Whitley Strieber on Coast-to-Coast radio program, 17 April 2000
Whitley Strieber was a guest of host Mike Seigel

Whitley Strieber was Mike Seigel's guest on the Coast to Coast radio show April 17th. At 1 hr 37 minutes into the program, Whitley reveals a detail of his Communion experiences that he has never revealed before. Whitley said that in addition to the already acknowledged aspect of his glimpsing an alien figure beside him while he huddled in the woods outside his cabin (while he was mostly paralyzed during an abduction experience), he revealed that he was spoken to by a friend who he knew from his college days in the 1960s. This seemed impossible, Whitley said, because this friend had been dead for some time. The friend, he continued, had been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The deceased man told Whitley that a stealth fighter plane would soon crash, and indeed soon afterwards a stealth fighter did crash, revealing the stealth technology to the world. Whitley did not say more about this, except that he was afraid to put it in Communion because it seemed so outrageous.

We are seeking a transcript of this portion of the conversation, if anyone has a tape of this show.

The friend's name is believed to be Wilfred.

WHITLEY STRIEBER: I had a friend who was a CIA officer for many years; a school friend. In fact, I interviewed as a candidate when I was in college. I didn't join it because it, it just didn't appeal to me. I mean, in those days, back in the early 60's, I wasn't – the Vietnam war, this was before the Vietnam war had heated up, and I was very definitely interested in something like a CIA or foreign service job. But anyway, when my friend got out he became an importer and eventually he died in the line of duty, later. But when he came out he said to me, “many of my friends get offers, have gotten offers from media.” From the New York Times he mentioned specifically, the Washington Post, he mentioned a couple of other media organizations. I think he mentioned CBS news. An advertising agency called Grey Advertising. He said that he hadn't ever gotten one of these offers because he hadn't been given a chance to do enough writing. And he was a very browned off about it because they were making a lot of money. And he was going to have to go into an import/export business and make far less. Because he had not been doing the writing of memos back to the agency; he had been doing a lot of field work. Now, is this true? Do these companies really routinely hire people out of CIA field work into their organizations?

