Somewhere in the Skies - Whitley Strieber: Communion and Beyond

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

On episode 293 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we are joined by the one and only Whitley Strieber. Strieber is probably best known for his breakout non-fiction book, Communion, which became an instant best-seller in 1989. Communion brought the alien abduction phenomenon to the forefront of pop culture with its terrifying, yet fascinating story and its iconic book cover of what is now known as the alien "grey". The book was later made into a feature film, starring Christopher Walken as Strieber. Since then, Strieber's journey with what he calls "The Visitors" has only grown stronger, especially after the passing of his wife. Today, Strieber will discuss the pinnacle experience that drove him to write Communion, his continuing search to find answers, the connections between UFOs and the afterlife, and then he answers listener questions. Follow all of Whitley Strieber's work at: https://www.unknowncountry.com/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Book your Cameo video with Ryan at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Official Store: CLICK HERE Buy Somewhere in the Skies coffee! Use promo code: SOMEWHERESKIES10 to get 10% off your order: https://bit.ly/3rmXuap Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at: https://bit.ly/3rJpbd7 Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2022 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Choice Hotels get you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to help you remember. Same drive, different day. Don't you wish you were getting away? Pack your bags and come on through. Texas, Ohio, Alaska, we're up there too. Comfort in. It's calling your name.

Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Well, I hope you like my little song. Book direct at sourceotails.com. The Summer in the Sky's podcast is free to listen to every week. But if you would like to help support the show, we have a very active Patreon page where you give what you think the show is worth. In return, you'll get early access to the main show, bonus episodes, and priority to ask our guests your listener questions. Your support truly makes the show continue and grow.

So, to learn more and to join, visit patreon.com. Welcome to Somewhere in this, guys. I am your host, Ryan Sprague. And today on the show, we have a guest that I have wanted to have on the show for a very long time. You know him probably from his breakout in 1989 book communion, which that book cover changed a lot of our lives. So today we're going to be talking to Whitley Streber all about his experiences, his experiences afterwards, after the events of the book Communion and where he is now in his life with these experiences and where he thinks we're going in the future when it comes to both UFOs and humanity. So today, our guest, Whitley Streber. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan's bread. Whitley Streber, welcome for the very first time to Somewhere in the Skies. Well, thank you for having me. I'm delighted.

So for me, Whitley, you know, Communion was a big part of my. initiation into this field, particularly the abduction phenomenon. And it changed a lot of perceptions of what this phenomenon is. It was a cultural moment for many out there, especially the cover of the book, which I know a lot of people have dissected as well. But I love if you could maybe run us through that initial experience in 1985. I know it goes a lot further back into your life as well. But that pinnacle moment that communion is sort of based on. Could you maybe run us through that initial event

in 1985 in upstate New York? Sure. It was December the 26th, 19895 and what the event was, I think, was a trigger to cause me to

realize that this had been in my life for a long time. And it didn't quite work that way at first. the reason being that while it had been in my life probably as a child I was not at all involved in this at the time it happened I had no idea about UFOs I mean I knew about them everybody does but I didn't you know I didn't think about them I didn't care about them I didn't certainly care about aliens and And I would never have thought that I would wake up in a room full of them. Never. In fact, I would have laughed at anybody who made such a claim. Then suddenly, I did.

And I'll tell you what I remembered pretty much over the next few days before it became more clear. And I, in the next morning, when I woke up, I was. really disturbed and very upset. And I hadn't had a good night's sleep. I knew that. I thought an owl maybe had gotten into the house because I could remember these big black eyes. And Annie, my wife, pointed out it couldn't have happened

because there was no way an owl could have gotten into the house, which is quite true. So I became more and more concerned. And then I began to feel rectal pain and pain in my temple. There was a red mark appeared there. And I began to have some very strange and disturbing flashes of memory, really, as the trauma released me from traumatic amnesia. I began to recall these big eyes and a lot of movement around.

me and by the end of the week I had a memory in my head that was so bizarre that I really couldn't understand what it could be because I remembered being taken being I remembered waking up on a bed or a little cot in this round room full of bizarre creatures some of which were dark blue and rushing around and others which one other especially which was the one that ended up on the cover of communion

who was older than the cover looks. She must have been delighted by that. In any case I would get to know her very well over the next few years and so many friends and

members of my family because it reached a point when they were visitors were coming back all the time at the cabin. And, you know, we had a lot of people up there who would interact with them when they were there. And it was a tremendously fun experience, but initially it was not fun. It was hard. And I gradually pieced this together, and I could not figure out what these memories might mean.

