Q&A: Strieber Sounds Off
UFO Magazine, Sept/Oct 1993, Vol. 8, No.
5
by Sean Casteel
Three years after closing down his abductee support group called
Communion Foundation and beginning his self-imposed exile from
the UFO community, the immensely popular fiction novelist talked
to UFO about his feelings in regard to ufologists and abduction
investigators, as well as his continuing daily struggle with the
encounter experience. Strieber is particularly upset about the
discrimination he claims he has suffered since the publication
of his number-one best-seller, Communion, in 1987, a supposedly
non-fiction account of his own alien abduction experiences. What
he has to say on all these subjects follows in a UFO exclusive.
Q What are your hopes for your new novel, The Forbidden
Zone?
None at all. I never really think about it. People will read
it, I would think. My hopes for it are finished in the sense that
I have done it. I've done the best I could, so that's that. I
guess when I started writing it, maybe I hoped it would be different
than it was, but it just turned out the way it is.
Q Are your abduction experiences also an influence on this
novel, like you said they were with earlier novels like The
Wolfen and The Hunger?
I think that when they were subliminal, they were more of an
influence on me they are now. And the reason for that is that
I'm pretty much in control of those memories now. So when they
come into my work, it's intentional. In the past, when it wasn't
maybe in some senses it was more revealing. It's interesting to
me that I wrote so many things in the past - for instance, the
wolfen, the way they're described in the book and the way they
act, seem to fit sort of one's impres- sion of this so-called
abduction experience. And in the next one, The Hunger,
there seems to be another sort of “being” involved,
similar to the so-called blondes. I've never really been able
to believe that they were all that sweet.
Q The “Nordics,” you mean?
Yeah, whatever they call them. I've never encountered anything
in my whole experience that was pleasant or angelic in any way.
It's always been very difficult and very scary and, as often as
not, dangerous. I've made it into a transformative experience
for myself because I had to. Because I had nothing else to do.
There's nothing that can be done about it. It's just there. You
can't stop it, you can't start it, you can't control it. So, either
you make something out of it for yourself, or you let it drive
you crazy. Those are really your only choices. I choose not to
be driven crazy. But it's not an easy experience and it's not
a pleasant experience. I guess that's why I'm a horror novelist.
Q Because of the unhappiness you've been subject to?
The pressure. I wouldn't even describe it as unhappiness, because
it's too interesting an experience. But the pressure that you
live under is tremendous. I've had this in my life all the time
now for seven years. It has not gone away. It has not gotten less.
In fact, it's gotten bigger and more complicated. I had the Visitors
with me for six days last summer, and it was really hard. I came
out of it, and I'm surprised I did come out of it. Very, very
difficult. I don't talk about it publicly now, and I won't say
anything about what happened to me, because it's useless. It's
a waste of time. It only adds to the emotional burden. The so-called
UFO investigators do nothing but hurt. They don't help.
Q You said in your final Communion Foundation newsletter that
“the so-called ufologists are probably the cruellest, nastiest,
craziest people I have ever encountered.”
That was my perception of them, yes. And as a group. I'm not
saying, “Oh, there was only one or two people.” As a
group. Because I have a file about eight inches thick of statements
made about me, false quotations - there's even audiotapes that
have been made with somebody. It's very scratchy, but they sound
like my voice. Enough like my voice to pass, I guess. I've heard
them. They're insane. They're absolutely appalling. They were
made for the purpose of destroying my credibility and making me
seem to be a madman. They've been passed around privately in the
UFO community for years. They're fallacious. I never said any
of these things. I never made the tapes. I never even spoke to
the people who I'm alleged to have spoken to on the tapes! That
kind of thing is sick.
And what's sickest is that no one
in the community who has heard these tapes has ever called me
up and asked me whether or not it was true. They've all assumed
that anything they hear must be true. And that's absolutely false
thinking. That opens people up to being deceived. And I think
the way the community responded to me was just dreadful, horrible.
What wasn't absolutely designed to hurt me and make me feel bad
about myself and to weaken the minds of me and everybody else
who's ever had this experience was simply wrongheaded. So, if
it wasn't culpably wrong, it was wrongheaded.
Q Don't you think ufologists are providing at least some decent
research and support regarding the abduction phenomenon?
There are very few people even peripherally associated with
the UFO community and with the so-called investigators, most of
whom are rank amateurs at what they do and show it, who ever said
or did anything reasonably sensible about the abduction experience
or did anythmg positive to help the people who've had these experiences.
Certainly (this applies to) these people running around hypnotizing
people into believing they've been involved in this highly structured
sort of “alien scientists” deal, where they've been
taken in the little ship and put on a table and diddled with by
what I would think by now must be incredibly stupid aliens who've
been allegedly doing this same abduction thing for 25 years.
