Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 340: Whitley Strieber - Communion

Episode Date: March 8, 2026

Mathas tells the story of Whitley Streiber, author of The Wolfen, The Hunger, and UFO non-fiction classic Communion, and shows Alex and Jesse why his influential alien abduction story is still one of the purest and most unique.CHILLUMINATI is a weekly comedy podcast hosted by Mike Martin, Jesse Cox and Alex Faciane. Hold on to your tin-foil hats and traverse the realms of the mysterious, supernatural, spooky and sometimes truly horrible - and your third eye will never be the same!Subscribe to our Patreon to support us and for extra content like full video episodes, weekly Minisodes, exclusive art, and more at http://patreon.com/CHILLUMINATIPODMERCH: https://theyetee.com/chilluminatiThank you to our sponsors:Head to factormeals.com/chill50off and use code chill50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year. Eat like a pro this month with Factor. Mike Martin - http://www.youtube.com/@themoleculemindset Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - https://www.youtube.com/@StarWarsOldCanonBookClub/Editor: DeanCutty Producer: Hilde @ https://bsky.app/profile/heksen.bsky.social Show Art: Studio Melectro @ http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Logo Design: Shawn JPB @ https://twitter.com/JetpackBragginSOURCES:"Communion" by Whitley Strieber

and welcome back to the Chulamani podcast, episode 340. As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined today by two of my favorite little alien grays on today's final alien episode of Alien Month. Oh, no, we got one next week, I think. Jesse's, Jesse's, Jesse's. I thought it was like a sexy love month, not an alien month. It's hard to make serial killers sexy and sexy ghost, sexy ghost stories are extremely limited. Most of what I've learned about serial killers is people get turned on by them. Sexual themes.

alien themes. That's all I can promise you for the next two months is sexual themes of all angles. No, it's all angles. It's almost, yeah, we're wrapping up on that though. Every angle. Every angle of alien. Also, I guess it's my two little gray aliens, Alex and Jesse. Hello.

That's us. Hello. Hello. This is just a suit for my consciousness. I am just goo. I am organic and yet I am robotic. I am from the future. I am you from the future from another dimension.

We are just a filter for consciousness to exist within linear time and physical space. I am witnessing the advent of a nuclear AI revolution as a student, as a graduate student from the future. I don't want to be alive during this time. You know what I mean? Not in a way where I want to die, but in the way of like, I wish I wasn't around for the AI apocalypse. In the same way that Tim Robinson was sitting in that old man suit saying, I don't want to be around anymore and that the chin kills.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Just like that. I know who Tim Robinson and him, so I don't know that reference. It's okay. The audience does. That's, you know, it's okay. We'll be all right.

Can't wait to the audience to be like, I don't know what the reference is. Alex cannot speak for us. He does not know which Netflix shows we have seen. Patreon.com slash Chulminati pod, you guys. Chilminati pod, you guys. Get there. It's us. Keep the show popping, rolling, shucking, jiving, growing, growing.

And, uh, you got to, you got to get a. feel kind of PBSy about it, right? There's no capitalism going on here, really. We're just a bunch of guys trying to do our little thing and you guys are the funding. You know what I mean? That's good. That's a good relationship. And in return, you get good stuff. What do you get? What do you get? You get a minisode every single time. We do rotten popcorn specials. We're about to do another one real soon.

There's ad-free episode. Ad-free episodes. Bonus items. We got a live show that was free that you can go check out over there if you're all kinds of good stuff. So it's a good place to go. A little Pokemon, a Pokemon fan art by our artist over there now. Oh yeah.

For Pokemon. A little like 8 bit Chiluminati Pokemon, which is really cool. Genuinely so cute. Yeah. Super cute. Shout out, Mel.

The topic of today's episode. Yeah. Super cute. Is that what you said? I said, yeah, it's cute. It's like today's episode is going to be.

You know, cute. Yeah. When you, I'm just impressed by that, but also, concerned a little when you said who you were doing I was like immediately I was like oh this is going to be a cute one yeah exactly exactly yeah because today gentlemen we're diving into

somebody else we've brought up in the UFO world many a time who is directly connected to bud hopkins Hopkins Hopkins Hopkins Hopkins not Hawkins Hopkins Hopkins yeah that's the actor not not this guy is directly connected to him and we'll talk about why but we are talking about today, Whitley Streber. Are either of you very familiar with Whitley Streber at all? If you listen to coast, yes. Yeah, I know the name.

We'll be talking about coast to coast later in the episode, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm aware of this gentleman. Uh, I don't know. I like most guys like this, like I say, the crazy guy that knows stuff and it has a, as a, has a bizarre background. I don't know. And I'm like, I approach with trepidation.

And this guy's like almost like the template. Yeah. He's another one who you may walk away from and feel like a lot of, if not all of his story is potentially not true for different reasons. But the reason he's still important is because he is where probing comes from. Alien probing stuff like basically got into the UFO mainstream because of this guy's story. And when his story went public and basically all the news stations latched on to that one aspect of the story. And that was it. That was was blasted across the country.

and why his story became big. You're trying to get some dignity back for the probes. Yeah, man. I'm trying to get them for the Barney Hills out there and all the other probes. And those guys and those people and those of us who aren't lucky enough to have yet been probed to have been probed, I don't remember it. Those who have probed and for those who are yet to be probed. Exactly.

Correct. The main source for today is his book communion. However, I did try and go take obviously the account that he, puts in his book communion and go out and do a bunch of other research via a bunch of historical stuff and try to like build an actual timeline as to the maybe the facts of what happened here. And we'll talk about like obviously we're going to talk about his side, which is the story as it is and then the outside perspective of that. So that's kind of always my favorite game with this type of story too is like trying to be like,

all right, let's see how much of this is a guy who did research and how much of it is jazz, as we call it. yeah yeah exactly so podcast jazz you know what I'm saying yeah that's yeah I think I know what you're saying people ask you questions people ask you a question you just hit them with a little I do you believe it but actually what you mean is beep beep beep it's psychic bab bab that's it you just got it and that's your answer yeah accept it's psychic I'm horny babap pop okay we got to get in the story here we go so before any of this happened like there's stuff stuff. Whitley Streber talks a lot about stuff that happened in his childhood and stuff that went on

after his child talks about stuff that happened his childhood after his abduction scenario happened. So a lot of the stuff we know about his childhood came after the abduction event that went public. Needless to say, anything we talk about when it comes to his childhood, you mean chronologically? Like, yeah, we don't, didn't learn about his stuff about his childhood until after his book communion came out. So obviously, there's no way to know any of the stuff in his childhood actually happened. just want to put that little stamp of, of, I guess, would have warning ahead of time so that when we go into this, I don't need to consistently go according to him. It was according to him. It was according to him. Obviously, this is going to be through his perspective for this first part of it.

By the way, communion is that one book with that one picture. That that one picture is that one I show on camera. That first up picture. Yeah. Yeah. Hang on. We'll get it. It's the weird. It's like, this is like the type of thing that like when you see it as a kid, it like, stays inside your memory for the rest of your lives. Yes, it's jarring. Everybody knows this picture. Everyone knows this guy. Yeah.

Community and Whitney, uh, Whitley Streber. Visible on our video episodes at where else Patreon.com slash chill, or use your imagination to try and figure out what we're talking about. Or just use Google images, which will give you exactly what you're looking for until it just generates a new thing. Yeah.

So Whitley Streber was born on June 13th, 1945 out in San Antonio. Tonyo, Texas. His father, Carl, was a lawyer and his mother came from the drought family, which was old Texas kind of like bloodline out there. You're telling me there's an old Texas bloodline called the drought family. Dude, there's a, yes. That is fucking ironic.

When we do more Wild West crime, we'll see more of family like that. Not that he came from a crime family. Not to like imply that the drought family is a crime family. They're not. I'm just saying there's a lot of like funny names Southern bloodline family. Cartoonishly cowboy last names like this. I mean, Littleberry shoot will always point to him. He was a real person with that actual name.

The mom, name him Littleberry. That's the part that I'm like trying to make happen in my head. Little Burry. Little Burry. Little Burr. What? I don't think like, littlebury. Littlebury.

Shout out to Kentucky Cannibal series. Great time. He grew up Catholic, went to Catholic high school. And from early on showed a real interest in dark stories, things that people would see as the edges of what most people considered popular or normal for that time. Like Batman versus Superman? Yeah, exactly.

Dawn of Justice. Yeah, that's Zach Snyder's version of the Justice League. Yeah, exactly. He went to the University of Texas at Austin, graduated in 1968. Excuse me. Edit that out team.