And plus I was in agony. I really had been very roughly treated. So I went to the doctor and I described the memories. And he was the first one who sort of put it into perspective in a very bizarre way. He said, it sounds like you're telling me we're taking a board of flying saucer by little men. And it occurred to me at that moment that that was what I was saying had happened to me. And I thought to myself, my God, I'm going mad. I must be insane.

And it was absolutely terrifying. So the next thing I started fighting with my wife, because it never occurred to me that anything like that could actually have happened. What did occur to me was that it was a psychotic break. And I thought to myself, Anne's going to be trapped with a psycho because if I become institutionalized, she won't be able to divorce me. And she would be with no husband, with a little boy to raise, and no source of income. So I kept trying to say to her, you should leave me, you should get me, you should leave the, you need to start again. You need a husband who can support you and things like that. And she was just frantic because we had a dear, good, sweet marriage and a very happy little seven-year-old boy.

And there was no time for something like that to happen. So I went through all these tests, including brain and everything, psychological tests. And the results came out that I was very healthy. I didn't have any seizure-related diseases. I didn't have anything wrong with me, except I was highly stressed. And I had read a book at that time while I was this was happening. someone named Jenny Randalls called Science and the UFOs. And I, toward the end of it,

my brother had sent it to me for Christmas, and he was interested in UFOs, but I thought they were, frankly, that was a stupid thing. And he was notorious for sending out bad Christmas presents. And this had been classed as one of the worst. But then I thought, maybe I should read it.

I did. And at the end, it talked about Bud Hopkins and alien abductions. And I thought to myself, as I read it, this is exactly what I remember happening to me. I want to talk to this guy. And he turned out to live just a few blocks from us in Manhattan. So we went over to his house, and I met this lovely man and very articulate and intelligent. and very caring. Oh, man. We had trouble later over various things, but I never had trouble with Bud. Bud had was, I think he was rather jealous of the fact that Communion sold so much more than his book intruders did,

which is very natural, and I never even, it never bothered me, and I don't have any grudge against Bud at all. I think he did a tremendous thing in this work. Anyway, then I realized, finally that that was what had happened.

I had been abducted by aliens or someone. I mean, they weren't human. I don't know if they came from another planet or exactly what they were. But that's basically the story of that experience. Right. And, you know, this would eventually culminate into the book Comedionion that you would write. And I mean, the firestorm that the book created when it was released, you know, I can't even imagine what you could have been thinking or feeling the day the book came out. So I love Whitley. Put us back in that moment. The day the book came out, what were you feeling? Were you reluctant, excited, scared, proud? What was going through your head when finally you're like, okay, there's no turning back? Like, this is real now.

out there. What was that like? Well, actually, I had published a lot of books before, and since I didn't know that this would come down that way, it was just another book coming out. I didn't think about it at all. I don't recall any particular thoughts on that day. But what I would like to talk about is what happened when I told Anne. Sure, yeah. And so let me back up a little bit. it from that day. It became clear that this seemed to have happened. And so I couldn't think what in the world.

I mean, my marriage was now very unstable. She was afraid I wanted to leave her. And now, more than ever, that was the last thing I wanted, but I was afraid she might leave me when she heard this story. And so I told a close friend Timothy Greenfield Saunders, who's been on many shows and talked about this moment. He's on the travel channel documentary. In fact, the visitors, which is available now, I think, on YouTube in Discovery Plus. Anyway, I told it.

And I said, I don't know how to tell Anne. And he said, just tell her. Just tell her. Anne's very flexible. She'll roll with it. I thought, I wonder if she will. So I sat down with her and I said something I have to tell to you. And she thought, of course, he's going to say we need to separate her divorce. And instead, I told this story.

And she looked at me. And she said, I was so afraid the roles would now change and she would say, okay, it is time for a divorce. but then she said, oh, thank God, I thought I was going to have. Now I don't have to get a divorce. And she ruled with it completely, just like Timothy said she would. And she took it over too. She was the one, she was the total power behind communion. She read every page of it.

She's the one who titled the book. I was going to call it Body Terror. and she was the one who later collected all the thousands and thousands of letters and organized them. They're now in a priceless archive at Rice University in Texas. So this, you know, I'm the one who still got a body, but Anne was the one who made this all happen. It's as simple as that. And I never want to, I never would talk about this and say it was all wittly, wittly, wittly, because there was a power there, a real power that was Anne who understood it.

better than I did from the first second and who was there for me and for everyone else involved throughout her life. Now, if you want me to go on, I can talk about what happened when it really did hit the fan, when I realized that the book was going to cause a fairly significant stir. Sure, yeah. All right. Well, this is a few weeks after they sent me on an author because they paid a lot of money for the book and they wanted it to sell, of course. So there I was on this author tour

and getting beat up, I mean, quite significantly. It was horrible. I walked on to stage after stage or into radio station after radio station to the tune of the X-Files music or the Twilight Zone music. music and was generally considered a complete boob for doing this and just being laughed at up and down.

