Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 33: An Interview with Whitley Strieber: On Communion with Non-Human Intelligences

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

Content Warning: Sexual assault In this episode, I had the pleasure of sitting down with someone that I regard to be one of the best minds and brightest lights in this field, Whitley Strieber. Whitley Strieber is an author of both fiction and nonfiction books, perhaps the most famous of which is his pioneering 1987 book Communion, which detailed his experience of abduction that occurred in the winter of 1985. Since then, Whitley has made many other contributions to the field including his most recent book entitled Them, and the book Super Natural which he co-wrote with Jeffrey J. Kripal, both of which have been referenced several times on this podcast. Whitley is also the host of the long-running Dreamland podcast. You can find links to all of this and more in the episode brief.Whitley’s work has been instrumental to my thinking and growth in this space, and I’m so grateful for both his courage and generosity in sharing his time and his insights.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up Now EPISODE BRIEFMORE FROM WHITLEY STRIEBERBooks by Whitley StrieberDreamland PodcastUnknown CountryFollow Whitley on XMENTIONED IN THIS EPISODETerrible, Glorious, & Useful by Trevor ShikazeBECOME A PATRONPatrons get lots of great perks like early and ad-free episodes, access to the private The UFO Rabbit Hole Discord server, and twice-monthly Patron Zoom calls with Kelly Chase.Memberships start at just $5/month.GET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, this is Marcy. And this is Betsy. And we're from a funny feeling podcast. We're comedians and paranormal enthusiasts who love getting scared. Each week on our podcast, we read and listen to stories from you, the audience, and we have our funny friends come on and tell us their paranormal experiences. Yeah, previous guests include Nicole Byer, Darcy Cardin, Aubrey Plaza, Brian Safi.

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Not to brag, but we have over 400 episodes. so come check us out over at a funny feeling. Don't. Your pants. Coming to you from Spectrovision Radio. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. In this episode, I had the pleasure of sitting down with someone that I regard to be one of the best minds and brightest lights in this field, Whitley Streber.

Whitley Streber is an author of both fiction and nonfiction books, perhaps the most famous of which is his pioneering 1980. book Communion, which detailed his experience of abduction that occurred in the winter of 1985. Since then, Whitley has made many other contributions to the field, including his most recent book entitled Them, and the book Supernatural, which he co-wrote with Jeffrey J. Criple, both of which have been referenced several times on this podcast. Whitley is also the host of the long-running and iconic Dreamland podcast. You can find links to all of this and more in the episode brief. Whitley's work has been instrumental to my thinking and growth in this space, and I'm so grateful

for both his courage and generosity in sharing his time and insights. Before we begin, I want to give you fair warning that what follows is an unfiltered conversation that includes references to multiple entity encounters, abduction experiences, alien implants, the sexual assault and extraction of reproductive material from humans by NIHs, and other topics that many people, even in the UFO community, often find to be taboo for one reason or another. For some people, these sorts of experience or stories are just too bizarre to really be considered credible. Others acknowledge that these kinds of things do happen, but they think that it's counterproductive to talk about them while we're at this stage of disclosure for fear of derailing our progress.

Whatever the reasoning, by avoiding the more challenging aspects of experience or narratives in the larger conversation, an incoherence has leaked into euphology. The growing wave of new people becoming interested in the topic of UFOs in recent years has primarily been fueled by the developing disclosure narrative that focuses on government conspiracies, sightings by members of our military, and claims from people like whistleblower David Grush, who say that the government is in possession. of non-human technology and even bodies. As a result, much of the focus in the world of uphology

has shifted from trying to understand what this phenomenon might be to demanding greater transparency from the government and pushing forward initiatives in Washington, D.C., to change the culture of secrecy that has relegated this topic to the shadows for decades. And that's great. We should be demanding that of our government. The problem is that has a result of this focus

on disclosure, we've significantly narrowed the aperture in terms of the conversations that are being had about the phenomenon in the public sphere, and as a result, we're losing sight of the larger picture. For example, while we focus on crash retrievals and reverse-engineered technology, the reality is that most UFO sightings don't include physical craft, but rather orbs of light or other strange aerial or underwater phenomena that aren't obviously technological in the way that we tend to think of technology. And while we talk about the stigma that pilots and members of our military deal with in reporting UAP sightings and how that can impact their careers, we almost never talk about the profound psychological and spiritual effects that these sightings have on a

certain percentage of those people. While it's clear that there is a real insignificant nuts and bolts aspect to the UFO phenomenon, if you only focus on the nuts and bolts, you're selecting a very narrow band of data and throwing out everything else. And it's very unlikely that that sort of approach is going to result in anything but a warped and woefully insufficient working model of what this phenomenon might actually be. There is a growing tendency in the community to be willing to pay lip service to things like the six-layer model of anomalous phenomena, valet's control mechanism, and the idea that all of this has something to do with consciousness. But stories that actually demonstrate any of those elements of high strangeness tend to be

automatically regarded with suspicion. We demand greater transparency from our government about the presence of a non-human intelligence on this planet, while still secretly suspecting that anyone who claims to have interacted with something weird enough to qualify as truly alien must be mentally ill. I think it's important for us to notice and to begin to question the cognitive dissonance of that and to reconsider how it is that we approach experience or narratives in the UFO conversation. As we explored in episode 24 entitled UFOs and High Strangeness, the Six-Lair model by Valet and Davis, there are a variety of reasons why we should expect. that encounters with non-human intelligences will not fit within our traditional understanding of things.

