Communion: A True Story

by Anne Strieber

There was a very stern warning … or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe if I had not been afraid of nuclear war and perfectly happy, when he touched that thing to my head other images would have come out.

And what’s weird about it is, why would someone come from a flying saucer and evoke that kind of impression in me? What possible reason would they have?”

Maybe that image was created to see how I react to something that would be ultimately terrifying to me. Or maybe they were just trying to find out what kind of person I am.”

If this was a real visitor, giving me a real blessing from some other reality, then why was it hidden in amnesia where I could not gain access to it?

Maybe my experiences were only a side effect of some sort of study. Or maybe it was known even then that this rich treasure would eventually be open to me, because the whole experience had been designed in detail by insightful minds engaged in a slow process of acclimatizing humanity to their presence.

It would be easy to say that the material revealed here is the work of a mind making opportunistic use of some nocturnal disturbances to gain contact with fears that it needed to explore.

If these are indeed visitors, they know us well … better than we know ourselves.

These memories are buried for a reason: They are frightful in the extreme. When they first emerge, the mind lives through the panic it has been avoiding.

These people are scaring me. Terribly, because … whooof! Right up! Just shot right up. Yeah, that scared the dickens out of me. I saw the trees down there! Now they’ve got a floor under me again.”

I’m not gonna let you do an operation on me. You have absolutely no right.’ “‘We do have a right.’

She’s sittin’ right in front of me the whole time, just lookin’ at me. They’re moving around back there.” (I could sense them, but I was looking at her. She drew something up from below.) “‘Jesus, is that your penis?’ I thought it was a woman [Makes a deep, grunting sound.] That goes right in me. [Another grunt.] Punching it in me, punching it in me. I’m gonna throw up on them. [Pause.]” (They began trying to open my mouth with their hands.) “‘What do you keep wanting to do that to my mouth for?’ They keep trying to put something in my mouth. They’re real. They’re real. Put up her cheek right to me, and they’re real!

Budd Hopkins’s book, Missing Time.

I speculated. It could be that the “visitors” were really from here. Certainly the long tradition of fairy lore suggested that something had been with us for far more than the forty or fifty years since the phenomenon took on its present appearance.

Or perhaps something very real had emerged from our own unconscious mind, taking actual, physical form and coming forth to haunt us.

Or maybe we were receiving a visit from another dimension, or even from another time.

If, say, some species of hive insect had become intelligent on some other planet—or even here—it might be very much older than us, and its mind very much more primitive in structure.

In terms of earthly evolution, man emerged only very recently. Maybe that also means that man is not the lesser creature, but the more advanced one. If this was so, then older, less quick-thinking and flexible forms might view us as quite a danger to them. They might even want to imprison us here in our earth, or do worse than imprison us.

And yet, I did not have the feeling that they were hostile so much as stern. They were also at least somewhat frightened of me. I was certain of that.

that this force might be essentially human in origin remained a definite possibility.

Given their general reluctance to expose themselves to us in an open and obvious manner, it may be hypothesized that they are trying for a degree of influence or even control over us, but one that at least presents an appearance of compliance on our part.

There was fear, awe, even a sort of love.

Intellectually, I was unsure about what the visitors were. But my emotional self did not share that indecision. My emotional response was to real people, albeit nonhuman ones.

First, the sheer helplessness that they evoked created awe, which could lead to a desire to comply … and then to love. Second, the fear caused such confusion that one could not be sure how to feel.

remembered my protest to her when she reassured me about the operation not hurting me. The sense of helplessness was an awful thing to contemplate. “You have no right,” I had said. “We do have a right.” Five enormous words. Stunning words. We do have a right.

If they were real visitors, though, I wanted to know the ethics behind their assertion of their “right.” Of course, we ourselves barely question our rights over the other species on earth. How odd it was to find oneself suddenly under the very power that one so easily assumes over the animals.

