Whitley Strieber — NewsNation “Reality Check” interview (2025, Contact in the Desert)
- Speaker: Whitley Strieber, interviewed by Ross Coulthart at Contact in the Desert (Indian Wells, CA), 2025. ~1h08m.
- YouTube: https://youtu.be/JzS2GqSB6OI
- Captured: 2026-05-29 via yt-dlp audio download → Whisper (speech_to_text_remote.py).
- Primary for strieber-communion-experiencer. His own current framing: the defining “visitors, not aliens” origin-agnosticism; the Dec 1985 cabin experience and physical injuries; the hypnosis tapes; the Roswell-uncle / Gen. Arthur Exon thread; the esoteric “Fourth Mind” (telepathy/levitation) material; and the temporal-lobe smear he references.
- NOTE: Whisper auto-transcript; “Striever”=Strieber, “Wrightfield”=Wright Field. Verify quotes against audio before load-bearing citation.
G’day and welcome back to Reality Check and of course we’re on the road at Contact in the Desert in Indian Wells near Palm Springs in California and we’re not here to report on the Rat Pack but we are here to report on an illustrious figure of American literature Whitley Striever who’s joining us today. Whitley is an accomplished American writer who’s managed what many of us authors think is one of the great challenges of publishing. He’s crossed the fjord between fiction and nonfiction writing at least 25 books. He’s author of two chilling horror novels one of them The Hunger I loved as a young student and like everyone in my generation we all flocked to watch David Bowie portray the sexy aging vampire in the film version of The Hunger movie. But it’s Whitley’s personal accounts of his own paranormal abduction experiences from his remote cabin in upstate New York beginning on the 26th of December 1985 so that’s 40 years ago that have also cemented his reputation in nonfiction. His book Communion where he wrote about being taken by non-human sentient beings rocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list selling over 2 million copies. Oh to dream. It’s an absolute classic in the abduction genre. So many people with alleged abduction experiences have described to me being triggered by the haunting image of a gray being that appears on the front cover of Communion. His latest book The Fourth Mind published in January explores the anatomy, brains, genetics, beliefs and capabilities of the visitors. He maintains that they have a set of abilities he describes as a fourth mind that include such powers as telepathy, levitation, the ability to move heavy objects without machinery and many others. Whitley claims we humans once possessed these same powers and that hidden knowledge of them has actually persisted but declined into the 21st century. Now Whitley welcome to Reality Check. Thanks. As a start it’s an honor to have you of course but I noticed you’ve always been very careful not to talk about aliens or extraterrestrials these beings that you’ve encountered. You’ve always used the term the visitors. Yes. Why? I’ve used the term the visitors because they come and go in my life at least and I don’t know where they’re coming from. I don’t think that there’s you know if if I knew a plan if someone showed me a map that I could believe in and it was a map that showed me where they came from or preferably if I went there and saw it then fine I would call them aliens from another planet but right now I’m talking about I’m going to talk about what I see and what I experience and I’ve not experienced that I have experienced these strange beings up close and personal but not over a long distance. Tell me about those experiences. Give me a description. Give our audience a description. Well it’s evolved enormously over the past 40 years. The first experience what I remembered most distinctly the next morning were these big black eyes and I thought an owl had gotten into the house and over the next couple of weeks things became more and more confused as the memories coalesced and I also had been injured rectally and the pain became significant and I finally ended up going to the doctor and it was still all a jumble and I couldn’t tell whether I had a some kind of hallucination or what had happened to me but the physical injuries kept me from assuming that it was all in my head. Are you okay to talk about the physical injuries you suffered? Yeah I am now. At the time I unfortunately called it a rectal probe. It really was a rectal probe. Well it was yeah but it was also but I struggled tremendously and it was raped. It was god-awful I mean it had they they did something I guess electrical to stimulate the nerve that causes an erection and you can hear me in the hypnosis tapes realizing I have one and I’m thinking to myself I you know why is that happening which is obviously was not the sort of situation one would expect that to happen. It takes guts for you to speak about this because the thing that really struck me is you have become unfairly I think the butt of ridicule. The butt of jokes right exactly the butt of jokes. I can’t tell you how tired I am of the Uranus joke. Are they from your anus? People think they’re clever don’t they? They unfortunately do and the ones that think they’re clever never are but anyway I had the experience of having my rape turned into an international joke for years and that was something that I don’t think too many people have had an experience of. It’s almost deterred people from coming forward hasn’t it? I think that might have been part of it because I’m not so sure that there weren’t social engineers skilled social engineers behind the scenes making sure that I was really being racked by this. So you described the black eyes. I’m actually really interested in getting a description of what you described these beings looking like and how they behaved. Well the black eyes were really arresting. They were I thought at first looking back my impression was that I was in that they were insects. That was why I thought at first I was having some kind of a nightmare because how could it be like that? I had apparently had experiences as a child I now think but I didn’t remember anything of that at the age of 40 and I had no idea anything like this could happen to anyone. I hadn’t thought about flying saucers since I was 12. Well I’m going to get to that but let’s first get a description of the actual beings. Were they humanoid? Okay the one that started to come around the house the most in the years to follow the experience in 85 looked like someone who was about maybe a fourth human but she had a big head and big black eyes and a long thin nose and little mouth and she could make a cry but she didn’t speak or warble or anything. She could go oh like that and it could be when she did it loudly or powerfully it was