But the public wasn't buying into that laughter. They were buying the book instead. And I got a call from my editor, Jim Landis, at William Morrow and Company while I was on tour somewhere, probably in the Midwest. and there were no cell phones then. And so it was one of these things where you just in the airport and a call for Woodley Street bringing you think, oh my God, somebody's died. I went to the public, the phone airport. And there was Jim Landis on the phone saying, Wittley, how are you doing?

And I said, well, I'm fine. I'm getting on a plane about 20 minutes or something. I said something like that. He said, well, listen, I've got some news about the book. And I thought, oh, my, what could it be? He said, it's good news and bad news. And oh, God, it's not selling. So I said, well, I said, give me the bad news first.

He said, no, I'm going to give you the good news first. The good news is everyone at William Morrow now knows you're not lying. And I thought, what? What could that be about? He said, now the bad news is the visitors think your book is ridiculous. And I said, Jim, could you explain this a little further? He said, yeah, Bruce Lee is not the Bruce Lee, but another editor at Marl, had walked into a bookstore in Manhattan and seen two people rapidly paging through communion

and laughing. And he went up to them and was sort of hovering to see if any books were moving off the shelves and stuff. And he they stopped and looked up at him and he saw these huge black eyes under their hats.

They were dressed in hats and overcoats. And he thought, oh my God, it's Whitley's people in their real. And he and his wife immediately left the store because they were scared. The two people left behind them. and walk down the street right in the middle of Manhattan with nobody noticing, which you think in Manhattan, that's probably inevitable. But it turns out that there is an actual psychological state that we all share.

If we don't expect something, we are quite likely not to notice it. There's a wonderful YouTube that illustrates this called the Monkey Business. illusion that was created by the psychologist who really has sphere-headed understanding of this. And in it, you're asked to pay attention to how many times people in a little group pass a ball back and forth through each other. So you're looking at the video. And I'm not going to tell you what happens. In fact, I'm just going to say, go to the monkey business illusion on YouTube, and you will

understand why nobody noticed these aliens walking down the street. So there you have that. And now I thought to myself, not only are they real, they know I'm here. What now? What will happen next? This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner

Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer, Gina Carrano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best heavyweight in the world, Francis Ngano versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carano, live only on Netflix.

Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Right. Well, what will happen next? Now, that's fascinating, by the way. I'm going to check that out. Well, so the book becomes a big hit. And then comes the movie,

which is a whole other story. I know there's a lot of a lot of controversy behind the film, but what was that like, Willie? I know you wrote the screenplay. What was it like writing the book adapting into a movie in that entire process?

I can't imagine it was easy. Yeah, if you don't mind, could you run us through some of your brutally honest thoughts on the film aspect to all this? Well, sure. The script writing was something I didn't think I should do because, you know, it's hard for a novelist in the first place, a novelist, to write a script based on his own novel. But for someone with a nonfiction book that was so personally intense being the screenwriter, I wish I wasn't sure I could do it. but and they never liked the script very much I don't think but there it works pretty well

there are parts of it that are intact in the movie it's not all the movie's not all my script but um it it works pretty well the movie itself was troubled in the sense that it was an independent production and the money was insufficient there was not enough money and the director had a tremendous struggle on his hands, especially with the special effects, which he did not get nearly the special effects that he had hoped for. And that sort of diminishes the impact of the movie, I think. But overall, the emotional content of it survived,

the fear, the disruption of the family, all of those things are in the movie, and they're pretty good. I did not like Christopher Walkins holding a camera on himself the whole time. I said it makes me look like a narcissist. And he said, well, what I'm trying to communicate is that you're trying to get a video record of what's happening. And so he did that and I didn't like it. But other than that, I think the movie comes off very well in the acting.

And both of them, Lindsay Krause and Christopher Walken are superb actors. And it shows they did a good job. Right. And, you know, we always wonder when these actors take on the role of an actual individual, like, their personal thoughts. Do they actually believe what is occurring? But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Like, they are creating a truth of something that they'll never truly understand, but live in that character. So did you ever have those conversations with Christopher as well, Christopher walking, of, um, Did he believe your story? Or what were those conversations like? I'm curious. I don't know whether he believed my story or not. I never asked him.