And that same year, studied at the London School of Film Technique in England. After school, he moved to New York, got into advertising, and was apparently pretty good at it. He rose to vice president at one of the firms he worked for, but the writing, but wanting to write kept calling him. And so in 1977, he left advertising entirely and became a full-time author.

And what followed was a genuinely impressive horror career. His first major novel, The Wolfen, came out in 1978. It's about a pack of ancient, highly intelligent predators. They descend from Canaan, it's kind of werewolf, obviously stuff that have been hunting humans in New York City for centuries. The premise came partly from his own experience. walking through Central Park at night and being followed by a very strange pack of dogs, he said. It got a film adaptation in 1981.

Then in 1981, he published The Hunger, which was a vampire novel that was adapted into a film in 1980. I know that I was going to say, yeah, the hunger is a known commodity. Absolutely. Yeah, a film in 1983 that was starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon. This is Catherine Deneuve, right? And that's how you say that. If you haven't seen the film, people say, I haven't seen it. of them but people seem to like it it seems like mostly people enjoy it this is an interesting movie

that's worth checking out even if you don't know shit about it and you just like vampires why would you say that why would you recommend it just a good movie it's just kind of an out there film with like you know like david bowie's kind of an out there guy susan sarandon's kind of out there like that those types of actors it's like richard e grant or you know some gary oldman it's that type of energy uh tony scott directed it his this was his feature debut actually and it has that early 80s kind of art house aesthetic going from from what I've looked at pictures a lot of shadow batmosphere that kind of thing people like I said yeah used you're saying and other people that I read say it's a good movie and it just gives you an idea about the quality of

his source material in a way because this is from streamers book he followed those with more horror work through the early 80s by the mid 80s he was a well-known name in the genre obviously he wasn't Stephen King famous uh he was still movies Yeah, he's still respected, commercially successful, and he was considered someone who understood how fear actually kind of worked in that industry. This matters because skeptics will later point to his background and say, well, of course, a horror novelist would come up with vivid alien abduction story. Admittedly, I was thinking that I was absolutely like, this seems perfect for this guy. Exactly. Correct. And hang on to that. I don't want you to let go of that thought, obviously. And it is, it is fair to bring up and we'll get to it. But the flip side is.

equally, equally worth worth holding on to. Streber was someone who understood, obviously narrative. It makes communion actually a pretty good

read for the fact that he just knows what he's doing when he's writing. Yeah, his prose is not bad. Yeah, like unlike last week's fucking dickhead

of a subject who can barely like, I don't even think he wrote it. I think he dictated it to another guy who couldn't write, which is so crazy. Well, in every aspect of this, like going public

with an alien abduction story during this wasn't any good move for his career. He didn't he wasn't writing the book communion while coming up with like there wasn't like he went public and then he's out of money. His last three books haven't been hits. He needs to do something new with his career. Yeah, nothing like that at all. No, no, no.

Because the alien abduction thing happened in 1987. So it was just a few years out from the movie happening and all this stuff. And people who knew Streber described him as intense and deeply intellectual. He read widely was interested in philosophy and consciousness and the nature of perception. And he was someone who meditated quite often. There was a contemplative, like, streak in him, quote, unquote, that people that were friends with him called that sat like alongside his commercial horror work, people say, that he was like, The Wolfin is essentially a novel about what happens when you realize you're not an apex

predator. The hunger is about the particular loneliness of immortality. They come from a mind, like people say that in these movies you can see his philosophical thoughts and experiments being done through his work. It's exploring these concepts through popular medium. There's a lot of good authors typically do. And there's one more detail about his pre-visitors work worth, I think, flagging of this too.

In his novel Cat Magic, written before the December 1985 incident, he included descriptions of mysterious small beings. Later, he acknowledged this and said these figures seem to be an, quote, unconscious rendering of the visitors, end quote, written before he consciously knew they might be real. And you can read that as a vivid imagination bleeding into the experience or something stranger. It is interesting. It's also like signs of his writing style present in his mythology of aliens that he's presenting

if you want to be skeptical. I did not mean to put on my glasses with such dickery at that moment. But I just saw that they were there and I needed them. So I put them on. I'm sorry. No, you're fine. He had a wife named Anne in the 80s, things just from all my research. that I could figure out.

Things seemed to be going well for them. Books were selling, film adaptations, raised his profile. That's big money, bro. Yeah. He was big and good money. And then December, 1985 arrived and then everything changed.

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Thank you again to Factor for sponsoring today's episode. And we're going to take our time because the texture of his experience is what imprints on the UFO lore overall as history moves forward. He described something visceral, very specific and genuinely strange in ways that might seem familiar to a lot of people who listen to the show and wholly interesting and unique, especially for the time that this happened. So let's walk through it. Day after Christmas, 1985,

Streber is at his cabin in the Hudson Valley with his wife, Ann, and their young son. They've been doing normal holiday things, skiing, you know, all that other usual stuff that you do when you have money and you have a place you can go out to the Hudson Valley for holidays to enjoy. And that night, Streber goes to bed. At some point during the night, he wakes up or thinks he wakes up. He brings up this distinction and it becomes incredibly important. later because one of the central tensions in his account is exactly where the line sits between

waking and dreaming, that hypnagogic state where you're almost asleep but not fully asleep. And in that between state, something that happened to his body and something that happened to his mind shocked him. He'd struggle with that distinction too for years in a lot of his writing of like he wasn't, it's, the hypnagogic state is weird. And as I've meditated, I've become more aware of the hypnagogic state as it's happening. Can you explain that in a like way a fifth grader could understand? The hypnagogic state is that point where you're slipping into unconsciousness when you're falling

asleep. And when I notice it, it's often my eyes are closed and I'll come to the realization that I'm like with closed eyes, I'm seeing shadows of images like buildings or a tree line. And I can see often like a white dot out there looks like a star and I'll all of a sudden become kind of aware that I'm like, oh, I'm seeing images. In the minute you focus on that, it all just fucking fades away and you kind of come back to being awake. It's a weird state where I'm there.

I know exactly what you're talking about. I've been there. Yeah. I feel like when you're at a sleepover and then like some guys like, you know what I mean? And then you're like at the like dishwasher with your half and you're like having a family. And you're like, everybody's like, what do you talking about? I don't know. Yeah, you went out of it.

And he's like, you don't, yeah, exactly that. That's a great, that's a great way to put it to. Because for him, when he talks about this event, what he initially remembered was fragmented, strange images, a feeling of disruption during sleep. And he said he woke up the next morning feeling off in a way that he really couldn't put a name to. And in the days that followed, his behavior became increasingly erratic. He became short-tempered, frightened without knowing why, paranoid.

And he described it later as feeling like his personality had simply evaporated. And that's, yeah, exactly. It's a weird way to word it. It is weird. Yeah. What? But it's also a way someone dealing with trauma might word something before they even have the words to describe the trauma they went through.

When your brain, for survival sake, put something in a blackout memory, you know, like just like completely blocks it out. It happens during childhood. trauma a lot. Your brain will, but those emotions from going through it still sit in you. Like that doesn't go away. And so your brain tries to figure out a way to express why you're feeling these weird

traumatic feelings and emotions. Alex, you're nodding away. I'm not trying to like, if you had something to say, no, no, I just,

I really understand what you're talking about. And I like, this is very like, sort of, I, I've had things that make me empathize with. this. I guess I don't know like this mind state. He's very recognizable to me. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And as he describes it, it's super, super recognizable to me. The reasons are the fragmented

memory for like a really traumatic period of time, like you will have a fragmented memory of that. Hypervigilance is something that he also describes heavily. Emotional dysregulation is something he talks about pretty heavily as well. For him, it was a certainty that something terrible happened to him combined with the inability to remember. it clearly that just kept him on edge. And his wife, Anne, was there to see all of it. She saw the man that she married kind of coming apart at the seams. And she didn't really know what to do about it. But most importantly, she did not dismiss it. She took it seriously, even when it was frightening and destabilizing their relationship together. But her staying, I think,

was one of the main factors that he was able to get the story out there if we take it as true. Without Anne, there might not have been the book Communion. And without her kind of steady, rock, like rock steady present, uh, try that again, without her rock steady presence and her willingness to engage with what was happening with Whitley, Streber might have buried the whole thing. Uh, and it wasn't until months later in March of 1986, two months before I'm born, that Streber underwent hypnotic regression. The sessions were conducted by Dr. Donald Klein at New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center with UFO researcher, Bud Hopkins, also present during this.