very very intense. Were they malevolent at all? They were doing a job. I didn’t have any sense of them being malevolent. Did they convey any kind of communication to you in any way? Yeah on the night that it happened they turned on a mechanism that kept repeating the phrase in my ears could what can we do to help you stop screaming and not much would be the answer. And were you alone in the house at the time? No my wife was there, my son was there. Was your wife in the bed next to you? She was and she didn’t experience this. She did however later said that she remembered something like what she thought at the time it felt like some kind of party. Like some kind of party? Party and he was not exactly hypnotized but having an interview with a psychiatrist a Dr. Naaman and he said well was it a nice party? She said no it wasn’t a nice party and it had to do with Whitley. Sometimes Whitley just goes. So you get the impression that somehow they stopped her from waking up or reacting in some way? Yeah that’s what we thought because she this over many years she never had an experience even when they were openly coming to the cabin and meditating with me which happened a few years later and she said that I want to try and she came into the room and as they as this old weird thing developed she said actually I’m not ready and left the room and they didn’t bother her. In other words they didn’t they did not penetrate into her life. So how tall were they? The one that I saw that first night was between four and five feet tall. Color of skin? Grayish brown and it wasn’t skin it was a bodysuit. And the head larger than a human head? Yes larger and larger than the head on the cover of communion. The cover of communion this makes it look more like a human head but it had a bigger forehead than that. So quite a wide cranial. Yes. And they didn’t talk did they have ears? I did not see ears but I have later think that they probably do because they can make sounds. Did they have a nose? I saw a very narrow suggestion of a nose. They were wearing a bodysuit that could you discern a gender? Was a male female? I had the impression that this was a woman and later I knew to be the case. Right. Why? Why were they there? Why Whitley Striever? Well I’ve thought about that a lot and the nearest answer I can come to is that they go down seem to go down family lines and my one of my uncles one of my father’s brothers was involved in the examination of the debris at Wrightfield that had been brought from Roswell so he told me after he read communion. I love the story I really want to get that detail. When did he have that conversation? He called me about six months after communion was published and said Whitley no I believe his wife called said Lee Whitley we would like you to come down to Lackland where he was retired and Mickey said he wants to talk to you and so I thought that’s interesting because he had he was in intelligence work and you never heard a thing about his anything about his career nothing and so I and I went down there and he and his wife proceeded to tell me that he had been at Wrightfield with Arthur Exum his friend the general and later commanding officer at Wright who had been they had been they had the debris and I never Mickey never meant mentioned this he said only talked about the debris had been brought in from Roswell and it was very clearly of non-human origin. When he said debris was it the craft as well? I think he said at one point that he had looked inside it which would imply a craft but mostly he talked about the debris the same sort of thing that Colonel Marcel talked about very thin foil that you couldn’t you couldn’t do anything to. Did he see any bodies? He did not he didn’t mention it to me. What was his name your uncle? Mickey Edward Edward Striever. He was Edward Striever and do you know what his role was in intelligence? No. Have you ever tried to get his file? No. Why don’t we try we should try. Yeah it might be interesting but my experience of that is that those files do not tell the whole tale. Absolutely. One of the things I can tell you is I’m talking to people in the program and you’re right it is genetic it does run in the family and they do take an interest in people in the family and there’s been a lot of harrowing incidents one of the reasons people feel inside the program it’s time for this to come out is because there’s a lot of emotion about what they have to go through what their families have to Yes. As a result of this experience. Do you think it’s possible your uncle was actually involved directly in the legacy program or was his work as an intelligence officer incidental? Did you ever ask him that question? No I didn’t know enough about it. I was astonished when he even brought it up. I didn’t know why they had wanted me to come down to down to San Antonio and talk about it. I was living in New York at the time. There was something though that happened in during the conversation that I found very interesting and I’ve thought about a lot. They wanted to know if I had seen the materials. Who wanted to know? My aunt and uncle. My aunt seemed to know a lot about it as well and she kept asking Whitley have you seen the materials and I didn’t know how to answer the question because I if I said no I was afraid they would clam up and not talk to me anymore. If I said yes I would be lying and I’m not a liar. So I sort of said well I’m I’m not really sure what you’re asking me. Why do you think your uncle decided to tell you? Because that was a breach of his oath. Well no it wasn’t. I asked that of General Exon and General Exon said we cleared it. I talked much more extensively to General Exon than I did to my uncle. This is the other part of your story because I’ve researched talking to people like Don Schmidt the full story of Roswell. Right. And Arthur Exon features prominently as one of the key officials involved in the cover-up. Right. How on earth did you end up speaking directly to Arthur Exon? He and my uncle were friends all through their careers and they worked closely together. What did he tell you? Well in 1988 he was still going to write to confer with the scientific group that was working on this because so many of the meetings that had taken place in his time of active duty had been on this subject had been pencils up because of the secrecy. I asked him about the secrecy and he he seemed to say that there was there were so many unknowns they did not know how to present this to the public in in the state it was in because they couldn’t tell much of anything to the public. Do you think they’ll ever admit it? I think now that there are major issues with for example unstable patents because I think that those