We did have some lunches and things, as I recall, during the early days of the movie, of making the movie, where he got sort of an idea about me as a person. And we didn't see much of Lindsay Krause. Interestingly enough, Ann and I were on the set most of the time. only and it didn't bother Lindsay and Christopher at all. They never complained about it in the least.

They were perfectly happy to have us there. Some actors wouldn't have wanted us anywhere near this set because, I mean, they were portraying us, and we were watching them do it. And I had a fairly friendly relationship with Christopher. I don't recall my relationship with Lindsay, so it must have been not very complex. In other words, we must have sort of seen each other in passing.

Anne was glad of Lindsay playing her because she thought the world, she thought the world of her acting. And, you know, she wasn't some kind of someone very glamorous. She had a more down-to-earth appearance. This is the same to Anne than Anne does and or did in her lifetime. So that part of it was fairly smooth. Christopher was a funny guy. We used to pal around a bit, and he said, you have to understand me. I'm not an alcoholic.

I'm a whino. And I said, do you mean that you're drunk all the time? He said, not all the time. But he was a fun guy. He was really very much fun to be with. I can imagine. Yeah. And he brought such a eccentric, just flare to the film that I think was needed.

Whether that's true to your life or not, that's for you to decide. But I thought he did a wonderful job. I do. I'm very in private life. I am, people would laugh, are going to see this, who know me, are going to laugh their heads off. I think of myself as being down to earth, but I am apparently not down to earth at all. And I have, I love to laugh. I have a sense of humor and I love to laugh and tell funny stories and listen to funny stories from other people.

I'm not much into things like politics and I'm not, I don't really care about that stuff. I, you know, it just comes and goes as far as I'm concerned. And, you know, my only concern is I don't want to end up in a dictatorship because I'm no good at keeping my mouth shut and I probably end up in jail. but you know I don't worry about that stuff much but I have a fun life frankly I you know I I miss my wife terribly but she's still with me in many respects the book afterlife revolution

talks about that and it's still very true so you know it's an unusual life but I wouldn't trade it for anything one of the visitors called me the luckiest of the lucky and I thought in the world what kind of sadistic sense of humor is involved here but now I understand it may be to a degree true

interesting well I'd love to touch on that afterlife aspect a lot of your later work dives into this and that's what I find most intriguing is how we interpret the visitors and what they could mean and how this could all somehow be connected and

I'd love to ask you, Whitley, one of our Patreon subscribers wanted to know this from you, one of our listener questions, and it has to do with that. In Leslie Kane's 2017 book, Surviving Death,

she details contact from Beyond the Vail with your mutual friend, Bud Hopkins. Did Hopkins ever get word back to you later in a similar fashion after his death? No. I know you talk a lot about Anne doing this as well. So if you'd like to, you know,

talk about both of them and if they've ever visited you, I'd love to hear that. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of love between Bud and Leslie, and that's why Leslie, Bud could come back to Leslie because love is like a path that you can follow from the other side. I only had one brief encounter with Bud after he died. He just laughed at me and disappeared. So that was it. And Anne was a different story. Anne, during the communion years, when she was reading all the letters, she came out of her office one day and said, Whitley, this has something to do with what we call death, which it does.

It also has something to do with family in ways that we do not understand yet. And I discussed this extensively, by the way, in my new book, Them, which is coming out hopefully before Christmas. I got to get on the stick. But in any case, hopefully before Christmas or right after. So what happened was she died. And she had become, she had a stroke and a near-death experience. And it read all of these letters. and really understood the relationship between the living and the dead

and what the soul was better than anyone I've ever known. She was one of the smartest people I ever knew, if not the smartest. She could pick up things on the immense, very quickly. So she passed on, and I was sitting in the living room about an hour and a half later, just devastated, wondering if I could even live through the night myself. I wanted to be with her so bad. We were so close. We still are.

Suddenly the phone rang, and I thought, oh, no, I don't want a call. Because no one knew yet except of very few close friends. And this was not one of them. This was a friend called Belle Fuller who we knew. I mean, you know, we went out with her and her husband from time to time. but not well and I certainly hadn't told Bell Fuller a thing

and she said I thought I don't want to answer this call but then I did because Bell was Ann's friend and Anne liked her very much and I'm just not going to just not tell her so I answered the phone and she immediately says not

hello but quickly I just had this thing happen I heard Anne's voice say to call you. And at that moment, I had been, when the phone rang, thinking, Annie, if you still exist in any way, please, please give me a sign. And that immediately happened. And that shocked me. And I thought, could this be real? Over the next week, it happened again and again. and then I vaguely remember and I'm still not absolutely sure we did this