Non-human intelligences will almost certainly have evolved with radically different senses, histories, cultures, values, and methods of communication that are in commensurate with that of human beings, meaning that our interactions with them will likely be disorienting, bizarre, and nonsensical. Therefore, if we insist on pathologizing and discarding experiences that fall outside of the realm of normal human experience, then we are almost necessarily excluding the best data that we have for understanding NHIs. But this doesn't mean that you need to take everything that Experiencers say as literally true. In fact, assigning a truth value to it is probably counterproductive at this stage of our understanding of what a non-human intelligence actually is. What's important is that we

listen, not just to one particular experiencer or another, but to a wide variety of different experiences. When you do this, patterns begin to emerge, and these patterns can guide us in asking better questions about what exactly is going on here. And if you listen closely to what Whitley is saying, he's not actually making any claims about the nature of his experiences or the thousands of other experiences that have been shared with him over the decades that he's been doing this work. He has ideas. He has hunches. He has working theories. But Whitley will be the first person to tell you that he doesn't know who his visitors are or where they come from or what they want. In fact, at the Seoul Foundation conference this past November, Whitley was the person who boldly stood up

and made the point that we don't even have hard evidence connecting the UFO phenomenon to abductions and other contact experiences. Both phenomena suggest that there is a non-human intelligence. present on this planet, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they have the same origins. To reach that conclusion, we'd need more data. And I'd argue that as we attempt to approach the radical mystery that is our relationship to non-human intelligences, that's exactly the kind deep commitment to intellectual honesty and open-mindedness that we need to embody. Before we dive into this conversation, I also just want to quickly apologize for some minor audio issues that kick in about a quarter of the way into the interview. Everything sounded

fine when we were recording, but something corrupted the file on Whitley's end, creating a little bit of static. I've cleaned it up as much as I can, and hopefully it isn't too noticeable. I enjoyed this conversation so much, and I really didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to share it with all of you. All right, without further ado, here is my conversation with Whitley Streber. Well, Whitley, welcome to the UFO Rabbitville. It's so wonderful to have you. Well, thank you. I'm glad to be here. Well, I will just jump right in with questions. This might not be the easiest place to start, but I thought it would be a good place to frame our conversation. How has your understanding of the visitors changed over the decades since you wrote communion? Oh, well, that's a simple question, 10-word answer. Exactly.

Okay. Let me just think about this. It is a very complex part of my life. there's the childhood stuff, which is very foggy, but was apparently there. And the only memory I have of it that is in ordinary memory that I remember from always, from my childhood, is I was taken aboard a dark blue sort of what looked to me like a raft that was floating above our neighbor at night. And I was leaning over the side of it and looking down and there were these little men in there running around all upset because they were afraid I wouldn't fall off. And yet they didn't want to prevent me from looking down. And I remember vividly looking down and thinking, oh my, this is wonderful fun. And that's the end of it. And

Is that a real memory? Well, I think it is, and I think it is because it's not something I would have been equipped to dream about. I didn't have the information in me to dream about a thing like that when I was like eight or nine, which is when it happened. So that might be the first memory of the visitors in my life. Then there came something in college where I had a very bizarre night, which was a night of what we now call missing time. It took me, I was in, just moved into a little apartment, student apartment, and I had put a TV dinner in the oven. And I took it out and sat down to eat it. but this whole thing, for some unknown reason, took like four hours.

And I got scared and started trying to leave the apartment because it was more than four hours. It was like two o'clock in the morning. I started to eat supper at about 6.15 at night, and it was 2 o'clock in the morning. When I sat down to this ice cold now, I cold but cooked TV dinner and couldn't figure out what had happened. And I was a tremendously terrible feeling of foreboding. And I went out to my car because I wanted to go somewhere and get out of the apartment. And I thought I would go to an all-night restaurant because I was also still pretty hungry. And something came, the car windows became black.