materials that we talked about have been extensively studied and probably much more and my guess is that there are a significant number of patents that flow out of them and we a patent is supposed to be a patent of original discovery of you can’t patent an element but you can patent something you fabricate from it. Yep. The problem is this material was already fabricated by someone else so there has to be novel law and I don’t think that the defense industry is going to be very comfortable going to the courts with Kate these defending these cases. This is something that I think in your defense when people accuse you and ridicule you they accuse you of fabricating the story about aliens visiting your home to put it in the context you know you were part of a military family or a military connected family. That’s correct yes. And you obviously see a connection there you think you think there’s a correlation between the fact that you had relatives in the military. Right I do. Was your father in the military? During World War two and we do not know what he did. So he was also a secret world? Well apparently and after the war he worked with the FBI in ways that I don’t know I’ve never been told. Why do you think General Arthur Exon agreed to tell you so candidly a secret that the US is still repressing? Ross that’s a really good question because he told me more than he much more than he told Stanton Friedman and the others. I introduced him to Stanton Friedman and then when that interviews with him showed up in public he was the Air Force got very upset about that. Just to give our audience an explanation Stanton Friedman is probably one of the most preeminent researcher historians into the so-called Roswell incident. A lot of people don’t understand that Roswell although it happened in 1947 it really didn’t explode into public awareness until the early 1980s. Right exactly when Charles Berlitz and William Moore published a book about it and then it became well known. When did General Exon have the conversation with you? In 1988. And when did he die? I don’t know I didn’t follow that I heard that he had had Alzheimer’s disease and gotten Alzheimer’s disease some years later and that’s all I know. There was a great deal of difficulty because of what happened after the interview with him went public and I did not feel comfortable calling him and talking to him anymore because he had told Stanton Friedman he thought his phones were bugged. You know the thing that amazes me Woodley just aside from the detail of this case is that is a classic case example when people bleat where’s the evidence this is a first-hand witness to the retrieval of an alien spacecraft relating to you a story which he never denied? Right neither of them did. And did it get any traction at all in the mainstream media? No. It’s something I wrestle with with things like David Grush and Jake Barber as well that there is this kind of inertia in mainstream media and an almost a default mode that this is all rubbish. It’s that’s the result of what is known as ontological shock. Shock of discovering that your entire worldview is wrong. It’s a very difficult thing to face and you have a huge community of scientists intellectuals academics and members of the speaking culture like the general media and so forth who have committed themselves to a set of beliefs about the human world. We are alone. There’s no way anyone could get here because travel is too slow. There is no one else here. Consciousness is contained in the head. There is nothing else here at all and to be told that that is basically wrong from top to bottom beginning to end is not going to sit well. You say that but there’s also clearly an institutional cover-up isn’t there? Well obviously there’s an institutional cover-up of major proportions and it has affected my life in many ways. For example, right before I published my book Confirmation which had some criticism of the Air Force in it, there appeared in Parade magazine which was in those days a big magazine at Sunday Supplement magazine in the United States and quite influential when newspapers were still in those days a big thing and the little story said that I had discovered that I had temporal lobe epilepsy and had given a contribution to the Epilepsy Foundation. It was a plant, a lie. Because I know you actually did have a test, you actually went and had tests and you verified it was untrue. Right, I spent time with my doctor consulting with him and with other doctors about exactly what could have happened if anything other than what it seemed and one of the possibilities was hallucinations and since I don’t take drugs and I’ve never smoked marijuana or anything taken any of those drugs, the thought was perhaps temporal lobe epilepsy. So I took the most aggressive test for temporal lobe epilepsy you can which involved leads up the nose and flashing lights and was extremely unpleasant and not only did they discover that I didn’t have it, I had an unusually stable brain, a brain that was resistant to any kind of hallucination and then this story appears in Parade magazine saying that I am the opposite and who knows how much damage that did to me. There’s been a lot of evil done in the name of covering up this dark secret hasn’t there? You know I’ve had a lot of experience with the visitors that goes very deep and one of the things that I’ve learned from this is you never lie. Every lie is like a little weight attached to your soul and you do have one and that’s ultimately what I think all of this is really about and I think I see all of these people living lies and lying about this all the time and I think to myself little do they know what they’re doing to themselves because I think they’re hurting themselves and I find it very distressing. I want to roll back in time. Obviously as a little boy you had these experiences with your uncle or younger. What about even earlier than that? Do you have any recollection as a child of any kind of contact, any kind of paranormal phenomena? Well you know I have, there’s two levels of this. First, one of the strangest things that happened with Dr. Klein, the psychiatrist who hypnotized me, he was the head of the New York State Department of Psychiatry at the time and a leading forensic hypnotist. In those days, while this communion was out there, there were story after story appearing in the press saying hypnosis doesn’t work, it’s dangerous. I had passed three lie detector tests and there were all these stories saying lie detectors don’t work when actually the CIA uses them to this day all the time and the truth is that in the hands of a very skilled professional like Don Klein, hypnosis is a good tool. It works and I found myself