A New World Read online

  A New World

  Whitley Strieber

  Walker & Collier, Inc.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  A Note from the Author

  Preface

  1. The Mystery Begins

  2. An Urgent Call

  3. Why Certain People?

  4. The Implant Mystery

  5. The Fields of Asphodel

  6. The Night Dogs

  7. The Return of the Visitors

  8. The Man from Paradise

  9. Shared Lives

  10. Dark Truths and Light

  11. The Donation Site and a Word of Caution

  12. Is Any of This Real?

  13. It is Time

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  A New World is a Walker & Collier book, copyright © 2019, Walker & Collier, Inc.

  Preface by Jeff Kripal is copyright © 2019, Jeffrey J. Kripal

  Walker & Collier, Inc.

  20742 Stone Oak Parkway

  Suite 107

  San Antonio, Texas, 78258

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  www.unknowncountry.com

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  First Walker & Collier printing, first edition, 2019

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  All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Strieber, Whitley

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  A new world / by Whitley Strieber

  ISBN (Paperback) 978-1-7342028-0-9

  (Electronic Book) 978-1-7342028-1-6

  (Audio Book) 978-1-7342028-2-3

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  Cover design by Lisa Amowitz

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  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  This book is dedicated to the children, to whom this world belongs.

  “The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

  ---John F. Kennedy,

  Yale University Commencement Address, 1962

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  “Mythology exists at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power.”

  ---Dr. Jacques Vallee

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  “We are part of a symbiosis with something that disguises itself as an alien invasion so as not to alarm us.”

  ---Terrence McKenna

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the help and support of Lorie Barnes, Josh Boone, Raven Dana, Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Leigh J. McCloskey, Anndrea Taylor, Prince Stash Klossowski de Rola, and too many others to name. Their help has been of inestimable value, and I can only hope that I have met their expectations. I would especially like to thank Dr. Kripal, Anndrea Taylor and Stash de Rola for their extensive and patient editorial help, and Josh Boone for reading all seven drafts with such care and insight.

  I wish also to honor all the witnesses and researchers who have struggled with the close encounter experience and the effort to understand it for so many years.

  I would especially like to thank Jeffrey J. Kripal and Rice University for creating the Anne and Whitley Strieber Archive, which preserves thousands of the letters that we received after the publication of Communion, and were collected and cataloged by Anne Strieber.

  When Col. Philip Corso asked one of our visitors what was on offer for us if we let them into our lives, the answer was “A new world, if you can take it.”

  In Memory

  Not a page of this book is absent the influence of my beloved wife, Anne Strieber. Meeting this brilliant human being blessed and defined my life. She brought crystalline insight into the ambiguous and yet real events that we experienced. The byword of her life was “have joy,” and it is in that spirit that I have written A New World.

  A Note from the Author

  Most of what you read in these pages is going to be strange beyond belief. This is because it is about events that are supposed to be impossible, a level of reality that isn’t supposed to exist and relationships that are entirely new. Knowing this, I have made every effort to tell my story accurately. I have never left anything out, changed anything or edited anything because it seemed too unbelievable. It bears essentially no relationship to any of the popular narratives about alien contact, even less those of ordinary life. And yet it is, word by word, based on observation and experience.

  Unlike many stories that deal with strange experiences, I have attempted whenever possible to add the texture of witness to my narrative. Given what I am asking here, readers deserve to know the degree to which every experience I relate was shared by others.

  It is also important to add that the close encounter experience only begins with what we now know as the physical. As you develop your relationship with the visitors, you discover that what we call the physical is only part of a huge tapestry of reality. The vision of those who do not strive to gain from their encounters remains bound to the familiar world, though.

  Presently, their physical appearance, although only a small part of what they are, is all most of us know about the visitors. For example, it is my belief that most people operating behind the curtain of secrecy have rarely experienced them except physically, and therefore have a very limited vision of them. But for anybody willing to see and accept the mystery that they actually present, there is so much more. It is this group that has the potential to lead the world to real change.

  Engaging with the visitors more deeply is extraordinary and rewarding. It is also completely different from living life as we have come to know it. The laws of reality change. Above all, the very nature of communication changes. The rules are much different and, by our standards, very strange.

  I could have edited my story to make it easier to believe—left some things out, changed others to make them seem closer to the familiar than they are. Like the visitors who are part of my life, I hate deception and will have no part in it. To make my story more believable, I would have had to turn it into a lie.