And the interior of the car was reflected. And there was something at the window with big black eyes that I could almost see but not quite. And eventually I did get to the restaurant, but it was a very frightening experience. Then another time at my grandmothers, I felt like I was taken over by something and couldn't stop myself. And it was moving around and it was absolutely, again, this. same type of figure, which we now call a gray. Then came October of 1985. In the previous summer, I had been loading up on guns and alarm systems by this time, without understanding it, I was very, very frightened. I had already written the wolfen, which the creatures in the wolfen are like the grays.

gray in color with big eyes, highly intelligent. And I call them sort of super-intelligent wolves because they're also predators. But very discriminating predators. They don't take people that will be noticed. They only take the unnoticed. So you can see there's this building disquiet here. Then comes the hunger, a tall, blonde, very sweet, beautiful, elegant, but extremely dangerous woman. Then comes war day, the nuclear concern, nature's end, the environmental concern. Then a book about the fairy folk, a very wonderful, fun novel to read and write called Cat Magic. But it's all about the fairy folk who will later become very much connected in my mind to the visitors.

Then comes October of 1985, as I was about to say, and a huge light comes over the house. And Annie Gottlieb and Jacques Sandalescu, who were guests at the house, Jacques sees the light and it's so bright, he thinks it's morning. And then suddenly it's dark again. Annie hears these footsteps scurrying across the floor upstairs. Their bedroom is downstairs and the master, where we are, my wife and I, is upstairs. There's a clap of thunder, a tremendous bang, and my little boy starts to scream, and I run downstairs, inexplicably tell Jacques and Annie, who are in the door of the guest room, it's all right, go back to bed.

But it obviously wasn't all right. I go in and comfort my son, and I go back to bed. By this time, I've got the alarm system. The summer has been filled with buying guns and alarm systems. I'm looted to the gills with weaponry and alarms. But why? Out in this country house, where Ann pointed out, she actually called the sheriff's office, as I recall, and they said there hadn't been a crime in Accord in 20 years.

I mean, like a burglar or anything. So there I am, terrified. Then comes the December experience. And I remember the struggle and the fear and the realization that I could not wake up from it. The taking of my semen, the agony of being penetrated erectally, by a device that was sending electrical charge into a nerve that caused an erection that I couldn't control. And you can literally hear me on the hypnosis tape remembering this and saying, I have an erection and how strange, you know, and at the time, I was scared to death.

Then comes a period of confusion of about six weeks where I gradually narrow it down to the point where I have to face the fact that I was attacked by unknown beings, taken from my home and attacked by unknown beings. That starts the next part of my life. There's a critical decision made. This is about March, I guess, of 1986. I decide I had a horrible time with them, but they're real and they're here and they're not human. And they're a highly evolved, intelligent people. I didn't know if they were as intelligent as we were or not. At the time, I didn't know where they stood.

But I decided I have to try to make something out of this. And I started going out in the woods at night. and it was really scary. It was terrifying. And it built a relationship with them. And that relationship goes on to this day. Now it's mostly not so much a relationship with the grays as it is with our own dead because they came into it from the beginning from the December of 1985 experience.

And they're an important factor in this. And that's something that most of, the UFO community just does not want to think about. This is strange enough without having to say, the soul is real and are dead are involved too. But unfortunately, I'm here to talk about my experiences, and this is my experience. What's it like now? It's sublime. I've written all of the books since Annie passed away with them as my co-conspirators. Sometimes the dark, people and often is not our own dead, including my wife. And I have been through hell, but I'll tell you this, I wouldn't trade it for anything. When the lady in the first,

in the December 85 experience said I was the luckiest of the lucky. I came to think those words were mockery, but now I understand that they were true. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. I wonder if you can say a little bit more about what that creative process is like with the others, whether it's the dead or visitors. I know for me, like so much of my contact experiences has played out and sort of through my creativity. And I wonder if you could describe that a little bit more. Well, it's complicated. Is there anything about them that isn't complicated, Kelly. I don't think so. You don't either. It takes a number of different forms. First, it apparently uses the implant, but I can't say that for certain because I don't know if

there's a connection between what's happening and the implant, but I think there is. And those who don't know, I've had this implant put in my head in my ear in 1989, an attempt to remove it in 1994, which is available on videotape on my website, failed because it ran down into the earlobe and it scared the hell out of the doctor and he pulled out. I don't blame him. He said, I'll have to take your whole ear off if I'm going to get rid of this thing. He had thought it was a little cyst. He had realized he was operating on the communion man.

And then he decided, my God, I'm trying to take out an alien implant. let's get out of here. Anyway, it's been there, and after Annie passed away, I started to learn how to use it. A slit opened up in this eye that you can see if against a white surface and words are racing past it. And it apparently draws, you can't read them, they're too fast.

You can almost read them consciously. And every once in a while I'll read one of them. And they usually seem completely innocuous. But they're not innocuous. What they're apparently doing is bringing up material from my unconscious mind that I don't know that I remember. And it uses as a kind of an inspirational process. The other way it works, the implant works, is by synchronicities. and they're happening right now just left and right because I'm working on a book.

