Whitley Strieber Exposed

this would not surprise me really
i have always thought striebers has the man that destroyed ufology, by inprinting the "grey" image on peoples heads
and ruining years of interesting research

AH COME ON PEOPLE, Leave Whitley alone! He is a very sweet and genuine man who is to me a cornerstone of the UFO mystery.

HIs extreme grief and depth of love for his beloved Ann, is nothing but a testament to his heart, to his loyalty and his commitment. So what if chooses to include her in his continued work, his show and his day to day life.

There are many charlatans, snake oil salesmen and women out there we could be picking apart, many opportunists, disinfo agents, liars and theives.

"He" believes his story, his life and his history, that's good enough for me. I still listen to his show once in a while on Tunein radio.

Please be negative on someone other than Whitley, he has suffered enough. Leave him be.

a reply to: Kandinsky

Oh do share, it is next to impossible to find places to gently and intelligently, trustingly discuss. It is one extreme or another with very little in between. You know for me I am not privileged to be a fence sitter nor a skeptic, so finding that road less traveled without all the hullabaloo is a challenge.

originally posted by: Kandinsky
a reply to: Mother66

I listened to your show and tend to agree with much of it.

In the sidebar to your video was a Whitley presentation from 2016 that had 5k views. The statistic says a lot about how far his popularity and relevance has fallen. That isn't to say it's all about him either. The fall is reflected across the whole subject of ufology and its sub-groups like the experiencers and abductees.

There have been scores of 'the end is nigh' warnings for ufology over the years. It feels like the end to me lately with only a few oases left to gather around and talk.

I've said before but there was someone who was looking at Mars through a telescope and he saw river canals and evidence of intelligent presence. We know now this isn't true, but in that era telescopes couldn't make out the features clearly, and this coupled with an even lesser knowledgeable public led to a lot of people believing maybe intelligent life existed on Mars. As telescopes became clearer and intelligent life on Mars was debunked, you might think that's the end of it, but it's not. This is a process of filling in the gaps with our imagination. For reasons unstated here, we favor the company of aliens in our imagination. Maybe it's a desire to feel part of a larger whole in the universe. So for a long while now we've seen--lacking a better word--ufos and aliens on Earth. Like that person who saw intelligent beings on Mars through his telescope, we're seeing aliens wherever information is scarce.

It's only a matter of time before we (likely) find conclusive evidence of advanced civilization elsewhere. When it becomes evident it's compelling and irrefutable, ufology might finally die. Or, alternatively, enter a metamorphosis stage and be remade into a relevant topic.

So these things are a barometer to our imagination. If the pressure is low, our imagination is high; and vice versa. Is imagination good or bad? It's only filling in the gaps. I'm sure it can be both good and bad. I think our imagination is influenced by what we worry about or speculate. To some amount, it's unavoidable, with varying degrees of representation in the real world.

A interesting question I might ask myself is what happens if there're no other intelligent civilizations close enough for us to discover EVER? In such scenario, how will our imagination evolve? Will it create ever more inventive delusions? Or will it simply follow a mathematical relationship between our knowledge base and what's unknown? So if our knowledge starts ruling out other intelligent civilizations in the local universe, our imagination then starts creating them outside the local universe, or in other dimensions. Only the most delusional--and infrequent--imaginings would still cling to conventional ufology.

a reply to: jonnywhite

Thanks for the thoughtful reply

Like that person who saw intelligent beings on Mars through his telescope, we're seeing aliens wherever information is scarce.

God in the gaps is how it's often explained. I'm more inclined to use the analogy of a Rorschach test. Some people have extraordinary experiences and describe them using the terms and references available to them. Commentators then apply their own interpretations until we're several layers removed from the actual incident.

It's only a matter of time before we (likely) find conclusive evidence of advanced civilization elsewhere. When it becomes evident it's compelling and irrefutable, ufology might finally die.

Fair points. What puzzles me is where the stimuli went and why they began in earnest in the late 1940s. Ufology has been dying through lack of incidents as much as anything else.

