Even the typical non-gender specific personage on the street may very think of Whitley Strieber if asked about UFOs and aliens. This is because Whitley Strieber is one of the most well-known personages related to such topics. In fact, the cover of his book Communion depicts an alien which has become more popular than any other and adorns everything from guitar picks and drug/head shop paraphernalia to drawing of many alien abductees, contactees and experiencers and crop circles—the grey alien or it is gray alien? (it is like cocoa and cacao).
Whitley Strieber has been the poster child for UFO and alien related subjects of decades just as much as the grey/gray alien has been the poster child for the same. However, those who are much more well aware of Whitley Strieber than is the typical non-gender specific personage on the street will already be shaking his and/or her heads because the fact is that Whitley Strieber has never claimed that his experiences had anything to do with aliens when we define aliens as typically conceived of extra-terrestrial beings who were born on another planet, etc.
Rather, Whitley Strieber is basically the Bertrand Russell of UFOlogy, for lack of better terms (keeping in mind that there is UFOlogy and then there is UFOlatry). Bertrand Russell is well known to have held to just about any and every philosophy at one point or another during his live and likewise, seeking diligently to understand his experiences Whitley Strieber has entertained a myriad of explanations.
Whitley Strieber has experienced many things which are typical of people who claim to have had experiences with extra-terrestrial aliens; abductions, experimentations, sexual encounters, telepathic communications and yet, even the good ol’ probe. He has referred to these beings as visitors and perhaps the most interesting views he has held about them are his original one and his most recent one.
But before getting to the alpha and omega of his views let us note that some seem to think that he, just like many others who have similar experiences, were just minding his own business and all of a sudden they are being accosted by unusual beings. Yet, the fact is that he, just like many others who have similar experiences, had a prior history of engaging in occult practices—by any other name.
For example, the place within the visitors manifested was his meditation room, “he had made a meditation room in the upstairs of his cabin. Indeed, it was there, while he meditated, that the visitors would come as the encounters developed and deepened…I meditated with them” (pp. 306-307).
Also, he “had been involved for some time” with the “work of contemporary mystic Gurdjieff” who teaches a “bizarre synthesis of alien intervention and Tantric Yoga.” Is it any surprise that he ends up involved with non-human beings who engage him in psycho-sensual/sexual relations (“sacred” sex/Tantric yoga)? I mean, there is a one to one correlation; this ain’t rocket surgery!
Moreover, Jeffrey Kripal notes that Whitley Strieber:
“invokes childhood and sexual abuse as possible triggers of the visitor experiences, something that the broader ufological literature would support.” (p. 320)
These quotes were from the self-professed possessed professor Jeffrey Kripal’s book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal.
Towards the end of my review of that book I focused on Whitley Strieber and got into some of the background.
In short, Strieber’s initial discernment of the experience was accurate as he wrote about in his book Transformations (pp. 44-45, 172, 181):
“Increasingly I felt as if I were entering a struggle that might even be more than life and death. It might be a struggle for my soul…so far the word demon had never been spoken among the scientists and doctors who were working with me…I worried about the legendary cunning of demons…I wondered if I might not be in the grip of demons, if they were not making me suffer for their own purposes, or simply for their enjoyment…I felt an absolutely indescribable sense of menace. It was hell on earth…I couldn’t move, couldn’t cry out, couldn’t get away. I’d lay as still as death…Whatever was there seemed so monstrously ugly, so filthy and dark and sinister. Of course they were demons. They had to be…”
Prof. Kripal further notes (p. 299):
“Strieber is very clear that, whether derisive or dangerous, the basic worldview of the dogmatic scoffers worked in the exact same way as that of the dogmatic believers. Each excluded—‘damned’…what did not, what could not fit into its particular system and assumptions. The official critics ‘were promoting a religion of skepticism that was as belief-based as the demonization of me that was going on among fundamentalist Christians.’ Both damned him.”
But fundamentalist Christians were not damning what could not fit into their particular system and assumptions. Rather, they were reacting to Strieber 1) based on his own claims and 2) because that which Strieber claimed did fit into their particular system and assumptions.
His most recent conclusion is one shared by many now a days (some of which I collected in the article Extra-terrestrial aliens and time travel) which is that so called aliens, Strieber’s visitors, are technologically advanced highly evolved humans who travel back in time from the future in order to help us evolve so as to realize that, as Prof. Kripal put it, “human beings…are gods in disguise…the angels and aliens, gods and demons are us.”
Kripal quotes an interview as follows:
“No,” [Whitley] Strieber jumps in, “I didn’t say aliens. I never said that. I don’t use the word aliens because I don’t know what they are. My impression is that the physical beings that are involved are from the Earth. They are an evolutionary leap of some kind, but that they are primarily Earth-oriented. That’s my impression. We are not looking at aliens. We are looking at our replacements.” (p. 46)
Kripal chimes in with:
“We are all future butterflies who think, wrongly, that we are just slugs. And we are evolving, whether we admit it or not, into something else. Something with wings.” (p. 56)
Jeffrey Kripal is personally acquainted with Whitley Strieber and thus, wrote much about him and so in this series we will consider some of these statements.