And if I need something, one way or another, it comes to me, either immediately or very soon. And it works flawlessly. It's marvelous. And I thought, I changed from coincidence to synchronicity when I realized that all of my research now relies on coincidences. So it must not be coincidences because there are not that many coincidences. And there's another thing that happens. 3 a.m., I have a meditation session that's in a time of day that in one of the yoga traditions is called Brahma Mahirtha time, the time of greatest learning. And at that hour, I will sit and just empty my mind and as,

best I can, I don't push that, and take some of my attention onto my body, and ideas come. Big, wonderful, useful ideas, and I usually have my phone right there beside me so that I can take notes, and I take notes. Now, the other thing that happened, this only happened once, was in the book A New World, where I wrote a lot of it at our... family country house in Texas, where I used to see the visitors when I was a boy and a couple of other people who spent time at that country house have seen them too. So they're there. And I'm talking primarily about the little dark blue squat figures. And I would sit in the living room. I'd go up to the house late at night and sit in the living room in the dark and the little

dark blue fellows would come onto the porch outside. right out, right beside. And we would communicate mentally and work on the book together. And it was very direct. And it was very fun. And it was especially fun because we got into arguments. And there were things they didn't want me to put in the book and things they did that I didn't want to put it. It was like working with an editor.

Only the editor happened to be from the beyond. It was a very cool experience. And unfortunately, one night my aunt stayed there and she was in the bedroom above the living room and I'm sitting in the living room and suddenly I hear her say is that you witty and I say no I'm down here it's you know it's it's not that you can easily hear each other from that bedroom to the living room because there's a big windows upstairs and down and upstairs sleeping board and what had happened was she had heard heard shuffling on the screen porch because the little blue guys, they don't walk.

They sort of shuffle along, and they were scraping along the porch. And she's heard that before. She's one of the people in the family who's had experiences with them. And she heard a voice say, why aren't you asleep? And that was why she called to me because she thought it was me playing a joke on it. And the next morning I said, are you upset about what happened? And she said, no, no, I'm fine. But I didn't think she was fine.

And sure enough, that afternoon she began to feel ill. And she was having a heart attack. I took her pulse. And fortunately, we had a doctor who happened to live in the immediate area, and he came rushing over and ended up taking her into the hospital to get a pacemaker put in and saved her life. because of the stress that's involved, that's unacknowledged. And that stress comes from a lot of different directions. But this is the creative process as it is with them in detail.

This is the best I can give of a detailed answer. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I resonated with a lot of that. To switch gears a little bit, I really appreciated your comments at Seoul. I really appreciated that you're willing to stand up and say the things that you said. And you also published an article after that in the debrief.

I guess I'd love to hear your thoughts on, you know, we're in this weird place where everyone's talking about disclosure and disclosure movement and transparency. And yet it seems like the experience or narratives have been kind of stripped out of the equation and that it's not something that anyone seems willing. to touch. And I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about your thoughts on that and what you think we're missing by kind of denying these more complicated

and weird aspects of the phenomenon. We're missing everything. That's what it's about. It's about the relationship and they don't want to talk about the relationship. Therefore, they don't want to talk about contact. They want to talk about something else.

And, well, like, for example, Lou Alessando, and Chris Mellon are two examples. They won't even interview with me because I'm an experiencer and I represent this whole experienceer movement and they don't want to touch it. And part of the reason is,

as Chris explained to me, that they're trying to legitimize this and you don't start legitimizing something by going down the weird path. You start with things like materials and solid objects and definite, provable things like biologics, which I know a lot, loads about the bodies. And David Grush mentioned them in passing, but they can't go there.

It's too much. And Lou doesn't want to be torn with the crazy person brough. But here's the problem. You know, I think it was Carl Sagan who said once, if they ever show up, it is going to be the strangest experience that human beings have ever had. And that is absolutely correct. Of course, he may have already known about the abductions when he said that.

But that's another story entirely when he found that path. They can't handle the strangeness. and therefore they have to go step by step. They have to reach a point where there are papers being published in the peer-reviewed press about the materials on the assumption that these materials are not of earthly origin. And then when they get used to that, they can go on to the next step.

But when you start to chase down the visitor narrative and what people describe, what in the world are you going to do with that? There is something that can be done. We can use functional MRI scanning to get an idea of what parts of a person's narrative came in through physical senses, because the brain stores things that it gets from the eyes,

the ears, the nose, and so forth, then touch, different from the way it stores imaginary and dream memories. And you can tell the difference. If we can learn how to question them people properly, we can get an idea of what parts of their descriptions represent physical experience, if any, if any. because we don't know yet what the close-in-counter experience actually is. I mean, I have an implant in my ear. I was raped. It took 20 years of medical attention. And the last time I felt pain from that was just about three years ago.

