Why I call Aliens “Visitors.”
I am Whitley Strieber, author of the book Communion, which detailed my own close encounter of the third kind. It happened in December of 1985 and was a complete shock to me. I was not interested in UFOs and had no idea that anything like this could happen. I also had no idea what had happened, except that it was strange and quite difficult. As memories returned, I became more and more concerned for my mental health.
After weeks of tormenting myself over whether or not I had a brain tumor or was going insane, taking all sorts of medical tests, I was left to conclude that what I remembered from the night of December 26 had really happened. I had been taken to a small, round room, raped using a device that induced an erection, had semen removed from my body, experienced the terror of a needle being pushed into my head, and left badly traumatized and confused.
I suppose that animals being tagged in the wild experience similar stress.
Initially, it didn’t occur to me that this was an accurate memory of a real event. I thought it was some sort of hallucination. But the pain from the rape soon caused me to go to the doctor, who told me that I had an injury in the wall of my rectum. In other words, I had been raped.
I was in no way prepared for this. It still didn’t occur to me that what I remembered seeing — beings with huge black eyes and other, smaller ones in dark blue coveralls — could be what was actually there.
At the time I was a well-known novelist, mostly for the horror-thrillers Wolfen and Hunger, but also for more serious books like Warday, written with co-author James Kunetka, which was a warning about the danger of limited nuclear war.
My brother had given me a book for Christmas called Science and the UFOs by Jenny Randles. I would normally have ignored it, but I was at my wits end about my experience. I had, after all, seen what appeared to be aliens and this book covered the subject. It turned out to contain a description of an experience very like mine, and a reference to a researcher who happened to live a few blocks from me, Budd Hopkins.
Meeting Budd and some of the close encounter witnesses he knew set me on what has become a lifelong quest to understand this strange experience. Even now, I cannot say for certain that there is a relationship between close encounters and UAPs. As I point out in my new book Them, in all the years that the close encounter experience has been reported, there is not one independent witness to an abduction and no reliable video either of the abductors or an abduction in progress.
So what is this, really? The short answer is that it is certainly something. It cannot be identified as any known form of mental issue.
It is not just about abductions, such as the one I experienced. In fact, the variety of encounters being reported is astonishing. When people make up stories, they are generally based on other stories. But, judging from the hundreds of thousands of letters I received after publishing Communion, thousands of which my wife Anne collected and cataloged, that is not the case here. (The letters are now housed in the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University in Texas.)
In Them, I analyze 11 of the letters. Most of them involve multiple witness events, and this is common. (But nobody ever seems to have a camera…) They are literally beyond strange. For example, on involves an entire family seeing and trying to communicate with bizarre creatures in the trees around their house. Another involves two different witnesses observing an extraordinary event beside the Grand Central Parkway in Queens that nobody but them appears to have seen. (One of these witnesses was a PhD psychologist who also had what is known as exquisite vision, better than 20/20.)
This could all be some sort of contact with what we might think of as aliens. But I suspect that it is going to turn out to be far stranger than a conventional story of beings coming from another planet. What form will that take? Will we ever conclusively relate the contact phenomenon to the UAP phenomenon? All interesting and compelling unknowns.
And that is why I call these entities “visitors” rather than “aliens.” They come and go, never staying in any contact situation for very long. Aside from trauma and some enigmatic injuries, they leave no evidence behind. They may or may not be aliens. As I have speculated in A New World and developed in Them, they may even be in some way human.
Perhaps, hidden in the relationship between us and them, there is an answer to another question: who is this species we call “human” that is so radically different from every other species on Earth, and why do we see the world as we do?
During this time of increasing evidence that there is somebody else here besides us, presumably with motives, needs and hopes of their own, it is important to remember how deep the mystery actually is. And it is not only a mystery about our visitors, it is one about us.
Yes, I wonder who they are. But I also have another question: who are we?