going back to the age of 12 spontaneously and because he had heard a change in my voice and he had worked with many people who had childhood trauma buried and he said to me afterwards, he said I could hear that your voice was changing and that you were now in your childhood and he says to me how old are you and I I heard my voice my childhood voice pipe up 12 and I thought what I couldn’t imagine I mean I heard myself say that you’re not you’re not like out when you’re hypnotized at all you’re very much there and subsequently I tried going back to Texas and tried to rebuild my childhood and see if there are things in it I had forgotten because obviously I had forgotten this. Did it work? Sort of. I wrote a book about it called The Secret School that maybe is partly true but it’s not it can’t be completely true. That’s a great segue for me because I was going to ask you about The Secret School which I recently read and I’m not belittling you or mocking you but I’m so pleased you just said then it’s only partially true because it can’t possibly be all true because when you read it you talk about how as a nine-year-old in San Antonio Texas you were initiated by the others or visitors into a secret nighttime summer school in the woods of the nearby Olmos Basin. Yes. There was a nun like figure known as the Sister of Mercy who gave you and a group of other children a kind of virtual reality helmet that allowed you to witness the cosmic collision that led to the creation of the moon and you also described traveling back in time to ancient Rome where you were the tutor to the future Emperor Octavius. It’s all this has got to be imaginary, most of it. But do you think is a plausible explanation to you that somehow someone, something, some being has planted memories in you to deliberately confuse you. That’s possible but I have a great imagination. I’m a professional novelist and I think in my effort to to understand my childhood my imagination kind of ran away with me in that book but I’ve worked hard to try to find the parts of it that have some truth in them for this reason. I mentioned a tree that I had seen it this unusual tree that we would go and park our bikes under and then we would sit on these benches behind the tree and have this experience with this hooded figure. So you do think that happened? Well I know it happened and here’s why and I can let me detail it. The tree exists, the benches were there, I found them, I found the tree, I found the benches but up the hill little ways was a retired sister’s home. Now a group of very bright children and I was among a group of very bright children in those days, retired nuns, possibly a science teacher who wanted to enjoy teaching more and had these super bright children and we would sit in these benches and she would teach us about things like that I described there that probably happened but it didn’t involve the nighttime and all of that it was a real thing we were probably taken there by our parents. It’s an important issue here though because if you’re right about that abuse that you suffered when you were obviously an adult there’s the potential that you were suffering some kind of abuse as a child that’s been repressed and I’ve done a lot of stories about victims of child sexual abuse and there’s a phenomenon where they compartmentalize the horror of what they experienced and lock it away in their brains and as a journalist I’ve watched lawyers, very clever cross-examining lawyers, tear apart young witnesses on the basis that they’re talking about things that they didn’t talk about the first time they spoke to the police and there are inconsistencies and it’s always one of the reasons why I think the law is quite deceitful sometimes, the way it treats witnesses, especially witnesses who’ve been abused. Do you feel that resonates with you as essentially you’re a trauma victim? I think that’s possibly true and I’m certainly, if I had this in my life when I was a child then I was being traumatized by it and you know my father was such a, he was such a close-mouthed man you just don’t know what he knew and didn’t know. There was a moment when you’d published Transformation and the book editor I think of the LA Times came out and the book was doing really well in the non-fiction category of course and he put it down as a work of fiction. Yes. Which is a really horrible thing to do. Essentially he was invalidating everything that you were saying. Right. Was there ever a moment where you thought I wish I’d never done this? Yes there were quite a few of those moments, believe me Ross, but at the same time it’s coming into focus now and obviously communion especially initiated an awareness of this in millions of people and in that sense I’m glad I did it but as to what I went through as a person and the desperate attempt to understand my childhood that failed, at least partly, all of that I wish I hadn’t gone through it. So was there, a lot of people that I talk to who describe these kinds of experiences and I have to admit I’m talking to an awful lot of them, there’s often a family history, mum, grandma, dad, brother. Is there one in your family? Do you suspect that there were family members that were suffering the same kind of visits? Well I don’t want to get into it but I know of one family member who was, yes. Okay. Actually two but I can’t, for their sake of their privacy I can’t. I completely understand. They weren’t my parents. Clearly there was some interest in your reproductive system. I would think so since they went and took semen right out of my body. I was going to say, do you think they took semen? They did take semen, I saw it happen. Okay. There’s clearly some kind of genetics intention here. Yes. What do you think’s going on? I’m pretty sure I know what’s going on. I think that they are trying to create beings that can relate to them and also be here, hybrids in other words. Whether, when I say hybrids though, that people always assume well that means that’s partly them and partly us and then you get into some major genetic issues and I don’t know that that’s even possible but they’re doing something in an attempt to manipulate the human genome and I would suspect create versions of us somewhere, somehow. So Michael Masters, you obviously know Michael Masters. Yes, I know Michael. He’s an anthropologist who has this theory, this hypothesis that the grey aliens, it’s implausible and I think there’s some strength to this that it’s implausible that such a similar type of humanoid being with eyes, a nose of some type, a mouth, ears and the standard humanoid shape, that such a being would evolve somewhere else in the universe in such a similar way to humans and he suggests that there’s