Communion

by Whitley Strieber

Further research revealed to us that our area of upstate New York, comprising roughly Westchester, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, and Ulster counties,

Ermagerd, the same place Joseph Smith found the golden plates and the Millerites were supposed to be raptured...

Even though there has been no physical proof of the existence of the visitors, the overall structure of their emergence into our consciousness has had to my mind the distinct appearance of design.

Mass halucinations perhaps

Then I saw, behind the door, an indentation in the wall that had been made by the door being slammed open with substantial force.

Gee, like a bang that woke people up? Hrm.

What did the monkey with the needle in its brain think of its observers? Were they gods to whom it submitted itself with a noble passivity because it could do nothing else? I saw monkey carcasses in the dumpster, too.

So you've seen animals being experimented on, write novels about the world ending... and suddenly have visions that aliens are experimenting on you and telling you that the world is going to end.

In May of that year my younger brother had been born, and the house was consequently in upheaval, only some of it pleasant.

Oh so we have an unpleasant, life-altering event occuring the same time you were first "abducted" eh.

When I plugged my assemblage in, there was a great buzzing, the electromagnet in the core of the thing whirled madly, and the lights in the house began to pulsate. The whole thing whined and fluttered. There were showers of sparks. Parental cries of alarm rose from downstairs. As the machine destroyed itself the pulsation of the house lights became a dimming, until the bulbs glowed orange-red. Then they burst to blazing life, a good number of them blowing out in the process.

Yeah that's not how any of that works. Complete bullshit.

Not having seen these plans, I cannot evaluate them other than to comment that the idea that counterrotating magnets of any kind would produce any unusual energies at all flies in the face of modern magnetic theory.

I haven't seen these plans or how this thing works, but I can say difinitively that it flies in the face of physics

Recall that I did not even remember my antigravity machine myself, but rather was told about it by a friend who remembered.

AKA your home electrocution device based off childhood listenings of sci-fi radio shows.

I accidentally dropped a large milk shake out of a tenth-floor window.

What the hell does that have to do with anything Also - he remembers that but not aliens

Now I have added to this recollection a vivid memory of the being pushing a bladder down my throat.

So you're admitting you add memories to what you believe, eh?

A few minutes later an owl flew in front of the car. I have to wonder if that is not a screen memory, but my sister has no sense that it is.

A fuckin' bird flew in front of her car ya dork.

Was it the pressure involved in keeping my memories of them hidden? I just don’t know.

At that to the long list of things you don't know, like how electricity works.

Are such experiences the source of the performance anxiety that has been detected in psychological tests I have taken, or does that have to do with the many recollections I have always had of sitting in the middle of a little round room and being asked by a surrounding audience of furious interlocutors questions so hard they shatter my soul?

Man, you just keep getting dumber with these takes.

This would go on for hours and hours until I begged them to stop, and I would be offered the relief of a brief rest at their feet, my soul confessing itself into the stern softness of their love.

So you manifested your childhood guilt as a Catholic into space aliens as an adult.

A few days later the results came back: absolutely normal temporal lobe function, confirmed by both neurologists. So whatever the visitors did, they did not damage me in a way detectable to our science.

Or - hear me out - you just had a nose bleed and are making things up.

I last smelled it in 1972 or 1973.

You can remember smelling something 15 years prior, but not... Good lord this is getting dumb. I can't even read this like it's fiction at this point.

Nothing further was said then, and he does not now remember the incident at all, much less the contents of the nightmare.

Why would he remember it....

A siphon of seltzer had exploded, so violently that the glass was reduced to beads, to dust. There wasn’t a trace of the water that had been inside. Anne cleaned up the mess while I calmed our son. Then we went back to bed.

Man he's digging up every random thing in his life and attributing it to aliens, isn't he.

But it didn’t happen; none of it happened. It’s just a screen memory, like the story of the six weeks in Florence that never happened. (After I realized that I had not actually been there that long, I began to believe another story, that I had gone to Russia and then to France, and been caught in the French strikes of 1968—without reference to the fact that they ended two months before I crossed France.) But why do I need these absurd stories? They are not lies; when I tell them, I myself believe them. I don’t lie. Perhaps I tell them to myself when I tell them to others, so that I can hide from myself whatever has made me a refugee in my own life.

Oooooor, maybe your life is a series of lies you drummed up to make yourself sound more interesting and experienced, and this book is another in that series. "Why did you say you spent six weeks in Europe when you didn't?" "Space aliens abducted me."

In late March 1983 something happened. I walked out to get a breath of air for a few minutes and found myself returning three hours later. Anne hadn’t been home and our son was in school, but the experience was so inexplicable to me that I invented an elaborate fantasy of having imagined myself back in old New York for the missing hours.

Well that's a rather self-incriminating statement, no?

“She’s staring right back at me. She looks like a big bug.

So a guy who glamorizes Metamorphosis is being probed by giant bugs, huh.

The triangle with the circle in it and the square comes around it and it moves all very smoothly, and it makes me feel better.” (Note: When people are asked at random to draw the first figure that enters their minds, 30 percent will draw a triangle. Nobody knows why this is the case.)

That means 70% don't do that.

She’s always sitting down. She’s got a lotta legs and arms.” “A lot?” “I mean four.” (Two legs and two arms.)

Wow, two legs and two arms, eh? Crazy.

