Joe Murgia

“I think that’s another level of the human species. I think that we are in contact with ourselves. I think that’s the joke of the whole thing. We’re all looking up in the sky when we should be looking at each other.”

~Whitley Strieber, Malibu 2018

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Comments, links and transcription by Joe Murgia – @ufojoe11 on Twitter.

On August 12th of 2018, I attended a lecture by Whitley Strieber in Malibu, California. It was hosted by Carla and Leigh McCloskey. They run Olander Foundation for Emerging Renaissance (OFFER) and have run events out of their home for the past twenty-eight years. For more about them, check out this article in Malibu Times.

Whitley’s lecture covered his past, the current state of Ufology, his new book and much more. That new book, “A New World,” has just been published and if you want to help out this blog, it can be purchased through this link.

Throughout the lecture, he showed us several alleged, UFO/alien videos. Fifteen months later, I searched and found all but one of them. If anybody reads the description below and thinks they know which video he’s referring to, send me the link on Twitter or in the comments section and I’ll add it to the blog. For the record, I’m not a fan of the videos he showed except for the Gimbal and Aguadilla.

So without further adieu…

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Whitley Strieber (WS): Back in 1985, I’m sure all of you know, I had a close encounter experience that was very powerful and extremely mysterious. One of the most marvelous things about it is, that all of these years later, it’s (inaudible) even more mysterious. And has developed and grown into a relationship. I’m working on another book about it because so much has happened. Especially in the past few years. It has changed and grown dramatically, to the point where I am in a very close, personal relationship with someone. But we’ll have to wait in terms of saying who that is because I’m not sure that I know. And I’m not sure that it’s not something very different from the sort of cliche idea of an alien presence. I’m not even sure that the word alien fits any of this.

I’m gonna read now from just the first page of the book because I haven’t written much else. I have written a lot of it but this is what I wanna read because this sets the kind of stage for where I wanna go from here.

Since the mid-20th century, there has been a scientific debate about the meaning of certain strange objects that appear in the sky. What they may be and what might or might not come out of them, is not the subject of this book. Whether misapprehensions or not, whatever they are, they are, seen. And the corollary close encounters are events, whether in the minds of the victims or in the world beyond their minds. Rather than seeking to prove or disprove anything, what I wanna do is to explore what may well be the most powerful and complex of all human encounters with the unknown. Not whether or not it happens or what it is that happens, but how it affects those of us who experience it. And what its presence in the world may mean. Not only to us but to the greater human challenge.

It is also the story of a relationship that started hard. It was and remains the deepest mystery I could imagine. It’s been a titanic, life struggle. Nobody, including me, has ever written about such a relationship. (As I’ve proposed to do now and will do now in the book when it’s finished. But tonight you’ll hear a lot of that without having to read it.) It is strange beyond strange but it has, especially in the past recent years, begun to come into a new sort of focus. I have come to treasure it deeply and regard it as the most precious and luckiest thing in my life. It’s not always (been) this way. Not hardly.

Now, I want to dispense with the conventional idea of aliens. We built a folklore without realizing it. And how do we build folklores? Well, here’s what happens. Something strange comes into a person’s life. They can’t explain it. The mind does not tolerate a vacuum. The mind needs that hole filled. All of our whole religious history. All of our beliefs. All of this is about filling that gap, that mysteries gap. But it’s time to change. We’ve done this now, for so long and to so little effect.

My wife, after she passed away, didn’t leave. There was a period of about two years, during which she was very present. And we wrote a book together called, “The Afterlife Revolution,” which I have a few copies of here if you want them after the thing. But she said, during this period, that the human species is too young to have beliefs. We should have questions. And I thought that was a tremendously powerful insight because we live by beliefs. And yet, they’re not sustainable. And the reason is simple: We have no ground of truth, yet. We don’t know what is final true. And it may be that we live in a Universe in which that is never going to be possible. It never finally comes into focus. And you think, “Oh no! How terrible!” And then you think, “But, wow! That means that it’s never going to be uninteresting. It’s always going to be interesting.” And it becomes extremely exciting and extraordinary.

Now, let’s inventory what we do have. There have been recently – and we’ll kind of play back and forth over the course of the evening, between hard, physical evidence and other, much different levels of evidentiary material and perceptual material. In any case…recently, last December, the Pentagon released, officially, the Navy department video of a UFO. This is a video taken with a very sophisticated infrared camera aboard a fighter plane.

Break in the recording. Strieber is now playing the Aguadilla UFO video and explaining why he feels it was released and how similar it is to the Go Fast, Pentagon UFO, video.

…years ago. And it was released publicly because of the fact that they had no…there was no classification process for it. And there as no evidence that it fell under national security because it wasn’t menacing in any way.

(The Scientific Coalition for Ufology did a massive study on the Aguadilla case, you can read it here. ~Joe)

It’s racing along. Look at how similar it is, over this community in Puerto Rico, being tracked automatically by this camera. It’s an automatic camera that’s tracking it. And it’s tracking it because of its speed and distance. It is aware of the fact…the camera is reacting to the fact that it is something that shouldn’t be there. If you look closely, you can see around it, these little flares of energy that are characteristic of those things. I have many videos of this sort of thing where those fields of energy are visible. Any way, it goes racing along at absolutely breakneck speed. It’s going something like 1500 miles an hour. And we have no idea what it is. We have no idea what these things are. We don’t even know if they are real in any absolute sense that we understand.

Recently, Dr. Jacques Valle, who has been working on this sort of thing for many, many years, received some materials that were from a UFO crash site in New Mexico and had the resources to analyze them for their isotopic ratios. And he found that not only were these pieces of metal not of this world, the isotopes in them were not from this planet, at all. They weren’t from anywhere in this Universe as we understand it.  They couldn’t even exist. But there they were. And the metal’s perfectly stable. I’ve held it in my hands. I find that wonderful and exciting. And I don’t find it at all scary.

(The might be what Strieber is referring to as far as Vallee and the materials. ~Joe)

I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily is true of The Visitors. I’ve had a lot of trouble with my own emotions regarding them. And the reason is this: We are a wild species. We are not tame. We think we tamed the dog…[it’s] a domesticated creature. He’s tame to us. He’s perfectly happy sitting in Jane’s lap. And cats. Lee’s cats have been captured into some room in which they are every night (audience laughs) and they all expect to go there and they’re all happy. We have cattle and all the creatures that are domestic to us. They’re tamed to us. We are a social species so we are comfortable to each other. But we’re not tamed to anything else. And when you come face to face with these beings, suddenly, you’re a wild animal. And you may think, “Well, I wouldn’t be that way.” I don’t think so. I think you would be because those emotions are powerful and uncontrollable. I have worked for a little more than thirty years to get to a point where I will not have those fear responses. And just recently. Just in the past year or so, I have had a few incidents of close encounter in which I did not feel fear. And the result was that there wasn’t an immediate backing off. There was a more development. And we’ll get into that over the course of the evening.

What we’re gonna look at now…it’s unfortunately a very poor video. But what it is is some children are playing in…I believe it’s in an alleyway in Columbia or Venezuela. They’re playing with a soccer ball at night. It’s about 11pm. And something happens. I’ll show you with it is.

They’re playing. They’re playing. At one point, one of the boys will notice something and he begins to walk down the alleyway to see what it is. Now he’s noticed it. This is…notice how thin that is. Something comes out and you can’t see it in the video. But it’s actually a very tall…a tall, about four-foot tall, very thin thing that comes out from behind that pole and grabs at it. And he runs away.You can sort of see it. It’s not completely impossible to see.

The next video was taken in, interestingly enough, San Diego a few years ago. And I wondered, when I saw the Nimitz video, if maybe, this is what came out of that UFO that the Nimitz pilots took images of. This is entirely authentic. This is not a CGI effect. What happened is a man kept hearing noises at night and so he set up a trail cam in his driveway, expecting it would be raccoons or something. And naturally, he was quite surprised when this is what showed up instead. And we’ve measured all of this out very carefully. That’s not anyone on stilts. It can’t be because the legs are too long for it to be a person on stilts. And the one behind it, that’s coming along, is even more impossible. The one in front is about three and a half feet tall and the one in the back is about two feet tall.