essentially a biological evolutionary reason why it seems almost likely that these greys are us from the future. What do you think of that? Well, that assumes that time travel exists and there are a lot of problems with that in physics. I’ve interviewed Michael and he’s a very brilliant man but I’m still unsure about whether or not the grandfather paradox could… could be violated. That is to say you can’t do something that would alter your own present in the past. But I think there might be a workaround, and this is what it is. And I think I talked about this with Michael on my show on Dreamland. If you created something that didn’t exist at all in your own past and set it there, it might be able to do things and act in your past in ways that could change your present. Because the grandfather paradox wouldn’t be engaged since it didn’t exist in the world. And that would mean that the greys, the visitors, are a fabrication that is also real, that is sent back from the future in order to change its own past without triggering the grandfather paradox. Whatever they are, why don’t they just show themselves? Why don’t they just come to you and say, can we please have a sperm sample? We need to create a hybrid being. If they had come to me and said that, I’ve wondered what I would have done. I might have assented. I’m not sure. But they didn’t come to me and say that. However, if you look at – you know, you’ve interviewed David Grush and a lot of the other people who won’t go on my show. Because the funny thing is, they don’t want to be affected by what they call the woo factor. It’s a stigma, isn’t it? It is a stigma. This is something I’m going to come to. I’m really fascinated by it. Yeah. But anyway, there is evidence elsewhere too that there has been a lot of shooting going on. There’s a lot of hostility between us and them. Well, we’ve been shooting them down. Right, exactly. And so, of course, they’re not going to come out. I mean, you know, would you if you were told to walk down that street, it’s full of snipers? You wouldn’t go down that street. Are they powerful? Are they strong? I mean, obviously, they’re able to overpower you. And obviously, in your 40s, this was happening. Physically, they’re damn strong. I’ve experienced their strength physically. And they don’t look strong at all. But that’s not the case. You’re obviously terrified at times when it’s been happening, aren’t you? I used to be. I’ve had so many bizarre things happen to me now at this point. And I’m still here that I’m more fascinated by them and terrified when they happen. What’s the most recent occasion that you recall now happened where you had an experience with the visitors? A couple of nights ago. Really? Yeah. It happens a lot. I wish I could describe it more, but there was a physical experience of some kind. There was someone in the room, and I jumped away in my sleep and got scratched. And this injury came. It’s a subcutaneous bleed, a bruise. And if you can’t see it, I’m sure, but the scratch is right here at the top. So is the bruise part of it as well? The bruise is a leaking of blood under the skin because the lesion is under the skin and the scratch… So you just woke up with a bruise and a scratch? No. It happened in the middle of the night, and I felt movement. And I moved away, and someone moved away from me. And these people have very thin nails and the nails scratch me. I’ve been scratched by them many times. They’ve been communicating with you. There came a time when they started communicating with you. Yeah. How did that happen? I have this implant in my ear, my left ear. It’s right here. It’s still there? Oh, yeah. We’re contacting the desert, and people know that they can come up and ask to touch it. And so many, many people have touched this thing. Well, what happened was this. In May of 1989, and you’ll find if you read my books, one of the books says 1992. And I just want to point out it’s a typo, so I don’t want people to get all over it. It was 89, May of 89. Anne was asleep, and I heard we were in the cabin. The windows were open. It was a warm night, and I heard crunching of gravel in the driveway. No car lights and a big gate. Not a good sign. I had a Benelli riot gun under the bed and a pistol in the drawer. And as I was going for the riot Benelli, I saw there was a man and a woman standing at the foot of the bed, not aliens. They were humanoid. They were humans. They looked human. I wouldn’t say humanoid. They looked human. And I heard a man’s voice in the backyard say very quietly, condition red, meaning I had waked up. They rushed toward me. I tried to resist. I ended up unable to see, lying on my right side, and my head being pushed down into the pillow in waves, and the woman’s voice speaking very gently and saying, I don’t remember a word. I don’t remember anything, and I haven’t been hypnotized because I lost touch with Don Kline, and I don’t think I can find anyone else as good. So anyway, I don’t know what she said, and it probably doesn’t matter. It’s probably something like, oh, it’s going to be okay. Don’t worry, et cetera. That’s how it fell. So the next thing I know, it stops. There’s a big flash and crashing in the woods. I jump up. I grab the pistol. I rush through the house. The alarm system is still, LED is still red, so it’s lit. It’s armed, and it’s not going off. I can’t find any unusual point of entry at all, and I end up sitting on the bedside trying to figure out whether or not it was a lucid dream, and since this was before Google, I couldn’t look anything up, and I went fitfully back to sleep, and in the morning, with the alarm system still on, I found the garage door wide open, and I called the man who put in the alarm, and he came over and said there was a big magnetic field there, and he couldn’t explain it, and he just replaced the switches. Communication. In what way have they communicated with you? That’s through the implant. Okay, but when you say they communicate, are they talking to you? No. A slit opens up in this eye, in my right eye, and you can see words racing through it. So it’s always written language? It’s written. It looks like typed. English? Yeah, and I can’t read it usually. It’s moving too fast. I don’t see it now. I don’t really have a good, I have to have like a white wall to see it. Is it often? It’s always, especially when I’m working, when I’m writing. Do you ever read it? Are you able to read it at all? Well, I was, and this I don’t want to go into in too much detail, but there were two men who came to the house at one point who, there’s a lot going on here that people don’t really know, and I don’t really know who these men are, where they were from or anything, but they knew a lot about