This is right during the time, but Hopkins is doing his whole thing. And it's a fairly high profile guy kind of, right? Like this particular section of, of, uh, what I mean is like they're, they're thinking to themselves, oh my God, this is the Whitley Streber, right? Like the writer. Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right.

So it's like kind of like he wants to. get involved because he's fucking bud hopkins you know what i'm saying but hopkins being there as well also causes issues in in just being able to trust the hypnotic regression which we will talk about right right um but what came out under hypnosis was very detailed as most are extremely specific and very strange it goes that he remembered waking to a sound a humming or whooshing sound coming from somewhere in the house then figures were in his bedroom, small figures standing near the bed. He described at least four distinct types of beings, which is one of the things that

makes his account unusual compared to other abduction scenarios. Most abduction narratives involve one type of entity, and the encounter follows a very, fairly predictable script. Streber's account was messier, more layered, and it had a quality of chaos and confusion to it that other abduction scenarios didn't seem to have. And I think that messiness is something we're going to be paying a little bit more attention to and why his story is so important. The first types were small, roughly three and a half feet tall, wearing curved caps or hoods with masks over their faces. They add a robotic quality to their movements, Streber described, as though they were running through a program rather than acting with individual will.

The second type of being were taller and slender with distinct blue coloring, large, dark, slanted eyes that had a kind of fragility to them that the other ones didn't seem to have. And the third type were more robust, wearing blue uniforms, physically larger and sturdier, less frequently described, but still present within his scene. And then there was the being. The one Streber kept coming back to the entity whose face is on the book that I just. showed. Mr. Peepers is what I call it. Mr.

Peepers is his name. I call it. Mr. Peepers. Long, thin face, the enormous black eyes, skin color of gray. You know,

later on he would go on describe the skin color as tan or more brown colored. And Streber described something in the face that he found striking. A certain quality he associated with femininity

and an impression of extraordinary age, which is something Chris Bledso describes with his encounter with the white lady. A smooth, beautiful old lady. Just to be exactly. He just, Whitley Streber described it as something that's like feeling of ancientness.

That's been around for a very, very, very long time. And when Streber looked into those eyes, he described a penetrating intelligence of a kind he could not categorize. Something that he didn't describe as hostile per se, just completely, totally present, just neutral. Other is another way he. puts it. He goes, he goes and describes what it wasn't, not warm, not cold, not hostile, not welcoming. The way I would describe what he says is neutral. And then what happened next, according to his account

under hypnosis, was that he was taken, physically removed from his bed and transported somewhere outside the cabin, some kind of structure in the woods, possibly a craft, we don't really know, possibly something more like an enclosed space. The environment was close and confining from his house. there was a smell to it, a slight scent of cardboard, which is such a weird, specific odd detail that I just don't know what to make of it. Honestly, because maybe it's like one of those spaceships that you built when you were a kid that you like crawled in. That was like little book. Yeah, that's what they took them to. Their little cardboard spaceship in the woods near as house.

They have like strings that they like whisper and they like can communicate with like cans on strings and stuff. Yeah, they got it rains. They're like so fucked. Yeah. Come in glitclarp. We've got them. We got some centipedes coming in. We got them.

We got about 14 centipedes in here and a couple spider webs. I got a big red rash on my leg, please. I'm going to call my mommy. I also don't know. Like in any other abduction scenario, the smell of cardboard has never been described. So it's just like a weird little detail that I don't even, I'm not even 100% sure exactly the smell. I was about to say, I'm not sure if you asked me what cardboard smells like I could nail it down. Surely I must have smelled it at some point.

But like, I feel some cardboard, you know what he's talking about. That's a smell. I can tell you what it smells like. I understand cardboard. I understand the smell of cardboard, but I'm just saying there's lots of aspects of that. That was a great line, actually. I understand cardboard. You know, I get what they mean by cardboard.

I'm just saying, I don't know what. Like, Brimstone also is another one. Like, is it supposed to be the creature that smells like an organic cardboard? Are they saying they actually smell that they're surrounded by literal cardboard? Yeah, I don't know what. just smelled like cardboard is what he said when he went in there i don't i guess it's like the area but most of the time the aliens smell like piss basically like they just smell like pee right like like everybody's just like not talking about it because they can't they're psychic but they're

talking like they're thinking of themselves they feel like piss yeah these guys smell like piss now they maybe that's why they've been they covered themselves in x body spray and the combination makes it smell like cardboard anyway bizarre inside the space that he was brought He was then placed on a surface and subjected to an examination. His accounts of this are invasive. And Streber described them with like that raw honesty during the hypnosis thing. Very much describes and this is where he was probed anally comes from during this entire process. And he was very embarrassed by the whole thing.

He was restrained when he was brought in there. But not by any physical things. More that he had a sense of being held in place and he could not move. like I guess like psychically being held down. Like he just couldn't. He just didn't. Yeah, his body was not under his control. No matter what he wanted to do, he couldn't control his body.

Interesting. While he was laying there, the beings began working around him. And at some point, he looked around the space and saw among the observers a face he recognized an old friend who he would later learn had died three months before this event. Yeah, exactly. Wait, what? Literally. He hadn't seen in a long time. Physically.

He was present. He was physically present in a long time. He was physically present in this examination room. What is he? And then he would learn after this that the guy was dead before. The guy had died. And it wasn't a dream. It was just he met him at an afterlife.

No. I think he's saying that he got abducted. Yeah, I think he's saying that like this, there's some spiritual component to this. I guess is like what he's trying to hint at. Like the guy didn't go missing, right? He just died. Yes. It's interesting listening to Streber now because, hang on.

My throat is like really scratching. Hang on. It's interesting listening to Streber now in interviews because he very much lands on the side of like, he doesn't know if these things really exist in a place where time is as we understand it and they may be coming in and out of like narrow time. And maybe this thing where he sees this person, maybe he wasn't like a spirit or dead, but he sat outside of time for those moments or something. I don't really know.

and he's really to say he doesn't really know either. Yeah, I read comic books. I'll buy into this. I mean, dude. Yeah, it's funny how much comic books have taken and adapted a lot of this. They're just a great way to help understand the Gaga, go-goo shit everybody says. You know what I mean? It actually all starts making sense when you start reading like multiverse like really helped.

Multiverses like really helped the general public understand about dimensions and shit like that really did it got them interested in it and like i don't know it's cool yeah it's fascinating um he also described physical contact with the beings when one touched him he said he noticed that the hand had a distinctly organic smell to it a slight sourness like an organic cardboard he described it as a slight sourness with an undertone of cinnamon that's what my watch band smells like after I walk several miles. Hey, perfect. So you know exactly what he's talking about.

Yeah. I don't know what the fuck that smells like, to be honest with you. Sour smell with cinnamon undertones. The coveralls or clothing the beings wore had that same fence faint scent of cardboard on them. The environment felt enclosed but not quite solid as though the walls were somehow permeable. Sounds were muffled. His own body felt both present and distant at the same time. time and then he said there was the fear.

Streber described the terror of that night as something beyond anything he had ever encountered in his life or in his fiction. This is a man like he goes on to talk about how he goes on. I'm a master of horror. It goes on. He talks about how he spent his career writing about fear and horror and all this stuff. But the thing he felt that night had no words for it. He calls it primal, physical in a way that nothing else was, a fear that like shook

him to his core. Does he think it was like, like artificial? Like it was like like put upon the way he describes it is like almost instinctual like an animal coming across a predator that knows it's a predator and see more prey. Something you just have no shot against. I'm missing part of our food chain that we didn't know about. In a way, you know, yeah, I guess it's a good way to put it. It's like if there was something that could kind of like present that fear to to you. And that, you know, to his credit, he doesn't like make himself brave in this moment either he never makes himself brave in these stories he said he describes it as being terrified helpless and that's it that he could do nothing about it the december 26th event was also not his final one in the weeks and months that followed

more incidents happened on march 15th 1986 streber reports reported waking to a piercing sensation in his shoulder when he opened his eyes and saw three small figures in blue standing motionless beside his bed, he tried to move. He tried to reach for the lamp and found that his body, much like last time, was completely paralyzed. A tall, slender entity approached nearby. Its large eyes were fixated upon him with what he described as total attention. Then they were gone and he could just move again. The room was empty and he was just left not knowing what the fuck that was about. There's also a dimension to these encounters that Streber was remarkably open about and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable,

which is the sexual component of these. And not in the way that we talked about last time with our, with our last topic of conversation. Alien doinker. Yeah. Well, you know, no alien doinker clear plastic eye heels in that kind of like, you know,

tabloid-esque nature. Yeah. But like he described a physical intimacy with a female entity, the one whose face ended up on communion. And he wrote about this with the same kind of honesty, I guess, that he brought with everything else he talked about. And it did add like another layer of confusion to an already very confusing set of experiences.

