh, more than just a few seconds when I realized my hair was practically standing on end. I was tingling, and when I took my fingers, my hands off the steering wheel there was a pop of static electricity. I jumped the hell out of that car faster than you can imagine. Because it was so full of static, I just couldn't imagine what was wrong.

Mike: At this point you have not noticed anything physical about your person?

Whitley: No. So eventually I called, well I say eventually, that minute I got on the phone and called the alarm man to come and see what was wrong with the alarm. And after a while I went back out to the car and it seemed perfectly normal, it ran fine. So that seemed to be the end of it. The alarm guy came and couldn't find single thing wrong with the system. He was mystified as to how the garage door had opened, which was on an instant alarm deal when you were inside the house. In other words, it would have sounded instantly if it had opened during the night. Then later that day my ear bothered me. My left ear did. I felt this lump in it, and I remembered this cold, cold feeling.

Mike: This was in the external part of the ear?

Whitley: It's in the so-called pinea, which is the external part of the ear.

Mike: The fan, the cup.

Whitley: Right. It's right up on the top of the arch of it. I was terrified. I didn't know what to do about it. I knew that there were implants that had been around, Eddy Ruth Macanaise's [?] implant had already been extracted and examined at that time and I was aware of that. I had made attempts through the Communion Foundation to do some implant studies in 1989, so I was quite convinced that they were real. But this was people that had come in here, and I was scared. Because I thought, God, the government has gotten a hold of this technology and now they are using it on me. To what end would they do this? I could not imagine anything good coming from that. It had to be something terribly evil; it was designed to harm me in some way or control my mind or whatever. It was horrible.

Mike: These were your first impressions?

Whitley: Oh, sure. But for reasons that I cannot explain I kept putting off trying to get it taken out. Then one day it turned on. I was by this time working with some scientists here at a research institute in San Antonio, I had moved down here, we have lost our cabin and I went into bankruptcy. I had a horrible time, I was just, my life, you know people think oh, he must be making a lot of money, but the life of somebody who practically everyone thinks is a liar is…

Mike: At best.

Whitley: …a living hell, believe me.

Mike: So you moved out of New York…

Whitley: We're out, we're down here in Texas. And I was with this scientist, who is a wonderful guy, we were talking about various things and I mentioned the implant, and he felt it. No sooner had he felt it then, and this has happened a couple times, the thing turned on.

Mike: Now when you say “turned on,” what do you mean?

Whitley: I'll tell you what happens. The ear gets hot, and it gets red, bright red. It's not painful, it feels like you've dipped it in real hot water.

Mike: Like when you are flushed?

Whitley: Yeah, but hotter than that, though. Hotter than just being flush. Significantly hot. It's hot to touch, so much so that even I can feel it even though it's my ear. It feels physically hot. But the thing is, it turns bright red and there's this ringing sound, not a - it's a rasping sound like the sound of a modem, you know, just as [a modem] turns on? Sort of a “shhhh” noise.

Mike: Really?

Whitley: And there are beeps, and then it goes away with seemingly no effect. I don't notice anything changes. But the thing that was such an extraordinary thing was this guy was actually able to watch the process, and feel the ear and see it turn bright red, and that was helpful because it make him much more interested in my whole story.

Mike: Ok, Whitley, we're going to pick this up in just a few moments. We are talking with Whitley Strieber whose book Confirmation the Hard Evidence of Aliens Among Us? gives the NBC special this Wednesday night its title and a lot of its subject matter. We'll talk more about that too as we continue tonight. Stay with us, I'm Mike Jarmus.

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