it. So they were Americans? Yeah, and they told me that it is drawing memories related to what I’m thinking about up from deep in my mind that I had forgotten. And the result of this is that it increases my ability to think dramatically. And it’s why I found myself using it. They trained me on it, writing a very detailed historical novel about World War II, which because I’m Whitley Strieber, I could not sell, sadly enough. Has it really damaged your writing career? It’s destroyed it. I publish my own books through my own company, and they go out on Amazon and places like that. The general bookstores, they won’t take my books. It’s interesting because you’ve been called a grifter. You’ve been called all manner of quite appalling pejoratives that you’re trying to profit by writing a sensationalist book about aliens just to make money. What’s the reality? What’s it done to you? People are scared. And it has destroyed my career. I lost my home. I lost the cabin. We ended up in a little condo in San Antonio that we happened to own. It was not part of a bankruptcy, thank God. And we would have been homeless. And I was destroyed, basically. And I clawed my way back slowly. I gradually got some novels published. But by that time, I had become such a pariah that my books wouldn’t sell anymore. And I went through a very, very long, hard period. And eventually, I discovered self-publishing. My show, Dreamland, I think is probably the first podcast because Clear Channel, which ran the show, took it off the air. Not because of this, but because they simply weren’t getting enough money out of it. So why were book publishers staying away from Whitley Striever when you’d sold two million copies of Communion that went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list? There is something called the death spiral in publishing. And that is this. A publisher publishes 50,000 copies of a book and sells 40,000. 10,000 come back. That means that the booksellers, the bookstores, are going to get 40,000 next time. 10,000 will come back. You can see the math. Soon, the bookstores are getting 500 and 200 are coming back and the writer is dead. That happened to me, basically. I don’t think the publishers are necessarily hostile to me, but they can’t sell my books because of this. Because the distributors all have the records of what happened. When you say that the beings, the visitors, are using this information that they’re scrolling through your eye to try to elevate your… Yeah. They’re drawing information out of my deep memory and putting it in my frontal memory that I can access. That’s basically what is happening. What’s the intention for that? Why? To enable me to write these books very deeply, I think. And I think the books I’ve written since this happened, this began to work in 2015, have been some of my best. So you’ve written books like this Solving the Communion Enigma. That was before this. But it was a beginning. I’m just going to get into that because you suggest in that book that we humans are being shepherded to a higher level of understanding and existence within a kind of multiverse universe. Energy, space, time. That’s a very expensive, broad project. There’s nothing in what they’re doing with you where you’re talking to them or having a conversation with them. How did you reach that conclusion? What led you to that conclusion? Looking at the way the society is responding to them. On a macro level, the response is, as we’ve been discussing, fairly negative. But on an individual level, many people are being waked up by this in ways that perhaps are not visible in the open culture yet. So you see your purpose as being to elevate public awareness of this ontological shock. I want people to get over the ontological shock. And in order to do that, what they have to do is to accept that a lot of things that they thought of as absolutely true are actually in question. And once they’ve done that, we can move on because we’ve come into a kind of a Cartesian prison. Descartes’ rationality is now a prison for us. And we need to get out of that prison without falling back into the prison it replaced, which was the prison of superstition that caused a religious dictatorship in the Western world. I don’t want to get too deeply into philosophy, but I love Descartes. And what fascinated me about it is it’s often written up in the books as the moment that there was a split. And it was the beginning of empirical science, the idea that if you could measure things, materialist science, that if you could measure things, they were real. It was also the departure from the era of superstitious belief, spiritual ideas. Was that a mistake? No, it wasn’t. The Descartian prison I referred to comes later when we, without really thinking about it, come to assume that the only measurement tools that work are the ones we already have. And we stop trying to measure things that we don’t understand and put them into a space we call the paranormal. There is no paranormal. There is no supernatural. There is only nature that we understand, nature that we don’t understand. And what we have to accept is that we must build tools that enable us to penetrate our understanding into the areas that we now don’t understand. Why do you think these beings are not more overt? I think, well, there’s a couple of reasons. The first is they may want things here that they think that we won’t want to give them, like my semen would be one example. And the eggs that have been taken from women, many women, that’s horrendous. Of course, they’re going to hide if they want to need to do that or have a need to do that. The second reason is deeper. It goes back to on a logical shock, and it has to do with cultural colonization. When Europeans developed the ocean-capable sailing vessels in the 14th and 15th centuries, they sailed out across the world with superior technology, but not necessarily a superior culture. But the cannons, the military organization, the much harder metals, steels, and so forth, made them seem to be superior to everyone they touched. They destroyed numerous civilizations by relentlessly colonizing them culturally. There was an article published in the magazine Science in April of 1988 by DBH Kuiper and Mark Morris, theorizing that if aliens were to come here, they would keep themselves secret because the only things they would want here were things that would be new to them. And as soon as they revealed themselves, we would refocus our entire culture toward them, and that would end it. So the second reason for the secrecy is that they want to learn from us things that are new to them. Have they, these beings, ever communicated to you their purpose? Not really. I wouldn’t say in any