but I think we made a kind of pact at some point in our lives that the first person to die in the couple would try to come back not to the other one directly but to friends so to get the friends to tell the person because neither one of us would believe it

if they came if she'd just come back to me I wouldn't have even written the book because I would have assumed it was just my wishful thinking and imagination. But she didn't do it that way. And it became much more complex because in January, before she died in August, she had been asking me to remember,

to memorize a certain poem called Song of the Wandering Angus. And I did not know why. Annie had never asked me to memorize anything, let alone a poem. And when I sort of ignored this, she cried. And I thought, my God, this is really important to Anne. And I memorized that poem. And one of the lines in the poem is when white moths are on the wing

and the moth-like stars are flickering out. And that line is very important because about three months after, not that long, but maybe it's more like six weeks after Annie passed away. I went to a UFO conference in Arkansas. I was invited to it. And as a speaker, and while I was there,

the house had a lot of cameras in it. It still does, by the way, of course. This white moth started flying back and forth in front of the camera in the living room. And I thought, What in the world? Have I now gotten moths? I had no moths when I left. But it didn't just fly past. It went back and forth, back and forth like it was showing itself to the camera. And I showed this video that the camera was sending out to some people at the conference. One of them was a powerful psychic. And he immediately said, that's no ordinary moth. And then another lady said, they don't do that. They don't just fly back and forth like that. there's something there. There's something telling you something. And that was the beginning of the white moth experience. Then I realized that Anne's favorite of all my short stories was called

the white moths. And it's about a woman who dies and is discovering that she has died. And I thought, my God, Anne not only is still with me, she has created an act. avatar to be in this world. And I began to write about all of this that was happening. And it's developed into a very strong and extraordinary relationship. Anne and I are still very much married. The last time I had physical contact with Anne was last night at 11. And that happens every few days. She's here. And the contact consists of this vibration that will come into my lower legs.

When in 11, I was meditating very deeply and I fell asleep in the chair. And this vibration immediately woke me up and I realized I'd fall in asleep in the chair. It's time to go to bed. And this happens not once or twice in a blue moon. it happens six or seven times a week. I mean, it happens every other day, and sometimes more than once a day. And it's always involved in sort of reminding me of things I need to do.

And so it's a proactive presence in my life. And I frankly can't believe anyone would care that much about my life except Anne. And especially because when I'm in a public situation and I fall in a, asleep, it happens immediately. And strongly, it wakes me right up. And she was always very annoyed at me because when we went to plays and movies and things,

I would fall asleep. And she would jostle me and wake me up. And sometimes I would snort, especially in the theater. And she said, Widdley, if you snort, I'm going to just leave. It's so

embarrassing. So it still happens, though. she'll do this to me when I'm asleep in the theater and are like that anyway I realized it was Anne it had to be Anne and it still is this is why I wear both rings my ring and Anne's ring because we are still together but we only have one body going at the present time Wow. That's very powerful. I really like that. I got to ask on a personal level, Whitley, if you're comfortable answering. Do you think Anne's visitations are connected in any way to the visitors? Or are these things that you compartmentalize and keep separate? I'd love to know. How does your experiences with the visitors influence? these visits you get from Anne, do they in any way? I know very precisely.

Hey guys, Ryan here, and I've got some exciting news. We've recently partnered with Alien Coffee Bean to bring you the official Somewhere in the Sky's coffee. That's right. What better way to listen to the show than with a delicious cup of Somewhere in the Skies? It's a perfect dark roast for those who love an earthly, full-bodied smoothness. These delicious beans come from the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. We've worked very closely with Alien Coffee Bean to make sure this roast was exactly what we wanted it to be.

So I hope you enjoy, and I hope you'll pick up a bag of Summer in the Sky's coffee today. Now available within the United States, with plans to go international in the very near future. Head on over to Alien CoffeeBean.com and use the promo code, Somewhere Skies 10, to get 10% off your order. Again, that's alien coffee bean.com. Remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop drinking somewhere in the skies. I can explain it very plain precisely. The difference between us and who is with us for the most part, and there's lots of different forms here. I don't think they have made me that are not all like this, but the little gray people. some of the others do not have any barrier between what we think of as the living and the dead.