You know, so there's a physical side to this. But who's on the other side of the physical state? In other words, I saw what obviously seemed to be aliens, but were they? Or was it something else? And we're here on a book that goes into all of this very deeply, is the something else because it could be so many different things. But using an fMRI scanner and enough participants and the right, kind of questions and above all honest scientists to study this because that's a problem too.

There are people who go into it with an agenda. Their agenda is usually this can't be true and therefore I'm going to, if I have to lie and fool of my data, fine, or I don't want this to be true. Or I have a secret locomotion from somewhere in the Defense Department. rent of the defense industry. And I'm going to say this isn't true, no matter what comes. If we can weed out those people and they will be the first ones to come to volunteer, you may be sure, and get some clear data of what part of this experience is consistently physically would have a baseline.

And then we could start to interrogate the individuals more deeply and more useful. about their experiences. Like if we knew that their bodies, that they had, that when they described being in a craft, that they were actually seeing what they were describing, that's huge. That's huge. That's the beginning of an interrogation that makes sense. That's never been done before. I've proposed it to Gary Nolan, and he's interested in doing it.

all I have to do is find the money. And I can find the money. I will, the money will be there if we can get a proposal together. And that's where the problem is, because Gary doesn't have time to do it. And so far, he's not, at least not told me about any biologists or skilled in this area who he's talked to. So I'm sort of hoping that someone will come forward who doesn't have a hidden agenda, by the way. And we can get started because once we've got people and a coherent budgeted proposal, I can get the money. I can find the money to do it. I could find a lot of money if necessary. That's so interesting. I actually have an episode, well, series of episodes coming out in February about my own experience and that got me all tied up with someone I didn't even know

at the time, a stranger. And he went to the Noetics Institute to be studied in a way similar to what you're talking about where he has what he calls upsite, which is like a, basically like a holographic overlay in his perception that he can interact with and that sometimes he sees beings and they communicate with him in that way. And he, at the Noetics Institute, they studied him. they just released a peer-reviewed paper where they showed basically that there is a distinct brain state when he's interacting with this holographic overlay versus just like recalling or

imagining something. Well, you know, that's fascinating. I want that paper. So send me a copy of it as soon as you can. I know. Absolutely. I did not know about this. This has slipped under my radar.

Yeah, they just published it. So, yeah, I'll send that to you as soon as we're done. But that might, you know, Dean Raiden and his team might be able to help. Yeah, that's, I haven't approached Dean about this, but that's the right way to go. I think Gary is not going to focus on it in all likelihood, simply because he's got too much on this plate. He has a huge, complicated life outside of this world. And he does so much in this world that, you know,

his time must be very limited. I can't imagine, yeah, how much work he must be overseeing. Well, I've been to his lab, and it's huge. It's extraordinary. And he's a genius who's over-extended, unfortunately. We don't have enough geniuses, unfortunately. We need... That's why they get over-extended.

Exactly. Exactly. I wonder what you think about. the secrecy around the phenomenon. We were both at Seoul and we got to hear all these people talk and understand all the different reasons on paper for the secrecy. But I also wonder often and almost assume that the others or the visitors or whatever we want to call them

have some kind of a stake in that secrecy and could potentially even be creating that secrecy. how do you think about that with regard to the phenomenon and kind of the disclosure narrative in general? Well, they must be creating the secrecy because they could end it by just showing up. And I've been back and forth with them many times about this. They don't want to show up. And in them, my new book, I go into the reasons why. The first reason is cultural colonization.

we have to be farther along and closer to where they are in terms of our understanding of the universe and our ability to manipulate its powers and its materials before they show up. Otherwise, we're going to completely redirect our whole culture toward them. And that's called cultural colonization. and even in the contacts between primitive tribes, technologically primitive tribes, and technologically advanced Western nations were benign, and they mostly weren't benign. When they were benign, even then the primitive tribes lost their reason for being.

They lost their sense of cultural identity because all of a sudden they, they felt terribly inferior. And they completely refocused on how do we get what they have. And they don't want that to happen to us. Because they want us as companions, not as supplicants. And this has been very clear to me. My genius wife understood it from the first minute. That's why she insisted the book we called Communion

and not say contact or what I, the horrible title I thought up, which was body terror, because I was so physically terrified. My body was literally in a state of physical terror. So that's one reason. Another reason I think is that there's a level of predation here of some kind. In other words, there's something predatory about the relationship. They want something from us that I don't think we're comfortable giving. and they're trying to take it anyway.