way that we would consider communication, no. The thing I find really disturbing about what you raise is it’s almost an apparent indifference, a bit like we are to cattle or to an ant on a pavement. It implies that whatever these sentient beings are, they don’t really appear to have any respect for the rights, the privacies that we all take for granted. You know, it’s a double-edged sword here because they, on a personal level, I would say that that was true certainly during the abduction time, which was from the 60s into the early 2000s, and it seems to have sort of tapered off after that. They were taking something they wanted, and they knew that we wouldn’t want to give it to them, and so they took it anyway, basically. I was really struck, I was listening to you a few weeks ago, and you came up and you said when Jake Barber was describing his experience with what he described as a feminine divine, when he had that moment of contact with whatever the being was inside the egg craft that he was flying, you were skeptical that it was kind, that it was a feminine divine. Yes. You seem to be implying that it’s perhaps malevolent or deceitful. Well, I have had experience with some of their weapons, and they can project fear, and they can project other emotions, like we would flash a flashlight. I can’t do anything that would project fear to you, but they could turn on something and point it at your brain, and you would become terrified. They can do that. Now, let’s go to Jake just for a moment. Jake is a soldier. He is engaged in aggressive activity, and suddenly he’s possessed by a beautiful feminine entity that dispels his aggression. Now, he’s delighted by this, and he says, I’m not in an illogical shock anymore, I’m in an illogical relief, but I think to myself, why wasn’t that a weapon? It could very well have been. Of course, I think so. And I haven’t spoken to Jake about this, but I’m sure he would agree. Yeah, I wish he would talk to me about it. I’d like to have him on my show and talk about it, because I think we’d have a fascinating conversation. Because it’s an absolutely brilliant weapon, because it turns an aggressor into a friend by just turning a switch. What are we all getting wrong with the coverage of this subject matter? What upsets you as somebody who is, on your own account, an experiencer, a victim of trauma, suffered by some kind of a sentient being? Well, I have to tell you, I think we’re getting better and better at it. I think this is a brilliant interview. And I don’t think five years ago, you could have done this. But I think you have worked at this. And in the course of the interview, you’ve talked about the many different things you’ve reflected on. And this is an important inflection point for us, because we’re making progress. Yeah, I’m optimistic, too. Yeah. One thing I’ve got to be in my bonnet about, though, is what do I do as a journalist, with firsthand witness accounts like yours, which, let’s be brutally honest about it, Whitley, they’re so preposterous, they sound, no offence, please don’t take offence, they sound so crazy and ridiculous. I live in this preposterous world. So I don’t take offence. My natural inclination as a journalist is to go and run and hide. Right, of course. I’m scared of the abduction story. But I’ve actually made the decision that I’ve got to listen to a lot of this. And I’ve been talking as a journalist to a lot of people who are having identical experiences to you. At what point, a lot of people say witness evidence is no evidence. They say it’s to be discounted, because you’re an unreliable witness. You were drunk at the time, you were having a hallucination, you were suffering temporal lobe epilepsy, whatever excuse they use. There seems to be a reluctance to even consider the possibility that when you’ve got multiple firsthand witnesses, all describing pretty much the same thing, a commonality of experience. Isn’t that by its very definition, a repeatable experiment? Well, it’s certainly not anecdotal. That’s what they all say, the sceptics all say, well, it’s anecdotal. But it’s not. It is very definitely part of a broad culture of experience. Not a single anecdote. But here’s the issue is the brain and I go into this more in The Fourth Mind than I do in my other books. But I want to go into it even more deeply is we have to understand the way the brain handles information and stores and catalogs memory. And we actually can do a lot of this. What you’re really saying is, you don’t have a ground of certainty. You’re at sea when you’re interviewing these people because you can’t tell whether or not any given thing they say is accurate or not. I’m sure you know what I mean when I describe slide nine, which is a briefing slide that was prepared by members of the Pentagon’s UAP task force, or it might have been OSAP, to brief an Undersecretary of Defense, so a fairly high level defense official, about the realities of the UAP mystery. And one of the things they very clearly briefed the Undersecretary of Defense, and this is a public document that was leaked, no doubt of its authenticity. They were telling the most senior officials in the Defense Department that this phenomenon can effectively manipulate human perception. I think I’m quite certain that it can. Which begs the question, if it can do that, how can we trust anything we perceive? Well, there’s some possibilities here. And I think that we do have an increasing ability to tell the difference by doing a functional MRI scan of a person being interviewed about an experience. We can tell the difference between parts of the experience that were gathered through the physical senses and parts of it that are constructed or confabulated in the mind in order to make sense of what was being seen. We can tell the difference between those, I think. I’m not sure that it’s, I think we need more experience in how to do this, but it’s possible. We could build a ground here of certainty eventually, because we could eventually, if we interviewed enough people like this, we would find similarities from person to person of the things that their bodies perceive to be physically real. That would be the ground. Then we could have a real start with this. One of the things I take away from your work is a potential sense of optimism. I mean, you’re traumatized by what happened to you. And you’re obviously bloody angry at times with the way you’ve been treated, which I would completely understand. Yeah. But at the heart of it, you’re quite optimistic about the intentions of these beings, aren’t you? I don’t think they would be trying to do this if they didn’t have an intention that was of service to all sides. Because if it was only of service to