So these things are a barometer to our imagination. If the pressure is low, our imagination is high; and vice versa.

I like your metaphor and I also think imagination is a key element in many reports.

a reply to: JBloo

I have written on ATS at least twice that Strieber at some point claimed to have been a witness to the Texas Tower massacre back in the 1960s. It was later proven that he was just a kid at the time and not present. He later retracted his account as an aspect of his fertile mind. --Something can be said about that aspect.

Before his alleged UFO experiences he co-authored a paperback novel entitle War Day It was about a nuclear war and not very interesting, but I do remember a segment of a nude female being intently examined, uncovered, by a lesbian doctor in a small exam room.

I've never accepted Strieber for being fully legitimate. I would not call him a total fraud for good reason. As a UFO abductee, a distinction that I've not yet fully capitalize upon, we, such folks, have extreme difficulties in living in the conventional world as regular human while being tormented by a whole different perspective that few of you are willing to understand let alone accept.

a reply to: Aliensun

I go into detail about Strieber and the Whitman shooting in the paper at strieberthekey.com. There are at least two different accounts Strieber gave to interviewers in the early eighties. You can read them in the paper in full. Strieber was old enough to have been there and was a college student, I believe, at the time. (Would have to go back and double-check.) But a few things are notable: years later when his mother was interviewed, his mother said that he was in Austin the day of the shooting but not on campus. (The sort of detail you'd think a mother would recall - whether her son's life was in danger or not.) Another thing: in both accounts, Strieber vividly describes a boy in a bicycle getting his head blown off by the sniper. Problem is, the youngest male victim was a Mark Gabour who was killed upstairs in the tower. There's more to it than this; you'd have to take a look in the paper, the last part of it.

In response to Antar above:

I used to think as you do - that whatever was going on with Strieber, he at least was sincere. Everything the guy says seems to be in deadly earnest, after all, and clearly he's been traumatized, etc. But actually: he's full of BS. And his sincerity act is part of the BS. If you read the paper, you'll see how his whole 'I was raped' thing evolved. For example, how he started claiming in the 2000s that it 'took [him] twenty-five years to tell his wife' he'd been raped. Meanwhile, you can go back and see that he was referring to the rectal probe as rape as early as Communion, he'd been comparing rape to abduction the whole time since that book, etc. Strieber has built a whole mythology around his victimhood. Claiming that South Park ruined his career, for instance, and not his involvement in Hale Bopp or the general deterioration in the quality of his books. Seems to me a true victim doesn't need to sculpt a narrative on how he's been victimized. When you look at Strieber's material for the last twenty years, it's always: a) he's been victimized, he's a martyr; and b) he's the most unique man in the universe who's been somehow involved in Roswell, cattle mutilations, the 'drones', 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, time slips, and everything else you can think of.

The final proof for me (that Strieber's no better than anybody else) is when this paper came out, Strieber got on his website and told the world he 'knew' who the author of the paper was: that it was an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi who'd been treated for mental illness. This came as something of a surprise to me as Curb Your Enthusiasm is my favorite show; I love the 'Joos' (William Shatner is a Jew!); and they haven't put me in the mental hospital just yet... but who knows, could happen any minute.

So, no, Strieber's Mr. Earnest routine doesn't work for me anymore. He's a man who overreached, in my opinion, and out of pure intellectual vanity tried to make himself the center of the contact phenomenon back in the '80s. When that failed and the aliens didn't land and make Whitley the philosopher-king of the world, it was a blow to his ego from which he's never recovered. Now he nurses his wounded feelings in public, and when somebody bothers to criticize him, the person must be a Nazi. I really sort of dislike the guy now, but I concur with what Kandinsky posted above - that luckily, his work doesn't get any real traction at this point.

Cheers.

the more i read about whitley, the more he looks like an certain eduard albert meier

I might be a year late to this thread, but I have been re-reading his earliest books on the visitors after some 25 years, and finding them just as sincere and compelling as previously.

So I am a little shocked to see the character assassination that has befallen Mr Strieber since I last read his books.