Five, six, tar babies. Six tar babies standing there.

Excuse me, what

I still do not remember seeing the fireball. All my life I have had a free-floating memory of a skeleton riding a motorcycle, a frightful effigy. Now I know the source of that image.

Me too except it was a tattoo and not martian

When people dismiss such innocent and uninformed testimony, they make a great mistake. Precisely because it is so uninformed, it is powerful evidence of the reality of the phenomenon.

My kids see monsters too and believe in Santa

It is also true, though, that Anne has a very active mind,

She aint the only one

My wife appears to have been made to believe that my mental health depends on her not remembering,

Oh isnt that convenient

But it’s very possible that after I take you out of the trance, between now and the end of the weekend something will come to you about the thirtieth. And if it does, try very hard to remember. If something passes through your mind.”

So much for the hypnotist not implanting memories.

“No, I don’t think he has hallucinations, no. But I think they come to him because of his head. He has a very unique head.”

Hmmmm.....

As most of the session was taken up in a futile effort to dislodge memories that either are not present or cannot emerge, I will transcribe only the relevant part of the material.

"Dislodge memories that are not present" ok so you're making the claim they should be there but aren't. Or, more likely, never happened at all?

There were further questions about the “little white thing,” which elicited the opinion that she did not remember it from her childhood after all.

What else was she imagining then

In general, Anne’s memories were clear until it came to anything that might have related to the visitors. At that point she became unable to remember.

Imagine that. She remembers what really happened but not what "Whitty" imagined.

There is another possible explanation for Anne’s testimony. It could be an expression of faith for a man she deeply loves and desires to protect even from the toils of madness by a subtle act of confirmation, really a hidden communion, an indirect sharing—of an experience she did not have enough information about to confirm in convincing detail.

That could be a lot of things. "My husband is being abducted." "My husband has a side chick." "My husband is a raving loon." "My husband fabricated a story about alien abduction to make himself famous."

“That’s the light that was on. Then they took special lights and examined my nose and took X rays and stuff.” (This last statement could easily be a buried memory of a babyhood injury to his nose, which involved an X ray to determine whether it was broken. But this memory seems to be mixed in with other material of a totally different nature.)

Oh so the kid's stuff is buried memories, but yours is ermagerd aliens

For example, if we could convert a human being into some sort of energetic medium—say light or radio waves—then place a reconverter 100,000 light years from earth, a person could step through a door here, feel as if he had come out the other side instantaneously, then step back and find that he was 200,000 years in the future. A cumbersome time machine, but it would work.

Anything can work if you pull the idea out of your ass and ignore physics.

Transformation for a Zen monk, a Moslem sufi, a Catholic, or a Jehovah’s Witness is the same:

"One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong...."

In my research I found an undertone of claims that the government knew more about this matter than it was saying. I decided to do some investigation into the truth of this possibility. I found myself in a minefield. Real documents that seemed to be false. False documents that seemed to be real. A plethora of “unnamed sources.” And drifting through it all, the thin smoke of an incredible story.

Whooo boy, here we go.

I base this notion on the two best pieces of evidence I could find, both of which I have personally investigated and confirmed as genuine.

That would mean something if your credibility was acceptable.

These two pieces of evidence are certainly real, in the sense that they are not witting hoaxes. Of course people can make mistakes.

"They're real, but they might be wrong."

To connect the book and the earlier incident in any way strikes me as an example of poor scholarship and seems not to be supportable.

You would know.

Was Mr. Brazel interrogated in order to induce him to change his story? There seems to be no other logical conclusion.

Oh there's plenty of other logical conclusions.

As a matter of fact, its author, it turns out, takes the unusual position that all unidentified-flying-object sightings can be explained. I have not found many scientists willing to make such a strong assertion about these transitory and poorly understood phenomena, and I wonder if the Inquirer has not stepped beyond the limits of healthy skepticism in its recent article.

Meanwhile you're out here saying every forgotten toe-stubbing of your childhood was alien experimentation.

Scientists nationwide have responded to the government’s public position by refusing to take the matter seriously. Many people of the highest reputation have been sucked into this stance.

Suckered into believing facts, logic, and provable events.

The fact that respected public institutions such as the government and the scientific and medical establishments do not consider this a real problem hurts people, and hurts them badly.

Why won't the government acknowledge the fae?!!?

Cornell University professor Dr. Carl Sagan has stated many times that there is no evidence that unidentified aerial objects—and presumably visitors—exist. To be precise, there is no publicly acknowledged physical artifact. The large body of encounter memories, some heavily freighted with imagination, others more sparse, amount to an artifact of something.

Ah, of course, your hypnosis-induced "recollections" are more valid than renound scientist Dr. Carl Sagan. (insert eyeroll emoji)

a substantial body of carefully authenticated photographic evidence of the devices themselves that is very hard to refute in any way except on an emotional level.

Bitch, please.

this is mere conjecture at this point.

And this entire book isn't?

The very strength of our resistance to the evidence on UFOs suggests to me that there is clearly a phenomenon of surpassing importance here.”

Lack of belief in UFOs implies lack of desire to acknowledge the truth? More like lack of desire to acknowledge the truth begets belief in UFOs.

As the emotional charge of the debunkers and Creationists diminishes the impact of their position,

Oh like the author hasn't been similarly emotional throuought this book.