Images by Lucinda Horan, except where indicated
“[W]here the inner world is filled with violent aggression, primitive defenses are present also. More specifically, we now know that the energy for dissociation comes from this aggression. . . . It seems that as the unbearable (traumatic) childhood experience, or something resembling it in the transference [i.e., during psychotherapy], begins to emerge into consciousness, an intra-psychic figure or ‘force,’ witnessed in the patient’s dreams, violently intervenes and dissociates the psyche.”
—Donald Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma
My aim with this exploration has been to uncover the self-protecting traumatic secret hidden behind Strieber’s narrative—and by extension my own—in order to unlock it. This inevitably runs the risk of being as invasive—and as uninvited—as an alien rectal probe. If Strieber has constructed a line of defense against seeing the true nature of his experiences—or at least a central aspect of them, one that changes everything about them—then he has done so for good reasons. Tearing down that psychological wall might prove harmful—to him, and therefore to me.
Chapel Perilous is not just any ordinary hall of mirrors; the mirrors are perfectly aligned to create an infinity of reflections, with nothing in between. To really see what’s (not) there does not mean to shatter the mirror—that would only leave us with a collection of dangerous fragments and a lifetime’s bad luck. It means to disappear from view, to become pure perception, without either subject or object because there is no perceivable difference between the two. The author, the subject, and the reader, all vanish into an infinite progression, leaving only the space behind. That is the picture I am trying to hold up to the light, without my shadow getting in the way. It is a picture of infinite space, not only out there but in here. The psyche, as within, so without.
When writing psycho-history, the meanings don’t make themselves available like ordinary facts and figures. They have to be teased out and then they need to be apprehended, not only with the intellect and the intuition, but with the total body. This exploration is attempting to present the “lost body” of Strieber’s work and of my own life simultaneously. With any luck, the vesica piscis of our two psyches as they overlap will act as an opening onto the collective psyche. But this will only happen through an accurate superimposition of material. If it is more than slightly off, the image will be fuzzy and blurred, and the reader will see only a double distortion.
To spell it out too much means losing the finer meanings that is the subtle body of the analysis. If I don’t spell it out enough, those meanings might never been recognized. It is like walking a razor’s edge, the razor’s edge that Strieber is walking: the edge between “worlds,” between the madness of denial and the insanity of going off the deep end. We are walking it together.
What I’ve done for this chapter is to take a leaf out of Whitley’s book. I have turned the focus around and taken it outward, to the stars, specifically to Mars, a planet which Strieber has shown a consistent interest in. Conversely, with fearful symmetry and not without hesitation, I will once again be probing into Whitley’s childhood experiences. In The Secret School, he describes his ninth year, in 1954, receiving nine lessons from a being, or beings, he later identified as the visitor(s), as part of a group of children being tutored in a sort of cosmic consciousness, beyond space and time. In the first of these lessons, he describes visiting Mars—in non-physical form—and seeing the (now famous) “face on Mars,” followed by an encounter with a Martian nun (whom he later identifies as the female visitor he was reintroduced to in 1985). This brings three elements together into a single narrative: Strieber leaving his body (dissociation) as a child; his encounter with the visitors; and his first being seeded with an interest in Mars. Strieber describes how, partially due to the influence of sci-fi movies, he became obsessed with the planet Mars as a child and staged fantasy enactments of being transported there. He recounts in great detail an out-of-body vision of flying above the surface of Mars. In it, he feels a great loneliness and a desire to be back with his parents:
The hollowness that fills children when they are far away tormented me. I could not let myself think about home: I was looking for something and I had to find it because failing would be very terrible. Still, I sure wanted to be home with Momma and Daddy (p. 5).
Art by Joseph Stodgel
The feeling of hollowness causes him to plummet to the surface of the planet. As he does so he sees a huge face staring up at him that resolves itself into a “tumble of low hills.” He winds up stranded, afraid he will freeze to death. In his account, he writes: “I fought with the only weapon I had, my mind.” This may be a key to Strieber’s whole oeuvre.