He also goes on to say in the book, he doesn't claim to know what any of it meant. He doesn't claim that there's a hybrid breeding program and that they're making his kids or anything. He's simply just saying what he remembered and leaves it at you to like, this is what happened. It's up to you to decide because I don't know what the fuck any of this means. Makes things easier also just in general as a writing practice, to be honest. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can also look at it in that way, though. Like, yes, correct.

He said that the aftermath of these lasts for months. Streber described a persistent feeling of being watched, difficulty falling asleep, paranoia that crept into his everyday life, that he would lie in bed at night, unable to tell whether shadows moving in his room were just his mind or if they were just more creatures that were coming to get him. He was very, very nervous. They really, really kind of left a mark on him. And one last thing about this, his account that I want to.

flag is that Streber made a deliberate choice in the language that he used that he didn't call these beings aliens he didn't call them extraterrestrials he simply referred to these things in all of his books as the visitors and he does that purposefully because he doesn't claim to even know if these are truly ETs or if these are things beyond our like our own consciousness or if they're things beyond our understanding and reality he hesitates to slap a label on these things and I do appreciate him for that. It does leave, it leaves it open to the possibility that there just might not be a name for these things.

An alien is basically a synonym for a visitor, but still. Right. Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, fair. True. But in,

in public consciousness, when people hear the word alien, they think of out of space. It's like UAP. It's like UAP. versus UFO basically at this point. Exactly. So now,

Streber is sitting on these experiences. He's a writer. And is his first instinct to, to he claims is to just like process these things through writing them out. Not a novel way, but more journalistic, just kind of like getting them out on paper in a therapeutic way to help get these kind of things moving. Before he wrote anything, he did seek professional help. And this is where the hypnotic regression sessions with Dr. Donald Klein happened in March of 86.

Now, at the time, Klein was a respected psychiatrist. He wasn't a UFO researcher in any way. And his involvement gave the process some clinical grounding. Bud Hopkins, who at this point was already a well-known figure in abduction research and author to the 1981 book Missing Time, was present here. And his involvement would later become a point of serious controversy. And we'll get to that in the skeptical section toward the end of the episode. Streber also submitted to an extraordinary battery of tests. Two lie detector tests, including one demanded by the BBC, voice stress analysis, a cat scan, two separate,

tests for temporal lobe epilepsy, multiple MRIs, psychiatric evaluations, and on. Dude, how many book copy? How many copies did he sell? This was like, this man went through, they put, they went through a lot of testing. This seems to be a big deal. Yeah. The man was like, I said, he was like, it comes off as a guy who's like trying to prove he's at least not lying about what is believed happened, whether his mind is creating the, the actual scenario to hide something else or whatever. We don't know.

I appreciate that he doesn't seem to have a specific outcome in mind. Yes, exactly. That then, but it's after all this stuff, he wrote the book. He didn't write the book until after all this stuff. He came out with his story and he was already a famous writer guy. It'd be like if Stephen King was like, I got abducted. Yeah, yeah, kind of. It would be if he came out and talked about being annually probed and like all this stuff.

It would be. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So then he wrote the book Communion, which was published in February, 1987, and hit the culture of the UFO world hard. It spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list with both the hardcover and paperback reaching number one. It sold more than two million copies. It got translated into a dozen languages. And it did something no previous abduction account had managed at this point. It broke through to a mainstream audience in a way that even Betty and Barney,

Hill story never broke into. And a huge part of that actually was because of the cover of the book, the painting of that creature that's a dude. Yeah. It's jarring. Like, it's jarring. Yeah.

Yeah. The painting was by a man named Ted Seth Jacobs and Streber worked with Jacobs directly the same, like almost in a way that a witness works with a police sketch artist. He was very much guiding the painting through successive corrections according to memory that he had. Yeah. Yeah. Eyes, you know, he had had the eyes adjusted multiple times. Skin toad shifted to a more tan brown the way he actually remembered.

If you look at the book, like the alien isn't a gray, it's shaped like a gray, but the skin is actually brown. Yeah, he looks like a dinosaur man or something. He looks like a little bit. You can see a little reptilian there. Yeah. When this was all said and done, Streber says this is exact, that this picture is exact to what he remembers.

Jacobs later described the process as working with Streber as intense as well. That he was just very demanding. He was also reliving encounters and it was very stressful for Streber to go through this stuff sometimes. And you just, in my opinion, it was perfect. It came out.

If this is exactly the way it looked well done. Also, like you said, it worked as a cover. That thing grabbed attention. It's like a YouTube thumbnail. It's like fucked up looking. And that picture is the,

is the reason we have a visual shorthand for gray aliens and pop culture now. 100%. Yeah. You know, everything from the costumes to X-Files episodes and so on. The public response when this book came out was split almost instantaneously. On one hand, readers wrote to Streber in enormous numbers, tens of thousands of letters in the early years, eventually reaching something like 200,000, I think was his last approximate count. God damn. All from people

saying their own impossible memories were in that book. People who were reading the book and were flabbergasted that some other person had gone through something like this, that they, uh, never shared with anyone before because it was too traumatic for them. For a lot of those people, communion was the first time they'd seen their experience reflected back at them. And even like, you know, whether you believe this is real or not,

like just even in therapy, this is so valuable when you realize you're not alone, you are, you've other people gone through something similar to you. There is a weird relief and sense of, and a feeling of a sense of isolation that does alleviate, when you feel that. And I can't imagine if people did truly go through something

like this and they read a book about it there must be the weirdest feeling of relief knowing that maybe you're not insane people know what you people there's something that can be done or some some thought that's been given to this yeah exactly uh and many of them in the letter you know told's head said like they had never told anyone and obviously on the one hand the literary and scientific establishments were largely hostile critics questioned his motives his mental health his methods the los angeles times would reclassify his follow-up book called transformation as fiction moving off the nonfiction bestseller list, though it's still charted on the fiction side

when they moved it as well. Yep. That seems kind of wild. Yeah. It's just, you know, it's weird. Pretty damning, yeah. Yeah. Those reader letters are still worth bringing up, though,

because they're genuinely unprecedented. Like before communion, people who'd had abduction type experiences were kind of isolated. The only community, I guess, are framework you could say that they have. was places like Mufon or maybe if you knew how to get in touch with like J. Allen Heineck in the past like those are really your only outlets but like you were going to be like off to coast to coast at best like you know there wasn't you're going to crazy boy show yeah yeah nobody's going to take you seriously at all then they read this

book on their own stuff and then obviously the ever relief kind of happened as we talked about the 1989 film adaptation directed by Philip Mora and starring Christopher for walking and lindsay crouse is also something that happened afterward streber wrote the screenplay for that himself and chose to work with more independently rather than through a major studio specifically because he was afraid hollywood would turn it into a special effects horror film rather than a character study uh did you see have you seen the movie no i never thought to it never occurred to me to yeah yeah i don't i i've obviously have not seen it either maybe it's something we can watch on rotten popcorn. It's probably like pretty weird and good, maybe a little bit if it's got those actors in

it. Well, people say Waukin's performance in it is extremely weird. And depending on who you ask, it's either like a genuinely strange and underrated piece of work like you just said, Alex, or just Christopher Wacken being maximum Christopher Warkin through the whole movie. It sounds like a really fun time. That's great to me. It's going to be a choice. Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be a choice. But we love this man. I love his choices. And for the most part, when people talk about Whitley Streber.

communion book they kind of treat it like it's the whole story like he had an experience or these experiences wrote a book and then they cleaned his hands and that was that but for streber publication was kind of just the start of it all the visitors didn't stop showing up after the book came out if anything the engagement with them seemingly deepened transformation the next book came out in 1988 just a year after communion and picked up where the first book left off where communion was more about dominated being dominated by terror confusion etc transformation started exploring something different for Streber. A shift in his emotional relationship with the experience is extremely palpable.

And while I'll say I read about half the book, I did not finish the book because that's not what this episode is going to be. It's not all about his entire series of books here. He basically goes on and described learning to manage the fear in the book, not in like work work alongside it. He developed a phrase for what he was doing, walking, quote unquote, walking the razor's edge between fear and ecstasy, which is not really a phrase as much as it is just a fucking sentence. Very cool, man.

