Communion

by Whitley Strieber

One of the documents, generated by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2009 and called “Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human and Biological Tissues,” discusses injuries to “human observers by anomalous advanced aerospace systems” and says that they could represent a “threat to United States interests.” This is not a previously classified document, but one compiled from outside sources by the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Assessment Program.

They soon found that some such witnesses had abnormally dense connections between two brain areas, the Caudate and the Putamen. These brain areas, collectively called the Striatum, are critical parts of its executive function, and are involved in cognition and perception.

In the middle of the night of December 26—I do not know the exact time—I abruptly found myself awake. And I knew why: I heard a peculiar whooshing, swirling noise coming from the living room downstairs.

If something is strange enough, the reaction is very different from what one would think. The mind seems to tune it out as if by some sort of instinct.

Months and months later, I discovered that another person who has had the visitor experience first encountered it through the medium of this same peculiar figure rushing toward her in exactly the way that this one now rushed toward me.

This figure was too small to be a person, unless a child. I have measured the approximate distance that the top of the head was from the ground, based on my memory of the figure’s position in the doorway, and I believe that it was roughly three and a half feet tall, altogether smaller and lighter than my son.

A few moments later, when it was close to the bed, I saw two dark holes for eyes and a black down-turning line of a mouth that later became an O.

From shoulder to midriff was the visible third of a square plate etched with concentric circles. This plate stretched from just below the chin to the waist area. At the time I thought it looked like some sort of breastplate, or even an armored vest. Beneath it was a rectangular appliance of the same type, which covered the lower waist to just above the knees.

“Whitley” ceased to exist. What was left was a body in a state of raw fear so great that it swept about me like a thick, suffocating curtain, turning paralysis into a condition that seemed close to death. I do not think that my ordinary humanity survived the transition to this little room. I died, and a wild animal appeared in my place.

There is one drug, tetrodotoxin, which could approximate such a state. In small doses it causes external anesthesia. Larger doses bring about the “out of the body” sensation occasionally reported by victims of visitor abduction. Greater quantities can cause the appearance of death—even the brain ceases detectable function.

I awoke the morning of the twenty-seventh very much as usual, but grappling with a distinct sense of unease and a very improbable but intense memory of seeing a barn owl staring at me through the window sometime during the night.

Later I discovered that memories of animals in strange places are a common block to this experience.

I did not know that the owl and the light were screen memories that concealed a traumatic experience. As described by Freud, the screen memory is a method that the mind uses to shield itself from things too upsetting to recall.

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. The only trouble with this theory was that what has been happening since the mid-forties seemed more than just a little different from the fairy lore. Now there were brain probes and flying disks involved, abductions and gray creatures with staring eyes. Surely no change had taken place in the human psyche extreme enough to account for such a radical change in the appearance of the fairy. And yet, there was undoubtedly something here… I thought perhaps the visitors were somehow trying to hide themselves in our folklore.

Or perhaps something very real had emerged from our own unconscious mind, taking actual, physical form and coming forth to haunt us. Maybe belief creates its own reality. It could be that the gods of the past were strong because the belief of their followers actually did give them life, and maybe that was happening again. We were creating drab, postindustrial gods in place of the glorious beings of the past.

If they were a hive, they might communicate as a hive, using a complex mixture of sounds, motions, scents, and even methods as yet unknown. Our knowledge of earth’s hive species is very limited. An intelligent hive might as a whole be very powerful, but as individuals, quite limited both in strength and in understanding.

If visitors are really here, one could say that they are orchestrating our awareness of them very carefully. It is almost as if they either came here for the first time in the late forties, or decided at that time to begin to emerge into our consciousness.

First the craft were seen from a distance in the forties and fifties. Then they began to be observed at closer and closer range. By the early sixties there were many reports of entities, and a few abduction cases. Now, in the mid-eighties, I and others—for the most part independent of one another—have begun to discover this presence in our lives.