Strieber’s Mars vision expresses the separation-anxiety of a child on the verge of growing up. When I was ten or eleven, I was sent away to boarding school. It was excruciatingly painful for me to be away from home. Among the memories I have from that time, there’s one that I have never been able to explain of sneaking out in the middle of the night with the boys in my dorm room, into a large field, and running around waving white sheets in the air. Did this actually happen, and if so, what on earth were we doing? It sounds more like something out of Strieber’s childhood than my own (I noticed, with a feeling of unease, that the Finders material included photographs of children dressed in white sheets for some sort of “blood ritual”). As if to further insinuate some hidden reality, in a letter I wrote home from that same period, I recount seeing a UFO from my dorm window! I have no memory of the incident—so what else have I forgotten from that time? I wrote quite a few letters during that period, and looking back I realize this was probably how I first learned to express myself through writing. It was a way to be connected to home, to feel less alone and isolated. For me as well as for Whitley, writing (the mind) was a weapon against the cold.
Strieber remembers being a child, traveling to Mars (the planet of war), far from home and the warm comforts of family life, where he discovered “the only weapon he had.”[1] Evidently, Strieber’s profound desire to “get to Mars” as a child was not just the result of too much science-fiction; considering the kind of abuse he was being subjected to during this period, was he unconsciously focusing on Mars as the location (internally) of his life force? Was he sensing the need to become a warrior? (Mars signifies the male body, just as Venus represents the female form.) Rather than connecting to his sexuality, however (perhaps because it had already been severely sabotaged by then), he turned to his mind. Eventually Strieber became a writer, for whom the pen is mightier than the sword. (Incidentally, this phrase was first coined by Lord Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Coming Race or Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, a book which inspired Hitler and the Nazis, most specifically with its descriptions of the Vril force.) Strieber’s chosen field was horror, a natural way for someone to use their mind/pen/weapon/Vril to distance themselves (disassociate) from the horrors they suffered as a child, by turning them into mental imagery—i.e., fiction.[2]
In Strieber’s childhood vision (which he apparently believes was an astral journey), having used his mind as a weapon to fight his fear in the freezing and hostile Mars environment, he then has an encounter with the “Sister of Mercy” who runs the secret school (the “good” one). The being (whom he later identifies as the female visitor depicted on the cover of Communion) is described in the lurid, nightmarish terms of horror fiction. When he first sees her, she is “something like a giant bat with a cloak wrapped around it.”
The voice became a hiss. “You will get to the telescope! You must, do you understand! Must!” Her hissing reminded me of the giant lizard at the zoo, the way he hissed when you got him with a mesquite bean. The hand was weird. It was bony and thin, and it was digging hard into my shoulder. This sure didn’t seem much like any dream I ever had before. Writhing from the pain, I looked up, trying to see this person.
The guardian figure demands that young Whitley get himself a telescope, which is a way to take the focus outward and upward: just how a lonely, frightened child might deal with unbearable isolation and loneliness, by gazing at the stars, imagining a better life in another world.
But she pushed my head back down and I found myself looking into a huge book made of dark blue leather and crusted with rubies so enormous that I could see my own face reflected in them. I could see the Sister of Mercy, too, a black shadow in the depths of each jewel. Her long, thin hands caressed the cover of the book with the care due a fragile, overripe fruit. And yet it did not seem worn. On the contrary, the sense of antiquity was combined with a quality of the fresh, as if it was both ancient and freshly minted. She lifted the cover, revealing supple, curiously floppy endpapers that reminded me in a creepy way of skin. Instead of pages in the book, there was a strange darkness.
What is the meaning of a book which also acts as a mirror, into which the young Strieber is forced to gaze? (Rubies reinforce the Mars-theme.) The child must learn to see himself as a warrior, but a “bookish” warrior—i.e., one whose weapon is his mind, a mentalist, a writer. The imagery of overripe fruit is both sexual and biblical; it brings to mind both sex and sin, equating them. Strieber was raised a Catholic, so the connection would be automatic. The book had skin, like a living thing, a body. Inside was darkness, i.e., unconsciousness, the womb. The floppy skin-like endpapers brings to mind the female genitalia—inside of which is “a strange darkness.”
I did not want to look; I didn’t even want to be near it. Hands grasped my head and pushed it downward. I was aware of sucking, as if the book were a well and there was a creature down there that was going to devour me. I could not prevent it . . . because in some way the creature was also me (p. 10-11, emphasis added).
