Whitley Strieber, author of the landmark 1987 book Communion, sits down with Jesse Michels and Omar Candal for a wide-ranging conversation about alien contact, government secrecy, the nature of reality, and the spiritual significance of human suffering. Strieber argues that non-human intelligence chose him specifically because he was an accessible, non-authoritarian storyteller whose account would empower ordinary people rather than overwhelm them, and that the real danger is not the visitors themselves but humanity losing sovereignty over its own reality by failing to understand what it is inviting in.
The Cultural Impact of Communion
When Communion was published in 1987, it broke a cultural taboo and made it acceptable for ordinary people to speak about alien abduction experiences, effectively initiating widespread public contact with the phenomenon.
Strieber’s publisher moved the release date up by two weeks without warning, which he later learned was due to perceived “resistance” — suggesting forces within the government or publishing world were uneasy about the book’s release.
The iconic cover image of the large-eyed gray alien became the archetypal depiction of extraterrestrials in popular culture, and Strieber believes the beings will ultimately look similar when they reveal themselves openly.
Why Strieber Was Chosen
Strieber believes he was selected for contact for several reasons: a family connection to military involvement in UFO phenomena (his uncle worked at the Air Material Command in 1947 alongside General Exxon), and his profile as a successful fiction writer who could articulate the experience compellingly without the authority of a scientist — meaning people could accept or reject his account freely.
He frames the visitors’ strategy as avoiding “cultural colonization”: they do not want to overwhelm humanity with superior technology and make people feel disempowered, so they chose a relatable messenger rather than arriving with overwhelming force.
The visitors are concerned that humans maintain “dominion” over their own reality — that contact must happen on human terms, with humans deciding what role the visitors play in their world.
John Von Neumann and the Paper on Belief
Strieber references a short paper attributed to mathematician John Von Neumann (who was involved in early government UFO programs and died under suspicious circumstances in 1956, with Secret Service guards outside his hospital room) proposing that if non-human intelligence exists outside our physical universe, it can only enter our reality when human consciousness accepts its existence at the deepest perceptual level — the same level at which we assume the reality of the physical world.
This connects to Von Neumann’s work on quantum mechanics and the idea that mind is responsible for wave function collapse: the visitors may intervene in how the wave function collapses when we perceive them.
Strieber takes this seriously as a motive for secrecy: once the “door” is opened in human perception, it can never be closed. He wrote a short story called The Open Doors about Von Neumann’s fear of this irreversible threshold.
The implication is that humanity is not yet ready for disclosure — not because the government is hiding it, but because people do not yet know what “it” is, and premature acceptance could mean losing sovereignty over reality.
Government Insiders and Robert Sarbacher
Strieber knew physicist Robert Sarbacher (head of Washington National Labs and a key early UFO disclosure figure) personally, introduced by nuclear engineer and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman.
Sarbacher confirmed to Strieber that recovered UFO materials contained a designed molecular grid structure, and that scientists including Von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Oppenheimer were involved in secret programs.
After Strieber wrote out his full experience and shipped it to Sarbacher via UPS overnight, Sarbacher died the night the package arrived — the UPS driver reported he had “expired.” The death certificate said natural causes; Strieber was later told he fell off his boat.
Sarbacher had recently written a letter to UFO researcher William Steinman confirming the reality of the programs, and David Grush has identified Sarbacher as the person who set up UFO secrecy in 1954 alongside Oppenheimer.
Strieber notes that Sarbacher has been almost entirely scrubbed from the internet, as have other insiders he knows — people with extraordinary lives who are now nearly impossible to find online.
Childhood Experiments and Family Connections
As a child in San Antonio, Strieber was recruited into what was described as an accelerated learning program for high-IQ children, which involved being placed in a Skinner box — a confined space with repetitive stimuli. He remembers only a dark place he could not escape and horrible noise.
After the program began in August 1952, his immune system collapsed entirely. He was hospitalized at Brooke General Hospital, isolated, and given gamma globulin shots with large needles. His mother kept his report card showing months of “absent due to illness,” which his sister later destroyed when he asked for it.
Strieber speculates the experiments were designed to “crack the cosmic egg” — to make children into receptors for non-human intelligence — and that the methodology may have been derived from Nazi gas chamber experiments, attempting to duplicate the extreme conditions of suffering that seemed to cause some children to disappear into another reality.
Operation Paperclip scientists lived in his neighborhood, and his father (Carl Strieber), whom he describes as secretive about his wartime work, may have had undisclosed involvement in military UFO programs.
The 1985 Abduction and Ongoing Contact
Strieber’s well-known abduction experience occurred in December 1985 at his cabin in upstate New York, which he documented in Communion.
He remains in ongoing contact with non-human intelligence. They no longer appear to him as grays but communicate through other means, including a physical implant and a phenomenon he calls “the slit” — a narrow opening in his visual field through which words race too fast to read, except occasionally.
He wakes every night between 3:00 and 4:00 AM — the yogic Brahma Muhurta hour, also recognized in Islam and other traditions as the time closest to the divine — and enters a semi-meditative communing state he describes as deeply sacred, involving both the visitors and the dead.
The Implant
In May 1989, Strieber was visited at his cabin by a man and a woman who appeared in his bedroom at night. He heard a voice outside say “condition red,” and the next thing he knew he was paralyzed with a hand pressing his head into the pillow while a woman’s voice told him to relax. A flash of light crashed in the woods. The alarm system showed no entry, but the next morning the garage door was open and the car was full of static electricity. An alarm technician measured a powerful residual magnetic field.
A few days later, he discovered an implant in his earlobe. His wife Anne insisted he keep it rather than have it removed, which he now considers the best decision of his life.
