Whitley Strieber is a strange character in this whole affair. He is the writer of Wolfen and The Howling, two horror novels. Lately, he turned to write about UFOs.
His first book on the subject, Communion, deals with his personal experiences with abduction by an unknown intelligence (Strieber always tries to avoid the word “alien,” so he can leave the options open that these are humans that are traveling through time or even an unknown earthly intelligence). His second book, Transformation, is not as familiar to me, but I have heard that it is more of the same as Communion, except that it is less well-supported and deals with a sort of religion of the unknown. Strieber contends in that book that the “others” (as he calls them) gave him a sketchy design for an anti-gravity motor that relies on rotating magnets.
His third book is Majestic. Milton William Cooper mentions it in his speech. This book follows Cooper’s speech closely in many regards; in fact, sometimes it seems like one is stealing from the other because they are so close. Strieber writes this book as fiction, but in the end there is a section in which he says that the book is based on truth and that the government is hiding information from the public. He insists that this truth must be brought out.
However, Cooper says that Strieber is working for the government. He offers some proof to this claim, but he doesn’t really say why the government would hire Strieber to write Majestic, or whether he was hired before he wrote Communion and Transformation. All Cooper says is that Strieber is testing the waters, leaking the information in a way that the government could deny. I think that if Strieber works for the government, then it is most likely because the government thinks that people will not believe anything he writes about UFOs, given his history of writing horror. Thus, the government has Strieber write something that is based on truth, and everyone thinks it is coming from such a bad source that it must be false.
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This from Keith Rowell in Oregon:
“You folks interested in Strieber’s claims should check out the book Report on Communion (Morrow, 1989) by Ed Conroy.
“Conroy is a San Antonio-based freelance reporter who wrote some early articles for the local newspaper and then continued to explore and investigate till he ended up with a book. He basically concludes that Strieber’s claims are true as far as we now understand the UFO phenomenon, which is very far from adequate at this time. (The scholarly and scientific establishment has yet to honestly and openly embrace the problem of the UFO. Conroy’s book is opening the way for the investigative media people, though. Things are changing as the UFO issue just refuses to go away.)
You will all hear more and more about the reality status of UFOs as we go through the 1990s. Intelligence establishment secrecy is being slowly broken down and the scientific/scholarly community is slowly putting up less resistance as the years go by.
“My opinions are based on 15 years of reading the UFO literature and four years or so of more or less active participation in the UFO community. It is very hard to understand what is going on in the UFO community without paying very close attention to it. The normal sources of news and information cover this group of people in a very inconsistent and sometimes downright biased way. You’re just going to have to get your feet wet on this one; otherwise, you’ll just being talking through your hat.
“I’ll be happy to send via electronic mail my representative UFO bibliography to anyone who wants it. Lately, new (and significant) UFO books are added practically monthly in the past few years. UFOs are hot again. We seem to be in a peak of activity again.
“The latest significant book is by Ed Walters on his Gulf-breeze UFO/photograph experiences, being distributed to your local bookstores as I write this.”