And I think also, although the abductions are now pretty much over as far as I can tell, there was a long period of time when they were forcefully taking sexual material from human beings. And we would have resisted that fiercely if we had not been confused about whether or not they were even real. And that was because, I mean, obviously, I mean, I thought like that. hell in that little room. Other people have, too, and taking of that material is an awful thing to contemplate. At the same time, we take it from animals all the time, and we do it because of a lot of reasons, many of which are very beneficial to those species. Like, we try to save species that are going extinct by taking their genetic material

and creating more versions of the same species in various ways, impregnating captured cows, for example, in the rhinoceros world, and so forth. So we abduct Lady rhinoceros, or we don't abduct her. We don't take her anywhere because she's too big and heavy. We overwhelm her. She ends up with missing time. and then she has an unexplained pregnancy. And that would be terrifying if she could think clearly.

Unfortunately, we can think clearly enough to where that kind of thing is terrible. Unwanted pregnancies and unexpected pregnancies. And the removal of fetuses and semen were big part of all of that. And yet it may have been for our benefit. We don't know. So they have a lot of reasons for keeping themselves hidden. Why do you think it is that people like yourself have so many encounters with a wide variety of different kinds of beings? Do you think it's, you know, as it's been suggested, something in brain or something genetic or is it just random?

Like, what do you suspect about that? Well, first of all, if you get a group of close-and-cover witnesses together, you find out something immediately. They're very gentle people. There's not many super aggressive people in a group like that, very rarely. And I think they're selected for that reason, that they're not aggressive. I'm not aggressive at all. I mean, I haven't lost my temper probably since I was 12.

And in fact, when I had Anne, Anne used to had a big temper, and I used to have to pretend to have a temper or she would get even madder. if I didn't react. She would feel that I wasn't relating to her anger. So it's generally a very gentle group of people. That's one thing about them. And in my case, in some cases, Gary Nolan and Kit Green found that there was a density

in the white matter between the caudate and the Poudaman. that caused apparently enhanced a person's ability to see into these other realms. Or perhaps, and they didn't ever address this, but they should have, to create these other realms. Because we remember from the bottom of this, the core of this, the root of it, we don't actually know its origin. And we also don't know a whole lot about what's going all in this thing. and how it can affect the outside work. We don't know that yet. So we're not sure.

There's no reason to be sure that this is what it looks like, and that it's not coming out of this thing. In my case, the difference between the white matter is very striking, according to Kit Green, who, if you have folks who don't know, he's a doctor who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency retired and takes a great deal of interest in close encounter witnesses, including me and many others.

And of course he didn't retire, but in that case, there, there you have it. That's what we have. The white matter, he said, was absolutely unique. It was like nothing he'd ever seen in his career. And it was high normal, but not super dense. But the structures didn't even look like the structures that are in a normal brain. So there's something about my brain that is different. And of course, I remember in one of the things that happened in 1985

was they stuck a needle in the side of my hand. Did they alter it then to set me up to be able to communicate with them? I don't know. So you have a gentle personality. Often you have something unusual about the brain and you put those two things together and you have a possible close encounter witness. I have a feeling that there are many, many more people involved than realize.

And what we're talking about here is basically people with unusual brains are the ones who notice it. The others don't notice it. I have a feeling it's just part of light. Yeah, that certainly resonates with me. Also the idea of contact teeth being very gentle. That's been my experience. The more friends I have who identify as experiences of some kind, that's something I notice across the board is that there's some of just the most

kind and gentle and open-minded people that I've ever met and just like profoundly sensitive, usually. That's right. Well, I have a group that meets every day at, 1 p.m. Pacific time for 25 minutes to do the sensing exercise together, where we take some of our attention and just put it on our bodies. And we do an induction where you go from body part to body part with your attention. It's a very, very healthy thing. I've been doing it for a long time, 60 years. And am I really that old? Unfortunately, yes.

And they're mostly experiencers, not all, but most of them. And they're just very sweet, gentle people. Incidentally, if anyone wants to join us, the only thing is you have to try to commit to do it, if it all possible every day. And I mean, it's not engraved in stone or anything, but you can't just dip in one day and then two weeks later, dip in again.

it's something you have to either do or not do. And they write me at Whitleyatstrieber.com and I'll set them up. It's free. It doesn't cost anything. That's so cool. What do you find happens to a person when you take that time every day? Well, I can tell you, I never questioned people in the group. In other words, if people want to talk about it, they can.