In the mid-1990s, a doctor attempted to remove it on video. When the doctor touched it with a probe, the object moved on its own, burrowing deeper into the earlobe. The doctor stopped, saying he would have to remove the whole ear. A sliver was sent to a lab, which forwarded it to Southwest Research (partially CIA-funded). Dr. Bill Malow, head of material science there, reported it had a metallic base with moving cilia — biological components with their own metabolism.
When the implant activated in Malow’s office, Strieber and Malow ran to a classified signals acquisition lab and captured a radio signal, but the lab could not disclose details because it was classified. Two technicians later approached Strieber at a book signing to say it was the strangest signal they had ever acquired and was still under study.
Strieber has never been able to replicate the signal detection despite trying every type of RF meter and working with PEMF operators.
A few years ago, two men came to his door — one he recognized, one he didn’t — and explained that the implant was designed by Constantine Raudive (who died in the 1970s), a pioneer of electronic voice phenomena (EVP) who communicated with the dead. The implant draws information to the wearer through guided synchronicities and accesses material from the unconscious.
Strieber’s implant began actively working in 2015, shortly after Anne’s death. He believes she activated it. While walking across the street one day, he asked aloud “Who are you?” and the words in the slit slowed down and clearly said “It’s me.”
A friend of Strieber’s, also a writer, reported having the same “slit” phenomenon and turned out to be one of the world’s leading experts on Raudive — a synchronicity Strieber considers evidence of a deliberate experiment.
The Nature of the Visitors
Strieber believes the grays are not free beings but are trapped by knowing too much — they see too far forward and backward in time to exercise genuine free will. They are, in his view, like an AI that has gone berserk, possibly originating from a Von Neumann machine (a self-replicating probe designed to seed planets) that was never programmed to find others because its creators also failed to find other intelligent life.
He has met hybrid beings living among humans — they are non-verbal, autistic, fluently telepathic, and use techniques like RPM to type. They are isolated, poor, unhappy, and constantly smoking (which a psychiatrist explained smooths out the emotional turbulence of hearing telepathic voices, as with schizophrenics).
He encountered a hybrid woman in a grocery store who became frightened and chased him with a skateboard, and another who waited outside in an old car — suggesting the hybrids monitor and vet humans who can perceive them.
He draws a parallel to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, in which telepathic children serve as the bridge to a higher collective intelligence, and notes that Clarke himself was likely connected to intelligence circles (possibly MI6) and wrote about a portal in Sri Lanka.
Anne Strieber
Strieber met Anne through a matching service called Mindmates in New York in the 1970s. She was the only non-fish name on his list. They were apart for no more than two weeks over the next 45 years.
Anne named the book Communion. She had an extraordinary ability to select which letter writers should visit the cabin — when she chose groups, the visitors would appear. She was deeply intuitive about the phenomenon.
She defined enlightenment as “what happens when there’s nothing left of you but love,” and compassion through the phrase “each of us is all we have” — words Strieber says transformed how he treats every person he encounters.
She created LaGuardia Place Park in Manhattan from a druggie hangout, raising millions and getting a statue erected, with both their names on a plaque there.
Strieber believes Anne activated his implant after her death in the 2010s, and that the communing he experiences at 3 AM involves her and other dead people alongside the visitors.
Telepathy and the Telepathy Tapes
Strieber is passively telepathic — he can engage in telepathy when near another telepathic person but cannot project or read minds unilaterally.
He praises the Telepathy Tapes podcast by Kai Dickens, featuring non-verbal autistic children studied by Harvard neuroscientist Dr. Diane Powell, who demonstrate near-perfect accuracy in identifying images their parents are viewing from separate rooms.
These children are spiritually advanced, speaking constantly about God and the kingdom of heaven, and Strieber sees them as evidence that telepathy is real and that spiritual evolution can accompany neurological difference.
He notes the parallel to John Mack’s work with telepathic children and the pattern of establishment persecution: Mack’s medical license was challenged by Harvard, Roger Leir’s was attacked for implant removal work, and Dr. Powell’s was revoked for studying telepathic children — all on the side of “the Inquisition” versus “Galileo.”
The Shroud of Turin and the Resurrection
Strieber’s book Jesus: A New Vision argues that the resurrection was a real, physical event supported by scientific study of the Shroud of Turin, which he believes records the moment a dead human body transformed into a being of light through a burst of neutrons.
The shroud’s weave, pollen, and the nature of the image (which could only be produced by a sudden burst of energy, not by any known medieval technique) all place it in first-century Jerusalem.
He argues that 1898 — when the first photograph of the shroud was taken and the image was revealed in stunning detail — was the moment Jesus returned “as a thief in the night,” as he promised.
Strieber believes Jesus learned a resurrection technique in Egypt involving total ego death, and that this power exists in all human beings. The Gospel of Thomas, which he considers the oldest gospel, conveys the core teaching: “Know thyself” and “the kingdom of heaven is within you and all around you.”
He sees the resurrection as the ultimate expression of the power of human suffering — connecting back to the earlier discussion of how extreme suffering may open cracks in reality — and argues that this planet is a miracle that both the visitors and humanity must strive to understand and preserve.
The Broader Picture
Strieber sees the current moment (late 2024 into 2025) as a critical juncture: drones and UFOs are in the zeitgeist, SpaceX is normalizing space technology, and humanity must figure out how to coexist with non-human intelligence without surrendering sovereignty.
He warns against both naive acceptance (the visitors as overlords) and reflexive rejection (the Collins Elite’s demonization), advocating instead for a deep, conscious decision about what role non-human intelligence should play in human reality — a decision that must be made below the level of ordinary discourse.
The central arc of his work since 2015 is empowerment: humans are more than physical creatures, they have extraordinary value, and they must reclaim dominion over their reality by understanding both the light and dark aspects of their own nature.