(I think this is the video he’s referring to. ~Joe)

You know, it’s always been assumed that there might be many different forms in this enormous Universe of ours. But it seems as if one of the strangest forms is one of the first that we have ever made a video of. But can you imagine what they must think of us?

And there they go. They’re gone. There was one other video taken at about the same time but it’s not nearly as good. In the same general area of a similar sort of stick figure. What are they? Where are they from? Are they even from this Universe? Well, they’re certainly not from any kind of physical environment like this. That is clear because they don’t have the kind of functionalities that you would need to live in or world. But they’re interested in it, clearly.

Now, I’m going to show you another piece of video. This was taken in a forest near Pittsburgh. And contrary to what you will immediately think, this little being cannot be bought at Home Depot. We’ve analyzed this video very carefully and it’s no joke. It’s real. How can it be real though? This creature, whatever it is, comes racing forward. It’s moving at breakneck speed. He wasn’t visible on this trail cam until after…actually, they happen to see it when they were looking at the trail cam. You can’t see him but there’s a man standing right over here, who didn’t see this at all. He wasn’t even aware they were out there testing their trail cam when this happened. They had just set it up. And their idea…there’s deer hunting in that area and they were trying to see if there were deer passing down this path on a regular basis. So this is where it starts…this is where it ends. It’s just a loop. That’s all they had because the next frame of the thing, is gone.

(Here’s an animated look at the alleged creature/gnome. ~Joe)

Now, you all know lots of folklore and this is a gnome like you’d buy at a garden store. And yet, it’s not a gnome from a garden store. It’s something, in some way, that’s real.  And what I’m trying to do here is to kind of get away from the alien folklore that we’re all so familiar with and look at it in a different way. Because these images are for…they’re just as strange but the difference is that they’re real. I’ll show you one of an alien…of a classic alien in a little while, that’s probably real, too. The joy of all this is that we live in a very strange world. We’re just used to the parts of it that we notice every day. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other things going on here.

(Next part is cut off a little bit. Whitley is talking about how he would day dream when he was a kid. And that day dreaming included reaching/loooking into a cookie jar that was in his house. ~Joe)

…in these wonders. That cookie jar, with a flower pot in it…I am telling you, I am seeing whole cities in there. I had more fun with that thing…I was so obsessed with it, that they finally…my mother would say, “You can look in the cookie jar for one hour and no more (everybody laughs).” Because I would start early in the morning with the cookie jar and I would be dragged, kicking and screaming for lunch, and then back to it. I can’t remember exactly what I saw in there but it was just wonderful. It was inside of me, what I was seeing in there. There’s nothing in the cookie jar. It’s just a little, plastic jar. But there’s so much inside us. We just need to look and to look in such a way that we see both within and without at the same time. Because there’s no border. What’s inside us is also all around us. Well, we’re pretending it’s not there, which is hilarious because it is. We live in a hyper-dimensional reality that we’re pretending doesn’t exist. How strange!

But gosh, I remember, when I was a boy, a little boy. One of the things that I would remember would be…I would go out on the roof at night and there was something I call the night boat. Was this a dream or not? It was a dark, sort of thing like a big raft. Like one of those rescue rafts…a rescue raft in the ocean. It was dark blue. And it would float over the neighborhood and there were little, dark blue men in it. And the other children in it would lean way over to look down and they would get nervous and grab us and pull our legs. Did that happen? I don’t know. But it happened within me, certainly. And it was one of things that, one of the memories that I’ve never been able to fully explain to myself. But it had to do with a childhood that was kind of unbound because I was living this way.

Finally, my parents…after seeing…there was a white owl that used to stand at the edge of our backyard during the day. And they were aware of the fact that I was moving about on the roof in the night. They nailed my windows shut…the screens shut on my bedroom windows because they were very nervous about this business that was going on. At the time I was involved with the strange, little dark blue figures that I’m still involved with now. That have in fact, been more important to me than the more famous ones – The Grays – because they’ve been very much in my life and had been recently very much in my life.

This is a tree. When I was a boy, I used to go to a place in San Antonio called the Olmos Basin. It was a fair distance from our house. I remember riding there on my bicycle at night but I feel that’s impossible. I don’t think I could have done it. Not as a child. But just beyond this tree where you can’t see it – you just see a little corner of it, if you look very closely up in the edge – there’s a building that used to be an old sister’s home. And I remembered vividly, sitting on benches, just beyond that tree. We’d put our bikes up against the tree and sat on the benches beyond the tree. And there was a hooded figure who came and talked to us about the Universe and all kinds of wonderful things.

I wrote a whole book about this experience called, “The Secret School.” And Anne and I moved back to San Antonio in 1994 and I was out looking for this place. I’d looked for it many times. Never found it. I was with the author of a book about me called, “Report on Communion,” Ed Conroy. And to my astonishment – we were walking along a path that’s just below this – I looked and I saw this perfectly straight line, angling up a little bluff and at the top of the bluff was this tree. And it was exactly the tree I had been describing to Ed. And I’d even just started to say, I looked for it so many times, I feel like it must be here somewhere. But I’m thinking maybe it was in a parallel universe. “Oh my God, there it is!” And then we went up the little path and beyond that were the ruined benches. So this was something I thought had to do with my imagination. But yet, it has some kind of a physical reality at the same time, which I find absolutely fascinating.

Now this next drawing is from the “Communion,” movie. And it’s sort of what they look like. Except, with the difference that the drawing you’re about to see, you won’t run screaming or anything. But I assure you, if you were face to face with one of these individuals, it would be a very, very different experience and a very much more powerful one. They sort of look like this. Like little frog-like figures. like workers. Worker bees of some kind. They’re recovered with little patches and pockets and things. They have a long history in the human imagination. In the middle ages, they were called kobolds.

They were seen in mines. Especially in Ireland, Bavaria and Austria. Now, interestingly enough, there is a honeycomb in many parts of Europe, especially in Austria and Bavaria, of mysterious mysterious tunnels called Erdstalls. This is an area where the stories of fairy folk and tales of little men are very strong in the old culture. Now that we’ve got the Internet and we’re all into our cell phones, it’s all dead. But the little tunnels still exist. And the interesting thing about most of these tunnels is…this is the area…this map is all the places where these tunnels have been mapped. And you can see them especially in Austria and then in Bavaria.

And this is what they look like. Many of them are too small for anyone to crawl through. So who dug them?

Back in, about 1970, I had a powerful dream that turned out was maybe not entirely a dream. Very important to me. In this dream, I was with these blue figures and I was taken to place where there was a tall, sort of triumphal arch but very graceful like a Roman one but not nearly as thick and heavy. And tall cedars…looked like cedars of Lebanon. And grass and a pathway. And then beyond this, there was a cliff and I could see a gigantic desert beyond the cliff. And on the cliffside, there was a round, dark blue building. It was kind of in ruins. And I asked what that was. And one of these figures said, “It’s a university.” And I said, “It’s in terrible shape.” And he said, “Yeah, the scholars are no good at maintenance. It’s a million years old.” And boy did I wanna go in that thing.

And so I went toward it. And I could see a little door. And I went closer and closer to this door. And then suddenly there were…the gray-type figures were standing there. They wouldn’t let me go in. I wasn’t ready. And I woke up from that dream just absolutely heartbroken. I’ve never wanted anything so much in my life…was to go through that door, into that university. And I think, in a sense, the rest of my life has been preparation for going through that door. This whole thing is a school that we’re in. And I’m hoping that I will eventually…the first thing, once I pass on and leave the physical world, the first thing…if I don’t get to go to that university, I’m gonna be really pissed (crowd laughs).

Why is it like this with me? And what exactly can we say is going in here? Well, first of all, we have to think about where we actually are. From that tunnel, we go right to this.