Yeah, like, metal, dude, like, sweet, bro. I wrote that on my folder one time, I think, back in high school, dude. This is the one that LA Times a decision to classify transformation as fiction is also worth just, again,

re-highlighting for a moment because this is where Strieber's work really puts his first account into doubt. Because this is where you see world building, I would guess, a call it in a light way, start happening.

where if the first book really does come across as hymns like these are my experiences i don't know what to make of them they're weird they happen i got tested nine billion times before i even wrote this book this one almost feels like anne rice yeah at least we're getting there not fully anne rice yet but we're like working our way in that way right um it really just didn't fit neatly into like the tone that communion had set like it wasn't fiction i guess in a conventional sense but he because he was insisting that all of this was true. Sure. But it like,

it really lived on the uncanny middle space of like what is possible. And I guess the best way to put it for UFO enthusiasts like me is the second book is where the woo starts showing up. Yeah. Where what is this? Is this really reality? Is it like a consciousness thing? Is it something outside of our understanding?

And his relationship with these beings, the fear coming away is more him being able to try and like, understand what these, like what these things are. That's, I guess, what like the best way I can put it. If you got to write more, right? You're going to expand and build the lore, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Then in 1997, he published the secret school, which reached back into his childhood in San Antonio in the 1950s. And this is what I was talking about early on. Is this right. He finds out he's an alien and he's going to alien school. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Is that we learn about his childhood.

He delivers a letter to him. Yeah. Yeah. A parrot. Uh, yeah, this is like 10 years. After communion come out, that's when we start learning about his childhood in the 1950s. Through meditation and reflection, he described recovered memories of being taken as a child to a school in the wild, almost basin, a school that was run by non-human intelligences,

where he and other children were taught a series of secret lessons. I was just joking, okay? I was just kidding. All right. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that. I was just joking about him going to alien school. I didn't mean he was literally going to go to alien school.

That's why I had to keep moving because it was alien. He believed that all this was happening. And it was all being preparing him up all because to prepare him for everything that came later in his life. Recovered childhood memories are even more contested territory than recent recovered memories from hypnosis. And we should hold on to that carefully as we move forward. This is what I mean by like we move into fictional territory because there is a layer of this that is communion. that is fascinating. And I wonder how much of this is him trying to make reason,

like create a reason why this stuff happened to him. And the brain is like, well, you went to childhood alien school. Like rationalizing a trauma. As he's meditating and doing these more inward focusing like things, his mind is creating reasons that all of this happened. I'm not saying that he definitely got abducted,

but the tone shift from communion to literally the rest of, of his work is like him going from an author who is just telling you what happened to him to an author being an author again and he's doing like here's my story yeah he's doing yeah and it's weird because I there is a part of me that thinks that there is truth to the events or something happened to him it doesn't know what it is it almost discredits the original but it's also sad because it's like maybe he just likes kind of taking it away from being something that unexplainable that happened to him and filling in the blanks right yeah and he talks about in his interview to how like when communion was being written he was in the middle of writing a political thriller

that he never finished he gives it he's talked i forget the title of it but he's talked about in interviews and stuff and he's never gone back but part of me can be like well yeah brother because communion sold two million copies yeah there's also that part of me it's like why would you go back if your best selling book is about aliens and your experience with them you got a movie bro yeah to go back um again that's what so frustrating right is like it muddies it immediately because a Anyway, I would recommend reading communion if you're, if you're interested in the UFO lore because I'm not sure I can completely say for certain nothing happened to him. It's kind of traumatic happened to him. It's kind of different though than like selling out in the way a lot of other guys do where they just start writing fake stuff because this is almost like he decided to turn it into like part of his verse or something.

You know what I mean? It's like weird. That's exactly correct. Yes. That's how it feels to me is like he took this weird thing and then he's like, well, I'm going to bring it into my horse. world. Again, he's done movies before this, successful books before this. He, you know, this is something he's good at. But it was through meditation and reflection and inner work that he discovered these hidden memories of his childhood where he was being brought out and being taught

things. Then in 2001 came the book, The Key, which might be the strangest book of all of them that he's written. What he basically says on June 6th, 1998, while on a book tour in Toronto, Streber says a stranger knocked on his hotel room door at 2.30 in the morning. The man never gave his name. What followed was a conversation Streber initially thought lasted about half an hour, but once he just transcribed his notes, realized it must have run at least two hours. The stranger who's Streber would call the master of the key covered the Holocaust, climate change, the nature of human consciousness, the afterlife, and the

possibility of building machines capable of housing human souls the day the earth stood still like what are we talking about here master of the key like pollution like uh the conversation completely reads like fiction throughout the whole thing um the stranger said among other things that mankind is trapped and that he wanted to help us like spring the trap the key the book of the key is genuinely hard to categorize because it's not really about aliens. It's more about something weirder and larger and harder to discern, honestly. Like, because it's a heady piece.

It's about, again, this is where he goes. It's like the matrix kind of a little bit. It does. It's like that kind of weirdness. It very much in my mind represents where Streber was heading, like from this point on in like where he's trying to figure this shoot out. Um, because he's now this, the key, the key and the master of the key is him. fully moving away from the question of whether aliens are physically real and completely

pivoting towards questions about the nature of consciousness and reality itself. And that sounds like the Chulminati podcast, if I'm being honest. But that's what's the aspect of it, I get. Because that's what happened to me, like when it comes to like researching the stuff and looking into it, you know, initially I believe, you know, you start as believing their physical things coming to. and they still may be, but like the more you look into it, the more you follow paperwork or follow studies and whatever, you're like, I don't know if these things are even physically real

or if they're just sitting and operating in a realm of physics and science and understanding and maybe consciousness, whatever you want to fucking call it that we don't understand. Sorry, Jesse, you're going to say something. I think there's just, it's, it's interesting to see the shifts in the way abduction stories go in that when you look at abduction stories, it's always the first bit is it's terrifying, it's scary, these aliens are doing whatever.

And there's another layer above that, which is the aliens talk to me. They've communicated this message. And this message is always, without fail, we're here to help guide humanity. Humanity is going through some problems or whatever, and we think you could be better.

And to me, very similar to the idea of like, are they even real man? Like maybe they're interdimensional. There's there's a bit here that I think is what we want aliens to be about rather than what aliens would be about because the idea that 99% of the stories we talk about, some aliens like humanity has lost its way. We must guide ourselves back.

It seems to me like that's what we. deep down believe as people that like we're all existing in a world that is not what we want it to be. It's less than ideal, I would say at this time. Yes. Yeah. But I think it always, I think it always, there's always been corruption and greed and war and hate. And like there's this future Star Trek goal that I think Gene Ronbury nailed of like, this is what we would love to be like. But right now we are not that.

And I think these aliens coming in and being like, hey, you guys. we need to make some changes. Show out, do you make changes. Speaks to, I think, a lot of who we are. Rather,

like, even, even, let's just say that none of these are real. Let's just say, I'm not saying it. Oh, yeah,

please. It's just a sad experiment. It's a hypothetical. I think that, no matter what, the takeaway should be, that deep within everyone is this capacity for like,

we need to be better. And the aliens, something coming from the outside, like a therapist coming from the outside in, and seeing the problems and being like, we can help you change that is comforting. It's something that deep down psychologically we desire. We're even regular old religions that don't, you know, like it's not that's not that crazy that aliens go into spirituality,

because in a way for a lot of people, there is like a meaning to it and there is like a sort of that role is served. But also like religion as a sort of like anthropological thing is like sort of like a life manual that's practical as well as it is spiritual. And I think like, you know, that's kind of fine. Like I don't know where that message is coming from, whether it's coming from within us or literally from Jerry the alien or whatever. But like, yeah.

Well, that's what I find interesting too, right? Like the more I explore this shit, whether aliens or consciousness, the more of the answer that I keep getting back is the dumbest, simplest, simplest answer of all time, care and love for each other. and just like be there for each other. Sure. That's it.

Like that's you like no matter how deep I go in whether it be alien abductions, that be the message that get back, psychedelic experiences and the message that people get back, therapy, whatever. The answer is always the same, which is love and caring for each other. And even at the core, like you said, religions.

Like Jesus is a fucking cool ass dude, dude. Like one of the frustrations with Catholicism and one of the reasons I left is because I, you know, I see the teachings of Jesus. And then I see everybody else around me, not following the teachers. Jesus. Richard Osmond spare over here.