They can come in and out of bodies easily. And when they're out of the bodies, they're in the same state of energy that our dead are in. And so they're together with our own dead in that state. And then when they're in the physical body, there in the flow of time. We live in the stream of time and we live here because we are, our purpose is to gain the energy of life and bring it into our souls. And this is the most, this is one of the oldest beliefs in the human world. In fact, it's described in great

detail in the pyramid text, in the pyramid of Eunice, in Egypt, which is the oldest religious text in the world. But I think it's not a religious text. I think it's actually the first or the last text of soul science written by people who knew this and understood it. But it's understandable again. And so they are in both worlds very comfortably. We are in the physical, learning and gaining energy from what we learn and do in life. This is also one of the reasons we're so scared of them. I was terrified when they would show up for a long time, and I gradually came to understand that they won't take me out of the time stream.

I won't end up in a state of permanent deja vu, which would happen if you saw your whole future life. They're not going to let that happen. and people say, oh, they're terrible and they're evil and so forth. This is a school, and they are the teachers and professors, and our own dead are involved too. Annie is certainly a teacher in this school because the white moth avatar is something many, many people experience. It's not hard to get involved with Ann. Anne stands ready to get involved in the life of anyone who wants to.

And she has a lot of fun. She's a happy dead person. I can say that for sure. So they're very much involved with our dead and with our living. And, you know, we're going to go through a hard time on planet Earth. There's too many of us, and the planet will break down very profoundly over the next few years, which most people now realize. And they're here, I think, as kind of midwives to birth us into a new kind of life. I think that's what this is really all about.

They're not evil. They're just very, very strict. And the military has misunderstood them. Because these, you know, they understood them in the context of the officers in the early days, and the politicians who knew about it in the 40s and 50s in the context of their own religious beliefs. And they were very scary, the visitors. And so they assumed they were demons. But, and they still live by that belief, I think, and still shoot at them a lot.

The, um, but the truth is that. that we fear them because we fear being withdrawn from the stream of time in the same sense that a fish, if it was withdrawn from when it is withdrawn from the water, and enters a completely new and untenable environment that it can't live in for long, becomes obviously very frightened. and when they approach us from the edge of the stream of time and touch us, we react with fear. I don't anymore because I've learned over the years to trust them not to take me out of the stream of time where I belong. And a lot of other people too.

I mean, contact's working really well. but it's very much behind the scenes. You don't see it in the public, in the books, you know, the scary stories and stuff. Some writers, some people who are in the experience, do wonderful books, but mostly, you know, the ones that are trying to sell a story,

tell horror stories that are largely not true. But it's going well. Contact's working fine. I'm not concerned about it, and I don't care about disclosure or any of that stuff. It's irrelevant to me. What matters, is contact between us and them and making it work in such a way that is useful for us.

That's what matters. I like that positive way of looking at it. You know, we had Mitch Horowitz, a friend and colleague of yours on the show last week. And, you know, he feels very optimistic about the future of the connection and the convergence of the occult and UFOs. And a lot of that was because of, you know, this. post-New York Times 2017 UFO world we live in. And you bring up so many good points of fear, fear, fear. And that seems to be a lot of the, what's motivating the narrative right now in the UFO field is national security.

And what could these be? And we need to open this office and have the military look at UFOs. So I love your personal thoughts on you. Yeah, what are your thoughts on all that? Because UFOs are bigger than ever. NASA is going to get involved. But the NASA thing is a new condon report because they started out saying there's no evidence it's extraterrestrials. So what do they tell us?

And why do they only look at UFOs? They never look beyond that. And they're very scared of that because they're afraid that they'll be made ridiculous in the public. And they won't get the funding that they are looking for that they can only get if they characterize this as a threat. They're children. They're children. But not all of us are children. There's lots of grown-up human beings.

And a lot of them are in the experiencer movement. Because it's a very sophisticated movement. An awful lot of people in it know a good bit at this point about what we're really here for and what is happening. And they can interact usefully. And so I'm also, I'm very optimistic. I think it's working fine. Good.

That's good to hear. Here's a good, I guess, listener question for you. Kevin on Twitter asks, in your book Communion, you said that one of the ETs tried to calm you down during an abduction experience and that they said it was with a Midwest accent. I found that interesting.

Have you had any other encounters where you detected an accent from your abductors? Yeah, well, I haven't, but Bruce Lee did. He said they had a distinct Jewish accent as they walked out of the bookstore behind him laughing and talking about the book. I didn't know what that was about. I didn't say, I don't think it was a Midwest.

I don't think I said a Midwestern accent. When they tried to calm me down in the first in the December, in the December 1985 abduction, they turned on a machine that kept saying, what can we do to help you stop screaming? And it was the wrong question. It should have been something like, we won't hurt you or what can we do to? help you calm down.