And that last book was The Key - which I don't remember too much about, but I do remember finding it mawkishly sentimental, and chucked it out.

And now I read all this - and have listened to some of the Mother podcast, and how has the intricate challenge of visitation and its implications for human evolution and philosophy ended up here?

Despite my sincere and compelling comment above, I would note that in Breakthrough Mr Strieber takes it as gospel that a flying Saucer crashed at Roswell, and that there is definitely a Face on Mars. I don't know what his take on that nowadays is.

His career path also reminds me of Adamski in that a potentially genuine experience led nowhere, and in the disappointment confabulation followed.

Is this what happened? The initial experience as detailed in his early books were bursting with promise and adventure. The Key sounds to me like an act of desperation to recover lost dreams.

But it was noted on the Mother podcast that his son is silent on all this. And I think that he is the real key to this, as it is popular in the abduction literature to observe that abduction spans the generations. And he was a first hand witness to at least some of what went on.

Looking at what has happened to his father, I would keep a low profile if I were him, no matter what his experiences are, but unless he says something I don't think we will be able to come to any final conclusions as to the discrepancy between early Strieber and what is going on now.

Though I might add that Mrs S would not likely - Mrs Budd Hopkins style - have stuck with him through thick and thin if he had been a plain fraudater "monetising" his experiences.

originally posted by: Drachenfel

... in Breakthrough Mr Strieber takes it as gospel that a flying Saucer crashed at Roswell...

Oh, dear. Did Friedman get to him?

I read 'Communion' in the late 80s and was transfixed, regarding it as a work of fiction with strands of reality attached, but the 1989 movie with Chris Walken (miscasting at its most ridiculous yet ludicrously enjoyable!) was rightfully laughed out of cinemas, Strieber himself angrily disowning it.

When his 'Visitors' threatened to become a multi-book industry for Strieber, I stepped off his particular woo-woo bus sharpish, yet still believed that something very unusual occurred to him at that cabin in 1985.

Why Strieber was ever interested in examining the Roswell rubbish is beyond me, especially since one of the main foundations for his Visitors was that they were NOT extraterrestrial in nature and something far more interesting, worthy of extensive research, including a fair bit of sideways thinking.

a reply to: ConfusedBrit

Yes, in all of his writings that I am aware of, he never saw a traditional flying Saucer, but his military uncle filled him in on this (Roswell)

Also, he takes crop circles seriously as an alien/spiritual message. They are 100% human made - and from the ones I have walked through they are just vandalism - however good they look from the air.

Know them by their fruits - we can judge the visitors adequately enough by revisting some of the 120k people who wrote to Mr S in the 80s who said they shared his experiences - let's see how their lives turned out as they approach old age.

Are they enlightened, or are they tramping cornfields with planks of wood tied to their feet?

Erm... let’s attack a guys belief because he is a weirdo who thinks that there are aliens and shoot his whole idea into the crapper with it.

BS!

Disinformation. That is all it is. And yeah, as a writer you need to keep up interest in your product. But to pass everything out as BS because one is BS is the height of stoopidity.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Yes, you are right - I withdraw any negative comments I made about Mr Strieber above.

I am now reading Transformation, there is truth in his words somehow or other.

I was just reading up on the attacks on him about The Key and so on and let it all get to me. It is like poison.

Strieber was very heavily in the limelight for a while, and had a very significant influence on how we talk about UFOs, even to this day. However, like all UFO personalities or "hot topics," from George Adamski through the Alien Autopsy through TTSA, they don't really add anything solid to the investigation over time, only more areas for conjecture.

If I was on a conspiracy site, I would suspect that these periodic distractions are either created or promoted on purpose to keep us from catching on to what's really going on. Of course, who is doing this and why are other areas of conjecture.

Sometimes I think the only real way to get a handle on UFOs is to actually have one right in your face. Then it becomes less about "understanding," and more about "experiencing." Without the experience, you're not prepared to understand.

I dont believe this guy, he seems like a drama queen and a writer first, a regular human being 2nd. Every time i listen to him hes so dam dramatic its stupid.