But I don't, you know, there's no questioning. No one has ever asked about their belief. their experiences, anything like that. We don't even know a lot of us where each other live. It's all on Zoom. But I can tell you, from my own personal experience, I've gotten, it's incalculable what I've gotten out. And let me go back to something that happened in the fall of 2015.

after Annie died, about a month later, I decided to go to a thing in Memphis, I believe it was, with William Henry. Because he does these things there, they used to do them, where he would take one beautiful Renaissance painting after another and interpret it. and interpreted in the context of the kind of inner world of religion, beautiful presentations. And so I thought I'll go there and just sit there and do that. We used to have the Dreamland Festival there, and Anne would be there, and it was really nice. It's a nice place, the Scarred Bennett Center in Memphis. So I was there, and all of a sudden the lady came up to me,

said, the funniest thing just happened to me, Mr. Feber, this is during one of the breaks. I don't know whether to tell you or not. It was so weird. I said, you're the only person you can be sure you can't tell me anything too weird. She said, I just heard your wife's voice in my ear just as clear as day, tell quickly that I can see him when he's sitting in the chair. and I thought, and then it came. I sit in a chair to do the sensing exercise

and I put two and two together and I went back to a memory from the cabin from the early days when I was asking them why they came here and the answer was I could communicate very directly

with them for the first once we got into a relationship for the first six months or so, the mental communication was very direct and unmistakened. It was easy. It's not so easy now, but it was then. I said, why did you come here? And the answer was, we saw a glow. And I thought, the glow of cities. But then the soon as that lady said that, I put it together. They saw the glow of my second body, of my ethereal body when I was doing that exercise. That's why they showed up in my life. They saw me this little glow out there because I used to do it every night at about 11. It started with my work in the Gertjeefe Foundation starting in 1969. And I've been doing it ever since. And so then I realized any can see me, whoever these people are and wherever they are, when you do that, they can see. And so I do it, especially at 3 o'clock. in the morning because most people are asleep and there's not much going on and you stand out. You're easier to find.

So that's what it's about. That's what the sensing exercise is about. That's fascinating. I can't remember if I told you this, but my childhood cats were named Gertief and Ospensky. Why? How fascinating. Why does you choose those names? My dad was a youngian psychiatrist and he was very into Gerejeef and Aspensky and he was my hero.

And so, you know, I named my cats after Gerejief and Ospensky and he died when I was 20. And so I don't think I really understood all of that when I was young. But as I've gotten older, I've gone back to Gertief and Ospensky and have found it's a really beautiful way for me to kind of keep my relationship with my dad. and also to recognize that this spark in me that led me to do this podcast, you know, I think started in him even if I was too young to really understand things that he was thinking about. It's interesting because I don't think I could have had the relationship with the visitors I have had if I had not been in the Gertjeepe Foundation.

It's been very, very, very foundational to my understanding of how to communicate. And the people, most of the people in the foundation, have no idea about it. I don't know what the heck is going on with me. But that's okay. You know, they pretty accepting. So it's not too much of a problem. Can you talk a little bit about how it's helped you, about how it's helped you make that connection? Yeah, you don't talk too much about the work, but I can tell you a little bit.

The work is about awakening. and it's about seeing it from outside of the context of the ego. And the ego becomes a life tool. It isn't you. In other words, eventually you become aware of the fact that you're not, Kelly, or you're not Whitley. These are structures that were built hung onto your name when you were young so that you could function in human society.

But there's someone else in here. someone behind. And this being that's behind is the real you. And I'm not talking about dissociation at all. I'm talking about an objective presence that is part of us all. And the attention can be drawn

into that objective presence. And when that happens, you see yourself and the world very differently. And it becomes incredibly, at least from my standpoint, incredibly characteringly beautiful. You know that, you know, like for example, Anne was really awake.

She was really, she really was like this. And when you asked a person who's like this, questions about life, you get some extraordinary answers. And I've been always very curious about compassion. Is it giving a dollar to a beggar? Or what exactly is it? And I said to Anne once, what do you think compassion is? And she said, immediately each of us is all we have.

And when you think of another person, we are with a person and you think, think that. Suddenly, they become so alive and so voluble and so beautiful, even the people who are ugly. And you realize this person, as unpleasant as they're being to me, is still alone. He or she is all they have. It makes you a bigger person to be in the work. It's a very slow processed. It's not very rewarding. People will go into it for, you know, a month and expect Angel's wings to grow, but it doesn't work like that. It's a lifetime thing. And you, you keep at it. I mean, I've been in the work now since 1969, and in it and out of it, life has taken me away from the work. I quit one time in disappointment and then came back,

And then couldn't continue because my life situation changed and I wasn't near any work groups. And now I'm back in the group because in my old original work group of Zoom. You know, I work with my group in New York, which is a wonderful group of people. Some of them have been in the work continuously for all that time. That's so interesting. It makes me think of something that you wrote in them about how, you know, that what you were saying about each of us is all that we have, the way in which we are individual minds,

but that there are some indications, many indications, that at least some of the visitors that we're interacting with might not have that same sense of individuality that we have and that there might be something that they're seeking to learn from us and something that like we can learn from them. And that really, yeah, I'd love to hear you say a little bit more about that. I found that really fascinating. Well, if they are linked mentally,

and certainly they're telepathically adept. I have been in telepathic communication with them. And so many other people have it, it's definitely there. And if they are continually linked to each, other, then that means they're one person. They don't have the kind of individuality. They couldn't. Therefore, they're alone. They're alone. And we are someone else. And that could be a great part of the reason they're here. And all of the kerfuffle that's gone on with all of the abductions and so forth could be because they're afraid they'll lose us. And they don't want

that to happen because maybe we're the only ones they've ever found. It's a huge universe, but there's something funny about it. It's much too quiet, as the Fermi paradox points out, you know, where is everybody? And it's when we say huge, when the Fermi paradox was first conceived, you know, the universe was not as big as it is now in our mind. We know we knew less about its limits. Now that we know more, we are appalled in a way at the silence.

