Whitley Strieber's Communion Encounter

Whitley Strieber was a horror novelist. He had written The Wolfen and The Hunger. In 1985 he and his wife Anne kept a secluded log cabin in upstate New York, reached by a private dirt road. It stood near Accord, in Ulster County, not far from Kingston.

October 4, 1985. The family drove up with two close friends, Jacques Sandulescu and Annie Gottlieb. After everyone was asleep, Strieber saw a blue light on the cathedral ceiling of the living room. Then came a sharp report, like an exploding firecracker. Anne heard it too. Downstairs, their son Andrew began to shout. The next day, both guests recalled the light and the noise.

It was about three in the morning. An odd noise woke Strieber. The house alarm was set. Yet a figure came into the bedroom. It was about three and a half feet tall. It wore a curved cap, a mask, and a breastplate patterned with concentric circles.

Strieber became paralysed. He lost consciousness. His next memory was of being carried naked out of the cabin into the night, unable to control his body. Branches moved past his face. Then a sweep of treetops, the forest corkscrewing slowly below him.

He found himself in a small circular chamber. The domed ceiling was ribbed at intervals, tan and grey, dimly lit. He sat on a bench against the wall. Short, stocky beings in dark-blue coveralls moved around him at great speed. A slender being, about five feet tall, had very prominent black slanted eyes. They inserted a needle into his brain. He screamed.

Much of the night is lost to him. He wondered whether terror amnesia, drugs or hypnosis caused the gap. He never called these figures aliens. He called them "the visitors," a word chosen to leave open the possibility that they were not extraterrestrials.

No government body investigated. Strieber contacted the abduction researcher Budd Hopkins, who introduced him to the psychiatrist Dr. Donald Klein. Hypnotic regression began on 1 March 1986, though accounts differ on who led it. Klein raised temporal lobe epilepsy himself. An EEG in December 1986 came back normal. Polygraph examiner Nat Laurendi concluded: "Does he believe what he is saying? As a polygraphist, I have to say yes." In 1989 journalist Ed Conroy published his own inquiry, Report on Communion.

Skeptics saw a familiar pattern. In Skeptical Inquirer, Robert A. Baker called the account "a classic, textbook description of a hypnopompic hallucination." Philip J. Klass proposed temporal lobe epilepsy, then questioned the EEG. Others pointed to hypnosis creating false memories, and to a fiction writer's motive. No confession or proven hoax has ever surfaced. Strieber's own position stays open. The visitors might be extraterrestrial, interdimensional, or "something far more complex."

Communion: A True Story appeared in February 1987 and went to number one on the New York Times list in hardcover and paperback. Ted Seth Jacobs painted the cover under Strieber's direction, correcting it until Strieber said it "was exact." That face became the standard image of the grey alien. Christopher Walken played Strieber in the 1989 film. Rice University now holds the Anne and Whitley Strieber Collection.