Jesus is fucking sick. He's such a cool dude. Like Jesus is a cool guy and he was the same messages. He's a hippie. Yeah, but I think that I think, you know, if, and again, hypothetical. Of course. If they're, all the religions are bogus.

Jesus wasn't a real dude. Aliens aren't real. Spirituality isn't a thing. Whatever. If we ignore all outside factors, then that must mean that deep within all of us is capacity for like being a good person. And so, even in like the darkest scenario where like, we're all we have, I think that speaks a lot to who we are as people. And it gives me a little bit of hope as like, okay, I'm not, you know, I shouldn't be like, man, everyone sucks.

It's like, no, no, no. The world sucks and we're dealing with it. But like inside everyone has the capacity to be good. And I think that says something a lot about like in all these stories across all time, there is a moral that's like, hey, be better, you know, I think it's fine. I like that, which is wild to think about. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating.

Obviously, through all of this, as is writing, his wife, Ann, was there the entire time. And she was like a full on partner in his work. She curated hundreds of thousands of letters from people who were reporting these experiences. So like a researcher? Like just his partner doing all this. Yeah, I guess like a researcher, also like an assistant manager, I guess you would call her. She would sit there and look for an identify, patterns across many of the accounts.

She and Streber eventually donated significant portions of that collection to the archives of the impossible at Rice University. Oh, which houses it's sick, which houses what is likely the largest repository for first person contact and abduction testimony in the entire world. That's kind of- And also developed her own philosophical perspective on the phenomenon, independent of Whitley's.

She came to see the fundamental division in humanity as being between the living and the dead and believe that the vision was neither natural nor inevitable. What do you mean? Is she Hideo-Kogima? Like, what are we talking about? Spirituality, like, there is no, there is no life and death. Death is just us leaving physical constraints of three-dimensional existence and moving beyond, like, that stuff and moving into a place where there is time

that there is no real separation between life and death. We just see a separation because we are living on linear time, all right which is partially why she thinks and she explains in the book uh or he talks about in the book that he thought that he may have seen his dead friend at that at the uh encounter because okay that explains that okay yeah um this is a relative term but very interesting yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah uh yeah after then uh where is he she yeah she came to that basically decision on her own um her death in all she died though in august 2015 and for him it was a huge loss obviously um not only just him personally, but also the work itself.

She had literally been his other half on this project for decades. And after she died, Streber published the afterlife revolution, which he described as a record of communication from Anne after her death. Now, obviously, whatever you make of that claim, the depth of their partnership and they're just like was really, really deep. And this could just be him processing her death. Sure. Who fucking knows.

Streber also built and maintained unknown country at unknown country.com, which became a hub for experiences and researchers. His Dreamland podcast, originally Art Bell's show, which Streber took over in 1999, has been running for decades and remaining as one of the longest running programs in the field. His website still isn't slick if you go check it out right now. It's still much more of a gathering place for people who take this seriously and want to think it through carefully together.

No, like all this like, just obviously nobody exists in isolation and the people Streber worked with, fought with, and was shaped by, tell you a lot about both the man in the field. He became central to as he moves forward in his career after this. So there's a few key relationships that we need to talk about. Bud Hopkins is the first one. This is the big one. Hopkins facilitated Streber's hypnotic regression sessions. He was already a major figure.

Again, as we said earlier, his 1981 book Missing Time had established him as the primary researcher for people who suspected they'd been taken. He was also outside of UIFology initially, more of a celebrated expressionist artist remember whose work hung in the famous museums like Metropolis Museum of Art, MoMA, British Museum. That's so fucking weird. I know. It's weird. It's like a refresher of like these people had careers before the aliens thing happened to them.

I mean, we on this show have talked about like the guy from Blake 1A2. Like there's other. That's true. Sometimes you just get caught up in it. And it's a passion thing rather than, you know, A job. It's wild style. Hopkins and Streber would be collaborators in the beginning,

and the hypnosis sessions that produced communions or covered memories happened under Hopkins' supervision. The relationship did break apart. By the late 80s, Strieber and Hopkins had gone in fundamentally different directions. Hopkins, along with Temple University historian David Jacobs, developed a theory that the beings were running a biological program, as we discussed, an interbreeding operation aimed at creating human-alian hybrid. It was a physically focused interpretation, extremely clinical, but Streber looked at the same

experiences and saw something that couldn't be reduced to a breeding program. He believed that the phenomenon had spiritual or transformative dimensions that the nuts and bolts framework was missing entirely. This is why I wanted to do Bud Hopkins and Streeper close together. Interesting. Because they same time, similar experiences, wholly different pathways as to what they think this thing is. Solid snake and liquid snake, baby.

Yeah, it's a fault. It's obviously, it's like a fault line in the abduction research that never gets discussed enough because those two parts, even today, don't really intermingle with each other. It's the two cheese steaks. It's Good Burger and Mondo Burger. Yeah. The Hopkins Jacobs framework positions that the experiencer as essentially just a specimen, a subject in their program with no agency in the matter, while Streber pushes towards something

that position the experiencer as an active participant in a contact event that might be about consciousness, an evolution of consciousness, or something we don't even have the language for yet that we are still to this day kind of on the forefront of exploring and trying to understand. In a 1988 interview, Streber accused Hopkins and Jacobs of filtering the experiences of people to fit a predetermined theory. He later said Hopkins had been undermining him for 25 years and after Hopkins death and made public comments critical of his methodology that generated significant controversy in the community. This is the other part about UFO community that fucking sucks.

They're always fighting each other from Mufon to Kufos to like, you name it. They never work with each other. It's like FBI and the CIA. It's desperate. Yeah. Nobody, they all want to be the only ones to figure this out and not work with each other. And it's fucking insane. There's so much access and politics that need to be played because it's all secret.

and like it's so stupid yes yes it's all dumb then we come to another contact jacques valet who is a very different story when it comes to to streber now valet is a french born studied mathematics at the at sorborn uh sore bone got a master's in astrophysics yeah yeah seabol uh got a masters in astrophysics and then moved to the u.s and eventually earned a phd in computer science at northwestern he also worked closely with Jay Allen Heinek on Project Blue Book and built one of the first computerized databases of UFO reports in modern time. His approach to the phenomenon was shaped by his background in folklore and history of science. And he places and placed to this day UFO encounters in a much longer historical context of unusual phenomena, arguing that fairy encounters, religious visions, and modern

alien contact reports share such consistent structural features. that they're probably different expressions of the same underlying phenomena. I kind of like it. That thing is. And this is where I tend to fall. I kind of like it. Yeah. Kind of like it.

They read his books. They're really, really good. His book, Passport to Magonia, originally published in 1969, was his foundational text for his way of thinking. Streber credited Valet with fundamentally changing how he understood his own experiences.

Valet's framework gave him room to think about the visitors as something that might, might not be nuts and bolts extraterrestrial in the conventional sense, but maybe something older, stranger, something way more persistent in human history than the flying saucer narrative allows for. He was like believing the movie rather than thinking about it as anything in science, right? Right. Exactly. The two shared kind of a comfort with the ambiguity that set them apart from the more literal-minded researchers in this field. And again, something we sit with today. A lot of the more people in the Jacques valet field are almost are comfortable with the fact that it's like, we don't know.

We don't know. We're trying to figure it out. We can't say for certain whether this is. Isn't that the point? Isn't that it unknown? But the other side of it is desperate to fit into the nuts and bolts people are desperate to fit all of this into a physical. They're coming from another planet.

They're teleporting, you know, lights years away. And that's where the desperation sits. They want to know which planet. They want to know where. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And maybe there is no, like we'll, we may never, ever. know.

Like, assuming these things are real, we may never fucking really know what these things are because maybe it's impossible for us to understand. Sure. Maybe we just genuinely are not built biologically. Our brains are evolved enough to understand why these things are. Then we have John Mack, who was a Harvard psychiatrist, Pulitzer Prize winner, head of the psychiatry department at Cambridge Hospital, who spent years investigating abduction accounts and published his findings in the 1994 book, Abduction, Human Encounters with Aliens,

and he examined more than 60 cases. Harvard investigated him for it, launched a formal review of his scholarship, and while they ultimately didn't revoke his tenure, the investigation left marks. Mack, like Streber, saw the phenomenon that has having dimensions that went beyond the physical, and like Streber, he paid a real professional price for saying so publicly. And the parallel between them is also just very very, very stark. And then there's Art Bell. If Streber's books gave the abduction narrative literary credibility, Art Bell with coast to coast AM baby, comes in and gives it a bigger boost to the

broadcasting hall. Is it the Lloyd Kaufman of like Chulminati topics? Yes. Strieber was a frequent guest throughout the late 90s and into the 2000s and the two co-authored the coming global superstorm together. Yeah, that's a big coast to coast AM topic. My God, they talk about that often. Bell's audience, millions of people driving trucks, working late night shifts, staying awake until in the dark at 2 a.m. I worked in college. It's just a vibe, man. Yeah.