This isn’t the picture because it hadn’t been created when I did this for this essay. But there is a picture like this of an even denser star field with something like 60,000 visible dots in it. Every dot is a complete galaxy, filled with billions of billions of stars. This Universe is endless. You know, we think of the many worlds theory with an endlessly proliferating series of realities. The truth is, this physical reality is so huge that it mine as well be that. It’s enormous beyond conception. Everything that can happen must be happening in this Universe somewhere. And probably a lot of things that can’t happen are happening because this is a Universe that has a tendency to bend the rules a lot. It has too good a sense of humor not to do that.

Now, when we had our cabin in upstate New York, one of the things that used to happen from the beginning, was that…first I’d like to set the scene about my wife Anne a little bit. But I had the close encounter experience. I was horrified to tell her about this. Because I was afraid she would…she was trying to raise a child. I mean, she had a six-year-old child. And my son and I thought, I can’t expose her to a crazy story like this and to say to her that this happened in the house when our boy was asleep downstairs. And, you know, I’ve been sitting down there guarding him with a shotgun. And she knows that. She was very upset about it. And she doesn’t know why and I have to tell her. And I thought that she would want to get rid of me, to divorce me. And we had a lot of fights. I was very upset at that very, very terrible time. And finally I told her. And she said, “Oh, thank God. I thought you were crazy (everybody laughs).”

And she just went into it. She began to ask me about it. She was the first person I told every detail I knew to. And she understood it deeply. Almost like she was made for it from the beginning. And one of the things that would happen would be that we got these thousands and thousands and thousand of letters coming in. And she would be reading through the letters and she’d pick one out and she’d say, “We’re gonna invite this person up to the cabin,” or that person up to the cabin. They would always be people, when we had a group of people up there, inevitably, The Visitors would show up. And she was amazing that way. And one of the things that would happen, that would be a sign that they were showing up, was that someone would come in or someone would announce that they had seen dead relative or friend.

Anne’s secretary, Lorie Barnes, was one of these people. Anne had found her by reading the letters. And she said, “You know, Whitley, I need a secretary.” And I said, “Well, we’ll call Manpower and get someone in.” And she said, “No, I’ll find someone in the letters.” And she’s reading on. And a few minutes later, she says, “Here, this lady’s gonna be our secretary.” I read the letter and I said, “It says here she’s a singer and an actress.” And Anne said, “Have you ever heard of her?” I said, “No.” She said, “Well, she’s doing something else for a living. Look at her handwriting. That’s the handwriting of a professional. My guess is she’s a secretary and she lives just across the street. And she’s gonna be our secretary.”

We lived on Bleeker Street and she was literally in the next apartment building. So she called her up and I couldn’t believe this was happening. And I hear this…”Yeah this is Anne Strieber. No! No! It really is! Yeah. Listen, I need a secretary. Oh good. You are. Are you working now? Okay. Well listen, why don’t you come over and get started right now?” Five minutes later, there she was. And she was with us for fifteen years. During that time, Anne and Lorie catalogued all the letters, which are now archived at Rice University, for the academic community. And are considered to be one of the…maybe the greatest collection, at the very least, modern folk narrative, in the world. And probably much more than that, obviously. But the point is, that’s there. That whole vast narrative of what was happening to people, when this was coming very close to us, back in the seventies and eighties, still exists and is in great shape because she made it happen.

Now, back to Lorie. Lorie had had many experiences in her life. Many close encounter experiences. It was a very familiar thing to her. Her brother had disappeared mysteriously, twenty years before this event, I’m about to describe, happened. I’ll tell you one of Lorie’s experiences.

This was in the mid-fifties or early fifties. She was in bed about eleven o’clock at night. Her husband was a pianist and he was out doing a gig. And she noticed movement in the room and looked up and there was this line of these dark blue figures – a la the one I just showed you – standing beside the bed. Of course she was completely appalled because, you know, this was the fifties. This was not in the ether at all at the time. And she was horrified. And then, the lead being says, “Do not be afraid. We’re not here for you. We’re interested in the girl child you’re carrying.” She was pregnant at the time. Which would probably be the least reassuring thing that you could hear at a moment like that (everybody in audience laughs loudly. Whitley chuckles a bit, too). It would. And so she absolutely recoiled from him. And he said, “Why do you fear us?” And she said, “You’re so ugly.” And he said something then that is maybe very important and maybe to a lot of people in this room. He put his hand, his dark blue, gloved hand on her hand and said, “My dear, one day you will look just like us.”

What are we? What are we? Is this all there is? Because there are lots of species on this planet that have many different forms. Caterpillars, butterflies…frogs, tadpoles. There’s a long list of such creatures. It’s a typical adaptation on Earth. Does the caterpillar recognize the butterfly? And would the caterpillar find the butterfly beautiful? Or terrifying? What is being? What are we? It’s a question that we must look at in an entirely new way if we’re going to move forward with this whole business. Now, are there aliens here, too? Well, I can’t say there are or aren’t. I hope so because that would just make all of this even more fun. Probably a little bit more dangerous, too because there’s a lot of evidence that this can get quite dangerous and I obviously have had some very difficult times in my life with it.

So Lorie is taking a walk in front of the cabin on one of these weekends. And suddenly, there’s her brother standing there in the road. And she says, “My God, where have you been?” And he smiles at her. And she says, “Come down and meet my friends.” We were all at the cabin. And he says, “I just wanted to let you know that I’m alright.” And he proceeds to drift back into the woods and disappears. She comes back…I remember her walking into the cabin this way like this. And that night, before we all went to bed, Annie said to me, “Wait and see. They’ll show up tonight.”

We had a low light camera on, looking down hallway. We were ready for ’em! I’ve been ready for them for a long time. I’ve tried every possible means of getting evidence. And I was frantic for it in those days because I was going on the television and being laughed at for this unfortunate phrase I used in Communion…a rectal probe. I became a national laughingstock for having been raped. And that’s hard. That’s difficult to bear. So there I was doing that. In any case, I wanted evidence. And they showed up. One of these beings came in through a window, into a room of a woman called Raven Dana, whose talked about it many times on the television and radio. She’s not secretive about it and neither is Lorie.

It touched her on the hand and said, “What can I do for you?” And she said, “You can walk down that hall.” That was where the camera was. And, you know, I was here with Raven recently. She came here and we were here in this room. And I asked Raven, “What does that experience mean to you now?” And this is like, nearly twenty-five years later. And she said, “Well, Whitley. There are two moments in my life that are as vivid right now as they were when they happened. The moment my mother died when I was fourteen years old and the moment that being touched my hand.” That’s a powerful experience. So anyway, it goes down the hall and there’s Lorie in the next bedroom and another lady. It wakes them up. And then it goes, apparently, into the living room where the filmmaker – who was responsible for this camera, he was a documentary filmmaker from Hollywood, who was absolutely sure this is all bullshit – is there with his wife. He wakes up and sees a little man with a huge head, staring down at him. And naturally, he’s deeply concerned about this and reacts to it. Whereupon the little man changes form and becomes the head of a hawk, like Horus. Like an Egyptian God. Or Thoth, rather. And then disappears. This is about four o’clock in the morning.

The house is filled with people and my son and I are sleeping in a tent, out in the woods. And we come up at dawn. And as we come up at dawn – we’re now overlooking the house – we see a figure come out the front door. A hooded figure about this tall,   sort of translucent…race down the deck, race across the backyard and go racing through the woods, avoiding the trees like this . In other words, it was not a ghost. It was something solid. But barely visible. It was sort of translucent. And it was gone. When we went into the house, the filmmaker and his wife were on their feet because they thought the bed had burst into flames. They had been hit by a huge blast of heat. So that was the way it was then. That was the way is was then.