BARBARA SIMPSON: [responding to a story from The Communion Letters in which a family observed and were observed by several strange beings in the trees around their home, an encounter that lasted for several hours]. I have never heard of an experience quite like that one, with so many people involved…
WHITLEY STRIEBER: ...The truth is, multiple witness encounters are more common than single encounters.
BARBARA SIMPSON: You almost never hear about that, though.
WHITLEY STRIEBER: Because they don't want you to hear that. The UFO community is very controlled, don't think it isn't. They don't want you to hear this, they don't want you to know that when this happens, as often as not it happens to groups of people together, not just to one individual alone. They want you to think it happens alone, in the dead of the night to single individuals. Because that is disempowering. What is empowering is to know that it can happen to lots of people at the same time, that whole families can see the same thing at the same time, and it can be that weird.
BARBARA SIMPSON: And you say that the general UFO community tries to cover up stories like this?
WHITLEY STRIEBER: They ignore them.
BARBARA SIMPSON: Why is that?
WHITLEY STRIEBER: The more innocent people ignore them because they want this to come out right in the press. They want to be believed. And so they want to tell a consistent, believable, structured story that makes sense. Even at the expense of the truth.
BARBARA SIMPSON: That's bizzare in itself.
WHITLEY STRIEBER: But it happens. I've seen it. I have seen them coaching witnesses to get rid of the high strangeness in their accounts. And even hypnotising them as if to say "no no, the high strangeness part is all your imagination, the stuff that makes sense to us is what really happened." But actually, the opposite is probably the case.
...
WHITLEY STRIEBER: One of the things the UFO community does not like to talk about is the fact that it is a commonplace that dead friends and relatives show up in the context of the close encounter experience.
[reads a story from The Communion Letters in which parents observed a flash of light outside and their youngest child then reported that his older brother, who had passed away some months earlier in an automobile accident, had at that moment visited the child in his room to assure him that he was alright. The older brother was accompanied by several apparently alien beings.]
BARBARA SIMPSON: I have never heard that, Whitley.
WHITLEY STRIEBER: You have never heard it because they don't like to talk about it. It doesn't fit. This is supposed to be about aliens from another planet, and they're going to come here in beautiful silver spaceships from the Galactic Empire, and they're going to land and give Mr. President plans for a starship and off we go.
BARBARA SIMPSON: And the world is perfect...
WHITLEY STRIEBER: Yeah, in a perfect world. It's the Leave it To Beaver version of the UFO experience, however. The reality is a whole lot different.
BARBARA SIMPSON: Now how would you explain if in fact the light and the other beings were aliens, how do you figure the son coming back and being part of that?
WHITLEY STRIEBER: Well if they are aliens, and that's an interesting question in itself of course, but if they are, then they have mastered something that we are just beginning to sort of recognize the possibility of. That they have mastered not only the soul, but the world of the soul. They have got technology of some kind that penetrates into that world and opens the curtain between the worlds. That would be a possibility. There's recently been a study done, a study about the soul a British doctor did saying that the mind survives death. A study of heart attack patients saying even when they are totally brain dead, some of them when they come back have organized memories from the period when they were brain dead. Now, if that is the beginning of the discovery of the soul, then it means that there is technology that we haven't invented yet that will enable us to detect the soul. And to come into contact with our own dead. The veil between the worlds... maybe eventually science goes from not believing in that level of reality at all, to mastering it. And maybe the aliens have mastered it, if they are aliens…
BARBARA SIMPSON: Maybe they were angels. Who knows what other type of beings they migth have been.
WHITLEY STRIEBER: Well there are so many possibilities. I don't discount the Biblical ideas of angels and demons at all, I mean the things I have seen, the experiences I have personally had, have ranged from the angelic way down to the demonic on a personal basis.
...
BARBARA SIMPSON: We're talking with Whitley Strieber here on Coast to Coast AM. Whitley, Just before the top of the hour you had told us about [an experience a family had]. Part of it was his wife seeing a flash of light by their front door and then their child coming downstairs and telling the parents he saw little people in his room and among them was a child with a message, and that child was who, the older brother who had died?
WHITLEY STRIEBER: His older brother, yes.
BARBARA SIMPSON: And the message was what?
WHITLEY STRIEBER: He said to tell his parents that he was fine, that he was ok.
BARBARA SIMPSON: How did the parents react?
WHITLEY STRIEBER: They were profoundly moved and they wanted desperately to know whether or not they had any reason to believe it may have been real. Which is why they got in touch with me.
BARBARA SIMPSON: Did they have a reason to believe it was real?
WHITLEY STRIEBER: They had very good reason to believe it was real. I've had many letters from people and have had even in my own experience this happen where we have actually encountered the dead during the close encounter experience. So yes, I think they had every reason to believe that insofar as anything like that is real, it was real that other people have had the same sort of encoutneters.
     I know when I had my first experience that I wrote about in Communion it took me awhile to realize - unfortunately I had already written the book before I got this all tracked down and sorted out, but - I had seen a friend involved there who I [knew] when we were in college together. I hadn't seen him since we were in college, I knew only of his future life, that he had joined the Central Intelligence Agency. And I'd never heard from him since. Oh, perhaps maybe a phone call or two over the years, but, um, I had seen him in this close encounter and it took awhile but I finally discovered he had died in March of the year that I had the close encounter in December. So he had been dead for some months before the close encounter, and yet he was there, I saw him.
BARBARA SIMPSON: Did he speak with you? Was there any exchange of information?
WHITLEY STRIEBER: Yes he did, he spoke extensively. And he spoke about the then stealth aircraft, saying that there was something wrong with the containment, some kind of a containment vessel on it. It was all very technical and I couldn't understand it at all unfortunately. But it was interesting that within a year there was a crash of a stealth bomber that burned, or a stealth fighter perhaps, they were still in testing then, that burned so ferociously...it created an extraordinary fire. So something was wrong, I guess they obviously got it fixed whatever it was, but…so, yes, he did.
     In addition, another personal close encounter situation I know about, a lady had her brother who had disappeared many, many years before and had been searched for by the FBI for two or three years, and was finally given up for dead, proceeded to appear to her in the context of a close encounter and he said the same thing to her that the boy had said to his younger brother : "I'm alright, everything is fine."
BARBARA SIMPSON: I wonder why a spirit of a departed person would appear with what we interpret to be aliens. I mean, one would almost think if a spirit wanted to come back, it would come back and say "I'm ok," they wouldn't have to appear with someone else. Do you have any sense of why that would happen?
WHITLEY STRIEBER: Unless the someone else is the one who has the technology that makes it possible for him to do it. Or, the simplest answer probably is, we don't know what the heck is going on! [laughter] But you know, lots of people have ghostly encounters with dead relatives especially that don't involve aliens.
~

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