Communion: A True Story (37 page)

They are not all-powerful superbeings. They are frail, limited individuals far from home

— if indeed this world is not their home.

I can discern a visible agenda of contact in what is happening. Over the past forty or so years their involvement with us has not only been deepening, it has been spreading rapidly through the society. At least, this is how things appear. The truth may be that it is not their involvement that is increasing, but our perception that is becoming sharper.

The evolution of this increase in perception may have a very definite design. We initially noticed objects from afar, then closer, then we remembered seeing the visitors, and now we are beginning to remember being with them. More than one of those taken were told that he or she would remember nothing "for five years," or "until 1984," or "in a few years." Will the visitors emerge into our world on a hood of memory?

And if so, then why? Why not simply land, open the hatch and come out? It could be that they wish to avoid what Cortez did with such eagerness. It is not difficult to crush the flower of a culture's spontaneity. A friend of mine sat in a Native American medicine circle within hearing distance of a hissing interstate highway — and he heard the emptiness in the old chants, the sadness where conviction once rang. And no new stories are being woven in Papua, New Guinea. The streets are becoming a ramshackle version of Lansing, Michigan.

It's all turning into rock 'n' roll, the scepters of the kings are being broken up for firewood and the old, rich truths of that culture now seem to its inheritors an embarrassment.

Would we not all risk being lost in nonmeaning if an apparently superior visitor culture emerged suddenly into the open? Science, religion, even the arts might be shattered by the appearance of a culture that already knew everything we want to know about the universe.

Unless, of course, it were to emerge not into blinded awe, but into our understanding of its truth, its strengths as well as its weaknesses.

Maybe that is why two triangles were inscribed on my arm: to symbolize that we are each a tiny, complete universe, a small but valid version of the whole; that the smaller is not less perfect than the greater, but only less mature.

Beyond the present level, what awaits? What will happen in ten years, in twenty years?

As we begin to admit that the visitor phenomenon has some sort of extrapersonal reality, perhaps it will begin to come into clearer focus.

A visitor once said to an abductee, "On is off and of is on. We confuse the language."

There is something of the mirror image in all this, and in the visitors more than a little of the prankster which has so much significance in our own mystical literature. From Till Eulenspiegel to Mullah Nasir Eddin, we have always accepted pranks as one output of true understanding. "God laughs and plays," said Meister Eckhart.

Dr. David M. Jacobs of Temple University recounts a fascinating story of a woman in Philadelphia who once saw a flying disk across the street from her house. As soon as she looked at it, it came closer. She beheld a row of nine windows. In one window stood a man with a cigar in his mouth, staring out. He was as motionless as a statue. The next window revealed a woman in a flowered dress sitting in a chair, also in some sort of trance. Three of the small gray beings then came past the other windows and conducted the entranced woman from the chair and off down a corridor.

The woman who saw this was not a "saucer nut," not a psychotic, but rather an ordinary person. She neither sought nor received fame or money. She simply told what she saw, all innocent to the fascinating combination of absurdity and far-reaching implication in her story.

At the moment of highest absurdity and intensity in my experience, when I was called their chosen one, I had a distinct memory of seeing them getting a woman in a flowered dress very excited with a similar speech.

How can something so profound and even dangerous as the visitor experience also be so ludicrous? It would seem to me to be possible to say that the mind, also, laughs and plays.

In August 1986 a man had a remarkable experience while driving toward Great Neck, Long Island, on the Grand Central Parkway. It was 9:30 P.m., and the sky was overcast, with a three-thousand-foot ceiling. The man suddenly saw an enormous airplane coming toward him so low that it looked like it was about to land on the parkway. It had two bright lights in the nose, lights that seemed to shine beams directly into his eyes. There was a red light at the tip of one wing and a green one at the tip of the other As he passed under the plane he looked up and saw that there were rivets in the undersurface, which was streaked as if it had scraped along the ground. He saw four engine pods with whirling propellers. The nose of the plane was flat and there was no horizontal stabilizer. The man slowed down and leaned his head out the window, looking up at the bizarre Craft. It seemed almost to be standing still, and the propellers made no noise at all. Soon he was past it and taking the Great Neck exit, which makes a horseshoe around a small hill. Above this hill he saw what appeared to be an advertising sign made of many small lightbulbs. It had an angle in it, suggesting that it was attached to two sides of a building. It was flashing, but the symbols were incomprehensible.

As he rounded the horseshoe and saw the sign from another angle, he realized that there was no building there. Then he concluded that it must be a plane. But it suddenly shot off to the southwest, rising into the overcast with blinding speed.

What happened to this man? What did he see? It would be easy to dismiss his experiences as a pair of hallucinations. Easy to debunk this one.

There is, however, a problem. The problem is the man himself, and his extraordinarily apt qualifications. He is a leading perceptual psychologist with encyclopedic knowledge of just exactly how the brain perceives things, and what misperceptions mean. What's more, he has a near-photographic memory and eyes so superb that he can see the moons of Jupiter unaided.

He is also highly intelligent and exceptionally emotionally stable, having had many hundreds of hours of psychoanalysis as part of his clinical training.

Anybody can have a hallucination or a misperception. But this highly qualified man feels certain that what he saw was actually there. Interestingly, other drivers did not react to it at all. I wonder if that might not be because they believed an illusion that this man's mind was too highly trained to mistake. Most people saw a plane and, an advertising sign. But this acute, trained mind saw beyond the camouflage to what was really there — a device of unknown origin and purpose.

How interesting that such an outrageous perceptual joke would be played on a skilled perceptual scientist — who himself has superb perceptual equipment. Or perhaps the visitors were indifferent, and chance played the joke. Then again, maybe it wasn't a joke at all. What about the light shining in his eyes — did they use it to learn something from him, or induce him to act in some drama of importance to their enigmatic designs?