Let’s go forward now to an event in September of 2015. My wife has been dead now for a few weeks. I am bereft beyond belief. Annie was a honeymoon that lasted forty-five years. It was the hardest thing ever in my life as you may all imagine. And those of you who have lost loved ones, know this.  It’s something that half of us have to do. We’re the ones with the bad karma. Believe me. In any case, I had already by that time, realized that Annie was still here. I go into that in a great deal in “The Afterlife Revolution” and also in another talk. But I’ll just summarize it by saying that she had shown herself to be here in a way that was impossible for me to deny. And I would deny it if she had just showed up in my life, I would have assumed it was my imagination and wishful thinking. But what happened was, an hour and a half after she died, she showed up in a friend’s life. And the friend called me and said, “Whitley, the strangest thing just happened. I heard Anne’s voice say in my ear to call you.” And I was literally sitting there, thinking, “Do you still exist? Do you still exist?” With this body lying there in our bed. Then the friend calls and says this. And it was like Anne had communicated with her. It happened again, two or three times at that point, by September. So I knew, each time it was always someone who would call. Like I was out at in forest above Palm Springs, sitting on a bench in the mountains, thinking, “Would you somehow communicate with me?” And my cell phone rings. I answer it and it’s a friend from Nashville, Clare Henry, who says, “Whitley, I just had this…I heard just as clear as day, Anne’s voice say, ‘Call Whitley right now.'” And, you know, I might be rather unwilling to just believe things out of whole cloth (entirely fictional or utterly false ~Joe)  but I’m not that stupid. I realized that something was going on there.

Now, what happened next was terribly, terribly important. Anne and I joined an organization called The Gurdjieff Foundation back in 1970. And in the Gurdjieff work, there is something called the sensing exercise, where you take your attention and you move it onto your physical body. You literally, extend your attention on to your body. You don’t try to stop your thoughts. You let them flow. But you extend your attention on to your body. And what happens is, now I know this changes the way your body appears in other levels of reality. You begin to be visible in another way. You attract attention, in other words. Back in the early eighties when we got the cabin, I was sitting there and doing this meditation every night at about eleven. And apparently, there was this one glow they saw in this big woods and showed up. In fact, they had told me at that time…I asked them why they had come and they said, “We saw a glow.” I thought, “Oh, you mean the glow of cities and so forth?”

But then what happened at Scarritt Bennet Center was this. This is a little center in Nashville where we used to have an annual thing called The Dreamland Festival, built around my Dreamland podcast that’s on my website, www.unknowncountry.com. And we had about 100 people or so there. It was a very lovely, intimate event. So I was there. William Henry, Clare Henry’s husband, was having a little weekend conference and I decided to go for old time’s sake. And a lady walked up to me at one of the breaks and said, “Whitley, I wanted to let you know something very weird that just happened to me and I don’t know how to tell you.” And I said, “You know, if you don’t know how to tell me something strange, you don’t know how to tell anyone something strange (laughs). So go ahead and just say it.” And she said, “Well, I heard Anne saying, right in my ear, just as clear as if she was here…” And she had been at the Dreamland Festivals and listened to the show for years. She knew how Anne sounded.  “Anne said, ‘Tell Whitley that I can see him when he’s in the chair.'” And she said, “Do you have a special chair?” And I said, “I know exactly what that means.”

I had been doing the sensing exercise, at that point, since 1970. And the glow is the glow that comes off of us when we do this exercise. It’s the simplest exercise in the world. And I thought to myself…Annie can communicate with me. If she can see me, she’s going to be able to focus in. So I redoubled my efforts at this. And what happens is…this is one of these aura photographs. It’s no big deal. But this is what happens…this is what an aura photograph looks like when you can be moved from mind to body, okay. This is what it looks like and it’s an ordinary aura. You can probably get one of those made yourself if there’s someone taking aura photographs. There’s nothing unusual about it. But that’s the glow that’s there.

Now, I got into intimate contact with Anne after that event at the Scarritt Bennett Center and with a group of Visitors who I am still in contact with now. They’re not all Anne. It’s something different. But as soon as I came back, this whole business of doing the sensing exercise just exploded. They wanted it not just at eleven, which is when I had been doing it for years, they started waking me up at three o’clock in the morning to do it, too.  And at first, they did at in a way that was calculated to attract my attention. And what happened was, one of my toes was electrocuted. Like somebody had literally taken an electric wire and stuck it again the toe. And that really woke me up. And I thought…what have I? Is this gout? What happened to me? I had no idea and no connection whatsoever. I didn’t make the connection. I noticed it was three in the morning. And I thought, well, I don’t know what that was. Of course,  the next thing I did was I turned on my cell phone and I’m looking up “gout” on Google, trying to see the symptoms. Obviously, it wasn’t gout. So I finally just went back to sleep. Nothing else to do.

The next night, it was a little more obvious. Fingers grabbed this nipple…HARD. And shook it! And I leaped up out of bed! And you know, you’re sleeping alone in an apartment with nobody else there. You don’t have any animals. And someone grabs your nipple and shakes it in the middle of the night, you will wake up (audience laughs). And I did. And I realized. Wait a minute. This takes me back to when I was meditating with a group of people who made it clear they were from the world of the dead, between lives. Back in the early nineties, at the cabin, they would wake me up at three. They wanted to meditate at three, too. They were just a little more gentle about it. They would just knock me on the shoulder. And so I went in the living room and I immediately went into the place with the chair. It’s a little couch, actually. And started  meditating at three. And I soon discovered that this was my new real. If I did not meditate at three, I would be woken up. And they became quite inventive. And it got to be kind of fun. I would actually, purposely not do it to see what method of waking me and getting my ass in gear they would come up with. And finally, it devolved down to blowing in my face. And I don’t need it any more because there’s a certain level of respect that’s developed. I’m there pretty much around three every morning. I don’t set an alarm or anything. I rely on the relationship to work. And I do the meditation at that time. And then I generally go back to bed.

And it’s become, almost a symbiotic experience. I feel as if I’m living in this reality in a completely new way. I’ve become very aware of the fact that the body and the ego are all part of the physical reality. There’s another reality here. Another being. And I’m that being. And I’m actually working this body and using the ego very consciously now like a puppet master. It’s not like it used to be where I was completely living in Whitley and I was Whitley. I’m not Whitley any more. I’m using Whitley in order to communicate with you. That’s the difference. And it’s getting more and more that way as time goes on. I’m beginning to feel much larger in a certain sense and much more at peace with myself. Because the part of myself that I’m living in has no concern whatsoever about death. The ego is gonna die. Whitley will die. Like Anne said after she died, “I’m not Anne any more but I will always be Anne for you.” And she will. And I understand how that works. Even if she projects another body into the world and is in fact reincarnated, the soul behind it will remember all of her different lives, including the one I shared with her. And when I want to come into contact with her, with that soul, it will be through that medium. But I don’t want it like that. I want to be in contact much more objectively with the actual being that’s back there. That’s doing this. That’s protecting this series of experiences of bodies into this world. And all of us are like this. This is what we are, I think. I think.

Now, let’s change direction. We’re going to go back to the physical world and to the idea of aliens. On purpose. Because one of the most extraordinary things about this whole experience is that it has anchors in the physical as well as being something that is deeply spiritual and having to do with levels of consciousness that are not physical at all. It’s wonderfully ambiguous in that respect. And I love that ambiguity. It’s fascinating to work with it and live with it.

Now, what I’m going to show you is something known as the rocket video. You can look it up on the Internet. It’s been debunked sixteen ways from Sunday. But there’s one thing about it that makes me think it might be authentic. You will see on the side, a little green light flashing up and down during the video. It’s not explained. And that little green light is what makes me think the video might be real. The reason is, that a little green light like that, flashed up and down on my desk, the entire time I was wiring “Communion.” And it drove me nuts! I couldn’t see it except out of the corner of my eye. You can see it clearly in the video. But I would turn to it and it would be gone. You know, you’re trying to write and you see this light flashing up and down. It’s very distracting. And one time I managed to put my thumb on it. And it was a little disc. I could feel it under my thumb. It sort of oozed out from under my thumb and I didn’t see it. And then I started typing again. And sure enough, it started flipping and I thought, okay, what I have to do is concentrate on my work and forget the damn light because it’s going to be there.