Is it a vast desert dotted here and there with these little living planets? Were they designed by someone? That's another thing about it that's weird. If you look at the way the solar system works, it's hard to think that Earth isn't a designed life-creating machine.

And, you know, I just don't know. But I suspect it's loneliness. And that being like them, if I'm right about how they are, you would be deeply lonely. And I have a feeling that might have been the real motivation that got them out into the universe of the first place. their lack of contact with anyone else may have been what got them searching,

searching for companionship. That makes so much sense. The idea struck me because it's almost counterintuitive. Like you would think that a species that was many bodies but one mind, I mean, how could you ever be lonely? But at the same time, if you're only one mind, there's many bodies become kind of beside the point, right? It's you might as well be.

Yeah, I mean, because you don't have a mirror anywhere. Every single one of us has got a mirror. It's the face of anybody else we look at. As a species, we don't have a mirror. And they know that, and they're trying, I think they're going to try to be a mirror eventually, and we would be each other's mirror. But right now, they're holding, hanging back for whatever reason.

Of course, it could be that I'm wrong about all this, and they're just dangerous predators, and they hang back because if we figured to put out what they did, we'd be desperate to escape them. There are people in the UFO world who think that. There are people who think they're demons. I think some of the original people in the government, in the military who were involved in this,

thought they were demons. And if you look at the literature about how to deal with demons, you ignore them. And that could be one of the reasons that there were so much denial at the beginning. You know, absolutely we had to ignore them. No, no, they scared the hell out of some people because I knew my uncle and General Exxon were both very scared of. It's scary. It's absolutely scary, especially something so foreign.

I wanted to give a shout out actually to a book that I heard you read. recently and that I read recently that I loved that I think it's coming to the end of our time. I already know what it's going to be, but you tell me. Yeah, terrible, glorious and useful by Trevor Shikaze. So marvelous. He gave it to me at the Soul Conference. And it's quite wonderful. Do you have information?

Can you give your listeners information? about where to get it? Yes, absolutely, because you can't get it on Amazon. So it's on their website, on Trevor's website, and his partner, Andrea, they've become friends over the last year. And I think the world of both of them. And yeah, I read it in one sitting. I will have all the information for people to get the book. It's probably my favorite book I've read in the last year. It was, I just think it's stunning and it's far too much and too complex to go into here. But I think it really speaks to what we're circling here, this idea of the other and the mirror of the other and the fear that comes with that first communication and with trying to like negotiate that relationship.

I think it speaks among many other things. It speaks really beautifully to that. And I, I think it said, I could hear the voice of the visitors in a lot of that book for the first time. I've never read anything that was as close to them as that book. Yeah, it was really emotional for me to read it. It was one of those things that just felt true and resonated with me. And I felt like put things into words that I wouldn't have been able to put into words. So I just wanted to give Trevor a shout out while we were talking about these issues. But yeah, this has been an incredible conversation, Whitley. I feel like I could talk to you forever. Before we go, when can we expect your next book to come out? Do you have a release date yet or is that still TBD?

I'm hoping for next summer and I'm beginning to get into the stride a bit and there's a lot of give and take again, a lot of give and take. And so we're working and definitely I've got my team on side again. I can't write without them anymore. I can't imagine. I don't know how I would do it. I have such a fabulous committee of fellow writers. Well, that's wonderful, and I absolutely can't wait to read it. Thank you so much for your time today, Whitley. This has been an absolute joy, and I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you very much, Kelly, for having me.

As always, UFO rabbit hole is definitely the one to go down if you want to find out what this experience is really all about. Oh, thank you so much. Now receiving frequency. How do we know what's real? There's so many things that are unknown in this universe that I'm thankful. I don't know the answers to. In many ways, I feel like the unknown is a gift. It allows us to imagine what could be.

And sometimes imagining what could be is actually greater than staring right at what is. Our brains try so hard to manufacture certainty. And in our attempts to manufacture certainty, I think we get stuck. And that causes us often to ignore what is real for one person, which may be completely unreal for someone else. So how do we know what's real? We don't. Not knowing what is real allows us to. to peer more deeply into what could be.

And that is a gift in and of itself.