Karmatoo : Most of the researchers looking into the
abduction phenomenon seem to be unanimous about its
extraterrestrial origin. Since the eighties, which are the
starting point of your relationship with the “visitors”, you
have expressed various speculative hypotheses to explain your
experience with
the Grays.
Twenty years later, do you have a new
understanding about this special night of 26 December 1985 ,
when you became aware of your abductee condition?
Whitley Strieber : I don't think that language has yet
evolved to describe why we see the phenomenon as we do. Even if
it involves, in the end, nothing more esoteric than creatures
who have evolved elsewhere in the universe, the array of
phenomena that accompanies our interaction with them remains
unexplained.
To proceed toward an explanation, it may be that
scientific method can be helpful, but that remains to be seen.
Certainly, a proper study of a representative sample of close
encounter witnesses would help. Such a study would involve
physical and psychological aspects, as well as careful forensic
study.
I doubt that we are presently able to construct a
meaningful picture of our “visitors” as they actually exist, but
we can certainly determine, in an objective manner, what has
physically and mentally happened to people who claim to have
been involved with them.
Karmatoo : What are the motives that drove you to publicly
reveal your alien encounters and what is the price you had to
pay?
W.S.: I thought the whole affair was quite interesting and
important, not because I had any certainty about what it was,
but because I knew what it was not: it was not a known
phenomenon of any kind.
To my mind, that makes it important, and
makes study and research essential. Instead, here in the US , we
got many insecure intellectuals rejecting it because they feared
the idea of an unknown presence that was more accomplished
intellectually than they were.
Scientists dared not address it
because the National Academy of Sciences has taken the position
that UFOs are not worth scientific study. But why not? At the
least, they and the aliens that come with them are a
psychological and social phenomenon, so they should be studied
at least by these disciplines. But they are not.
I believe that
even appropriate scientific response is intentionally
suppressed. I don't know why, but I do have a guess.
My guess is that whatever is out there, be they aliens or
something perhaps quite different, are in control of everything
that happens relating to them and their presence here. Our
society ignores them because they have orchestrated it to happen
this way.
As to motive, D.B.H. Kuiper and M. Morris offered an
interesting speculation in Science Magazine in April of 1977,
when they suggested that anybody capable of traveling the vast
distances between the stars would be so richly informed that the
one thing we could offer them of value would be innovation.
But,
if they revealed themselves to us, our entire culture would
immediately refocus toward them and all new and original human
thought would end, just as happened in the past when materially
robust western cultures came into contact with primitive
societies.
If you want to see why our visitors keep themselves
hidden, go to American Samoa and observed the empty,
disempowered Samoan culture, of no interest to anybody. The
visitors hide both out of their need and ours.
They need what we
have to offer that is new, and they cannot get it if they reveal
themselves. We need them to hide, or we risk a shattering
disempowerment from which we will never recover.
Karmatoo : According to some projections several hundred
thousands to one million people have been abducted, just in the
United States. You yourself have received more than 150.000
letters reporting alien encounters. The operational scale of the
phenomenon appears to exclude the hypothesis that the aliens are
just studying people. So, what are they actually doing?
W.S.: I received half a million letters. Whatever is happening
is certainly not some sort of study by alien scientists. It is,
rather, as deep a penetration into the human species, I think,
as can be made. In my personal life, it affected me mentally,
physically, even - and perhaps most profoundly - spiritually.
It
completely revised my world view, throwing into question every
single certainty that I had.
I am no longer sure that we are
even close to knowing the true history of the human race; I do
not think we understand how the human body works except on a
gross and largely irrelevant level; I have seen with my own eyes
that there is such a thing as conscious energy, but I do not
know if that means that human beings have a soul; I have moved
both backwards in time and into other places that appear to be
in some way occupying the same space as we do.
In fact, I have
become unstuck in reality, and in order to remain sane, I have
learned that the question is everything.
As long as I embrace
the question, I can go anywhere and do anything, no matter how
impossible it once seemed, or how badly it fits my expectations
and assumptions about what is real.
Karmatoo : Some people refer to the aliens as “intruders”; you
call them “visitors”. Why?
W.S.: Because I don't think it's time to make a decision about
this. “Intruders” says that we know something about their
motives; “visitors” simply that they are here.
On the night of
December 26, 1985 , I was raped with a device commonly used in
animal husbandry called an electrostimulator. This device is
inserted into the rectum and conducts a small electrical current
into the area of the prostate that causes erection and
ejaculation.
My ejaculate was taken. I was badly injured and my
doctor felt on examining me that I had been raped. Obviously, I
was attacked by “intruders.” But why? If we were desperate to
save the human species and needed genetic material from a
species on another world who, we feared, would not understand
our need and would resist giving it to us, we would not only
take it, we would feel morally justified in doing so.