This next video is a classic gray alien like we all think exists. And probably does. It is under duress in some kind of God knows, what kind of facility it’s in or how it got there or what kind of back story there may be. But you’ll see that light. And that to me…because I had never told anybody about that light. It may be mentioned briefly in one of my books but not so…I don’t think that someone would have thought to put this in it, in a video like that. This being is in a room and you see the light flashing, popping up and down. And what’s happening is it’s in duress and it’s going to collapse and you’ll see this shadowy figure come in and try to remove material from its mouth. And I sense this is a real video. I’ve been told a thousand times, it’s a puppet, it’s this, it’s that. But there’s something very familiar about it. I’m not so sure it’s an alien. It might be a human being, in a different form. But it’s quite sad that it’s there at all. If this is real. Because it would suggest… (recording ends) It goes on like this. There’s no sense in watching it any more. It got son and it finally falls down.

There is a level of our culture that appears to be more or less at war with them. And specifically, the Air Force. Now, the Navy, isn’t. The reason is, is very simply…that unless the Nimitz carrier group…they just observed these things in the video you saw at the beginning. They observed them because they weren’t threatening the carrier group in any way. And I know of another story from the fifties which is the same sort of story where they just observed then. But every time they show up over territory that the Air Force is controlling, the Air Force must react to their presence. Because the Air Force’s job is to keep our skies under its control. And they can’t do it! And not only can they not do it, there’s all of these stories about close encounters of the third kind and horrifying alien abduction stories. I’m sure you’ve heard many of them. I’ve experienced them myself. So what’s the Air Force going to do if…people always say to me, “Well why don’t they just tell the truth?” Well if this is happening, they can’t come out and say, “Well, okay, these objects are coming down out of the sky and something is showing up in people’s houses and they’e being dragged off in the middle of the night and things are being done to them. We don’t know what it is.” And the next question is, “Well, can the Air Force protect us?” And the answer has to be, “No.”

And the Space Force that the president has talked about is about protecting our satellites from space warfare promulgated by North Korea, Iran, China and Russia. It has nothing to do, as far as I know, with The Visitors. It may but I would somehow doubt that we have any weaponry that would enable us to control a situation like to to any great degree.

This next video (This is one I can’t find. ~Joe) was of a UFO chase in Florida. It was taken illegal by a housemate on an Air Force base. She wasn’t supposed to be using a cell phone video. But she sees this. This object here. And you can think it’s a plane in the distance. A very high airplane. That jet actually is running on afterburners. It’s a fighter jet, not an airliner. And this probably isn’t an airliner but we’re not 100,000% certain of that. In any case, it seems clear that the jet is moving toward it. In fact, they’re both moving in the same direction, in this direction, You can’t see that very clearly. And she’s struggling with the cell phone to try to keep the whole thing in range. But it’s probably an example of an attempt to run the thing away. Essentially to say, “This is our space and you don’t belong in it.” Is that wise or are we more like islanders, who have never seen anything in the modern world, reacting?

You know, after the tsunami that occurred in the Indian Ocean a few years ago, the Indian government sent a helicopter to circle a protected island in which there is a small tribe who have never seen the outside world. And they circled the island to be sure that they were alright and didn’t need help. And what happened was, these people, who had certainly never seen a helicopter because the Indian government keeps all aircraft away – it’s a no go zone. no fly zone – came rushing down to their beach and started shaking spears at this strange object in the sky.

And I’m afraid that the Air Force is doing the same thing and I find it a little embarrassing. I wish that I had more say over what we did. My relationship with this through the Air Force goes back a long way. My Uncle Mickey, Edward Strieber, was involved with the Roswell incident. Specifically, he was at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio when the debris from Roswell was brought there. And he helped to assemble, as he put it, tried to reassemble the debris.  And he told me about this after he read “Communion.” And he introduced me to his commanding officer, General Arthur Exon. And General Exon had been the commandant of Wright Patterson Air Force Base at that point until in the sixties. And was now a rather old man. But he told me a great deal about what happened. He told me about, for example, the biological materials but also made me promise never to speak of them in any detail, so I can’t do that. But I can tell you that there were certainly biological remains that were found at Roswell.

The Air Force has bent over backwards for years to pretend that this never happened or that is was something other than what it was. But General Exon was very clear to me. He said, “Every one from Truman on down, knew that what we had found was not of this world, within 24 hours of our finding it. That’s the truth. He would have no reason whatsoever to lie to me and neither would my uncle.

So, what to do? That has been my question for years. I have been struggling with The Visitors for years, to try to make some kind of sense out of all of this. To bring it into focus and make use of it. Because they know things. If you read the book, “The Key,” it comes somehow from my relationship with them or with this experience. I don’t know quite how.  But it’s basically a book about a conversion I had in 1998 with this man who came to my hotel room in Toronto and we had about a forty-five minute conversation in which he talked about things like the changing climate and things like that. And to my horror, this is all starting to come true. I wrote a book about it with Art Bell called “Superstorm,” in response to what he said and to other inputs as well. It wasn’t just what he said. There was other…we looked through the scientific literature very carefully, of course. That became the movie, “The Day After Tomorrow.” And it is about climate change. And now, here we are in California, all these years later, in a terribly hot summer with fires everywhere. On a planet which recently, smoke from fires that are completely unrecorded and unnoticed in Siberia, reached the Pacific Northwest! At the same time, the smoke from the fires here is reaching New York.

And this is a reality. And it’s horrifying and I wanted to…I’ve been completely disempowered by my public advocacy for these experiences. I am on a larger world stage, I’m considered a joke. I can’t do a TED talk. I can’t advocate on any level. In fact, anything I do advocate for, is disempowered by my mere advocacy. And so I was asking The Visitors to empower me. There is something…I’m not going to go into what it is but there’s something they could do very easily and could completely change the world’s vision of me and view of me. And then I could go out and lay out what they have already told me is happening, going to happen and in fact, I’m seeing it happen. They’re quite accurate in their assessment of what our experience of life on this planet is and what its future is.

I had a…it turned into an actual physical conflict. And it’s so difficult to explain how this works. But every time I get past a level of fear, they will take it to another level. Each time. And here’s what happened this time. I was absolute insistent that I could interact with them, that I could do this, they could come and we could have a type of contact the I failed at many years ago and that they’ve thrown back in my face a hundred times. And so here’s what happens this time. They do show up…one of them does show up physically. Wonderful! Except the situation is this: I wake up in the night, ready to do the three o’clock meditation. And I realize there’s something between my legs in the bed, under the covers. I do have dogs and cats. It’s obviously not a possum or anything in Santa Monica. It can only be one thing. One of them. And where is it? It’s not in the room, sitting in a chair. It’s not even sitting on the bed. It’s between my legs! Inches from my gonads! And I know what they’re like. I’ve seen them. They’re not pretty. And they’re really, terribly fast. And they may be physically small but they’re powerful. They’re like iron. And yes, I was terrified and I leaped up out of the bed. It leaped up with me and I got a gash on my leg, which is still visible. That’s the gash. And nothing more.

The whole process of empowerment that I was trying to get, was denied me. And I think the reason is, that their vision is, that we are…this is our world and we’re going to have to go through this, whatever it is that’s to come, we have to live it. And they’re not going to enable any kind of an intervention. They’ve even showed me…this is what’s so agonizing. I know what we need to do, technologically, to change things. And we still could, I think, if we had a massive international effort to first understand how to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then do it. We could probably…we might even succeed at this.

Now, at this same period, they were very close to me physically. And I went to The Esalen Institute up in Big Sur. You probably all know something about Esalen. It’s owned by man named Michael Murphy, who has become a good friend. And they have private conferences at the Esalen Institute that, from time to time…it’s a big public thing and they have a big catalogue of courses and so forth. It’s a wonderful place, by the way, if you’ve never been to Esalen. You should certainly try it. In any case, they have conferences at which, among other things, they have groups of anthropologists and so forth and social scientists who will be brought together. And then they’ll get people like me to tell these extremely wild stories so that these people can be exposed to these stories. And however they may view them is their business. They may think of them as folklore, they may think in their cultural context, they may think of them as real stories that need to be examined in a deeper way.

In any case, the last time I was there was last February. And I was with my co-author, Jeff Kripal, who was the organizer of this particular conference. Co-author of the book, “Supernatural: A New Vision of the Unexplained.” And in “Supernatural,” if you haven’t seen it, it is essays by Jeff , who is an academic. He’s at Rice University and he’s a specialist in modern mythology and folklore. He knows everything about things like X-Men. And he knows everything also about things like Fatima. He’s actually a fascinating human being. So, he would write an essay and then I would write an experience. And he would write an essay in response to it and that’s how the book works. “Supernatural,” of course.