Yeah. This was exactly the audience that Streber's work resonated with. Coast to coast was a space where strange experiences were taken seriously and where someone like Streber could speak at length without being cut off by a skeptical host calling crazy. It amplified has reached far beyond what the books alone could have done. Put these relationships together. You've got a map of the entire goddamn UFO field today.

Hopkins and the literalists on one side, valet and the interdimensional folklorist, Wu contingent on the other side. Mack trying to bring clinical rigor to something that keeps slipping out of any clinical framework, and then Bell providing the megaphone that brought all of it to a massive late night audience. And Streber moved through all of it,

sometimes collaborating, sometimes clashing, but always following his own read on things, which I do appreciate about him, as he doesn't seem to ever get pulled. He's just like, this is how it is. He's trying to be, yeah, he's trying to be the real deal at the very least. Now we've been inside Streber's experience for a while. Moving with his account, we've gone through all of it.

I want to step back and now we can give the skeptical case its full due as we wrap to the end of this episode because obviously that's just what we do here on the show to the best is our ability. Strieber's story for all its power really has some seams in it that we need to talk about. The biggest one is the method by which his memories were recovered. hypnotic regression, baby. Obviously, you talked about it a million times. Hypnotic regression, despite its popularity and abduction research, is not considered a reliable tool for recovering true memories by the mainstream scientific community.

It's almost as bad as a lie detector, bro. Like, you know what? Yeah. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and most major clinical bodies have been explicit about this. Hypnosis can produce vivid false memories that feel completely authentic to the person experiencing them. And here's why this happens under hypnosis,

a person enters a highly suggestible state, they become more responsive to cues from the hypnotist, more willing to fill in gaps with all this stuff. Again, stuff we've talked about. It's important to say the person isn't lying per se. They genuinely believe what they were calling in the moment. But whether those recollections correspond to actual events is an entirely separate question.

It fails to consider the suggestion of... Exactly. And in Streber's case, the conditions of the session are of a specific concern and because, as we said earlier, Bud Hopkins, a researcher in all this stuff, was fucking present in the room.

Even without a conscious intent to shape things, him being there instantly creates a dynamic where the memories that emerge could be influenced by what is be expected from Bud Hopkins.

You're not just patient and a doctor in this situation. Right, you could be asking questions. He could be... He's literally there tainting it all. His presence alone taints at all. It's not me accusing him of bad faith, it's literally just how

suggestibility in this shit works. What Strieber did do that's genuinely notable, though, is he published the full transcripts of his hypnosis session as an appendix in communities in the book. That means you can read the polished narrative in main

text and then go to the back and see the raw material it was all built from, which again, I appreciate Strieber for doing. When you do that comparison, the transcripts are messier, way more confused sounding, way less narratively satisfying.

Like, they're snippets. If you read them, they're just snippets of him being like, oh, they've got me. Oh, there's something in there, they're,

they're, they're, like, you know, like, it's all disjointed. It's just, a transcript,

though, right? Yeah, it's just the transcript. Do the recordings exist? Uh, I didn't go look, to be honest with you.

I don't, I would love to hear and be like, oh, shit. Oh, fuck. I don't think, they may. I don't,

don't take me for sure. I just read it. I don't know. But yeah, like I said, they're just like messier. Depending on your read, that either means streber shaped chaotic, hypnotic material into a readable account, which is something we do on Chulamati all the time,

adding structure and meaning that may not have always been there. Debateably. Or it means the transcripts capture the raw emotional reality before he found language to put to what happened to him, right? Like, he's through his emotional, the emotional re-experiencing. It's more confusing, but more true. Right.

And both readings are available. Like, and the fact that he gave you the tools to make that comparison yourself. Pretty chill. Right. Pretty chill. Second, sleep paralysis and hypnagogia, which we've talked about a little bit. Neurologist Stephen Novella has pointed out that many specific details in Streber's account,

waking unable to move, sensing presences in the room, experiencing dread and helplessness, seeing shadowy figures mapped directly onto hypnagogia. A well-known, well-documented neurological phenomenon. comment on that occurs in the transition between waking in sleep like sleep paralysis state uh it's not rare somewhere between 80 and 40 percent of people experience at at some point which to me is like a huge fucking gap in numbers but they say experience it at some point i've opened up and like seen a man in my room for a second and then like he wasn't there you know what i mean yeah i've told the story before but when i was younger i think 13 i remember waking up turning over seeing

Jesus turning back over and then double taking because I was like, wait a minute and then he wasn't there. Wait, the Lord. I was like, yeah, no, he's just standing in my room just standing there looking at me in my bunk bed. And I was, I double took and he was gone. I dreamed it, obviously, hypnagogic state. But across human history, it's been interpreted like this state can be used to be interpreted

as demonic attacks or spiritual visitation, alien abduction, et cetera, et cetera. Then there's a third point, temporal lobe epilepsy. brain imaging of Streber showed occasional areas of high signal intensity and his left temporal temporal temporal temporal temporal period suggesting scarring that can be associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. Oh shit, really? Which is TLE for sure. That is not what I expected you to say. Okay.

Yeah, exactly. This produces a genuinely striking constellation of experiences for people who have this. They can include vivid hallucinations, strange smells, formication, that's the crawling sensation on the skin, rapid heartbeat, feelings of rising and falling, intense deja vu, all of these things. A number of these overlap with elements of Streber's accounts. He did undergo testing for TLE in December of 1986,

and Dr. Klein reported that EEG came back normal with no epileptiform discharges. So there's two sides of this. And that's legit. That's like super. That's for legit. You can go see like that all actually happened. Yeah.

He got tested. It came back negative. But then the skeptics like Philip class question the thoroughness of the testing. And the presence of that scarring on the imaging is, uh, is a data point that doesn't simply go away. So we're weirdly sat in this too. It's like there does seem to be scarring that can correlate with it. But it is not a causation of like it's not a hundred percent.

And then the other test came back and gave him no epileptiform discharges. So maybe you got Havana syndrome, bro. Yeah, I don't know. Like we can't. Unfortunately, that leaves us with like we can't do anything about that. Right. It's like we, he would need to have more testing done or something. But the scarring is there.

The scarring on the imaging is still is there. That is there. It is there. Then we have the other problem that we kind of, you brought up immediately. The horror novelist problem. Streber made his living writing, writing, uh, terrifying. writing non-human intelligence, hunting and transforming human beings. His brain was by training, inclination, and profession already stocked with exactly the kind

of imagery that he started seeing as we brought up about in his book cat magic, which predated his first incident with those little beings. Little being showed up in that book. And this is obviously where a skeptic would say that Dreamers fiction is claimed experiences share suspiciously similar imagination and they're not wrong. Then you have the memory inconsistencies. The most notable involves the 1960 University of Texas shooting,

the Charles Whitman massacre. Streber's accounts of whether he was present shifted over time. And after Communion's publication, he provided specific details, including seeing a young boy on a bicycle shot dead. Researchers who checked

found those details didn't match the historical record. An eyewitness memory is famously unreliable even under normal circumstances, but for someone whose entire public credibility rested on the accuracy of his memories. It's not good to have inconsistencies on whether you were present during a massive historical shooting at. I wonder one of the dead people existed. Right.

That's fucking crazy. That's such a bold thing to say if you weren't fucking there. Exactly correct. And then I would say the last problem, which is the most obvious one, evidential problems. Like he has no physical proof. There's no artifact, no samples, no piece of technology, like most abduction scenarios. There's just nothing that can be independently verified from this actually ever happening. Streber saw evidence, submitted to tests, like published his transcript, invited scrutiny,

all the stuff he could do without physical evidence. But at the end of the day, what we just have is one man's account supported by memories that were recovered through a method mainstream science considers unreliable at best. Again, it doesn't make the account false. But it does mean that by the standards we apply, like the case remains unproven and it's worth being honest about that as we always fucking are on this if i get if you convince me that i that you know i saw a celebrity by dressing a guy up like the celebrity and not telling me i still think i saw the celebrity you know yeah yeah exactly uh and like i also just want to be clear as we come

to the end here i'm not like saying the skeptic stuff as an attack on streber either this is stuff that he openly invites he like i said with all his submission to testing talks about a open like he's inconsistent. It's inconsistent. He's scarring on his brain, but he doesn't have epilepsy. Like there's stuff. It's very, very bizarre. So like at the end of the day, where does that leave us?