And it was a gentle sort of mechanical female voice. But I don't recall, I may, it may have, when I was closer to the experience, I may have been aware of it having a Midwestern accent, but I don't right now recall ever saying that specific phrase. Okay. Gotcha. Thank you for clearing that up. A couple more listener questions here, Whitley, if you don't mind.

Of course. Great. Thank you. Let's see here. Todd on Instagram asks, how did you reconcile the trauma of your experience to come to a place of understanding? Was there ever forgiveness involved? I know there was some very disturbing traumatic things that happened to you. I mean, how did you find that closure or that way?

Have you ever forgiven the visitors from? what they've done to you and the path they sent you on? Or have you kind of come to terms with it? That never even occurred to me, the idea of forgiveness. I never felt a need in the sense that what I wanted to do was to understand what was happening to me and to make it work for me. And so I'm very involved in that aspect of it. and not so involved in personalities.

I don't even know if they can understand forgiveness in the same sense that we do. Or anything, for that matter. I don't know how their brains work and therefore cannot know how their minds work. Acceptance, yes. I have accepted their presence in my life. And I know that they are,

difficult in many ways to be with, very difficult. And I also know that from long experience now, that they do have my and our best interests at heart on their terms and based on their understanding of what life is and what the world is. I think they are somewhat predatory and conceivably rather dangerous, especially

perhaps to souls that die without with a lot of weight on them. I think they may be very predatory at that point and may indeed be the reason we think in terms of demons because that would be what they looked like to a soul that died that way. But I saw Annie ascend after she died. I saw it. And there's another way, believe me, a good person

And most people are good. It's not rare. What's rare is the ones that aren't. That's very rare. We have to work hard to be evil on earth. It's not easy because this is definitely a school and there's plenty of latitude. Yeah, you go through your life and you do things that you later regret and so forth. But it does not, it lies very lightly on your soul.

You have to really work at it. You have to be a Hitler or Nazi or some of these people in the Russia. You know, really work at it to be an evil person to build weight into your soul. And then you can't get rid of it very easily either. Going to confession, for example, is a joke. That's not how it works. You can't kill somebody, then go into a priest and say, bless me, father, pride of sin. I killed somebody and walk out free.

No. you belong to that person. You kill somebody. You are theirs until they let you go. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I never thought of it that way. You're almost tethered to the soul now, whether you like it or not.

And you don't like it. I wouldn't think. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Last listener question for you, Wittley. Besides your own, what other UFO or ET cases most intrigue? Which are the ones that you put a lot of credence into?

Whether it's just a sighting or a close encounter, abduction, any others really stick out to you? One, yeah, there are lots. I'm very, very involved in this. I'm writing my new book, Them, is not about my experiences at all. It is in just one brief chapter at the end. It's about cases that came out of the letters that Anne saved and deep analysis of those cases and also deep analysis of where the military is and what their experience has been. Because it's an attempt to build a picture of what they, of how they relate, the visitors relate to us. And therefore, from that, create some of the kind of an idea of what they want here, want from us and what they have to offer us.

In other words, to build contact to another level and of clarity. So I analyze 10 letters. and in the book, in the first part of the book. And these are all truly a remarkable experience. You know, the abduction experience, which is such a big media thing, is actually fairly rare. They're much, much different relationships, not all of them pleasant and certainly not all of them unpleasant. Either most of them are rather neutral. they're the people trying to understand what's going on when these approaches occur.

And they're very complex and very different from what has been put out there. So those are cases that I think are important. And you know, another case that's sort of lost is the Corina S-A-E-B-E-E-L-S. She wrote a book, I believe, called Taken. and what happened, this was in the early 90s, I mean the early 2000s, she and a friend suddenly had an urge to go out into the, to take a drive and to go into this, down this rather lonely road and get out of the car and to look at the stars. And when they did that, they were abducted and they were conscious of the abduction. Being called to a place for interaction with the visitors is something that's not common, but it does happen. And they ended up with significant medical issues that had to be treated by doctors.

So it's a pretty strong case, and Corrino's book is pretty good. But the thing that makes it special is that the UFO investigator, Brian Fike, at the time, in British Columbia, was recording all kinds of science. that were happening in the area of UFOs. And in fact, the single best piece of UFO footage in private hands was recorded by someone there at that time off of their back deck. To me, that's an important case. I have a copy of the video.

Brian was kind enough to give me it. So I use it in my talks quite often. And it's important because there isn't a single video that's ever been released by the government that's better. Good. Very good point. Yeah, I know. The ones we have gotten our leave a little too much to the imagination to be completely honest. Well, you know, people have to realize if it's blurred, a video now is blurred. That's because it's a CGI effect, and it's easy to make CGI if you blur it a little bit, and then you don't see all of the, you can't identify. Because, I mean, my cell phone doesn't take blurred videos. Does yours?