So we were there together. Jeff has described himself of the Helen Keller of parapsychological research because he’s never seen a thing. So we were there together. He’s had one, incredibly powerful experience back in the eighties that got him declared persona non grata in India for a lot of complicated reasons. In any case, one of The Visitors showed up in the room. We were sleeping and we were sharing a room in a place called the Murphy House at Esalen. And one of The Visitors shows up in the room. in the middle of the night and is beside my bed. I turn, because I noticed movement and I’m only three quarters of sleep because I’m just about to get up and do the three o’clock meditation. And he’s standing there, with these big, dark black eyes that are not, like gleaning, like the eyes of the creature that you saw a few minutes ago. They’re like looking into infinity. A dark, deep infinity and it’s quite frightening. And at the same moment or about that time, Jeff experiences something like a tremendous crashing noise and an interior feeling of something being…something very, very powerful happening. And hears an inner voice inside himself say, “Oh my God!” Because this is a level of reality we’re not supposed to be experiencing. The bodies are supposed to be focused on the outside and drawing in information and experience. We’re not supposed to be looking in the other direction. We aren’t supposed to look behind the curtain and this is indeed a stage. Shakespeare was right about that. It is a play.

So…and I’m looking at the being, whereupon, something blows on this hand because it knows I can’t look at those eyes for long, even though I’ve been doing this all of these years. And my head turns because of something blowing on my hand. And then the experience is over. If you ever go to Esalen, you wanna be in the room where this happened, this is it. It’s the Sea View room at the Murphy House. And that’s the Pacific Ocean. It’s a beautiful room as you can see. And I was in a bed right behind that window and Jeff was on the far side of the room when it happened. So, it’s a devastating experience, even when you’ve lived it for years, as I have. Because it is a matter of taking you outside of not only yourself but outside of what we have come to assume is reality. This is part of the real world. Yes. It’s part of it. But it’s only part of it. It’s changing rapidly.

This summer is not an aberration. It’s the new normal. And it’s a baseline. From now on, it will always be warmed and warmer and warmer on this planet. This is something that we’re going to have to face and live with and find out way. And you know, I know that The Visitors in a heartbeat could help us. I know exactly how they can do it. But they’re not going to do it. One of the things that they said early on…they said to a man called Phillip Corso, who was an intelligence officer who had some contact with them. And he’s, of course, like all of us, terribly controversial. Everyone thinks…people say, oh, well he made it all up, etcetera and so forth. But there was one thing, the moment I heard Phil say this to me, I knew that he had had a true encounter. He was in a situation, he said, in New Mexico, where one of these devices was grounded in a cave. And he was detailed to go into the cave and try to communicate in some way with this thing. To find out why it was there. And it became clear to him that they needed to turn off radars at White Sands or it couldn’t leave. And he said, “Well, how long?” And the answer was, “Ten minutes.” And he responded, “That could be an awfully long time,” which obviously it could be in contact of a military situation. And then he said, “What’s in it for us?” And whether it happened this way or not, I don’t know. But the response is the truth. He said the response was, “A new world, if you can take it.” If you can bear it. If you can take it for yourselves. It will not be given to us. Nothing will be given to us. We either take it or we don’t. It’s as simple as that.

And right now is…we don’t. Will that change? Well, it’s gonna get harder and harder here until everyone is going to be aware of the peril. There will no noone on the planet who isn’t aware of it. And who does not know for certain the it’s there. What will we do then? What will be like then? Well I want to leave you and then I’m going to open this to questions with a couple of things. This is the central thing I have learned from my long experience with The Visitors. One: You belong to your self. We belong to our self. To our species. We belong to us. If you live out of love, compassion and humility and understand what those things actually are, you will have power. You will end up with a strong and coherent soul.

Love – My wife said this, as she was dying. One of the things that happened was a book flew open on a bookshelf in our house. And this was a book called “Physics from Fisher Information.” And it flew open to a passage that had been underlined in yellow magic marker. That the Universe began with a single, primordial quest for knowledge. And the reason this happened…the book flew open literally as she left this world, goes back to a story that was told to us by a wonderful man. It’s not in his biography and I’m not going to say his name for that reason. But if you figure it out, that’s your business. He was a heart surgeon. And he was lying in the hospital with a myocardial infection. An infection of the sac around the heart. And he was beginning to come into stress. And he began to push the button for the nurses to come in because he needed oxygen. And no one came and no one came. Suddenly, a figure came into the room in a long, white gown. A woman. Leaned over him, reached into his chest, cradled his heart in her hands, rose up and left via the window. In that moment, he told me, the entire operation for the heart transplant came into his mind in that instant. And that operation now has saved thousands upon thousands of lives.

Now, when Annie left, she knew and loved that story deeply. She left behind the book, open to that page. Because in that instant, the moment you’re out of the body, you know…you are no longer restrained by all of the filters of the physical world. And you know where you stand at once. This is why you definitely don’t want to be a bad person, because it’s not pleasant to die into that, I would think. In any case, that’s why she left the book open. Because it was a message. And beyond that, I learned more about love. It’s not sentimental love she was talking about. It’s objective love. It is the love that animates that quest for knowledge. It is a deep yearning that is at the basis of reality. It isn’t that gravity is at the basis of reality. Below that, there’s an even deeper basis.

In fact, what the book, “Physics from Fisher Information,” is about…it’s a speculation about…what is the information that causes the Universe, when it goes from superposition, when particles are in an indefinite state, something causes them to come into position. To come into focus, as it were. Why do they come into focus in the forms that they do? What is this hidden information? And this hidden information, as far as Annie is concerned, is another kind of love that she calls objective love. It’s not, what is in the New Age movement is called…it’s not sentimental at all. It’s a yearning toward being and knowledge. That kind of love. Finding that kind of love. She said enlightenment is what happens when there is nothing left of us but love. That kind of love. That kind of deep yearning that is underlying all of reality. And you can get in touch with that in yourself. It’s very possible to do.

Compassion is the next one. We think of compassion…oh, it’s like giving a quarter to a beggar or something. There’s much more to it than that. Now, I am hasten to add…I am not a Christian. I am not involved in religions at all. But, I am a student of the Gospels because they are a useful tool. And if you read through the Gospels carefully, you will find very methodically, a whole group of different descriptions of different types of compassion. An example of an incident we don’t think of as compassion, but is a compassionate act, is when Jesus went into the temple and overthrew the tables of the money changers. The compassion there was…he was giving them a chance to see their greed. It lead to his death became the Romans, they couldn’t care less about whatever kind of nonsense he was preaching. But when he fooled with the money, he was over. He was on a cross a couple of days later. They didn’t waste any time. They knew what they were doing. That’s why their empire lasted so long.

The Romans were…if someone came after their money…that was…and that money, what was happening there, was that money was being changed into coins…the Jews had their own coinage because they would not allow images on their coins. So the Romans said, “Well fine. You can mint coins here in Israel and they won’t have images on them.” But then they can’t be used anywhere else in the empire. So you have to change them and that was what the money changers were all about. And they were changing, people were changing their money into regular Roman coins and then contributing it to the temple. And the scenes, the Romans were taking their cut. And when that was interrupted, up on the cross he went. But that’s an act of compassion and he would, by the way, known the results of what he did. Anyone would have. It wasn’t because he was some kind special guru or anything. Anyone in Jerusalem, at that time, would have known that if you fooled with that money, you would be killed. But it was an act of compassion.

And there many other more conventional acts of compassion. But you have to look into yourself and into the people around you, to find what they really need and how can I see that beyond my ego. Because if you look at it through your ego, you’re gonna soon figure out, “Well, X needs to be told that Trump’s an asshole.” Or, “Y needs to be told that Trump is God.” Depending on your position. “And I’m gonna do it out of compassion!” And the Nazis had the same idea and we’ve always had that kind of idea. That’s why we persecute each other. But you have to find. behind your ego, there is another part of your being that will know your truth the second your body is finished.  And knows it now if you just have enough of a sense of humor about yourself to see it. And once you are really able to laugh at your own foibles, you will be able to find real compassion for others.