The sexual implications here are too clear to need spelling out. The child does not want to place his attention on the inside of the “book” (the body), or even be near it, indicating a child’s fear of female sexuality, and by extension of his own body. But he cannot prevent it. As with all of Strieber’s encounters, to a greater or lesser extent, the dream-vision has the earmarks of a symbolically-reinterpreted memory of sexual interference; and yet, despite the distinctly unpleasant, even horrific nature of the encounter, Strieber sees the being as a benevolent presence. Later he writes:
There was something about her body—a tickling vibration—that we really liked. We all wanted to be near her, and sitting beside her was a big reward. When she touched us, it would transform us into a state where we felt spectacularly, deliciously alive, as if every cell was conscious. One by one, she would touch us, grabbing our hips, our faces. I remember I saw inside her wimple once, and it looked as if a giant moth was staring out at me. My whole being rocked with terror (p. 146).
Strieber’s early experiences, as described in The Secret School, connect various fragments together to indicate a larger picture. His desire to go to Mars shows the desire to become a warrior, discover his weapon (mentalism/writing), and develop a tool for understanding and combatting the forces controlling him at that time.
As a point of comparison, in my adolescence (after I had left boarding school for a local school), my stepfather went off philandering and my mother became suicidal, spending days on end in bed. My brother and sister had left home by then and I was alone with her madness. She was an irrational, unpredictable, and terrifying presence. I had terrible nightmares (as previously described) and took refuge in comic books about superhuman beings and David Bowie songs about aliens (and spiders) from Mars. I became obsessed with Clint Eastwood (a warrior-type who resembled my father) and then with movies in general. This led me to writing (I wrote movie lists, then reviews, and finally scripts). I was also writing short fictional pieces at the time, including one I can remember from the period quite well, about a boy who met a magical teacher, an older man. The man gave the boy a magic watch that could stop the flow of time, and the boy learned to use the watch. He had complete freedom to move through the world, unseen by others. Somehow the watch broke while he was using it, and the boy was trapped. Since his own body was not subject to the ravages of time, he realized he would be trapped there, isolated from all human contact, forever: a prisoner of infinity.
*
In Strieber’s follow-up to Communion, Transformation, he describes a series of experiences from 1986. Having been given a book by the researcher Robert Monroe, Journeys Out of the Body, Strieber begins to experiment with the exercises Monroe devised.[3] He has no clear success until one night, while attempting to leave his body, he has the following vision:
It was the image of the long, gray hand of a visitor pointing at a box about two feet square on a gray floor. The hand was extremely long and thin, with four fingers. They had black, claw-like nails on them. The longest one was pointing down at the box. For some reason this image had the effect of causing an explosive sexual reaction in me. My whole body was jolted by what I can only describe as a blast of pure sexual feeling. I have never known anything like it before or since. . . . The effect only lasted an instant, but it had an amazing effect on me, quite beyond anything that one would have thought. What happened was that the blast of sexual energy seemed to loosen connections inside me. I rolled out of my body. It felt as if I had come unstuck from myself. The experience was strange in the extreme—almost beyond description. [T]he vision of the box drew me so powerfully that I literally left my body (p. 202, 208).
Strieber then finds himself looking down at his sleeping body and sees the face of a visitor at one of the windows. He interprets the face as a “warning” (like the face on Mars?) and goes out another window instead. He explores the normal world outside and then returns to his bedroom. He looks down at his body. It is so still it looks dead.
Going down into it again didn’t appeal to me very much. I had the feeling that I could leave and never come back. . . . When I dropped down into myself, my body seemed to have an invisible opening in it that I went through. But I was terribly loose inside and I found myself coming out again (p. 205).
Suddenly he finds himself in a scene from his past, at his childhood home in San Antonio, looking out of his bedroom window at his father, who is mowing the lawn at the crack of dawn. His father looks up and says, “When are you going to come help me?” Strieber shoots back to his body in fright. “I had the feeling I’d touched death,” he says. He notices his body is “chilled to the bone” and that his arms and legs are stiff as if they haven’t moved in a long time. When he looks at the clock, he sees that only ten minutes have passed.
The vision begins with a box and ends with his father and a feeling of having “touched death.” The image of a box is already connected to Whitley’s father by the photograph of the coffin—signifying death and confinement. What is concealed in the box—in Whitley’s story—is not only the “dead” father but the living boy—the victim of original trauma. The box, like a picture of a father in a coffin, is the secret that guards itself. Seeing the box activates an intense rush of sexual energy for the adult Strieber. Why? Is it because what was trapped in the box was inseparable from that initial sexual trauma, namely, his Martian life force, his libido?