People who hypnotize people into believing that experience cause
99 percent of what actually happens to just be hidden behind a
screen of false memories. And the person never even begins to
get a hold of it. This thing that's happening to us - I don't
even buy into the idea this is necessarily abduction by aliens,
by the way - is hard and it's awful. It needs to be worked through
very carefully by skilled, open-minded professionals. By that,
I mean psychiatrists and psychologists, (who can) help a person
cope with this.
The frank truth is, there isn't
anybody to do that. There are no professionals who know what they're
doing. God knows, I've talked to dozens and dozens of them. And
the psychologists and the psychiatrists, with few exceptions,
are not even really trying.
The UFO investigators are way off.
I mean, hypnotizing people into believing they've been abducted
by alien scientists who are interested in stealing genetic material
is stupid. There's no evidence of that. There's only anecdotal
evidence, and the anecdotes come from a self-verifying circle
of so-called (hypnotically-retrieved) memories which probably
aren't memories at all. Without any direct evidence of that kind
of thing, it's a fantasy to believe it has anything to do with
reality at all. The whole thing is a fantasy.
Q At this point in your life, do you think the abduction experiences
you went through conceivably could work out to be a positive experience?
I remember that was your initial determination.
Well, I had to, because if I hadn't thought that in the beginning,
I certainly would have blown my brains out. There's no question
about that at all. And if I had not made myself find something
about my experience that could be made into a positive thing,
I couldn't have lived. it would have meant I was living in hell,
and there was no escape from it. First of all, there's nothing
to be done to stop this experience. The social structures that
surround it, by which I mean the UFO community, insure that the
people in it will never get the advantage of having legitimate
science look into it and see what's really happening. Meaning
that it is, in effect, incurable. And totally misunderstood. Having
had this experience and declared yourself as having had it means
that you will spend the rest of your life being discriminated
against just like a black in the South in 1925. I am just as discriminated
against. My civil rights and my personal rights are as consistently
abused as if I didn't have them. I'm treated like a madman was
treated in the 18th century.
My son, for example, was so discriminated
against in the school he went to by the teachers and the administration,
even though he's an honor shtdent, that we had to finally move
him to another school where they don't realize who I am. The discrimination
I experience is really just across the board. From the literary
community, where I used to be a member - now I'm not even welcome
at meetings. My life has been threatened half a dozen times since
I wrote Communion. My family has been threatened. Things
have been sabotaged. Oil was poured down our wells up in our little
country house. We had to move finally from our cabin to another
house because the cabin had become the focus of things like -
we'd wake up in the morning and find a man just standing out in
the road with a rifle in his hands. Not doing anything but just
standing out there. That kind of threat was constant. But appeals
I've made to writer's organizations have gone completely unanswered.
No one cares. I will say that when there's been police involvement,
it's all been very professional.
Q Is there anything else you want to add?
Well, this is the first time I've touched the UFO community
at all in years. And I'll be very interested to see what happens
this time. I've had so much of this experience and such an intimate
involvement with it all and so many really extraordinary things
have happened in the past six years. I really have a very thorough
knowledge of what has actually happened with the government, for
example. But it's fascinating to read the “UFO” speculations
about that. And they never mention the names of the true companies
that are really involved in it. They don't know the names of the
people who run the thing. And they've always been going down the
wrong trails in that area.
With regard to experiences, I think
that if I wasn't such an enemy of that community, in such an adversarial
relationship with that community, so afflicted by so mwch lying
and so much confusion, my experiences could be very useful in
illuminating the problem. With Communion I have actually
elevated and increased people's ability to handle this experience
tremendously all over the world.
You should see some of the thousands
and thousands of letters we get. Nearly a thousand letters a month,
from people who have been enriched by the book and whose encounter
experiences are richer because of what have read in that book.
The rest of the UFO community has never accomplished anything
like that. And I feel that I should be treated with, first of
all, more respect, and second, taken more seriously by the community.
Instead of these stupid mind games they played with me. The community
as a group must learn to respond to me in a more meaningful and
sensible way. I don't expect a continuity of reaction. There should
be a lot of diversity. But it shouldn't be based on lies, innuendo,
rumors, and in many cases, purposely incorrect interpretations
of what I say.
Q Such as?
Most specifically, to characterize (the attitudes) as either
black or white. “Strieber believes the aliens are good, and
Budd Hopkins believes they're evil.” That kind of thing is
so moronic. Both of us are struggling with this and are having
a tremendous amount of difficulty in different ways. We don't
have the same take on it. But he's struggling just as much as
I am. I've seen him just I as misinterpreted as I've been.
This is the most complex experience
that anyone has ever had. The totality of the encounter experience
is incredibly complex. It is shaded with dozens of different layers
of meaning. To try to make it into something black or white and
to divide people according to this black or white issue about
whether or not the so-called aliens are good or bad is to fail
to even begin to see what's going on. So, as far as I'm concerned,
the UFO community, which revolves around this black or white interpretation,
literally has no idea of what's going on. They haven't even begun.
