FigureWhitley Strieber (b. 1945)

Whitley Strieber. Texas-born novelist. By 1985 he was an established horror novelist — The Wolfen (1978) and The Hunger (1981) had both been made into major films. On the night of 26 December 1985, at his weekend cabin in the Catskills near Pine Bush, NY, Strieber reported an event he was at first unable to interpret, later sought hypnotic regression with Dr. Donald Klein (a Columbia psychiatrist), and described in Communion: A True Story (Beech Tree / William Morrow, 1987). The cover illustration of the grey almond-eyed face by Ted Jacobs became one of the defining images of the modern abduction iconography. The book sold over 2 million copies, spent 32 weeks on the New York Times nonfiction list, and was adapted into a 1989 film with Christopher Walken. The skeptical case: Strieber was a professional fiction writer and his earlier novels include sleep-paralysis imagery similar to what he later described as the Communion experience. Strieber himself has never asserted the events were extraterrestrial — he uses the phrase “the visitors” and explicitly does not foreclose psychological or interdimensional interpretations. He has continued to write and to host the Dreamland radio program since 1998. His subsequent books (Transformation 1988, Breakthrough 1995, The Key 2001, The Super Natural 2016 co-authored with Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University) have moved his account closer to Vallée’s folkloric/control-system framing than to ETH. Kripal’s involvement is itself notable: he is a tenured chair in Religious Studies at Rice and the Super Natural collaboration is the most-cited academic engagement with Strieber’s case.