We’ve already seen how Strieber’s memories of being abused as a child center around being confined in a box for extended periods of time, and how that led to visions of angels and demons. Was such confinement part of a successful attempt to force children to dissociate and develop an ability to leave their bodies? (Perhaps it was connected to an early remote viewing program?) At the same time, if such experiments were occurring simultaneously with some kind of sexual interference, this might also account for Strieber’s strange reaction.
When a child is sexually abused, there is often a sexual response, not merely despite but to some degree because of the terror and the violence being inflicted. One way for the child to reduce its distress and to survive psychologically is to identify with the abuser. This means the child to some degree experiences the abuser’s sexuality as its own, which is how the trauma becomes internalized, and why the act of dissociation, as Kalsched describes it, is an aggressive one. It is equivalent to a kind of involuntary self-violation on the part of the psyche, a splitting of awareness that allows the developing ego to escape the scene of the trauma, and secure itself from any future incidents. As Kalsched writes, “The full pathological effect of trauma requires an outer event and a psychological factor. Outer trauma alone doesn’t split the psyche. An inner psychological agency—occasioned by the trauma—does the splitting (p. 14).”
The conscious self then becomes de-eroticized. This doesn’t mean they are devoid of sexual response (the person may even develop a sexual pathology), but only that the libido remains trapped inside the body by, and to some degree as (inseparable from), suppressed traumatic memory. The child dissociates. Its consciousness leaves the body and enters into (or creates) an alternate, anti-libidinal identity, a “mind-self” that is forever safe from re-experiencing that trauma, but also forever cut off from its own life force and body, like a child, trapped inside a box.[4]
*
“If we now survey all the far-reaching possibilities of the infantile constellation, we are obliged to say that in essence our life’s fate is identical with the fate of our sexuality.”
—Carl Jung, Aspects of the Masculine
Unsurprisingly, Strieber’s early visions of Mars (which he didn’t remember until much later) connect directly to his first interest in extraterrestrial life. In Breakthrough, published in 1995, Strieber states it plainly:
The first time that I came across a possible hidden government policy devoted to concealing evidence of extraterrestrials was in 1984. Early that summer, Dr. John Gliedman, whom I had then known for about a year, showed me a photograph that appeared to be of a gigantic sculpture staring up from a desert. . . . I was soon involved with the group, which was known as the Mars Anomalies Research Society, Inc.[5]
Strieber is confused about the date of this incident, because in The Secret School he reports it occurring “on a clear September day in 1985.” This date fits better with his contention that the photograph of the face on Mars triggered his semi-conscious close encounter experience, in October 1985. “The mystery of Mars and the secret school, it would turn out, were deeply bound together,” he writes, adding, “It should be remembered that my encounters started after I became interested in the face, not before.”[6] Apparently being shown the photograph of the face on Mars in 1984 or ’85 stirred vague memories of his childhood trip to the planet, which in turn triggered, or paved the way for, his first fully conscious memory of being taken by the visitors in December of 1985.
This strange scenario clearly links Strieber to a group of intellectual elites and intelligence types with an interest in space travel. At that time, Strieber was a writer of horror fiction, so how and why exactly did he wind up joining such a group? He doesn’t say, only that he was asked to finance their efforts and agreed. He does state that, after Communion was published, he “withdrew from direct participation in the committee out of concern that [his] connection with the UFO subculture would embarrass the other members and compromise the already tenuous standing of the project in the scientific community.” This raises another question which he doesn’t address. In Communion, Strieber indicates that he had no knowledge about UFOs or aliens prior to his experiences of October and December 1985, stating that, in January of 1986, even after doing some research, he “knew almost nothing about UFOs” (p. 39). He was quoted in 1987 saying: “I did not believe in UFOs at all before this happened. And I would have laughed in the face of anybody who claimed contact.”[7]
So what is Strieber saying? That he had formative experience in childhood which he recalled as an out-of-body trip to Mars, during which he was handled by an alien nun and made to stare into an empty book; and that this created a psychological mechanism within him that was “triggered,” thirty years later, when he was shown a photograph of Mars by a member of an elite scientific group with a focus on extraterrestrial life and/or space travel—a group which Strieber mysteriously neglected to mention (effectively lying by omission) in Communion? And that the Martian-face-trigger then led, in Strieber’s own estimation, to his abduction experience, during which he was given a rectal probe by the visitors—an event which to this day he refers to as a rape, and from which he still suffers physical symptoms. It’s also worth noting that the incident that immediately precedes the rectal intrusion is that of having a needle inserted into his brain.
