Strieber’s Communion
Professional writer Whitley Strieber found solid, early commercial success as a horror novelist, with The Wolfen (published 1978) and The Hunger (1981).
Warday, a 1984 collaboration with James Kunetka, is a fictional account of America following nuclear war. Strieber’s first book of nonfiction, Communion, appeared in 1987, and became an enormous best seller. The book also set the course for Strieber’s subsequent career. Communion is based on Strieber’s own abduction experience at his cabin in New York State late in 1985.
Strieber awoke during the night of December 26, 1985, to see a humanoid creature standing in his bedroom. His next memory, of sitting alone on the forest floor, did not account for “missing time,” one of the classic symptoms of alien abduction. Under regressive hypnosis later, Strieber remembered being removed from his bedroom and taken aboard a craft resting in the woods. Inside, he saw nonhuman creatures representing a variety of body types, from squat to very tall.
One of the creatures took a blood sample from Strieber’s finger. And then there was this: a needle inserted into his brain, and a probe pushed into his rectum. (Strieber identifies the rectal device as an “electroejaculator.”) Abduction, dread, sexual assault—all reflected in Strieber’s working title for what became Communion: Body Terror.
Although Strieber refers to his abductors as “visitors,” and never identifies them as extraterrestrials, he sat with BeechTree/Morrow cover artist Ted Jacobs to help the artist put together the painting that became the book’s jacket: a portrait of an alien with the by-then-requisite narrow chin, generous cranium, and immense ebony eyes.
At once rational and sensationalized, the book begins this way: “This is the story of one man’s attempt to deal with a shattering assault from the unknown.” The book’s gaudy opening aside, much of Communion has an involving, documentary-like realism. Strieber’s account is powerful, particularly his descriptions of the religious fervor he held during his childhood, and his startling later encounters with “visitors,” including encounters that predate his cabin experience by more than thirty years. Specifics of the hypnosis sessions undertaken by Strieber and his wife, Anne, with Dr. Donald Klein (with occasional kibitzing from artist-UFOlogist Budd Hopkins), to recall buried memories, are no less compelling.
Strieber admits to being not just unnerved and fascinated by his 1985 abduction experience, but perplexed. Reflective of that, Communion pointedly avoids giving “answers.” (Strieber subsequently defined the visitors in dark terms, describing them as “profoundly evil” things “maneuvering us toward the earliest possible extinction. . . .”) Although Communion enjoyed huge sales, the ridicule aimed Strieber’s way soon threatened to deep-six his career. According to the author, sales of books he wrote immediately after Communion amounted to bupkis, and he had to declare bankruptcy. But he persevered. Notwithstanding a rather embarrassing 2004 “novelization” of a brainless science fiction movie, The Day After Tomorrow, Strieber has pursued a busy and commercially successful career during the past twenty-five years, producing some two dozen books that encompass horror and science fiction, adventure thrillers, young adult fiction, and pseudo-religious introspection framed as self-improvement.
On the other hand, the great success of Communion has typecast Strieber as “that UFO guy”—a status that may not have been his hope as he wrote that book, but one that he apparently feels obligated to pursue. Strieber’s 1989 novel Majestic is a fictionalized account of the Roswell crash and subsequent cover- up. 2012, a novel published in 2007, links the Mayan end-times kerfuffle to reptilians eager to steal human souls. Transformation, The Secret School, Breakthrough, Confirmation, The Communion Letters, and Solving the Communion Enigma are transparently commercial follow-ons to Communion.
Strieber also lends his name to a mass-market-paperback series with the umbrella title “Whitley Strieber’s Hidden Agendas”; those books are done by writers other than Strieber, and are devoted to a variety of UFO themes and events.
About fifteen years after the publication of Communion, Strieber revealed that memory regression had allowed him to recall that, as a boy, he had been one of many American children subjected to mind-control tests secretly carried out by the CIA. That revelation, as well as his postmillennium claims about unchecked world-government conspiracies, have clarified Strieber’s status as a chronicler of the secret and paranormal, even as it has relegated him—perhaps unjustly—to the fringes.
Above all, though, stands Communion. The book defines much of Strieber’s personal and professional lives, and still has the ability to unsettle readers. The rectal probe is rape, pure and simple, and quickly became an abduction trope so familiar that a comic take on the procedure motivates “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe,” the pilot episode (1997) of the satiric television cartoon series South Park. (Strieber has written about his devastatingly negative emotional reaction to the cartoon.) Cartman’s dilemma isn’t just that he runs afoul of grays and is probed, but that he’s left with a backside implant, as well; implants figure prominently in Whitley Strieber’s writings.
Is Strieber’s violation the first of its type? “Skeptical xenoarchaeology” blogger Jason Colavito notes that Barney Hill claimed to have been rectally probed in 1961—a detail that Mr. Hill omitted from early accounts of his misadventure. (Colavito very perceptively cites “The Invisibles,” a 1963 episode of ABC-TV’s The Outer Limits, as another early masscult instance of [implied] rectal probing conducted by malevolent extraterrestrials.) That Strieber arrived on the publishing scene as a genre novelist unjustifiably undercut his credibility as a victim of abduction and assault. Even reviewers who praised his gifts as a storyteller struggled to give Strieber the benefit of the doubt as to his tale’s veracity. Undeterred, two years after publication of Communion, Strieber established the Communion Foundation, taking the position that human encounters with benevolent visitors are turned into negative ones by regression therapists, hypnotists, and untrained UFOlogists. Contrarily, though, the foundation offers magnetic-resonance imaging to abductees, to detect alien implants.
Because of Strieber’s prolific output, and his skill as a writer, he is now a “brand,” an “airport author.” He brings slick novelistic technique to his nonfiction, and an appreciation for history to his fiction, blurring (unintentionally, perhaps) the line separating truth and speculation—a situation that undoubtedly pleases his publishers.
The jacket of Strieber’s entertaining 2006 novel The Grays is dominated by a stunningly discomfiting portrait illustration of a big-eyed gray in the vein of the alien visage that is central to various editions of Communion. A terse phrase printed above the main title of The Grays, “They’re Already Here,” suggests neither fiction nor nonfiction, and invites interpretation as either. So the writing continues, because even famous writers must buy groceries.
They also must sometimes put up with cranks, such as Richard Doty, who claimed to have given false background information to Strieber when Communion was in preparation; and Milton William Cooper, a deranged conspiracy theorist and sometime UFOlogist who loudly identified Strieber as a CIA agent assigned to sow disinformation about UFOs.