Nor did I feel that they were simply studying me. Not at all. They had changed me, done something to me. I could sense it clearly that night but I could not articulate

I reflected that the abduction to a round room had a long, long tradition in our culture: There were many such cases in the fairy lore. The story called “Connla and the Fairy Maiden,” as collected in Joseph Jacobs’s Celtic Fairy Tales (Bodley Head, 1894, 1985), could with some changes be a modern tale of the visitors.

The supposed antigravity effect was based on a principle of counterrotation.

I asked who the people around me were, and was told what was obvious even to me. They were all soldiers. Then I wanted to know why they had been brought here. The answer is telling: “Because they were alone.”

The craft seem to favor isolated areas. They do not appear as often over cities, and there are not many stories of their taking people from heavily populated places. Perhaps a limitation of technology is visible here: There are simply too many risks in populated areas.

“What’s the point of that?” The creature seemed ready to reply, but she was cut off in midsentence as if somebody had flipped a switch. For a moment she sounded like a stuck record. “The point of that is—The point of that is—” Then she stopped, as if surprised that she had been caught off guard, and said, simply, “Well,” her voice melodious with amusement.

It is incredibly upsetting to see something that is clearly not human walking and moving about with intelligence. There is something that is unmistakable about the precision of consciously directed movement that is deeply frightening when seen in such an alien form.

When I asked her why she looked so awful, she replied almost absently, without stopping her work, “I can’t help that.”

But if they have really been here so long, why did they have so much trouble getting me to keep down my feeding? Perhaps the substance has not been changed over the years to suit me, perhaps the very act of eating it has changed me. Maybe it is a process of acclimatization.

The “awful-looking” creature now came to seem absolutely monstrous. And there was no question in my mind about its being real. It had never even crossed my mind that I might be dreaming. This was as real as any other event in my life, despite the fact that it was far more frightening even than the most frightening horror movie and would soon disappear into amnesia.

Perhaps the visitors are the gods. Maybe they created us. Robert Crick, the renowned discoverer of the double helix, has postulated that the genetic structure of life is so intricate that it seems designed.

triangular spacecraft like the one that was seen over Westchester County in 1983,

People with temporal-lobe epilepsy report déjà vu, unexplained panic states, strong smells, and even a preoccupation with philosophical and cosmic concerns. They also sometimes report vivid hallucinatory journeys.

So whatever the visitors did, they did not damage me in a way detectable to our science.

There are reports of visitors carrying small lights, and the fairy lore contains dozens of instances of “fairy stones” that glowed.

the idea of intellectually and technologically advanced visitors who hide their knowledge from us is threatening and infuriating. It suggests that there is something ignoble about mankind, or even that we are prisoners on our planet.

I think of those rushing little figures, those haunting eyes, the smells, the little rooms, the uniforms, the sense of hard work being done. I remember how stiff and insectlike the movements of the visitors seemed, and how very careful they were to keep me under control at all times,

If I am right, then the source of their reticence is not contempt but fear, and well-founded fear, too. They are not afraid of man’s savagery or his greed, but of his capacity for independent action.

I have seen them from close range, and if I was seeing real beings, then what was most striking about them was that they appeared to be moving to a sort of choreography … as if every action on the part of each independent being w...

return to the thought that they may be a sort of hive. If this were true, then they may be, in effect, a single mind with millions of bodies—a brilliant creature, but lacking the speed of independent, quick-witted mankind. If they think slowly enough, it may be that a ...

If I am right about them, it is unlikely that there will ever be the kind of open contact between our two species that seems so logical and useful to us.

“She’s staring right back at me. She looks like a big bug. Just sitting there, staring at me.”

“Yeah. Great big black eyes. She’s sort of brown. She has a little, tiny mouth. She’s thin.”

It looks just exactly like a bug. A praying mantis is what it looks like. Only it’s so big.

What is most interesting here is really a pattern. It involves two types of interaction with the visitors.