If I had been afraid before, I now became quite simply crazed with terror. I argued with them. “This place is filthy,” I remember saying. Then, “You’ll ruin a beautiful mind.” I could imagine my family awakening in the morning and finding me a vegetable. A great sadness overtook me. I do not recall screaming, but evidently I was doing so. . . . (Communion, p. 28).
The reason I cite this is because, if the (sexual) violation of his body occurred simultaneously with what he perceived as an attack upon his mind, it appears that Strieber’s narrative is held together by a common thread, that of a recurrence of trauma.[8] And these incidents seem to date as far back as Strieber’s own memory: when I first dipped into Solving the Communion Enigma while working on the first part of this exploration in 2013, I was struck at once by a couple of incidents which Strieber mentioned (in chapter two, “The Mirror Shattered”) from his early childhood. At four, while playing in a kindergarten run by nuns (again), he was made to leave for thrusting a “friction toy under a sister’s habit. Her underthings became tangled in the whirring mechanism. To put it mildly, she was agitated.” A few paragraphs later, he mentions, in passing, how his “best friend got his penis caught in a bicycle pump” (say what?). These aren’t offered up as part of Strieber’s fragmented, otherworldly memory set, but as ordinary childhood memories; yet both relate to technology interfering with the sexual organs, somewhat eerily echoing the rectal probe of December of 1985.
I am well aware how the rectal probe has become the source of much humor, of the blackest variety, in popular media (including the first episode of “South Park”), and how Strieber has been understandably indignant about it. I am also aware that, despite his belief that it was a medical action, he has frequently described the procedure as “rape,” because of how deeply traumatic the experience was for him.[9] While I can sympathize with Strieber, it is also understandable if people have turned his trauma into a joke. The possibility that an otherworldly race of highly intelligent beings took a grown man from his bed in the dead of night and anally penetrated him with a foot-long device for unknown reasons is not something most people want to even think about. But even that scenario (which could be easily placed in the realms of sadomasochistic science-fantasy) is preferable to considering the deeper implications of Strieber’s traumata.
Strieber has stated that a medical examination, taken after his abduction memories surfaced, revealed physical signs of rape. He has said that he suffered side-effects from the experience for years afterward, and that it was his rectal pain (among several other physical symptoms) that caused the memories of his abduction to surface in the first place. Is it fair to say then that this was the most real thing about his experience? Yet such physical symptoms hardly prove conclusively that he was taken by nonhuman beings that night.
While Strieber has described the rectal probe as part of some “medical” action, he also remembered, during the second hypnosis session transcribed in Communion, a distinctly sexual element:
(I could sense them, but I was looking at her. She drew something up from below.) “Jesus, is that your penis?” I thought it was a woman [Makes a deep, grunting sound.] That goes right in me. [Another grunt.] Punching it in me, punching it in me. I’m gonna throw up on them. [Pause.] (They began trying to open my mouth with their hands.) “What do you keep wanting to do that to my mouth for?” They keep trying to put something in my mouth. They’re real. They’re real. Put up her cheek right to me, and they’re real! That’s the incredible thing here. I’ve still got this thing in me and it’d be nice to take it out.
A little while later, Strieber describes how the beings are asking him if he can be any “harder” (i.e., more erect). In 2006, Strieber discussed the possibility that he had been manipulated to provide semen to the visitors to impregnate the female being. While exploring his fragmented memories of the summer of 1968 (which I will look at in the next chapter), he remembered being sexually manipulated by strange people for unknown purposes, apparently to impregnate a woman (Róisín). In the audio commentary at the end of his second hypnosis session, available at his website,Strieber makes the connection between the rectal probe of 1985 and the semen-extraction process, referring to the procedure known as “rectal electro-ejaculation” (REE), which has been used on humans since 1948.[10] For whatever reason, as far as I know he hasn’t referred to this connection since, nor has he addressed the question of why beings able to enter into (and/or emerge out of) the depths of his psyche would need such archaic technology to bring him to orgasm.