The third one is humility. Now that’s a fairly simple one. I started out in this. I was not a humble man. I had had a lot of best sellers and then I had this big book and I was taking my brother around my cabin and showing him – my younger brother, eleven years younger than I – showing him all kinds of, all the wonderful things and feeling very proud of myself. Walking down to show him the place where I had actually gone up with The Visitors. And suddenly I hear this voice in my head say, “Arrogance. I can do anything I want to you.” And I thought, “That has to be my imagination.” We get down  to this place where this happened and there’s a sort of mist hanging there. And then a huge UFO passes overhead and I could see, he didn’t see this…I could see these figures standing in the mist. And I thought, oh dear, I have obviously crossed a line here. I’m being arrogant to my brother. And something is gonna go wrong. What will it be? I could not imagine because they had never really done anything like that to me. Then next morning, the bank calls. “Mr. Strieber, we have a number of checks here and we have no way of clearing them – checks written by you – because you don’t have an account with us any more. Have you moved to another bank?” And I said, “No, I haven’t. My only account is with your bank.” And the man said, “Well, you don’t have an account with us. We have no record whatsoever of it.” I said, “You have to find my money because that’s all my money in the world. It’s gone.” I had like twenty dollars in my pocket and that was it! And I had a life! All of my money was gone! Just like that! And he called back a couple of times during the day saying, “We have no record whatsoever of an account. You have no account here.” And I said, “You have to look for it more deeply. It must be somewhere.” And then finally, at the end of the day, he said, “We’ve decided to give it another day because normally, we are required to return these checks but we’re gonna give it another twenty-four hours since you’re so insistent.” They finally found my account on some kind of magnetic tape record in a special vault in the Iron Mountain facility, which was near the cabin and near the bank, in upstate New York, which is where a lot of corporate records are kept. And they were able to restore the account.

I considered that a memorable lesson and I have never forgotten it. But finding, what my real humility is. What is it? When someone comes up to you and needs something from you. Someone you love. Or you think that you have a better idea than they do. You have to look at yourself. This is all about looking at ourselves. And this is the empowerment that we need. This is the power that will leave us when we pass away in the state that Anne said…Anne had a near death experience in 2004. In it, she was in a sort of subway station. And she saw all of these people holding these huge burdens. Big suitcases and stuff. And she realized, “They’re not going anywhere until they put those burdens down.” And in this house, every time you brought anything like this up, Annie would always tell that story. She’s told it a hundred times in here. And this last thing, humility, enables you to put all of those things down. All of your judgment of others. The wrongs that were done to you. All of this. You can put it all down. And inside yourself, behind the ego, behind the body, there is this very peaceful, lovely being, that is also full of humor. One of the things that she loved the most…she loved the work of Meister Eckhart. The, I think, fourteenth century theologian and philosopher who left behind him some marvelous statements and sermons. Among those statements was this: “God laughs and plays.” And she said, “Always.” One of the few things The Visitors have ever said to me in physical hearing was, “Have joy.” And she used to say, “That’s the critical thing! We have to find it!” And all the letting go that these things involves, leaves you with that. And the way you do it, is with humor! You will always find the same thing about yourself if you look closely enough. You’re hilarious. You’re absolutely hilarious. You don’t wanna be funny and that makes you even funnier. I’ll leave you with this. Meister Eckhart’s creation myth:

“God laughed. And his laughter begat the sun. And they laughed together. And their laughter begat the Holy Spirit. And out of their laughter poured the Universe.”

So, that’s where we need to stay. In that laughter. That is the beginning and end of reality. I think. Thank you. (applause)

Q&A…

I asked the first question…

Joe Murgia (JM): Can you expand a little bit more…in the beginning, you talked about the being. You had an idea about who it was but you don’t want to say. Any more hints?

WS: Who they are? I think they’re us.

JM: Well, the one specific, physical contact.

WS: I think that’s another level of the human species. I think that we are in contact with ourselves. I think that’s the joke of the whole thing. We’re all looking up in the sky when we should be looking at each other. I don’t think that’s entirely true. The little gray being that we saw with the big black eyes? I think there probably are aliens here but why wouldn’t there be? My God, the Universe is so huge! And one thing you do learn when you get involved in this…you know there’s people working on the materials and stuff. There’s a lot going on, behind the scenes, unfortunately. But there is a definite, physical side to this and it has probably do with aliens. But they aren’t living like we are. We are isolated from ourselves. I think that they are not. I think what we call the soul and body, for them is all one thing. And this is why I’ve seen them dematerialize before my eyes. Be as just as physical as you and then…not. And I always think to myself when I see people thinking about building starships and so forth, We’re never gonna take these hulks out there. Never! But when we can change our own materiality…what happens is when you go out of your body, you can be in this reality, if you wish. But you can also be in a situation where there’s no idea of alien vs. human. It has no meaning. There is no elsewhere. It is all here, now.

I hope that one of these days something really fun happens, like a spaceship actually does land on the White House lawn. The Visitors, by the way, they have a marvelous sense of humor. After the thing that happened at Esalen – and I was talking about how those eyes were so scary and so forth – one of them shows up in the apartment in Santa Monica wearing dark glasses (audience laughs). You have to take it as a human experience, as a…often a very fun experience, a very…it can be dangerous experience, if you…it can be very dangerous, obviously. But it’s a human experience. From my perspective, there may be aliens involved and there may be not. But my interest is in the human side. Our experience.

Any other questions?

Audience Member (AM): Do you have any recommendations on how to quell the fear when you’re facing them? Because I black out every time.

WS: You’re not gonna quell it. I’ve been trying to quell it for years and the harder I try to quell it…

AM: Or if not quell it, how do you..cope?

WS: I’m learning to laugh at it. And that’s helping. That’s really helping. And as I said early on in the beginning…we’re wild. We are not tame. And the process of taming is really hard for an intelligent creature. For an animal like a horse, that can be easily convinced that you’re not gonna eat him because you’re sitting on his back. Because after a while, you don’t eat him and he figures it out. It’s not so easy for someone like us with a big imagination. I can think of a whole lot of different things The Visitors can do to me that is never going to occur to a horse…that I might to do to a horse. Though a horse can be tamed. I am still working through that. And you know, they don’t help me. They make it worse. They are into, you know, if you’ve gotten this far, then w’re gonna make it even scarier. We’re gonna get deeper. We’re gonna go deeper and deeper and deeper. Until finally, there’s a little creature, which I know has long claws, because I’ve seen them…lying between my legs, in my bed.

AM: Further scaring the shit out of you (laughs). Making it that much more difficult.

WS: Oh yeah. That’s what the gash was about. I leaped up. He leaped up. And he left me with a gash on my leg. And that was the end of that conversation.

AM: Why would there be fear? What’s the reason for the fear?

WS: The reason for the fear is this: When you are walking in the woods and you see a raccoon, the raccoon is scared. The raccoon is scared because he can’t, in any way, predict your actions. He does not know what you are or what you’re going to do. Any number of different animals will make sense to him but you don’t, because he’s not tame to you.

AM: But why would they be projecting fear?

WS: No, they’re not projecting fear at all. It’s us.

AM: It’s our reaction to it?

WS: Yeah.

AM: Well, they’re still not making it any easier.

WS: No, they’re not. They’re making it harder. They’re going deeper and deeper and deeper.

AM: And why would that be?

WS: For the same reason that…you know, I’ve broken horses when I was a kid, which is a very interesting experience. The horse has to get to a point where he no longer has anything left in him that’s afraid of you. And when he gets to that point, he stops. He will quiver. And you can literally feel him getting it. And he just stands there. And you’re on his back. And he’s gasping and gasping. And he’s realized that you’re not dangerous to him. And that’s when the relationship begins. So that’s what’s happening here. Only we’re much more complex than horses. And so it’s many, many more layers to get through. Hopefully I get to the end of the darned thing before I die. If one of us gets to there, we all get there.