The easy move with Streber is like to pick aside, right? Like most people do. Either his encounter was real and they took him or he was delusional and dishonest and he made up the whole goddamn thing. But to me, where I personally land is I think if something happened, communion was the most honest presentation of what may actually have happened. And then anything after that, transformation in his books afterward are maybe too fiction for you to like really invest too much time into. I think transformation in the first couple of books may be him trying to, like I said, with his meditation, put a why this all happened and like create a reason by meditating and like creating false memories that he doesn't even realize our false memories, be hypnagogic hallucinations during meditation or whatever.

He could be realized, he could be not realizing he's creating. right and there also comes the point where like this became the defining point of his career can you like what do you do after this this is what you're known for now once you're the alien guy what's up once you made up gray is an anal probing what's up yeah what else is there to do actually right so once you've achieved those heights i think what he wrote is probably false i am i am hesitant to dismiss that something happened to him that was traumatic enough to put him into a weird state of paranoia and him try to work through it. Anything after that, while I may agree with the weirdness of the Jacques valet stuff and

all that stuff, there's no way to know anything he's doing afterward isn't him just exercising strange writing with his own meditative practices. It's weird to say. And I'm curious what you boys think after going through this story. I think he is telling the truth about what he believes occurred. And I think that it's worth judging these people on that and their sanity. And I think that this guy's a rare guy who is 100% sane and also believes what he's saying. And it doesn't seem that interested in whether or not it's true so much as that is what he experienced.

And I don't think that's necessarily bad. I don't think that's necessarily good because he's not trying to do anything. He's just putting out books and talking about what happened to him and not saying it means anything. And to me, like, at the very least, like if you look at somebody like Bill Tompkins, for example, from last week again to bring him up. And this guy, right? Like, I feel like Bill Tompkins represents a lot of the things that are, that are not admirable about this type of guy.

And I think this guy is almost everything that we want in somebody like this, because we already know from being on this show for this many years, that it is impossible to be an alien guy and be credible. Nobody will believe you. You just, you're not going to, it's not going to be a normal fame. It's going to be like with the squirrel on the jet ski on the news, right? So, like, yeah, yeah. you know, if you set aside that absolute disqualification that culturally occurs by literally

everyone, including probably me. Like, I'm not immune to like being like, oh, his alien story, let's see. Right. But this guy is the ideal thing to discover upon looking into story like that. He believes it. He's not whack. And he's doing it from a place of like, you might be a little whack. That's okay. I think he's doing it from a place of like his own interest rather than like his own gain, if that makes sense. Yeah. He's passionate about this. Well, yeah.

Yeah, like, I'll read this last bit that I've ran out here. Is that like, I know, to go back to Streber's famous quote that we must learn to walk the razor's edge between fear and ecstasy, obviously. What in the fuck does that mean, though, bro? I don't know. But I think it's a great, it's a kind of a good way to look at this stuff, though, like this walk the line between like fascination and skepticism. And like, you know, in the decades.

Since communion has been published, we have to be honest, the conversation around UAPs has shifted pretty dramatically, even since we've been doing the show. In surprising ways, I'll admit, yeah. The U.S. government has acknowledged that military pilots are encountering objects that are, like, difficult to explain. Obviously, we have the congressional hearings and stuff, whether you like, not the call, not to do the call to authority, obviously, the appeal to authority, but like, it's not about the government talking about it, but at all, like, how public this conversation has to call.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I know a lot of people are going to think, like, and you're rightfully so, like, come on, man, it was sleep paralysis or whatever. And you're genuinely, maybe it was. It may have been. But if it was, then we still need to explain why sleep paralysis produces such consistent, emotionally devastating, culturally transcendent imagery across thousands of people over hundreds of years who have no connection to each other. Because what you like to know why at least that. Exactly. That's exactly what I have next.

It's like, that's still an interesting question too. And if it was something more than sleep paralysis, well, the universe is just much bigger and stranger and more populated place than we're led to believe. But either way, it's an interesting question. Whether you sit on it is like why the human brain goes back to these images over and over again or there is something that sits outside of our understanding of reality. Both things are interesting enough that we should look into it and research and explore it, whatever that's going to be to you. Like me, the sci-fi fan, right? I obviously want it to be creatures like us from another planet who are exploring with us and want to teach us how to use faster than light travel.

Star Trek. Yeah. But I also like the scientist and the guy who just is interested in finding shit out who likes mystery solved just wants to know the answer regardless. And I don't think it's like something I'm going to avoid if it turns out it's not aliens. Does that make sense? Sure. No, no.

That's exactly. Yeah. If it turns out of not aliens, then what, like I am still fascinated with why that is like, we still, as humans share, this weird imagery, these weird experiences. Because again, over 200,000 letters showed up of people being like, holy shit, I've experienced this. And even if only less than a percent or a percent of them is telling the truth, that's still interesting that these people are having these same experiences.

Definitely. That wraps up our episode on Whitley Streber today, gentlemen. A nice, delightful, even-headed look at a crazy thing. Yeah, absolutely. He's still alive today, you know, doing interviews or, you know, talking about stuff and his experience to this day. He still does the show too, right? Does he still do a show?

Yeah, he still does a show on his own. And you can still write to him and, like, privately, just to share. And he literally says he does his best thing. You get back to every single person that writes to him to the day on his email or his Instagram. So like, and he, that's cool. Like, if you had an experience, you just want to share it with somebody. He's there.

He'll take it. Especially for like an old ass dude. That's pretty lit. Yeah. It's just become his life. Yeah. Jesse, I don't know if we got your final thoughts. What are your final thoughts on this?

guy as we say goodbye. I'm going to propose what I call the Jessica Cox theory. I love it of how this all gets started. I think this man, and I don't necessarily believe this, but I think it's fun and I'm going to go with it. I think this man started running a novel, like a horror novel. And at some point, I engaged this thing. It was like, it's scarier if it's real. And he made it seem like the book was told from the first person like, oh man, this is what really happened. And then it blew up in a way that he's like, oh, no, these people really think this was me. Yeah. Like it was his whole, he set up a whole thing.

And one day he was going to say, oh, that was part of me selling the book. And then he realized, oh, man, that's, I's goofed on that. I guess I'm living this life now. Like, that's, I'd be willing to put that out there is that's what happened. Yeah. I mean, it's, again, it's. possible there's no way to know i think it's i think there's definitely shades of that i i agree with you i fully agree like when the world building there's no way he didn't take a little license with the story i

agree i i agree with you i i like i said even even comparing the transcript to how he words it you can see his author mind shaping these things into a comprehensive like through line it's cooler he makes it cooler he makes it neater he says beautiful things instead of correct things sometimes etc etc yeah yeah i think that's i think that's true uh but i think at the core of it there may have something And like something weird probably happened to him. And he doesn't really know what to make of it. I don't. Maybe it was a sleep paralysis event.

Like who fucking knows? We don't know. We don't know. I don't think he's being disingenuine when he says he wants to know, doesn't know, and thinks it's something. That's all. If he was a lone individual with a loan story,

kind of like how Bill, what was his name fucking from last week? Bill Tompkins. Bill Tompkins did where like his is clearly an individual super spy story about sex. Chosen one. Horndog. Like if he was a one.

one off kind of guy whose story didn't fit a pattern that would emerge over the decades as time went on from the 80s on. I could throw him away. But there's just something about his experience that is like weirdly fits a pattern, even if the pattern is just a weird pattern, it's there. It's bizarre. But anyway, as always, there's no clean answer at the end of this. That will do it for our episode on Whitley Streber, everybody.

That's a baza much. That's it. Thank you so much for listening. We're off to go to a minisode at patreon. slash illuminati pot as we do every single week. If you want to send us into this ad free or in every other episode, ad free, head over to patreon.com slash juleleini pot. Your support helps us greatly.

And hey, leave us a review wherever you are, because that also helps us a great amount. Thank you. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. We love you. See in the minisote, cutie pies. Yeah, bye.

Anyway, me and my wife were sitting outside indulging on our porch one night, enjoying ourselves. I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped back inside, and after a few moments, I hear my wife go, holy shit, get out here. so I quickly dashed back outside. She's looking up the sky in the fall.

I look up too, and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky.