91: Communion On Earth Goodwill To Aliens

that may or may not have happened. Please enjoy and we will be back with more night Calls in It's eleven PM in a cabin in upstate New York and you're listening to the Night Call book Club. Hello, and welcome back to the Nightcall book Club. My name is Tesline, I'm in Los Angeles, and with me I have Molly Lambert, name Emily Yoshida. Guys. For this month's book club, we're doing Communion and this was probably I thought this was our most difficult and dance book to get through. Because

I show it, I'm excited of that challenge. But yes, it was like the first thing that felt like a primary source into the paranormal. Yeah, with all the baggage that comes with that. Um. But I'll just say up front, in the interest of total transparency, I did not finish this book this month. I'm very very sorry to all of our Patrion subscribers. I will always try to finish it from here on out. I was just in the

middle of moving it. Also, if you don't finish the book club book, if life gets in the way and you don't finish the book, that's okay, well in this in this in the case of this one, it can be a book club for like Whitley Striber's personal website or media entry or like anything having to do with him. I generally hate book clubs actually because as soon as I get assigned a book, it's like the last thing I want to do. It just takes me to high

school in that way always. You know, anytime I've ever been in a book club before, it's just been like, oh, what a big responsibility yourself up to get in trouble with your friends. But the book club is I love the night call book club because I also, yeah, I feel like nobody's judgmental about it's a cool book. Yeah, you can read the book however you like. You can watch the movie. It's not like that Seinfeld episode. If you watched the movie of Communion and that's what you're

working off of, that's fine too. I really wanted to see the movie at and I haven't yet the same. Yeah, we should maybe do a bonus up or something because I'm so I like because that was the first thing when we started reading it. I of course saw, oh there was a movie made with Christopher walking In. It must check this out and the images from it are incredible. Uh So I was very very area and the author didn't approve of it. Connect thought Christopher Walkin played him

as a dick. Yeah, um, let's talk about what what communions about? How about you guys? So I let's talking about Whitley Striber too. Yeah. Well, Whittie Streiber is kind of the most interesting thing about because Communion derailed his entire career. So basically Communion they say, but it's like it started his career as a ufo ologist guy phthologist. He also post. So we should say about Whitley Striber. He's an author, He's a horror author. He was supposed

to be like the next Stephen King. Almost, if not every single one of his books has been turned into a movie, most of them very high grossing movies. Yeah. Um. He wrote The Hunger, which is like turned into a movie with was a personal favorite of mine by Tony Scott, starting Katherine de Neve and David Bowie. He did The Day After the Book. The Day After Tomorrow was based on That was recently, and that was recently, and that was post his life getting ruined. I'm doing air quotes

right now by Communion. So he's like done okay for himself, and he's made It's almost as if he's made a bargain. Part of what he talks about being exiled from is that his like super rich New York penthouse friends started to think he was too weird to associate with, which is well, to be fair, he started associating with a lot of upologists and you know, alien fans. Some of his friends were really fringy, right but right, But some of these people were like taking a plane to secret

petto Island. So I'm just saying, maybe Whatley Striper chose the right stripe of the conspiracy world towards being those like secretive petto Island New Yorker conversation. So you could be talking about what did he say he like hung out with lou Reid and they talked about about UFOs with lou Reid like spiracy theories. I don't know, it seems pretty chilled me with a striper. It's from Texas.

He's from San Antonio or near San Antonio originally, and then he wrote a bunch of horror novels that got adapted, and then Communion he started writing in the eighties. It's based on it's based on a bunch of experiences. But the primary experiences, the one that started all happened in UM late nine October and December nineteen, the day after Christmas, after he had finished his Christmas Goose, finished his Christmas Goose and working on a hearty novel about the Russian Revolution,

and he's cross country skiing a lot. Um. Yeah, so he had two experiences, I believe in one in October and one the day after Christmas are the two that he kind of focuses on. Both at this upstate house, UM that he's gotten with his Hollywood riches. It's his weekend house. UM. But then yeah, over the course, so the book was published in seven very soon after these

events transpired. UM and then over the course of the book he kind of goes back into his past via regressive hypnosis and discovers that he has had earlier contacts with visitors. But also one of the weird things about Communion is that it's kind of credited with like establishing

the gray as the stereotypical alien form. But he Whitley Striver, is really clear throughout the book that he has no reason to believe that these are extraterrestrials, right, He's kind of like, I think maybe, but I have no evidence that they when people say that that's what it is, because he's like, I never said that, And he said it could be just crazy military experiments where they come kidnap people in the night and do things on them,

which is way scarier. Well, there's a interview that was earlier this year, so a very recent interview that I think test linked to for us UM and will included in our notes. He says something, and I think this is sort of similar to some some things he said in the book where he says, I've also unfortunately had an influence on modern UFO folklore. I think it's all folklore. It's something that people don't understand and they generate stories

about it. What I'm interested in is this something that's there?

What's behind them? Um and so. Yeah, And he talks a lot about like he's he goes and does research on other people's UFOLK experiences prior to that, kind of comparing recurring images and experiences and commonalities and stuff and like, and that approach to it is like one of the things where I'm like, this feels like a very rational way too if you have an experience that feels unexplained like this, Like he's going about like he's doing what

I would do basically. So I feel like all that is super interesting because it's not it's not like, oh, I've been visited by aliens. It's like I'm having an experience that's similar to these other kind of abnormal experiences that other people have had. What can we learn from the sum total of these experiences? No, I mean, as a testimonial, especially from the beginning, it's free really well. I mean, obviously he's a horror novelist. It's sort of

written like a horror novel. It reminded me a lot of some of the HP Lovecraft stuff of just like was living my life in a weird part of the East Coast, and then an inexplicable thing completely out of my frame of reference happens that completely horrifies me and makes me unable to function in life. Ah After he has one of the experiences, he tries to kill his son accidentally, sort of, doesn't he like pull a knife

on his son or something. I don't think. There's a part where he's talking about it has like this weird encounter with his son, which again we'll get to that later. Whether well it's after the it's after the October incident where they have friends over and everybody at least shares a recollection of like strange lights and a sound a blue light and crashing noise, like things clattering down. And then he talks to his son about it. And this is so like you said, it was like a horror book.

This this book scared me more than like most other books ever have, because there's this part where he goes to like ask his son and he's like, yeah, I was worried for a second, but then the little doctors came and told me like it was all going to be okay, And I was just like, it's so like the and those those sort of unexplainable things. I mean,

it really gets into kind of like subconscious stuff. It gets into a lot of like like childhood memories and the weird foggy you're not really quite sure what was a dream and what wasn't that comes out of childhood memories, including his own. That stuff is all super super interesting

to me. Yeah, And actually I think that's the scariest part is just this unrelized the the idea that your memories, that some of your memories are are what he calls screen memories or memories that replace And I mean a lot of if you, if you kind of go down the web hole from Whitley s Driver to his friend Bud Hopkins UM, who's mentioned in the book as for

the hypnosis he guides the with Dr Klein. But Bud Hopkins kind of became famous in his own right because he he would observe these hypnosis sessions and then he kind of started these like therapy groups for survivors of alien abductions. Um. But he had no background in psychology and he was kind of playing fast and loose with people who were describing like really intense and you know,

often the experiences were a lot like rape or child abuse. Um. And Bud Hopkins was very sure that the alien abductions were real and this is like the only answer. And so the regressive memories through hypnosis and the screen memories, they just obviously as you're reading the book, there's a feeling of being you know, the fact that that is like a very dangerous kind of thing to do. There's

something so eighties about it. So that is what I remember being the big like panic constantly in the eighties was things like that was repressed memories. People doing regressions that lead to like recovered memories that aren't real. And that was like how they did all the satanic panics stuff supposed to be like hey do you remember when this crazy thing happened? And kids are like, oh, yeah, yeah,

I remember that happened. Yeah. I mean, you're still kind of getting out of the trend of analysis as as your main kind of form of therapy, and that very kind of old school still for Freudian way, because screen memory is like a freud thing, um and all this sort of like psycho sexual such a scary idea, but

I totally it makes sense though. But again, like in that case, a lot of this stuff does feel like a you stories, like it has the pattern of it, the kind of yeah, the way that the mind shields it from from oneself is it feels really um and then that makes it even scarier than like that's not

less scary than you epposed. And I think the tricky thing is that Willie Striber has I think the forward to this book, which was written much later, but when he talks about how depressed he became and how you know, he was just so frustrated because he feels as though, you know, he's been cleared by neurologists. He doesn't they thought maybe at temporal lobe epilepsy or something very clear about that. He talks about it a lot, but he's just saying, just take me at my word what I'm describing.

There were physical symptoms in some cases witnesses who who were at the cabin, who saw something weird happening. So I think he was finding it very upsetting. Like we're not obviously the first people to say this is not probably what happened. What happened could have been something real. All of that stuff, when you're saying it does just sound like such abuse stuff, like you're telling everybody what happened, but nobody believes you, well, even like the one thing.

So maybe we should go through and just like talk about at least the ive incidents. And because one thing that I think happens in the the first one he talks about, not the first one chronologically, the day after Christmas one is like this recurring thing that also happens in the the one on the train when he's a kid, is like this feeling of like, oh, and then suddenly I was above whatever was going on, Like I was seeing everything from a bird's eye view, which is just

like I'm just like, oh, that's an out of body experience. Yeah, like that's what that feels like. Yeah, that stuff all too. I was just because somebody who's had like anxiety attacks and I was like, oh, yeah, like disassociating because you're having something happened that you'd like you have to leave your body for him. But the day after Christmas one, yes, he had his Christmas goose went crossing. He went cross country skiing later afterwards and was like unusually fatigued by it.

That was like one of his first symptoms that something wasn't right. But click interjection. I hate cross country skiing so much, and it's such a like weekender thing to do at your country home, where I'm just like, you take something that's like fun and dangerous, you suck the fun out and then you're like take a walk, but we're gonna make it hard. Always I fully understood it. I always thought it was like a competitive sport where you just like ski for a really long time, like

just I mean, that's what it is. But it's like you're walking on ski literally what you're on an order chack. You're hiking on ski. It's not snowshoeing some you know. I always thought it sounded delightful because like all activity so bundled up and having to swish, swish swish, any

winter activity. I was like, God, that must be the most fun thing ever and I'll never get to do it, so I'll never know sledding skiing that I did for so long because my mom used to live in Minnesota and so she had ski still then like downhill skiing was too expensive you had to get the real or in the lift pass and all that stuff. But like we would go to Mount Rainier and go cross country skiing,

and I hated it when I was little. The biggest, biggest fight I ever had with my parents as a child was they would beg me to go across country skiing with them, and for some reason I just always refused. And it was like a two year battle because your parents were no anyway, we digressed. I just wanted to go on the way tree Wood for the walk off some of that Christmas goose. I would be home eating

my goose and my gams. So it's like he gets a little guy comes into his room, a little guy wearing like a plate of armor or something, yeah, which he thinks is like because they've found his gun and they think he's going to shoot him, so they've like pre armed themselves or something. Um, and he just like suddenly is standing up with his clothes off in his

room and then is being transported outdoors. He kind of it's like he describes a bunch of like witless hands with gentle hands like shuttling him out the door, and he's like frozen. Yeah, he can't move. Um. It's very dreamlike. There's one part where he talks. I don't know if it's when he's leaving his room or some other part where they're moving him but it's like he talks about being like he's like mid stride and frozen and getting like shuttled out, like floating out, and I just like

that just sounds like dreams I've had. It's very it's very evocative. It also sounds like sleep paralysis. That's what I also is like, this just sounds like you had a really vivid nightmare that you had sleeper. But he would say that the physically he had been you know, it looked as though he had been roughed up. So that's his defense against the sleep paralysis argument, is there were physical marks. But yeah, so he is he's brought

to this like clearing in the woods. Yeah, and I forget if something happens there, does he get some kind of that's where he goes up? He goes up and then he's in a ship. Yeah, but he's just like he's like, I'm chamber room and he's up and then he's brought into the reality of the experience when he smells the Yeah, she's like, what can we do to get you to stop screen? When it's like a two thousand's parenting thing of the like how can we help your body? And he's like, let me, let me smell

your hand, the only normal response. Doesn't it smells like cinnamon? Yeah? And he's like, that's how I knew it was real because I can smell the cinnamon so strongly. I mean again, like, can you remember a smell from a dream? Like I don't. I don't think dreams have something I can, but I can. I can't remember smelling something in a dream, but I can remember like everyone acknowledge ideas. Yeah, yeah, um, that

part is so compelling to me. You would think he would have asked to read something because you can't read and dream. That's true. That's like the litmus test that supposedly in dreams you can, like you can't look at a page of letters. There are no rules and dreams. Have you ever read a book in a dream? Probably you can. You can be holding a book, and you can be understreading. You can be understanding a story, but you can't physically read in a dream. I don't have

dreams anymore because I spoke too much pot. But when I stop, I have the type of vivid nightmares such as might produce a communion dream. I'm so very clear that he doesn't do any drugs, although then He's like, he's such a liar about that, talks about in interviews he'll talk about like he went to England. He was like in and out of Eric Clapton's child, Like, come on, many there were zero cocaine. Yeah. I mean again, that's

another possible explanation. A lot of that stuff causes very infect psychological side effects down the road, especially um but I don't know. I'm not going to diagnosequally striper. I'm just saying other people have tried and failed. Yes, um so, yeah, he that was his first experience. He was returned eventually. I forget did they sample him and then they did? They? Okay, the anal probe and that is where that comes from.

It's what I've learned. That was like the beginning of that being south Park because he says it ruined his career because that was the first South Park episode. Was I guess entirely about this particular alien abduction book. That's so weird. I never know. I think I just thought

these were even older tropes of alien abduction. But now that I think about it, it's very eighties for somebody to introduce like and also their sexual assault involved, you know, because it does seem like in the fifties and sixties, it's sort of just like and then the cow comes back down weird. Um. I mean obviously because I was looking, I was like, where when did they first start documenting UFO sightings? Well, this is what's interesting. So there was an I say, it was like actually a back and

forth between two people on we are the Mutants. It was so fascinating to me because they talked about how I think it was in this one, Um, how in the fifties the the UFO was seen as a largely like non intervening kind of thing. It was just sort of like an observational thing. Um. But then in the eighties this is when there was like this explosion of

people claiming to have had interactions. And one of the things, um, that they say that I think is really interesting is just how this is a book that is completely really about Striber's fear and the way that he tries to protect and arm this cabin in the woods. So he has an apartment in New York. He doesn't even really talk about his sense of fear there. He talks about how in the country he's afraid and he's installed like motion sensor lights and has a shotgun. There's a security system.

So eighties. It is eighties, but it's also it is very strange to go from a city where you would understand feeling like, especially if you're from like urban Texas.

But I just thought of that, like he's clearly such a paranoid person, and he talks about how, like the reason they went to the country was because he was having like nervous breakdowns in his apartment in the city where he was ready to be a paranoid person to have nervous breakdown, right, he was having nervous takedowns, and he was having like intruder famas, like like nightmares, specifically intruder nightmares and like home invasion nightmares, which I feel

like we're also just like super stoked by news all the time in the eighties. Yes, well, also he had this experience. I don't know if he talks about it in the book, but he talks about it in the medium interview about like his parents left him alone for two nights or something when he was eleven. I was, I feel like, a totally normal thing back then, but it's still so striking that they took the rest at

they took his siblings and then just left him. And they just left him at home, and then he looked into a room and there was like the window above an air conditioning here and it was open. And he called his parents and like, well, if you think of someone who's like come in and call the cops. And then the cops came, and he said they were really freaked out, and then they just left. But I feel like that will put like a fear of an intruder. I mean I had intruder fears really home alone had

I had a wicked fear of being home alone. Yeah, I think everybody does at a certain point. Also just because again like local news especially as always like putting that out there. It's like a reason to be afraid and to never leave your home. I feel like that was why in the eighties people were supposed to never leave their homes, and that's why you turn your home

into a fortress. Well, this is kind of like the other element of eighties man to it is the kind it's like the boomer idea of I am a chosen This is they also talk about this and that we are the mutants thing where they were just like it's so boomery to be like, I'm gonna like overarm my house. I'm so afraid of someone like sneaking in and disrupting this like perfect whatever. But then also I am like

extra specially I've been chosen for observation by aliens. And then at the same time, in the second half of the book, he I mean, it was really Throughout the book, he talks a lot about how stable his family is. He loves his wife, he loves his son, he doesn't drink, he doesn't do drugs, and then occasionally he'll kind of slip and be like, well, I mean I was like drinking myself to sleep during that time. I was having

a bad period between October and December. There are some real Stephen King stuff in there where Stephen King the first abduction. My whole family was like really stressed out all the time by me sort of losing it. But it's it's these conflicting reports of how life was, and I mean, I think it's you can't fault him for being something was going. He was allowed to be this We're just presented as a novel, it would be just like an amazing horror novel. But the but he was

very firm that it's nonfiction. And then it's follow up that was on the best seller list in New York Times was like, we will not classify this as nonfiction. It's fiction. And he was furious about it, which is again also understandable. I mean, he's very sure that he lived it. And they also talked about he introduced this early on about his own conflicting memories and how the

shooter he thought he was. He said he would tell people he was on campus for the University of Texas shoot, but he wasn't, but he had a very specific false memory of it. Um So a lot of it does sort of sound like compulsive liar stuff for people makeup stories that are interesting to be He says something odd of you know, he was like they were lies, but they weren't lies because I believed them. Hold up, that's

still that's that is a lie. Like that's still a lie, you know if you know that it doesn't line up. But then he's just like there's that stuff. There's all the animal memories to where he's like, I saw an owl, but like I knew I didn't see an Now I don't know where I said I saw an owl. Like all that kind of stuff where it would have been so weird to have a barn owl right, right, You're in the country in a barn. Yeah, is it weird?

Or is that why people always say that owls are what they see instead of aliens because it's only people in country houses their barns. It all sounds like it made me be like, is everybody Upstates seeing aliens? Just like had a little bit too much wine after dinner and they don't want to talk about it. Had one

drink and one glass of wine. I mean, that's the other kind of thing where as a person who would desperately like want to give myself credibility, where that's like the obvious answer is that I was just so drunk. It's like I'll tell you I had one drink and one glass, and it's like you don't remember, like it was like how many years ago and you're remembering how many drinks yet I don't know. But that's the sort of thing to you where if somebody like interrogated you

relentlessly about like, okay, then what did you do? Then? What did you do? Like your own story might start to slip just because like if you tell it over and over again, it's going to shift and you start to question things that you would take for granted, like because it's being called into question again, we're back in the land of trauma and all of that. But um, I also wanted to talk about the October Internet because

that one is interesting just because there are other witnesses there. Um. And this is again one of these things where it's like, this is one of the things that it's hard to write all the stuff off because they go to the cabin with Annie and what's her husband's saying? So frasier. They're like, like, you know that thing where you invite your friends over to your cabin for a weekend and then you have a lovely weekend of cross country skiing

and you make it. Of course, you make a delicious brunch in the morning, but not until after you've like threatened everybody with a gun because you maybe saw an alien. Yes, he doesn't threaten them with a gun, he just has like he has a gun. I thought that's what I'm talking about. I thought that he like brought the gun out. Everybody was like, what are you doing? No, I think he just mentions that he has it right, But like that's crazy. I don't think he mentioned it to them.

He just mentioned it in the course of the like he says that he so, I think it's after the October thing when he was feeling really unsettled and felt like something was like at the house or somebody was like coming to the house. But he still hadn't kind

of decided it was these visitors that he bought the shotgun. Um, which I mean, okay, we don't condone guns on this podcast, but again, if you think I don't know, like it, doesn't it sound crazy to me that he has a gun in a cabin in the middle of the way. To me, the security system is the crazy thing. Yeah,

And and he acknowledges that too. He says, like, there's no reason I should have this stuff, that I got it because I was just feeling so nervous yuppie in the eighties and some but he's like, we can sell you this and it'll keep you safe. I lived for many years with the eighties yuppies in the country, and nobody had a security system they do now, And it's like a point of pride to your house unlocked, yes, exactly, doors open. It would have been very very rare. I mean,

he was definitely super du preparanoid. But yeah, so let's go to the October incident with Jacques um. This is the one where he's very clear about who has their doors open, but and like but that there's a light that comes in through a window in the living room that I guess all the rooms open out onto and he sees it because their door is open. And then what does he say. He says something to his wife like no, he says that the house is on fire. He starts freaking out the houses on fire, like did

I leave a stick? Doesn't he say? Like did I leave a cigarette burning or something? I don't know, but he's like something must have been burning and I must have fallen asleep. But then he's like instantly also like never mind, is fine, go back to sleep, And then

he apparently goes back to sleep. So yeah, well his he says, my mind inventory the possibilities as I watched this blue light because it was a blue light, so that's what made it super weird, slowly creep up the ceiling as if whatever was causing it was slowly moving down into the front yard from above. Finally I hit on what seemed to me to be a sensible solution. The chimney must be on fire, and dropping sparks into the chimney must be had to do something about it

at once. Then I fell into a deep sleep. Great, but that's something where it's like, yeah, that's what he goes back. And that's the thing that feels really nightmarish too, is that thing of like when you're in a dream and you try to like run and you can't. That's what all his abduction experiences are like. When he also has I mean, he also just has these unaccounted for like blank spots and like there's a missing time. The

missing time in Texas is terrifying. Oh my god, Austin stuff where he's like I was, I was heating up my food and then uh, I looked down and the food was totally cold because six hours had gone by, right.

And so Bud Hopkins, his friend who later like observes his hypnosis, he wrote a book called Missing Time because that apparently is like the the thread that goes through all of these abduction experiences, and that people who are abducted once will be abducted again and have been abducted before, he claims, and the evidence of this abducted. You know the fact that they've been abducted is the missing time. These like blank spaces and they'll talk. He talks a lot.

I don't remember if this isn't communion or in the Bud Hopkins thing, but um, people driving and then like coming to and it's been a while and there's like a white driving. Yeah that's I designed a night Night Call event poster based on the drive being abduction. Wait, remember when we had rush Field on the show and talked about it. No, I thought of that too. I

had the experience where they were like Brand Park. They went to the park and they like walked up the weird hill and they were all of a sudden in a car driving. Yeah, what if they got abducted? Something similar happened to me. I'm not going to like go it go into it, but I don't think it was an abduction. I should go into it. No, there was there was a time when I was not drinking or

doing anything. I had one drink and you know I was the dead because we I went to a party this was a very long time ago, with friends and I wasn't like very comfortable with the crowd. So it was like i'll drive, and we were on the freeway and there was like a you know, I have no idea how much time elapsed, but all of a sudden, I was like in a different lane, had missed the exit, no idea what had happened. But I had been having fainting spells at the time, and I assumed I had, like,

you know, had a fainting thing. But normally with the fainting spells, I would like collapse kept and I didn't. And yeah, and it's and what's weird apparently, is that the car continues. Like people aren't usually harmed in these instances, to my understanding, when they're I mean, I don't think I was like missing time. I think I was zoning out board. Yeah, my mind wandered and I drove badly.

But it's interesting because you're like, oh, one of the things that they point out is like you would think if you were zapped away that you would your car would crash, But it seems to be not the case that the car continues on the path. It's just that all of a sudden, you're like somewhere you shouldn't be. Well. There's also the idea that you're like entering a parallel

dimension multiverse. Still there, right, the arrival thing where time moves differently when she's in this ship spend I forget which way it is. If she can spend like four hours in there and like thirty minutes have cone back, I can't remember. Or is that is that an arrival or something else? I know what you're talking about, my

arrival contact? Yeah, Well I want to talk about contact too, because there's another there's another common trope that that contact uses as well, which is like like the idea of these visitors being interested in our minds and our subconsciousness and so like gathering data from them and then using that to talk to us or communicate with I just watched Stargate again, which is a great movie, um about what's kind of about each and aliens? Yeah, I think

I watched it last year in parallel dimension. My mom's

a big fan. Yeah, that movie is amazing. James Spader plays like a wholesome virgin and that is like the most perverse do I mean the movie He plays a guy who can only get it up for some weird thing, and like in that movie, it's like Pyramids, me too, James Spader, Um, so I wanted to talk with you guys about what you thought about whether at least Striver was so one of the theories I read about, and I don't remember where, but was that the he talks

a lot about the female alien who he's kind of like, I don't know if he exquistly says he's attracted to her hate her, but like I'm like for some reason, I'm like, they have a real salm and Diane. But he's like also like physically aroused in her presence. Yeah, and he and he's like uncomfortable, but he also is like, we don't know if they have genders. We can't write.

So this is like in in some of Striver's fiction, there's a lot of like, you know, vampires having babies with humans, about mating with mating with the ancient mystical creature um, but what's kind of weird, you know. So so basically he had also written speculative fiction about both nuclear apocalypse and climate apocalypse, and he he was like super then, like for war Day, which I think was the lard day he had done before this all happened. Term stuff happened to him. I think he had been

super steeped in it. But yeah, the his fears, like he clearly was just so freaked out by the speculative fiction. And he definitely and some of the stuff too, You're like, oh, that's what a lot of people are going through that now, that's what I was going to say. And so he kind of was. I think he was basically in the position where he was like, well, we have to like think about alternatives to Earth. And he had a son, which also is stressful because he's like, even if I'm fine,

like he might not be fine. And he he kind of was calling the climate crisis in the eighties, like he was one of the first people to be actively

upset about like what Earth was going to be. Like he was totally right, but I think, you know, inventing this kind of race of like beings who are smart enough to be able to like so they implay did a chip in his ear, which then he thinks now can read his thoughts and also like suggest things to him, like the number A hundred and thirty seven where it's just like seven, and then he has to figure out

what it means or whatever. Um. But it's almost like he was so panicked about what he thought would happen to the world that he had to kind of invent a way out and he had to be chosen to be the messenger and like the mother alien who can save us all. I'm sure he would hate that reading on it, but well, but he does. Isn't isn't there some point where they are talking about climate change the aliens are or like talking about the future of the planet. I feel like I didn't make this up. No, that

sounds familiar. It was. Also he gets a like a weird visit in the night, this is not in the book. Later he gets basically the suggestion for day after tomorrow. This is crazy from some like dude in a trench coade who walks into his a hotel room and after midnight and tells him like, we can't abandon our plan.

Let's talk about that stuff. Okay. Yeah, So some of Whitley Strieber's later books, so his his work is generally like this horror novels and then sort of communion and post communion work that is all supposed to be nonfiction, but well, and there's also a lot of like apocalyptic stuff around around communion and post communion too. So he wrote this book The Key, which is about the visitor who was supposed to be the man in the Trench codeh came to him from the future probably and like

told him a bunch of secrets. People have pointed out that all of the secrets he heard from this man actually come from Uh George Gerda Jeff, who is this philosopher that Whitley Striber was really into studied for a million years, and uh, we should talk about him a little bit. Yeah, he's I'd never heard of him. I never heard of him either, an Armenian mystic and philosopher. And Gerd Jeef I think it's Gerd Gff Jeff Jeff. I don't know. I don't know how to read this

pronunciation thing on here. He came up with what he called the Fourth Way, which was a self help method um that involves o a like dancing is exactly. He invented something called the the ger gf movements, which are a combination of other sacred dances. Basically, this guy was sort of early on the kind of synthesizing Eastern religions with New Age stuff tip um, and so when he brought it to America, a lot of people got into it. Frank Lloyd Wright there's thirty nine movement Henry Miller. Um.

But yeah, it looks like what he did. I mean, the the ger Jeff stuff is not super quacky. It's actually like it's very mindfulness. One of the conscious labor is mindfulness and then intentional suffering. It's and there's and it's got a little bit snacking. There's a whole like it's got a little bit of like matrix c nest to it, because it's all about like everyone is asleep until you wake up. You have to wake up and like live your life consciously because otherwise you're just going

through the movements. And I think the ger Jeff movements help you wake up. I want to learn them. Yeah, somebody want to teach them to us. Yeah. Well, he gave the first public demonstration of the Sacred Dances in so he was like he sort of gathered followers throughout Europe. I mean, britt Marlein absolutely like took this from for away, right. I mean, it seems it seems like it has to be. Yeah, it's so interesting. I can't wait to read more about this.

So interesting. Um. But he also did like angiogram stuff as well, So he image of book called Balzebub's Tails, which is allegory about an alien for his grandson. We his grandson. It's about an alien and the aliens grandson and they like go through a bunch of trials on this new planet, and it's like a metaphor for something, but it's also about aliens. So the guy who came to striverers hotel room and told him, So that guy, the guy who showed up in his hotel room, didn't

he say that. He He was like, hey, um, I I'm trying to make sense of my notes on this.

The man warned him about climate crisis by way of a strange anecdote about a child who could have invented extraterrestrial travel but had never been born because his or her parents died in the Holocaust, is like what the synopsis that like I took from what the man said to Whitley Striverer, which seems like, well, there is an episode described in Communion about him trying to build some kind of spacecraft as a child because he received instruction

from he told his friends. His friend had the memory of telling him as a kid, which seems like out of context, like some something that kids says, like oh, an alien came and visited me and told me how to make a spaceship. I'm gonna make one, and then he like knocked out the power in their house. It

was using magnets, some kind of magnetic connectic whatever the funk. Um. But yeah, that that's just what I thought of when I heard except for the whole Holocaust, the Holocaust reaction, Yeah, I mean some of the later stuff, it starts to seem to rope in more just kind of conspiracy theory, things from other corners and sort of be you know in the way that people start to be like just asking questions. Yeah. Um, like maybe it doesn't add up

to anything. I was reading a lot of stuff about there's like this new book about the Manson family murders that was written by somebody who sort of like researched it for a million years and like didn't necessarily find anything new, but then took that as evidence that like one was lying because they didn't want to talk about it.

Um yeah, yeah, I feel like but it's like just I read an interview with that guy where it was just felt very similar to the Striber interviews where it's like at a certain point, once you start to unravel. It's like it all starts to it kind of falls apart. Well, and part of me is just like it's like when we talk about ghosts and stuff like that. I mean,

I've never seen a ghost. I also just like pretty much like I'm interested in the idea of ghost but I pretty much fundamentally don't believe in them at the end of the day, if you're really going to ask me, so like, is that why I've never seen a ghost? It's that kind of thing. Or it's just like he's had this sort of paradigm shifting experience. We don't really know the truth of it, what actually happened, but whatever it was, it has opened him up to a plethora

of possibility. What couldn't be happening in the I mean, here's my reading a lot of his books also in the way that they are about like communing with some other species. Well, it's so interesting that he's so boring and straight, because all of his books are like really queer and weird, you know, and that is like he's also a Catholic guy, and there's Catholic esotericism in there. But to me, I was a little bit like, is

this about a closeted guy. Yeah. Again, that goes back to the thing of like, oh, my life is your own because I can't hang out with my like wasping New York friends, Like he still considers that to be something that's like missing that that like this, he he will like stick to the truth of his truth is truly his truth here of what happened to him. But he's still like hanging on to some idea of like normalcy or and like and his his case, it's a

very like white bread American normalcy. Yeah, and he's not he's not like willing to give that up totally because he's like, everyone should be listening to me because I'm the I'm the smartest man alive. Obviously, I'm telling the truth. It's yeah, he's so forthcoming. I think, what what you know. What makes it hard to completely dismiss what he says happened to him is that he is so he seems so open to any number of possible explanation as long as it stays true to like, the only things he

does know are he was physically affected. Sometimes there were witnesses he apparently approached people, um, you know, about things and didn't didn't tell them like what it happened to him,

and they kind of knew. Yeah. We got a night letter about this where somebody brought up the possibility that this book was about child abuse and about the author character abusing their son, and the whole thing being an elaborate sort of way to try and make sense of that, which again we don't know, we're just speculated ing, but definitely it has a lot of similarities to the Shining to me, Yeah, yeah, I'm like, this feels like a dad with a problem in some secrets trying not to

like ruin his kid's life by being a real person, but like inevitably well yes, I mean, I think it's really important for us to state that all of you know, any kind of speculation into whatever happened is purely speculation, because I really feel like what happened is a person with a very vivid imagination became completely paralyzed with fear, and it was like a kind of you know, it was informed by the books that he was writing, the research he was doing, like he was hanging out with

Art Bell right in the book that would become The Day after Tomorrow, and like, you know, he there was this weird overlap for him between his friends who were kind of fringey and his friends who are intellectuals, and he kind of got this weird, uh you know, slice of the pie where he was getting really really smart conspiracy theorists and that's who he was surrounding himself with, and they really reinforced like you should be terrified, you

should be terrified in your cabin, you should be terrified that the planet's going to explode. And I think he had like and then against totally speculative, I think he had a psychotic break and then I think he kind of recovered from it but couldn't integrate that into like his experience unless he found some other explanation. And he's open to that being a possibility to and kind of kind of he says, like something happened, Yeah, but yeah,

he's always he's that's yeah, exactly what he said. Like he the fact that he leaves that possibility open, that he's never really actively trying. He's not a bias. There's a word for this, and like the scientific method where where you're um whatever, it's like confirmation bias or something like that. He's like, well, he claims he's not somebody

who was looking to a UFO abduction. But it does feel like all of his fiction is about like special people being chosen to commune with another worldly being, and like his most recent book is like his wife died and then I guess he keeps a blog where he's like channeling her. He met. He has to meditate twice every evening in this special way because if he doesn't, then the aliens will tap him and kiss him and wake him up. And when he meditates, he is able

to feel his wife's presence and also his wife. He and his wife had made a deal before she died. She was sick for a long time. They said, after we die, whoever dies first, don't directly try to contact me as a ghost. Do it through our friends, which like what Okay? So apparently his wife passed away and then contacted his friends and would be like call Whitley and there's like an hour and a half after she died, which is bizarre. I wonder how his son is. Yeah,

me too, I just can't imagine. Yeah, it is like the shining and it's like what do you what is that like to go through that when you're because when you're a kid too, it's like you need your parents to be stable, even if they're not so like maybe they like try to hide the fact that, like they also don't know what's going on and are afraid of things.

And so he's pretty clear. In a few different moments he talks about the fact that he tried to keep you know, anything that would disturb his like he he tries, according to what he says, he tries really hard to like preserve normalcy for his son Um and seems to feel really guilty about the times when his son became

aware that something was going on. But it also kind of reminds me of you know, um More Gallons or Morgellons, for instance, where it's something that you know, no one believes you, and of course there's that element to it, and it's so isolating that if you find other people who claim to have experienced this, and you know, again, like the folklore kind of builds on itself and people have more similar experiences because of that. But you just form this really tight community and it kind of asters

like you're bound together by the only people. They're the only people who think you're saying and well, there's a really great X Files episode about Communion. UH. One of the best X Files episodes of all time called jose Chungs from Outer Space UM, which is about Charles Nelson Riley playing a Whitley Striber type guy named jose Chung who has a book called from Matter Space and the cover is exactly the cover of Communion, but with the

alien smoking a cigarette. UM. But it's like a classic episode also because it's kind of like a comedy episode UM, and it is about people's different stories, different overlapping stories about an alien abduction and how they all It's like a Rashaman thing where nothing really lines up at the end, you know, it kind of like seems like he's a kook, but then it seems like, what if he's not, Maybe he's telling the truth. Great episode, recommended to everyone. But

that's where I encountered this for the first time. I had never heard of this book until you suggested it, and now I have found out that it is so deep in the cultural consciousness. Also just because it derailed this poor man's writing career, and so I mean it's like a hard book to read. Also because it's like in the way that when you read a book where it feels like somebody is having a mental breakdown in the writing, and that it makes you feel like you're

having a mental breakdown. And the timing of reading this was also I thought really heavy because um, in the past week since we've been reading this book, the Jeffrey Epstein, the whole thing went from being a pretty straightforward but crazy story to a completely plausible conspiracy theory. It's not a theory that it's not. Yeah, but that's the thing is that all of a sudden you're you are reading mainstream news and completely entertaining that there's a conspiracy, which

makes you feel well. It made me feel it made me feel crazy because some of the stuff they were posting on crazy days and nights, and you know, at a certain point, with the lightest like hornor of where that stuff, I thought, I was like, oh, this is just going into pizza Gate stuff. It's just part of pizza Gate. But then it was like, no, no, no, this is like the grain of truth that was apparently

in the telephone game of pizza Gate. I got stuck down a very regrettable rabbit hole that did not start with me looking into Epstein stuff. It started with something very too weird to to explain here right now, take too long. But I ended up I ended up on a very fringe e. I wouldn't say it was like a q and on message board, but it was like that. It felt like it was two steps away from that.

I was looking at rational Wiki. Cool. Yeah, but like, but they were talking about there there was a threat on Epstein and they were just saying, like, this is a thing. Like people make fun of Pizza Gate because they think it's like about Hillary Clinton has a sex ring in comic Pizza or whatever that place is called.

But like we're talking about like a whole phenomenon ship And I was like, for the first time, I was like, oh, ship, And I was seeing like in a weird way, like because as that story started to zoom out, I went on this other podcast, true and on that's just about that stuff slipping. No, it's like that's the thing. We're bringing conspiracy theories back for the left. That's what we

set out to do. You know. Somebody is saying Inherent Vice is like the actual best movie for the Trump era, because it's about all how all those things do line up, how it feels conspiratorial um in cities, especially when you're just like, oh, like this person is in the pocket of this person really knows that, you know, people who shouldn't know each other for any reason except that money and power is changing hands. Uh eyes wed Shut is a documentary, but yeahwi Shut is real. I'm not over that.

I do feel like I've become Whitley Striber a little bit because all this stuff has broken my brain a little bit of like oh wait, like there are like evil ritally heats offering sex trafficking rings in broad daylight in front of people, just using the fact that they're rich just cover for crimes. Nobody should be able to get away with Ye, that's real. Then anything can be real.

Well it's not, but that's so rap like that when you look back that with hindsight, with like OCAM's rais or you're like, yeah, of course, but when but when it came up on crazy days and nights, I was like, this is so detailed, how could it be fake? But it's like who, Like it's too crazy and far fetched, and like once it clearly started implicating the Clintons, I

thought it was just right wing stuff. But then it came out to be like just beat for beat true And then one of them not empty but him with many as the other one was posting about some of that stuff. He posted a great, like three part blind item about it, again not saying any of this is true. It's a great three I could not read it for me. It was just too but his hand is it's terrible. But it's like, but it's it's zoomed out on the stuff where it was like, it's not even about the

sex trafficking ring. It's about different nations having like secret deals with each other involving Massad. You know. In that part again broke my brain. I was like, Epstein is just the fall guy. It's all like this everything is connected, and then you can't do anything again. After that, you just start thinking that way about everything. Um, and suddenly you're writing books about UFOs instead of just cat magic. Well it happens. I would encourage people to go to

at least Striper's website, which is called Unknown Countries. Yeah. He also does the podcast Dreamland, which was a former art bell podcast. He's like an active content maker, which is kind of interesting. Uh. Yeah. Then this interview that we can link to of his recent I mean he's still like, I mean he's still on the thing that's funny about his website is that it is it is all this stuff and and stuff about climate change, like

really passionate, like cogent stuff about climate change. If he wants to come, if he wants to come collect his awards for being right about climate change, that would be a great time for him to reappear and be like, hey,

guess what ye called it? Called it? I also, oh, this is one last thing I wanted to say, just as far as like believing him about this stuff, I just like so I kind of started to play the game of like if I was an alien civilization that was coming to study another species, how would I go about it? What would be the way fun nerd game?

Because that's like a lot of the like a lot of the stuff on First Blush does look very dreamlike and kind of random and like it feels like cobbled together from like some real corporeal experiences, the way that it always sounds like surgery. But the one thing that I was thinking about is like the repeat things, like like this thing of like once you've had an experience, you're going to have more, and you've probably had once before.

It's just like, well, that's just having a control Like if you're if you are studying monkeys in the wild, you're going to tag them and you're going to come back and study the same Certain people are acting as control subjects for the aliens. Well yeah, I mean that that makes sense to me that like, how are they being chosen? I don't know, because they're very special and they write great novels. But oh my god, what if what if there's like an Epstein island but it's a

Planetble know what I'm saying. What if there's like evil elite, you know, they already have colonized. Would you be surprised if Elon Musk already owned a secret planet. I'd be so surprised. He would have stopped tweeting and you would have just gone, nobody should own a planet or an island? I agree, um us, what do you think? Do you think? What do I think about? What? Should people own islands?

Why are people chosen? I mean so this, I think for anyone who wants to answer that question, go look at the Bud Hopkins Wikipedia because I felt like it gave me such a good frame on this. I mean, I do think that it's that you know, people who are Willie Striver is a really good writer. Like, granted, he lost me by the end of the book, and I was like, I cannot, I can because I didn't trust him and I didn't enjoy being mired in the conspiracy. Start to feel like you were losing it a little bit.

It has has because that's like I've only had to put down a book once before because it had that effect on me. And it was this Oliver Sacks book about hallucination that yeah, yeah, it was like I literally had to stop reading it because if you're someone who's ever had mental health and you start think think about your brain in the ways in which it can fail, weaknesses of the human brain. Definitely, the screen memories in this was like, Okay, definitely, sure, I have screen memories, right.

I think at least Driver would say he was chosen because he's a really good communicator with a very open mind, and he I think that he would say that like the creatures that he had written about in fiction, um that then ended up resembling the creatures that he meant in the eighties when he was abducted or whatever, that they had always been with he was writing book already

been encountering. Yeah, I mean I have to say, like, before reading this book, I was way more open to the idea that this dude had met extraterrestrials, And by the end of it, I was like, I don't think that happened. I haven't gotten to that part yet because I'm still like pretty like I'm I'm not. My first my first instinct is not to be like, he's out

of his mind. Yeah, I don't think. I don't think he's It's not quite like a psychotic break either to me, because what it really sounds like, and again he's Catholic, it's like enlightenment. You know, it's like your special you ascended and now you come back to Earth with knowledge that nobody else has and you have to live among regular people knowing more than they do, which was what he was feeling about climate change. That's true. That's true.

It's like like it's like an actually inconvenient sort of an inconvenient truth. Yeah, well, an extra inconvenient truth. Because on top of that, if al Gore was like and by the way, I got this from Aliens, right, even less would be done about Gore was an alien? Would you be at all surprised. He's like the most lizard person presented. It would make me so happy. If he was an alien, I would be like, if that's it, like bring it on. Uh yeah, Well anyway, I still

recommend people read this book. It's super interesting that first hand account. Yeah, I'm putting that in air quotes retrograde, but retrospectively, the cinnamon hand account. And as he said himself, if they are they can't be lies because even if they're not true, he believes them. And I'm like, okay, that that I can digest. I mean, something happened to this man. He's trying to process. I honest, he's honestly

trying to process it, and it's working. It if nothing else, If it's not a book about UFOs, which I think he would probably even you did not say it's a book about UFOs called Communion, it's about communion, Well, it's about the human mind. It's about like the processing anything. In his case, he has a lot of crazy stuff

to process. But like you know, I think it makes you think about your own experiences and stuff that you've been through, which is like why it's so scary, and honestly the scariest I think one of the scariest things is the is the hypnosis and the regressive memories and stuff like that, and that is a very it's a very good, unintentional warning against doing that because without any for me, I was like, Wow, without any of that, I think this book would have gone in a totally

different direction. And the more you know about that, the more you think that's a very shaky foundation to feel. It's like, we're also the thing about hypnosis. Yeah, it's just the human mind is vulnerable easily. Somebody poke around in there. That is the scariest idea. I am scared of it for those reasons. But I was also just like what would what would come out? Right? Yeah, it's like an eclonic It is like, get what what would you what kind of alien do you like to meet? Um?

I don't know. I mean I like the idea of well, I actually do like the idea of like the contact like alien, like, especially after reading this, like the alien that like minds your subconscious and presents as something that is um compelling to you, Like it's like a it's like a workshock test of it, but it's it is. But it's like very because I would want to know what what would it be? It's like or it's like

even like stupid shit like Captain Marvel. There's like a thing where they go and talk to whoever, like the great great authority takes the form of like whoever in their mind is like the most admirable person to them. So she sees it at Betting, I personally don't care for in a space movie when they finally meet the alien and it's like your dad, wife, oh yeah, or like your child self, you know. You know I would like is the little ones in the jars from Flight

of the Navigator. Those are my platonic aliens. I want, like who are those little weird guys from Final Fantasy, Like yeah, oh yeah, those would be cute or like triples, yeah, like like something docile, all overbearing, Like it's something that purs Yeah, something that purs like a furbyby, you know, the cat from sailor Moon. Yeah, shows up in the first day and starts talking to you. That's what I want. Well, she's an alien, yeah cat, Well that's what I'm sain like.

That's the cat who comes to tell you that you're also an alien. That's my favorite thing about sailormen. Also is that they're all technically aliens reincarnated. First start us after UM, well, I think that's that's it for Communion. Thanks everybody for reading along with us, taking the ride with us on Communion. Um. We're going to announce our next book soon, but we're not at this moment going to do it because we don't have it yet. I got some thoughts. Yeah, we'd also love to continue to

take your suggestions for our next book. UM. Yeah, let us know you. We we had to. We we're still in the process of moving and starting at our new our new Nework. We're so close. We're so close. Were you hear this? It's probably going to be old news and we'll be up, but you'll be ascended. And once we do that, I think we'll announce our next book. Yeah. But in the meantime, if you have any thoughts or questions,

you can contact us at two four contact us. You can make Communion with us to four oh four six Night or Nightcall podcast at gmail dot com. Um, thank you so much for supporting the Patreon. If you want to tell other people to support it as well, it's patreon dot com, slash Nightcall and as always. When we're back on the air, please give us a rating and review, and don't forget to subscribe. But I think you already have because you're supporting Patreon, So thank you again. Yeah

you better be all right. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next month. Bye Nightcall is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.