AM: The islanders off of India are the Sentinelese. And Hubble Deep Field is the one they took that shows the tens of thousands of galaxies in that one, tiny little speck. There was something I remember hearing several years ago…I think it was over the radio. It was a woman that claimed she was being visited, that put a sound-activated tape recorder in her room. And then they actually played back what it recorded, which was a very mechanical voice saying, DON’T WAKE UP!” in a really commanding tone. And I haven’t been able to find this anywhere.

WS: Well you know, I’ve tried that. Here’s what we’ve tried. We’ve tried many different type of cameras. I have a surveillance camera in my apartment now, in fact. And when I go into the living room to mediate at night, I leave it on. It turns itself off. It always turns itself off. It turned itself off last night. If I’m not in the house…if I go on a vacation or a trip or something and leave it on. It stays on all night. We were never able to get…the only thing we ever got was…a guy, a psychologist I knew called John Gliedman, a wonderful man said, “Why don’t we go low-tech?” Why don’t you just put powder on the floor in your bedroom? And so, what I got were these little…like, goat-like footprints. And between them, what had appeared to be a swishing tail (laughs). Oh my God. And, of course, it’s meaningless. I probably look pictures of it. But I can’t go out and show that, “This is proof!” I got that. And you notice how it’s just a little scarier. That tail was pretty disappointing and concerning. Because I’m not a fool. I know what stories of demons and the tails and all these things. They’re scary. I also know other things about their tails. About tails.

AM: The question was more, had you heard that tape or has anybody played that for you?

WS: Oh no, I’m sorry. I haven’t heard that tape.

AM: I mean there have been so many different…I mean there’s the Iranian Air Force pilot that was in an F-4 – this was before the fall of the Shah – that pursued a UFO in Iran. And basically, the turned off all the electronics in his plane.

WS: Yeah, they do that all the time. They’re past masters of that.

AM: What happened to him? Did he crash?

AM2: No, no, no. After it left, his systems came back on.

AM: I have a question. If were you…if I was in your position and I kept being bothered by these creatures, I’d be really freaked out. I’m really like, dead serious. Have you ever thought about like, hiring a (indecipherable) or an exorcist?

WS: I have no interest in that whatsoever. I’m far beyond the good/evil deal. They are not evil. They’re working hard at this and I respect their effort enormously.

AM: So you’re afraid of them but they’re not evil.

WS: Yeah. Fear doesn’t necessarily mean a thing is evil. The horse was scared of me when we were breaking those horses. But I wasn’t evil.

AM: So fear is what you don’t know.

WS: Yeah, exactly. We used to break those horses at a ranch down in south Texas. The interesting thing for boys was that we weren’t very heavy. And they really could, if you didn’t know what you were doing, you’d definitely go to the Moon. And when you landed, you would realize that you had not in fact escaped.

No…I don’t see..I’m not interested…I went through a whole long thing of the evil versus good stuff and I’m far beyond that. This has, essentially, nothing to do with that. I’m not interested in having people make them go away or anything like that.

AM: Quite the contrary…

WS: Quite the contrary. I mean, I had a thing happen the other night…I’m not gonna go into it. It was incredibly terrifying. It was beyond…night before last.

AM: Will you share the…

WS: I saw something that was really, really horrendous. And my reaction was…how can I help this something here, which is obviously suffering terribly, who wouldn’t be like that. And I don’t know the answer to that question. But I’m not turning away from this. I refuse to. It’s time to quit…to get beyond all of that. We’ve been dong that through our whole history. Let’s take the next step. And yes, I’ll probably be dragged away by my hair by awful demons and so forth. But, you know, everyone who goes out on a frontier, faces danger. And yes, I do face danger. I’m sure of it. I’ve had lots of dangerous things happen to me. But I’m gonna do it any way.

AM: So you said there was something you saw the other night and you wanted to know how to help it and you didn’t know what to do.

WS: Yeah!

AM: Have you ever tried to…this is gonna sound really hippy but…tried to like, send magnetic energy through your heart

WS: Oh yeah. I’ve tried everything. And sometimes, there’s some sort of a reaction. Mild. I have the sense that whatever I have tried has not been very effective or even very interesting. But, nevertheless.

AM: Whitley, it’s so fascinating because so much of my experience with lucid dreaming and out of body experiences that really led up to so much of this art, were about phase shifting. In other words, that time has a sequence. And that things are both in and out of phase. The interesting thing about three dimensions – and you think about a multi-dimensional story – is that we’ve tried to create coherence and consistency. And with your experiences, it’s very intriguing to think, cause like with the gnome you showed…with this borderland…this liminal place. That is like a crop circle saying, “I’m not going to show up and prove something because that’s not the point here.” It’s to pull you out into a larger conversation. Not to have proof, but to create…because these things are shifting in and out of phase. That maybe it is – and I wonder about your work – being a way of creating a context to create a larger frame of reference where we allow these imaginal planes to interact.

WS: It’s very much like the crop circles, in the sense that it is about experiencing questions that you can’t answer and cannot ignore, either. And the temptation is to go into some sort of belief system to fill that gap. But why not instead, stand there, with the question, and let the energy of the question guide you. That’s what I’m trying to do with my life.

AM: I was just curious if there’s significance to the fact that you meditate at 3am?

WS: And eleven.

AM: Is there something about that specific time?

WS: Well, you know, I’ve thought about…why is it? And I’m sure that when we do this particular type of meditation, it sets up a glow. There’s something different about the way you’re seen in other levels of reality. And I have a feeling that at that hour, people are asleep, and there’s this one little glow there. And that’s also probably why they showed up at the country house. Because I was out there alone in the woods. And there was this one little glow. And they saw it and came to investigate to see what was going on.

But it’s very complex because I’m not the only person in one of the Roswell families – in the Air Force families that were involved with Roswell – that has this in the family. I’m not alone in that respect. The others are all, you know, they’re all in the Air Force, in those families, and they’re not talking because they’re not supposed to. Behind the scenes it’s a whole different world. And I just wish that the darn curtain could be opened but I understand why it isn’t. And I understand also why The Visitors keep themselves hidden because, you know, we… I do know this: The more of us get used to them on the deepest possible level, the more this will work. And there’s gonna be people, “Oh no, we mustn’t do this. This is evil,” etcetera and so forth. Because their egos are invested in a type of…feeling a type of importance that comes from thinking something is evil when it’s really not evil. It’s just simply something they don’t understand. And we have to get past all of that! And yeah, we’re running out of time, too because this darn planet is falling apart around our ears here. It’s a real interesting time. Too interesting.

AM: It just seems to me like we are, and you are – one of the people in the forefront – we’re just…we’ve been this way for too long now. We’ve put ourselves in, you know, this is all there is and we have five sense and we can see these seven colors and whatever. And it’s all out there. And we’re already hardwired, I believe, to perceive a lot more.

WS: You were just filtering it out. And the bigger and more intense the material world becomes, the strong those filters get. The ancient Egyptians understood the soul very well. With the Babakan, they understood the three different levels of the soul, early, early on. Later, they got all tangled up in all kinds of different ideas. But initially, their pure, clear idea from the pyramid text is really clear and probably quite true. We are in the situation that right now, I mean, we are so involved in the material world. And the Internet is just sucking or attention into this great electromechanical  illusion. It’s a human catastrophe of the first order.

Lee: Whitley, if I could just say for all of us, a deep appreciation for really the story and the journey you’ve taken. And one of the things that I just want to point out because it’s so important, is that you are a philosopher in an age that doesn’t think we need philosophers.

WS: Well thank you.

Lee: We need philosophers because they allow us to examine a question, not by taking sides, but by giving us perspective that we don’t have otherwise. So I deeply appreciate what you bring to us and I want to say thank you for having the heroism and the willingness to take the journey you’ve been on. We all benefit from it. So thank you for a wonderful evening.

WS: Well thank you.

Applause…

 

a new world, alien, breakthrough, communion, confirmation, secret school, strieber, the visitors, transformation, visitors, Whitley, whitley strieber

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