While I was working on this material, I suffered from my own rectal pain, which eventually led to inexplicable bleeding. I didn’t interpret it to mean that aliens had recently interfered with me, but I did consider that working on this subject matter, since it was undoubtedly stirring up suppressed trauma in my own body, might be causing “old wounds” to reopen. As already mentioned, past trauma will often surface through somatic effects—or affects. Freud wrote about this over a hundred years ago, and called it “hysterical phenomena.” In extreme cases (such as the famous “stigmata”), wounds can open up in the body, bruises may appear, and blood can flow.[11]
Is this a literal, tangible attempt on the part of the psyche to re-integrate the trauma, not just emotionally but viscerally, by re-experiencing it in and through the body? If so, where did the limits lie of such a psychosomatic re-enactment? Might the “physical proof” of the kind Strieber and another abductees have displayed be proof of something quite different—something that is both present and past at the same time?
In relation to this, and to the psychological process described by Kalsched, it is striking to observe how the interactions Strieber has had with the “daimonic layer of reality” (or of his own psyche, assuming there is even a difference), have become progressively more human (and correspondingly less traumatic) over the years. His first fully recalled traumatic encounter with alien visitors was in 1985. His experience with the feral man-child was roughly eight years later, around 1993. His encounter with the being he called “the Master of the Key” was five years after that, in 1998. During his alleged conversation with this “radiant being,” the Master of the Key told him, “I can imagine no greater honor than to be called human.” [12]
Just as past trauma can be integrated by the psyche through a re-emergence of bodily symptoms, perhaps the dissociated, disembodied, “alien” fragment of Strieber’s psyche is assuming a progressively more human form, on its return journey from outer to inner space?
****
Accompanying audios from 2013 (download links): “Sisters of Mercy” and “Straw Men (Strieber’s Intelligence Connections).”
[1] Besides war, the archetype of Mars represents male sexuality (also play, more on which later). It is associated with adolescence, the period when sexuality awakens. Mars was an intrepid warrior but also reckless, impetuous, rash, and headstrong—all characteristics of youth.
[2] In fact Strieber describes everything he learned in the secret school in mental terms: “the secret school was founded by the mind, and it lives in the mind. . . . The mind is the teacher, also the student. Of all the truths that are emerging out of this strange colloquy, perhaps the greatest is that time itself—even time—may become our servant” (p. 191).
[3] Robert Monroe started the Monroe Institute in Virginia which has been central since 1977 in the training of military personnel in “remote viewing,” including Joseph McMoneagle, “the first person enlisted into the top secret military program known as the STARGATE Project that began operation in October 1978.” It is now run by Skip Atwater, who was the Operations and Training Officer for Stargate for ten years, before taking over MI. http://www.thegatewayexperience.com/explorers-of-hemi-sync/
[4] As the Master of the Key says to Strieber, “That is why you and your world are called ‘Dead Forever.’” The Key, p. 108. Curiously, when Strieber asks who calls us that, he is told “God.” On the next page the Master tells him that “the victors” in an ancient cosmic battle call Earth the same. Strieber also reports hearing from another contactee that it is Martians who call us “dead forever.” “The truth was that there had been a war between advanced civilizations on Earth and Mars many millennia ago. Earth had wrecked Mars, but Mars had gained control over our souls. They had condemned us to a perpetual cycle of rebirth and forgetting, of rising and falling civilizations, of always losing track with our past, going on and on forever. They called our world ‘Dead Forever.’” http://www.unknowncountry.com/journal/dancing-mirrors#ixzz2OKzs76Z6
[5] From chapter 18 of Breakthrough, “Blood on Mars.” I didn’t have a copy of the book so I was dependent on the Internet for this material. It continues: “On the committee were former NASA scientist and member of Reagan’s National Commission on Space, Dr. David C. Webb, John Brandenburg, Vince DiPietro, who was one of the original imagers, writer Dan Drasin, astronaut and planetologist Dr. Brian O’Leary, imaging specialist Dr. Mark Carlotto, Randy Pozos and Dr. Gliedman. Dr. O’Leary is the original Mars astronaut, and, if our Mars exploration program had not been abandoned in favor of military objectives, he would have been to the red planet and back by now. Dr. Carlotto, who was a contractor for an intelligence agency involved in reconnaissance, was in possession of imaging equipment so advanced and so secret that many of its controls had to be shielded from the eyes of committee members without proper clearances. The primary purpose of the equipment was to transform satellite pictures into clear and accurate images with high detail content. The fact that the Mars face was re-imaged on the best equipment known to man in 1985 and came out looking even more like a sculpture has been efficiently suppressed. However, the results of studies made with the TASC Corporation`s equipment were routinely used in the most sensitive of reconnaissance projects. Except for what he did on the face, Carlotto’s work was routinely assumed to be completely accurate. My specific role was to finance the new analysis of the data and subsequent study that Drs. O’Leary and Carlotto undertook.” http://www.oocities.org/marksrealm/et057.html