I would not be at all surprised if the visitors are real and are slowly coming into contact with us according to an agenda of their own devising, which proceeds as human understanding increases. If they are not from our universe it could be necessary for us to understand them before they can emerge into our reality. In our universe, their reality may depend on our belief. Thus the corridor into our world could in a very true sense be through our own minds.

The idea of parallel universes is neither proven nor new. It has a distinguished history in physics. Of course, the conditions under which movement between universes might be possible are not known.

We have seen that the visitors are not fairies, and that their ships are not figments of the wind. Now that we know this, what more will we learn?

Humanity could be clutching the frail barque of an outmoded world view while the wind of the mind is swaying the stars into very real craft, and out of them is coming . . . a faint call for help from a lady in a flowered dress.

This is not a "mere" matter, to be explained away by one facile dodge or another. It is an immense human reality, vast in its impact and complexity. It has coherence, strange but undeniable, and thus there is certainly a process of thought that will draw it into our understanding. Presently it is lacking effective definition. To leave it this way when it seems so rich with potential would be a shame. But has science the wit to study such an elusive and multidimensional enigma?

I say yes. Resoundingly so. Even a brilliant but arrogant curmudgeon of my acquaintance, who denounced it all as "Preposterous," is important to an understanding of it. Blind denial is as empty a response as blind acceptance, and operates on the same level of validity. There is no real intellectual difference between the haughty psychiatrist or physicist and his refusal to accept the truth, and the nervous "contactee" eager to see the phenomenon as a dimensionless cartoon of space friends. We must break through both distortions — and we certainly can.

The visitor experience may be our first true quantum discovery in the large-scale world: The very act of observing it may be creating it as a concrete actuality, with sense, definition, and a consciousness of its own. And perhaps, in their world, the visitors are working as hard to create us.

Truly, such an act of mutual insight and courage would be communion . . . two universes spinning each other together . . . the old weaver of reality rethreading creation's loom. Who knows, maybe really skilled observation and genuine insight will cause the visitors to come bursting to the surface shaking like coelacanths in a net.

Something is here, be it a message from the stars or from the booming labyrinth of the mind . . . or from both. It must have left a signature somewhere, a thread in the snow, the scratch of a strange nail upon a wall. And we can certainly find that thread, if we bring humor and honesty and courage — and great care — to the effort. In taking the thread we might find ourselves in possession of a very real key to the universe. In any case accepting that. the visitor experience is not a false unknown will relieve a lot of suffering.

Once the thread is in hand, our own mythology will tell us where it leads. for it will be the same thread that the maiden Ariadne handed to Theseus when he stood before the maze of the Minotaur, voting and strong and mad with courage.

And we will all o down the labyrinth, to meet whatever awaits us here.

APPENDIX I

A Statement from Donald F. Klein, MD

I have examined Whitley Strieber and found that he is not suffering from a psychosis. He is not hallucinating in a manner characteristic of psychosis. I also see no evidence of an anxiety state, mood disorder, or personality disorder. He is an excellent hypnotic subject, who appeared to make an honest attempt while under hypnosis to describe what he remembered.

He has approached the dilemma of what is happening to him in a careful and forthright way and has pursued his investigation with diligence. After an initial period of stress, he became much more calm about his situation and soon learned to deal with it in a psychologically healthy way. He appears to me to have adapted very well to life at a high level of uncertainty.

— DONALD F. KLEIN, MD

Director of Research

New York State Psychiatric Institute

APPENDIX II

Polygraph Results

On October 31. 1986, I was polygraphed by Ned Laurendi, president of the Society of Professional investigators and vice-president of the Empire State Polygraph Society. He has been a polygraph operator for twenty-five years. He was paid in the normal course of business before the polygraph was undertaken, and was not familiar with me before the test.

I was aware of the controversial nature of polygraphic results, and so determined to add a test of Mr. Laurendi's effectiveness to the process. Without telling him, I lied in my answers to control questions thirteen and sixteen. In both cases, he detected the lie correctly. His ability to do this — along with his leading position in his field — has convinced me that, despite the controversies surrounding lie detection in general, he is very skilled indeed.

The letter referred to in the test results was written to Mr. Laurendi on October 17, 1986, and outlined the part of my experiences that I remembered before hypnosis.

The reason I carried out the polygraph was to reassure readers that I honestly think that I perceived the things reported in this book. It is not fiction, and does not contain a word of fiction. My successful completion of this test in no way proves that my recollection of my experiences is correct, but it does confirm that I have described what I saw to the best of my ability.

Test Results

1. Are you known as Whitley Strieber?

Yes. (Evaluated true.)

2. Do you intend to answer truthfully?

Yes. (Evaluated true.)

3. Did you intentionally plan to be given a lie detector test on this Halloween day?

(Note: Mr. Laurendi suspected that he might be the victim of a practical joke, an understandable response in view of the coincidence of date and the nature of my experience.)

No. (Evaluated true.)

4. Do you belong to any cults?

No. (Evaluated true.)

5. Do you think that those things happened to you on October 4, 1985, that were outlined in your letter dated October 17, 1986?

Yes. (Evaluated true.)

6. Did you ever fraudulently conceal any information prior to 1984?

No. (Evaluated true.)

7. Do you think those things happened to you on December 26, 1985, as outlined in your letter dated October 17, 1986?

Yes. (Evaluated true.)

8. Besides when you were eight years old, did you ever hallucinate again prior to 1984?

(Note: I had a hallucination during a fever when I was eight.) No. (Evaluated true.)

9. Do you live in New York?

Yes. (Evaluated true.)

10. Do you think those things happened to you on March 15, 1986, as outlined in your letter dated October 17, 1986?