them, they could compel us more violently. But instead, what we see is a part of it hidden away, which did involve compulsion and violence when they were doing the abductions. But then we see an extremely careful approach that avoids cultural colonization, as Kuiper and Morris were discussing. Do you think there’s a prime directive in place, the idea in Star Trek that you mustn’t interfere in an alien civilization, you’ve got to keep your distance if you’re an advanced technology? Listen, I have enough trouble with my imagination without going into science fiction. I never think about things like that at all. I’ve had successes and failures in this in my books. I’m trying to be as accurate as possible, knowing that my perceptions may be distorted, even intentionally, but I’m trying to at least present them as accurately as I can. You described earlier two men, I assume, perhaps from some government agency who came to you and talked about what the intention was of this device that was in your head. Have you had government agencies approach you more overtly and take an interest in what you’re saying and seeing? No. The only approach that seemed somehow to have possibly have a locomotion like that was when Dr. David W. Webb came and met Ann and I after the communion experience and before the book was published. Dr. Webb was a prominent space scientist and a consultant with many of the alphabet agencies, and I think I was probably introduced to him by Santon Friedman. I don’t remember exactly, but he came to the cabin and he befriended us and he came to the house. He introduced me to an allergist who gave me allergy shots that would enable me to not have allergic reactions to the visitors and gave us epinephrine injectors to keep all over the house. In other words, he knew what he was doing. Therefore, at that time, they already knew about what happens during close encounter experiences within the intelligence community. What do you think is the reason why the government, at the moment, is lying to the American public? I think a significant part of the reason may be the abductions. I think, as I said earlier, the patent issues concern the defense industry. I don’t know quite how to put it, but this is a kind of a dream that we’re in. This isn’t real in a final way. We have a series of cultural agreements about what we are and where we are that are going to be challenged by this experience. That’s what I’m trying to say here. It’s hard to put into words. I want to come to a close, but I just want to get a quick response from you on the broader implications beyond the UAP mystery. Probably our mutual friend, Leslie Cain. I was always puzzled when Leslie went away from UFOs and started getting into life after death. I thought, why the hell is she writing a book about UFOs one minute and then getting into spiritual ideas of life after death? Do you think there is a connection between whatever the phenomenon is? Yes. I can give you some empirical information about this. When we had people up at our cabin to meet the visitors, my wife, Ann, who is the one who titled the book Communion, managed this whole thing. She was like me, a kid from an ordinary American town with no evidence whatsoever that there was anything unusual about her background. Except she was extremely good at dealing with this. Incredibly. She was the one who saved all of the letters that have ended up at Rice University and from the beginning said that they would be terribly important and they are now a wonderful resource. Is there a connection between, you believe, this UAP mystery that we put in a ball and call aliens ET and spiritual ideas of life after death? My wife knew a great deal about this and it was very strange that she knew so much. But she used to always say that it was somehow connected with the dead. She came out of her office one day when she was reading all the letters we were getting and she said, Whitley, this has something to do with what we call death. And when we would take people up to the cabin to meet the visitors, in those days that would happen fairly frequently. When you say meet, you’re actually introducing people. Well, the little beings would come up to the house and come in the house and touch people. There’s a lady called Raven Dana who held hands with one of them in the cabin. Another lady, Laurie Barnes, who encountered them. She was Anne’s secretary. She’s since passed away. And others who haven’t come forward as well. Was it a positive experience for you? Yeah. It was never a negative experience. It was a lot of fun, to be honest with you. I mean, God, can you imagine? You’re having a house party and the climax of it is not you’re going to dance the night away, but that aliens are going to show up and hold your hand and it happens. You weren’t doing magic mushies or something like that? No, absolutely nothing. I’ve never done anything like that in my life. So the answer is yes. But here’s the thing. I want to complete the thought. The dead would be involved. Laurie Barnes, this lady, she sees her dead brother on the road and he’s disappeared for 20 years and the FBI gave up on him. And suddenly there he is standing in the road in the afternoon. He’s out for an afternoon walk. And he says, she says, oh, my God, come down to the cabin and meet my friends. And he says, I just wanted you to know I’m all right. And he smiles at her and drifts away through the woods, floating up into the sky. She comes rushing back to the cabin and says, this, this happened. And Ann says quietly to me, the visitors will show up later tonight. And they do. There’s a connection of some kind. I find that a bit scary, but also quite exhilarating. I have a feeling that we are already and quite comfortably communicating with each other on this other level. We talked a bit about the Cartesian prison. In Descartes’ time, it was no prison. It was a release. It became a prison. Now it’s a prison and we have to figure out how to get out of it. And one of the things we have to do is we have to learn how to communicate with the level of consciousness that we probably laughably call the dead. And when we do that, we will also learn how to communicate with the visitors more accurately and truly. That is as good a place to end as any. You’ve blown my mind, Whitley Strever. Thank you so much for joining Reality Check. Thank you, Ross. And before we go, please don’t forget to send in your questions for our weekly question and answer. You can email us at realitycheck at NewsNationNow.com. We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for watching. Subscribe below and download our NewsNation app right now on your phone and you will get fact-based, unbiased news for all Americans.