After this initial rough encounter, I spent eleven years in the
most complex possible relationship with the visitors and many
people connected with them. I have written only a little about
this, because I decided that the culture was not ready for my
story, given that I was attacked on so many different levels,
misrepresented, lied about by U.S. government agents, and
laughed at. The “rectal probe” became a cliché of modern humor.
I do not feel that this cultural reaction was appropriate or
useful, and I have therefore kept most of my experience, and in
particular the powers I have gained, to myself, and will
continue to do so.
Karmatoo : It seems that there is a great deal of similarity
between alien abduction and altered states experiences like
ghostly visitations, out of body experience, levitation, near
death experience, lucid dreams, etc. What make the distinction
between true extraterrestrial abductions and altered states?
W.S.: This is all connected, because “seeing” at this level is a
matter of opening one's eyes - or having them opened - in such a way
that conscious energy that is independent of physical life can
be observed. You soon discover, incidentally, that human beings
have the potential to weave, as it were, energetic being that
will live in this state.
Most do not and cannot engage in this
hidden craft of the soul. Instead, they are duped into an
elaborate tissue of lies that range from the secular to the
religious. It is not a matter of praying to old gods or
retreating into the assumption either that only the physical
exists or that whatever happens after death will be for nature
to decide.
Creating an energetic body is craft based on science.
You are lucky in Europe because the best machines ever devised
for doing this dot the landscape in the form of gothic
cathedrals. They are not “Catholic churches.” The
Catholic
Church has simply paid for and maintained them.
Proper use of
these instruments can engage the engine that the whole universe
wishes us to start, which is the creation of a conscious energy
devised upon the form of our individual body and vibrating with
its essence.
Many in this world die without making souls. This is why this
civilization, itself, will die. It costs the earth more than
it's worth in results.
Karmatoo : Have you collected some physical evidences about the
UFO/abduction phenomenon? If yes, what was the response of the
scientists' community?
W.S.: Implants have been harvested from patients. The harvests
have been carefully recorded. There is no scientific interest
whatsoever.
Karmatoo : UFO sightings and abductions: are these parts of the
same experience, the same process?
W.S.:
There is certainly a connection. It developed, for example, that
many UFOs were seen in the area of my cabin in upstate New York
during the months before my abductions. Similarly, in the
Corinna Saebels case in British Columbia in 2003, not only were
three “ufos” seen by the two people who were abducted, they were
seen by people all over the area. It is important to understand,
though, that
UFOs come in many different varieties.
Please
forget the idea of “ships,” etc. It's useless thinking.
Better
to approach the whole matter as an open question about the
nature of reality and the means that we have of perceiving
phenomena. For instance, three “UFOs” in triangular formation
were seen by Mrs. Saebels and by many other witnesses in British
Columbia on the night she and her friend were abducted.
These were not “ships” but beings whose science has long since
enabled them to take forms as needed by their circumstances.
They do not fly around in little machines at all. They are the
craft that we see, also the “aliens” that we think of as coming
out of these craft.
I have recently finished a book that is written, to some degree,
from the viewpoint of these people called “the grays” of whom I
have become a part, in a certain sense, as I have parts of my
soul woven into a form that enables it to participate in them.
If there can be an analogy in this world of ours, think of an
antenna of a certain length that enables it to pick up signals
of the same length.
To say that I am therefore “controlled” by
them is to try to explain my situation in the same way that a
man with no knowledge of radio might try to explain why a box
speaks. It's useless to even try to draw this material down into
the languages of a world which is so very far from knowledge of
the principles involved.
I know that these statements will
trigger ego-reactions and fear-reactions of various kinds, all
signs of the weakness of the present human culture, and more
reason that it will die.
Karmatoo : Is it possible to prevent an alien abduction? Is it
possible to say “no”? How could you protect your mind, your
psychological and spiritual integrity?
W.S.: This question is asked from deep ignorance. I have no way
to respond to it, beyond saying that it is as profoundly
meaningless as a question a dog might ask about whether or not a
given fireplug is “good” or “bad” based on the way it smells.
It
is no more possible for man to prevent the action now being
undertaken here than it would be for a baby to prevent its nanny
from bathing it. The baby will cry, but the bath will proceed.
Karmatoo : What is your opinion of the television series
Taken,
a genuine false documentary produced by Steven Spielberg that
explains the abduction phenomenon like a necessary evil, an
hybridization of our mankind to create an higher race? According
to you, is it information or disinformation?
W.S.: It's meaningless. Probably comes from some of the US
government people who work on the phenomenon. Their octave
failed at the first note that was sounded.
Everything that they
have bled into the community is without value. All of it.
Understand this clearly: nothing whatsoever that has ever been
said about the phenomenon has any value at all, any more than
anything chimpanzees might communicate to one another about guns
or hairspray or books has any value whatsoever in any context
that resonates beyond the level of chimpanzee reality.