The true encounter experience is a form of rape, basically. And
I think because there is no viable cultural infrastructure to
support the people it happens to and to control the ones who are
doing it, (abductees) have to help themselves and make it into
a transformative experience. Just as if a woman was raped and
is just laughed at by her friends and family. That happens. She
ends up in the same situation I was in. Two choices. Either she
makes the rape encounter into something she can live with, she
makes it something that strengthens her soul, or she falls into
despair. I did both.
Q How did you cope with that?
I went through three years, from middle 1989 to the middle
of last year, where I was so deeply depressed that nothing, no
drug that the psychiatrist tried on me, nothing, would get me
out of it. I was almost inert. Really, terribly depressed. Then
I had a Visitor encounter which was as usual unspeakably terrifying.
You know, encountering them in a slightly dreamlike state for
three seconds or three minutes is bad enough. But when you are
face to face with them alone and it's not a dream and you're wide
awake and you're wearing your clothes and you see them the way
they really look, you cannot imagine how terrible it is. I've
come away from this experience convinced of one thing: if there
aren't demons out there, there might as well be. Because these
guys are indistinguishable from demons. Indistinguishable. To
see them, to look into their eyes, is to be less. Forever. It
hurts you, it takes from you, forever. Because then you know that
it exists. And that makes you less. And then you have to try somehow
to build on the scar tissue. Just like the lady who's raped and
laughed at. Build on the scar tissue. That's all you can do.
This society is monstrously inhumane
to people who have the encounter experience. The number of us
who are so spiritually superb as Betty Luca, who can really make
this encounter fly, is tiny. Most of us are down here in the muck
struggling with it. That's why Betty was such an inspiration to
me. When I was at the depths of my depression, one of the things
I did was read Betty's interviews and listen to her tapes, just
to hear the sound of her voice when she was talking. I would I
look at the drawings she sent me. and it helped me a lot. Betty's
experiences are the thing you grab onto while you are sinking.
I want to tell you about one experience.
I want people to know something about what happens to me, about
what I live with, what's going on. This is not the worst experience.
It isn't nearly the worst experience. But it is certainly way
up there in terms of off the wall. This is about three or four
years ago. Driving along Route 17, which is a big, populated strip
of shopping malls in New Jersey. Taking a kid to meet his father
at a diner, and then the kid's going to get taken on into New
York City, bringing him back from the country. So, I've got a
12-year-old in my car. We get to a divided highway and in the
direction we're going in, the diner's on the other side of the
road. So you have to cross the highway on an overpass to get to
the diner. We get to the overpass, and I can see his father's
truck is sitting there at the diner, I can see his father is actually
standing beside the tnuck, although as it turned out he didn't
see us, which was forhunate.
We go off the exit to the overpass.
Suddenly, the boy screams. And he screams for a very good reason.
Because we are all of a sudden in this vehicle - we're in another
world. We're no longer on Route 17. We're no longer beside the
shopping mall. Instead, we're on a long, almost totally empty
concrete highway. Pristine. Beautiful, with thick woods all around
it. With no shuddering, no feeling of change; just suddenly, that's
where we are. He screams when he sees this change. And for fully
20, 30 seconds, we're yelling back and trying to figure out where
we are. We come to an exit on the highway. I take the exit. And
as soon as I get off the highway I begin to realize something
terrible has happpened, We slow down. The boy tries to jump out
of the car, and I grab him. I stop the car and calm him down.
I tell him we're going to find our way back.
We go off into this neighborhood
and there are wide, incredibly quiet streets, the sun is shining,
there are lots of trees and very green foliage. It's like a very
expensive neighborhood would be, only the houses are all very
similar. They look like they're made of sandstone; they're tan.
They have no roof, they're just flat. They have no windows. And
they have carved in the sandstone elaborate serpentine reliefs.
They look utterly unlike houses I've ever seen in this world.
And yet we are there, the two of us, in a jeep. And what's most
appalling, and what makes me sick to my stomach with fear, is
that I have another man's child with me. How am I going to get
this child back out?
There's never a question as to whether
or not we're seeing the real world. It is entirely indistinguishable
from the real world. We both see it independently. We both initiated
our observing it independently. I make a couple of other turns,
just at random. What I was actually trying to do was find the
highway again.
Then I see what looks like, sort
of in the foliage, an entrance ramp. I take that ramp, and just
as suddenly as we got into the thing, we're on another road. Twenty
miles from where we were a few seconds before. So I have to drive
back the 20 miles to the diner. I give the boy to his father and
say good-bye. The boy of course immediately tells his father the
whole story. They spend the rest of the afternoon searching for
this mysterious road, and they never have found it.
About two weeks later I go back
and look for it. Alone, I might add. I never find it. We've never
seen it again. That's the sort of thing that happens to me fairly
frequently. That's what I live with. In other words, I live in
a situation where I don't just suspect that what we perceive as
reality is not real. I know it for certain. This is not real.
This is something that looks real, that seems real, but it's only
part of the story. ~
Q&A: Strieber Sounds Off
© 1993 UFO Magazine