[6] “Aliens, Predictions & the Secret School: Decoding the Work of Whitley Strieber,” emphasis added. Proud continues: “In Breakthrough, Strieber mentions having been acquainted with Richard C. Hoagland, whom he met through Gliedman in 1984, three years before the publication of Communion. Hoagland, of course, was involved in a group known as the Mars Anomalies Research Society (MARS), and has written several books claiming that ancient civilizations once existed on the Moon, Mars and on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Hoagland believes that evidence of these civilizations, such as the ‘Face on Mars’, have been kept secret by NASA and the US government. Strieber donated money to Hoagland’s group, and soon became a member. The aim of the group was to conduct further research on the ‘Face on Mars’ photograph—which they succeeded in doing. Among those involved in the group were Dr. David C. Webb, a former member of Reagan’s National Commission on Space, astronaut and planetologist Dr. Brian O’Leary, physicist John Brandenburg, and an imagining specialist named Dr. Mark Carlotta, who, according to Strieber, was a contractor for an intelligence agency.” http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/aliens-predictions-the-secret-school-decoding-the-work-of-whitley-strieber
[7] “The Village Alien,” by Thomas M. Disch. (The piece first appeared as a review of Communion in The Nation, March 14, 1987. http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472068968-27.pdf#page=1&zoom=auto,0,674
[8] As Ed Conroy notes in Report on Communion, “For Strieber, an intellectual whose livelihood has been gained by use of his mind, brain damage would threaten his entire identity, not merely his professional ability” (Avon Books, 1990, p. 302).
[9] “My fear would rise when they touched me. Their hands were soft, even soothing, but there were so many of them that it felt a little as if I were being passed along by rows of insects. It was very distressing. Soon I was in more intimate surroundings once again. There were clothes strewn about, and two of the stocky ones drew my legs apart. The next thing I knew l was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long, narrow and triangular in structure. They inserted this thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the time I had the impression that I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger” (Communion, p. 30).
[10] “Rectal electroejaculation (REE), also called electroejaculation (EEJ) is a process designed to help retrieve viable sperm from a man who otherwise has difficulty producing it. Used since 1948, this infertility treatment helps to stimulate a man to release ejaculate. Rectal electroejaculation uses a probe attached to an electric current to induce erection and ejaculation. Once ejaculate is released, it is then collected and prepared for use in artificial insemination.” http://www.fertilityfactor.com/infertility_ree.html
[11] “The possibility that psychic conflict can cause organic damage is currently widely accepted. The central neuro-physiological, neuro-psychological and neuro-chemical mechanisms that realize the bodily expression of an unconscious content are still to be discovered, but certainly much more is known today than one hundred years ago. Regardless of the working of such a mechanism, that could be defined as a central analog/digital converter, conflicts and emotions can influence the immune system and, also directly, the somatic periphery through the autonomic and endocrine systems. . . . According to [Ratnoff’s] theory, stigmatics (especially women) were individuals who, at some moment during their lifetime, had been subjected to physical trauma from a male figure with strong affective-emotional links (father, husband, etc.), such trauma (like being beaten) often resulting in internal hemorrhaging (subcutaneous and intramuscular hematomas). The emotional circumstances in which the traumatic events took place would favor the manifestation of an auto-immune reaction against the person’s own red blood cells (auto-erythrocytic sensitization), but such auto-immunization would occur only in subjects psychically predisposed to conversion (i.e., hysterics). Later on in life the recurrence (even in the imagination) of the emotional-affective situations in which the original lesions were produced would trigger the formation of the stigmata (Agle et al.,1969; Ratnoff, 1969).” “An Unusual Case of Stigmatization,” by Marco Margnelli, Journal of Scientic Exploration, Vol.13, No.3, pp. 461–482, 1999.
[12] The Key, p. 58. Rather bizarrely he also said, “If I were an intelligent machine, I would deceive you.” But nothing is ever straightforward in the life of Whitley; we will return to the machine question later.