  Preface

  This Book Is Contact

  by Jeffrey J. Kripal, PhD

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  This is a book about a new super natural world in which communication between the visitors and us, between the “dead” and the “living,” enters a new level of intensity, where physicality is extended into some other new materialist or superphysical dimension, where time, and so evolution, do not work like we think they work, where astonishing sensing capacities or parapsychological abilities run in genetic lines (otherwise called families), and where the UFO is as much a vehicle of soul as it is a source of metamaterials or the invisible object of new radar returns or classified military attention. There is also a model of embodiment shining between these remarkable lines, constituting a paradoxical vision in which we use the physical body as a kind of temporary portal into these physical and temporal dimensions, even as we also remain outside the body and its particular sensory-generated reality. This is a new world not because it is really new (I assure you that all of these themes are very old convictions in other cultural codes), but because it depends on us right here and right now to take shape and appear.

  The deepest message of this little book, then, is an intimate one: that the actualization and appearance, or continued distortion and camouflaging, of this new world depends on us and, more particularly, on how we choose to interact with the invisible presences of our cosmic environment. These choices include whether and how
we read this very book, which, in the intentions and understanding of the author, is itself an urgent communication from the visitors. The intended implications are clear enough: to the extent that you really and truly interact with and so actualize this book, you really and truly interact with and so actualize the visitors. This book is contact, but this contact depends on you.

  Allow me to be nerdy for a moment, as this new world and our uncanny reading role in bringing it into focus intersects directly with my daily life and work.

  I live and work in an elite academic world, in a school of humanities at a major research university with some of the smartest people on the planet. (I am not sure how I got here, but that is another story.) These remarkable intellectuals see through things, like so many X-ray machines in a doctor’s office. They see into the bones, organs, and mostly unconscious structures of whole societies, nation-states, empires, value systems, and religions. Nothing is sacred here.

  The fact is that everything human has been invented by humans, so everything can be questioned. The central argument of my own life-work is that there is a secret human potential hidden in such a deep questioning. To understand who we are, we must first understand who we are not. We must understand that the Human is Two. Yes, we are the hairless, dying primate with this or that social identity, but we are also something Other and More that we cannot name with any words or measure with any instrument.

  Of course, looking at ourselves in this way can be frightening. This is because everything we think of as “me” or “us” ends up being called into question, seen through, and, in the end, simply set aside. We are left with a mystery, and that mystery is us. But there is also real hope, since we are Other or More than any of the identities we have invented for ourselves.

  This is why I so appreciate the ferocious insights of my colleagues. I so admire their unflinching search for deeper and deeper structures of truth and, by implication, for justice (since every structure they uncover and see through privileges and includes some people and marginalizes and excludes other people). I have called this broad-based intellectual sensibility of seeing through societies, nation-states, and religions “prophetic,” not in the sense of predicting the future, but in the sense of giving witness to difficult truths that a particular society, authority, or individual does not want to hear. These truths might be about gender or sexuality, about race, about class, about colonialism or empire, about power, about God or the gods, well, about pretty much anything humans think, make, do, or identify with.

  But none of this makes academics infallible or all-seeing, and social justice and the endless sufferings of different identities are by no means the only kinds of truth to seek and to know. It turns out that there are sacred cows in the academy, too (and even the Hindu cow, by the way, was once not so sacred in India, not at least as it is today—it was once raised, herded, prized, and, yes, eaten). Our present-day sacred cows, which we will no doubt someday “eat,” involve an unquestioning commitment to naturalism, materialism, and scientism, that is, the largely unconscious assumptions that what we think of today as “natural” is all there is; that everything is finally “physical” in the ways that physics understands matter (not very well, it turns out); and that the objectifying methods of science are the only way to know reality, with the often unstated assumption that anything science does not know or cannot know with these same methods must not be real.

  Believe it or not, virtually every aspect of modern intellectual life is committed to this triple set of assumptions around naturalism, materialism, and scientism. Take the study of religion, my own area of research and writing. I have spent the last four decades studying religion. For the first three of those decades, I was schooled in a way of thinking that argued, with some very good reasons, that every religious prodigy—every shaman, mystic, seer, saint, medium, or spiritual teacher--is just a biomedical body locked down in space-time, that everything he or she claims to know came through a material text, a social institution, or a social interaction. In other words, I was taught to believe that everything human is finally and completely “historical” and “social,” which is to say: conditioned, relative, local, and material. Nothing super here.