However,
it is nevertheless quite possible to sound not only a single
note, but many notes, in fact to compose a whole symphony of
being while in the human form, and even limited by the
electrochemical structure of human bodies and the slow,
“hard-wired” synaptic arrangement we call a “brain,” which is
actually a plug that plugs a sensation-detector we call a “body”
into a much larger and more complex being that is, for reasons
of its own, presently engaging in sensation-gathering in this
level of reality.
Humanity is merely an incident in this
process.
Karmatoo : Do you think like Alex Constantine, Jim Keith and
Dr. Hammond that the alien abductions are related to the mind
control and ritual abuse phenomenon?
W.S.: They are definitely related, in this sense: all fear is
connected to all other fear. However, it is also true that mind
control is possible and sexual abuse of children is endemic.
Even thinking about them, however, reduces one's potential.
Engaging in such things as controlling the minds of others,
abusing children, abusing power, acting cruelly, ignoring the
impulses of compassion, indulging greed - all of it, is a
statement.
The statement is, “this human form will not proceed
further than the physical.” To grow, it is essential to find
one's courage and one's compassion. Indulging the dark side is
not embracing the darkness in a productive manner, it is
allowing oneself to be captured by it.
Indulging fear is just as
damaging as doing actual evil, in the sense that it reduces the
overall potential of the biological entity just as much.
Karmatoo : In 1999, the COMETA organization (a mouthpiece for
the Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Défense Nationale -
Advanced National Defense Studies) released an informal study
about the UFO phenomenon and the national defense in France .
Although
the report had its weaknesses: the lack of
argumentation and the unofficial representation, it was the
first time that former high-ranking members of the French
administration and the army openly suggested that the United
States is concealing the extraterrestrial reality of the UFO
phenomenon in order to gain an economic and military supremacy.
What do you think about this scenario?
W.S.: There is a lot of interest in French culture and language
because there is potential to understand that is greater than
elsewhere. The language is especially useful because of its
ability to construct ambiguities, which is also why French
intellectualism is so highly developed.
The culture seems a
little more open, also, and less bellicose than the Anglo-Saxon
ones. I am speaking from the standpoint of those on the outside
trying to understand how it might be possible to "contact” man,
who have the same problem an elephant would have attempting to
contact an ant: there is an enormous problem of scale.
And yet,
we can see that human beings and dogs work well together because
we have found ways of entering one another's vision of what is
real in ways that are mutually satisfying - and yet, which, to
each species, have entirely different meanings.
Man, however, is different from the dog, in that there is a lot
of potential rewiring possible. The dog is fixed, in the sense
that he has only two “brains,” physical and emotional. The
cognitive part is vestigial. This is not true of man. Man has a
somewhat more developed cognitive area, and thus the potential
to become a full member of the cosmos.
The
COMETA report was of
interest because it represented the fact that some French were
attempting to approach the matter rationally.
Karmatoo : You did a lot of research in your writing of
“Majestic”, a novel about the Roswell incident. Regarding this
event, you state that your uncle, Col. Edward Strieber, who had
spent much of his career at Wright-Patterson AFB, had first-hand
information about the delivery of alien materials to Wright
Field from the Roswell Army Air Base in the summer of 1947.
Well, it's an amazing coincidence, don't you think? Could you
tell us more?
W.S.: He spent his early career at Wright field. Mostly, his
career remains classified. It was not a coincidence that we were
both involved.
Karmatoo : What do you think about the blockbuster “The Day
After Tomorrow”, the screen adaptation of your book “The Coming
Global Superstorm” written in collaboration with Art Bell? Do
you think that this kind of movie had any ability to influence
the environmental strategy of the United States or even to
induce an awakening?
What I mean is that, from a European point
of view, this movie looks more like a sci-fi movie than a
politically-committed one.
W.S.: I attempted to sound a note in a very disturbed octave.
The note is off, because the octave is not properly tuned. But
the note was correctly sounded.
Even the science of the movie is
quite correct.
Karmatoo : You said that it was a mystical experience, a
peculiar meeting in a hotel in Toronto with a strange man that
drove you to write the book “The Coming Global Superstorm”. Who
is this man?
W.S.: The Master of the Key - who is he? A good question.
Karmatoo : According to you, this event seems to be unavoidable.
What kind of challenge are we facing with the global superstorm?
W.S.: Environmental breakdown at the most profound level is
inevitable. Will it be a return to an ice age or something else?
No way to be sure, but the superstorm is one quite valid
scenario.
In any case, no matter what transpires, in some way
the human species will experience a significant dieback in
coming years.
abductions “procedures”, he also stresses the
fact that alien encounters could become some kind of spiritual enlightment.