No, is the answer. And that's, you know, so you see these fake cell phone videos of these blurred things. And you think, you know, on my website, we have a section called Out There, which we will analyze videos. and we don't even touch the blurred ones because they're all fakes. But there are occasionally good videos that are taken by normal people who aren't trying to create clickbait. And, you know, those are real. Those are real.

And there are people. There's John Martin in, I believe he lives in Georgia. And Melinda Leslie, in Sedona, Melinda takes people out to see UFO. every night. And they do. They see UFOs. John Martin's got a YouTube channel where he puts up his videos. He plays the classical guitar and he says, talks, oh, beautiful, beautiful. He's such a sweetest guy in the world. And he does this all the time. And often what he

records are not satellites. They cannot be. and they're not planes, so that leaves the unknown. The visitors are here. They're here in large numbers, and the next step is to get closer to them so that we begin to be able to use the tremendous store of knowledge that they possess to help us get along and aim the life of mankind a little bit more clearly so that we do survive as a physical species into the future,

because this process of being physical and going through physical life is very useful. And if we lose this on the earth, we don't go anywhere else. Our bodies, these bodies are part of the earth. Then we will realize too late that we have lost the treasure of treasures. We mustn't let that happen. here to try to help us not let that happen. They have uses for our souls to remember. Yeah, very good point. Very good point. Well, Whitley, to close things out here, you know, you just came out with a new release of communion with a new intro, and I highly suggest everyone

check it out. The intro is very powerful. But on a separate note, as a film buff, I'm curious. We have the newly released communion. Would you ever consider like a reboot of the communion film or a television series? Has that ever been, you know, going around in your brain? We worked on a TV series for a while and it was all, it was going ahead. But, you know, there are a lot of people in this field and on the shadowy peripheries of it who don't want communion to, to succeed. That's been true from the beginning. And the series was suddenly mysteriously canceled. I have a feeling that somebody in an executive suite got a whisper from somewhere saying, you don't want to do this. We don't like this. And that happens quite often. I would love to do it.

There are people who try all the time to get something up and it always fails. But maybe not forever. Maybe times will change and maybe something will happen. I'm glad. I'm glad. I'm glad you're optimistic about it. I'd love, love, love to, for your story to be introduced to a new generation, you know. Yeah, and I would love to see a movie that had a sufficient budget. It doesn't, it wouldn't take much. I mean, it wouldn't be a lower middle budget movie. But it can't be made on a shoestring. Not again. Exactly. Yeah, I don't think any budget really can really give you. what you need of these experiences. You look at something like fire in the sky as well, who I know your colleagues and friends with Travis Walton. And he's gone on the record and said,

yeah, movie just could not, couldn't get to the level of what I actually experienced. The emotion was there, which is very similar to your own. Travis is a great guy. He's a classic example of the real deal type of contactee out there, telling the same story.

again and again for years and years being trashed and still going out there and doing it anyway. That's the job. And I think all of us who are out in public have one personality trade in common. We're stubborn as hell if a single one of us. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you are. I'm glad you are because the story lives on.

And I hope we get those answers. I truly, truly do. Yeah, yeah. It's not getting answers. It's getting into useful contact. Then the answers will come right out of us. The government can't answer these questions because it doesn't know the answers, not the real answers. I love that.

I love that. Each individual, I think, is going to experience their own disclosure, you know, that word we like to stay away from. But, yeah, yeah, I think it is a very personal thing. So, no, I'm glad. Very personal. I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah. Well, Whitley, thank you.

Thank you for your time. You've been so gracious. Before we go, obviously, let us know where we can find your work and everything. Yeah, if you'll give that to us. Yeah, well, unknown country.com is my home, my website. I'm very personally involved in it. If you want to, you can subscribe to it for $5 a month, and then you get a whole wealth of additional material.

But if you don't want to subscribe, there's still plenty on the outside. The visitors are not interested in riches and wealth. So when I built the website, it was very clear that we needed to make it plenty of it free. And the subscriptions basically just barely support it or don't sometimes. So if you do want to subscribe, go do it. It would be very well. Awesome. That's where you find me.

And I'm on Amazon, of course. Okay, perfect. And I look forward to the new book. Hopefully, hopefully we'll get to see that sooner than later. But Whitley, thank you. Thank you for sharing all of your insights. And thank you for joining me on Somewhere in the Skies. Thank you very much.

Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network.