  This is often the case, of course. Hence the prophetic function of the humanities: all claims that a religion or nation-state makes to include some and exclude others can be deconstructed, taken apart, shown to be false in any universal or absolute way. That’s because they are.

  But that is not all there is.

  I once thought that all talk of sky-gods inserting special “crystals” or sacred “stones” in the bodies of shamans to signal the calling and authorize the teachings of a new spiritual prodigy was nothing but the stuff of myth and folklore. Then I encountered Whitley Strieber and the implant in his left ear, which, as he explains in his books, was central to his own calling and now inspires him to write his books, sometimes with very specific information. Turns out that the mythologies and folklore were true.

  I once thought that scriptural scenes like that described in the first few chapters of Ezekiel could be explained as literary inventions, that every detail of them could be traced back to some other text, social institution, or previous belief. Then I encountered the modern abduction literature, many scenes of which feature apparent craft and seeming technology that look, well, pretty much exactly like Ezekiel’s famous “chariot” vision, which is obviously no chariot at all. Turns out that the Bible, or any other religious scripture for that matter, is sometimes describing actual human experiences and not just making stuff up.

  I once thought all that talk of “ghosts” and “spirits,” of invisible spectral beings, was some kind of psychological projection, social construction, or mistaken dream. Then I met Whitley Strieber, who interacts with invisible “visitors” on an almost nightly basis, most recently to write this book. Turns out that ghosts and spirits are real, “real” in ways that we still cannot grasp or define with our prescribed evolved senses and adaptive cognitive capacities.

  I have interacted with Whitley for about a decade now, often on a daily basis. I believe that I have also interacted with his departed wife, Anne, through a most remarkable drawing channeled by a Canadian medium (more on that some day). Perhaps most dramatically, I have slept in the same room with Whitley at a symposium (a risky enterprise, I assure you) and experienced my own psyche “split” in two in his sleeping presence. Some other part of me, completely separate from the conscious self, watched something astonishing take place in that dark room. As this all transpired, this Jeff-self heard very distinctly in his mind the following words uttered by some other part of me: “Oh . . . my . . . God!” The tone was one of ontological shock, as John Mack once put it so well: not quite fear, but something that included the intellectual emotions of amazement, astonishment, and a kind of pure or total cognitive dissonance. Indeed, I was seeing something so shocking and so dissonant that I could not see it. I literally could not process it as myself. And so I split myself in two, so as to process it and not process it, so as to see it and not see it.

  Most recently, just a few days ago actually, Whitley shared with me a recording of a similar night scene. The audio recording features the other Whitley (he is Two, too) speaking lovingly to a visitor in the room whom he calls by name: “Teach me, Mature.” The recording ends with a female presence sighing deeply as she sensually and intellectually interacts with Whitley. As I listened to the audio, I was reminded of the feeling tone of that night that I split in two in our shared room. Like Whitley, I suspect that this female visitor was in some way “Anne,” whatever that social convention we call a name means to that being now.

  Clearly, I am not the same person (or persons) I was in graduate school, or even a decade ago. I “have” a social name and a physical form, as Anne once did, but I don’t really believe either. And I live toward what Whitley calls here “a new world.” Alas, I cannot say that I have entered it, or that I have shaken off identification with my social ego o
r bionome, but I can say that I have seen and heard entirely too much to believe the old world that I have tried my best to leave behind and in which I no longer believe. Words like “religion,” “myth,” “folklore,” “shaman,” “mystic,” “possession,” “god,” “demon,” “spirit,” “animism,” even “body,” “mind,” “individual,” “history,” “time,” “identity,” and “human being” all mean entirely different things to me today than they did a decade ago. That old world is gone, even if this new world has not yet taken shape.

  “What?” some of my colleagues might say, “You expect us to believe that invisible beings interact with humans, that the human is also superhuman, and that this is what the history of religions really points toward, some kind of post-contact social formation?”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

  I would assure my colleagues that we do not know what or who these invisible presences are; that I suspect they are in fact us (whatever “us” really means); that I understand the supernatural as super natural; and that I do not believe any of the traditional religious, sci-fi, or military mythologies that get wrapped around these mind-blowing moments of real contact and spiritual transmission. Whatever this new world is, I strongly suspect that knowledge practices like “religion,” “science,” and “technology” are fundamentally inadequate, and that we will finally have to be this new world to know it. All the beliefs, science, and weapons of the world will not get us one inch closer to this new world. Indeed, they will only take us further and further away.