Whitley Strieber - Solving the Communion Enigma: What Is to Come

SOLVING

THE

COMMUNION

ENIGMA

what is to come

WHITLEY STRIEBER

foreword by Jeffrey J. Kripal,

chair of Religious Studies, Rice University

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

New York

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

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ISBN: 9781101554234

BOOK DESIGN BY TANYA MAIBORODA

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Version_2

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

This book is dedicated to the close-encounter witnesses and those who have tried to make sense of their dilemma, on whose shoulders it rests.

FOREWORD

Reading as Mutation

I T IS DIFFICULT TO DENY IT ANY LONGER: UFO S are real. This does not mean that we know what they are. We do not. The accent remains squarely on the U, on the Unidentified, on what the folklorist Thomas E. Bullard has recently called the mystery within the myth, the something that yet remains after we have carefully thought our way through the documentation of the sightings, the dubious turns of the conspiracy theorists, and the cultural and media networks of what amounts to a modern mythologization process taking shape right in front of our eyes. The stories themselves are certainly stunning enough: triangular, boomerang, or rectangular ships as big as aircraft carriers (or, in the memorable words of one recent Texan witness, as big as a Wal-Mart) floating silently over heavily populated areas; green fireballs, flying disks, and supercraft shutting down nuclear missile silos, floating over nuclear power plants, and effortlessly invading highly sensitive military installations; fighter pilots from Iran to Brazil attempting, always in vain, to engage the things; baffled airline pilots gazing at immense UFOs from the privileged miles-high position of their cockpits; and Chicago OHare Airport workers watching a disk float above the United Airlines terminal for five full minutes in broad daylight before it zipped straight up at an impossible speed, punching a perfect hole in the cloud cover.

We are not talking about easily understood misperceptions by lone individuals here. Well-documented UFO waves, like the Hudson Valley sightings of 1983 to 1985 (just a few miles and a few months from where the Strieber story begins), the Belgium wave of 1989 to 1990 , or the Phoenix Lights of 1997 , were seen by thousands, including, in the latter case, by the Republican governor of the state of Arizona, Fife Symington. Nor is it true that we are dealing here with something as vague as fuzzy lights in the sky. People routinely see technological details, specific metallic colors, underbelly structures, tubes, search lights, weird plasmic probes, bubble domeseven, in one famous case involving a security police squadron at an American base in England, markings that looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs on the side of a small triangular craft. Nick Pope, who ran the British Ministry of Defenses UFO unit from 1991 to 1994 and has done as much as anyone to get us on the right track here, had it just right: these are The Real X-Files.

How any rational person can read this material and not conclude that UFOs are real is beyond me. At this point in the game, dogmatic denial and professional debunking constitute the irrational. Sadly, such propaganda and shaming strategies work: not one of the OHare witnesses, for example, would speak about the incident in his or her own name, so fearful were they of their jobs. Why do we, as a highly educated and supposedly free society, allow these fake rationalisms and this constant censorship campaign to continue unchallenged?

As a historian of religions, I suspect the presence of a taboo here, not in the easy metaphorical or secular sense of that overused word, but in its original sacred sense. So understood, the tabooed is an object or event that violates the proper order and structure of a society and so is anxiously surrounded, walled off, and neutralizedsomewhat like an invading disease sets off an immunological responsewith rituals and prohibitions of various sorts, often of an extreme and seemingly irrational nature. Such excessive responses mean something here, though, as they eloquently witness to the attemptalways in vainto preserve the cultures order of knowledge and its illusion of completeness. And such an order, any order (including our present secular scientific order), is always incomplete.

The tabooed is not just dangerous, however. It is also sacreda presence of unimaginable power, potential, and paradox. So too here. As gifted authors like Dr. Jacques Valle, Bertrand Mheust, and Thomas E. Bullard have shown in great detail, the UFO phenomena is as much about mythical structures and mystical experiences as it is about radar traces and ships in the sky.

This is where Whitley Strieber comes in. Whitley is one of our most gifted, prolific, and thoughtful writers on these matters. No doubt, this is partly because he himself is a professional writer, a horror writer and novelist of considerable accomplishments who knows how to structure a sentence and a story. The true source of Striebers genius, however, lies elsewhere.

Way elsewhere, in an eleven-year ordeal of close encounters with strange beings whom he simply calls the visitors. He thus understands that the true mystery of the UFO phenomenon, itself a part of a much larger complex of unimaginable things, does not lie with mathematics and machines, but is finally a deeply and transcendentally human one. He understands that we sit on an intellectual and spiritual precipice, that a new world is just over the horizon, that science and its clunky methods are not going to get us therein short, that the greater mystery by far is the human one.