UFOs and...dumping someone!
A UFO story with a romantic twist
I’m back on 3RRR this Sunday on the venerable Jonnie Van Goes Radio Method show doing my little “UFOs and…” spot from 3.00. Each week, there is a new theme for the show, and this Sunday it’s “dumping someone”. I get a huge kick out of taking any random theme thrown at me by Jonnie, and finding a UFO connection. But because ‘the phenomenon’ flirts with all aspects of human experience, I am never going to be stumped for a connection! and the following story occurred to me straight away:
In late 1985 Whitley Strieber, then a moderately successful American writer with a gift for horror fiction, was living in a cabin in up-state New York with his wife and young son. As a liberal/progressive intellectual with some immersion in 60s/ 70s counter-cultural ideas, Strieber was most preoccupied with climate change and ecosystem collapse, and not UFOs which he didn’t believe were real things, let alone any far-fetched stories of human contact with so-called aliens.
However, strange experiences had started to beset Whitley in the cabin, and from October he found himself becoming increasingly paranoid and unhinged. There was lost time he couldn’t couldn’t account for, there were terrifiying flashbacks with bizzare imagery. At a loss for what could be wrong with him, Whitley, at his wife’s urging, subjected himself to a barrage of medical, psychological and psychiatric tests, including MRIs looking for temporal lobe epilepsy. But all that was apparently physically wrong with him was some unexplained injuries.
At that point in time, Whitley had been happily married to the love of his life, Anne for 15 years. Streiber was born in 1945, grew up in San Antonio, Texas, went to a Catholic High School and his views of marriage were traditional. When you made a vow to a woman to love and cherish her forever, that was sacrosanct, you didn’t break it.
But these small town America, conventional ‘50s values also meant the husband had a responsibility to look after, protect, provide for wife and family. What happens then, when you still love and cherish your wife but you also start to feel your grip on consensus reality starting to unravel, you start to think you are going mad? What kind of responsible husband is that?
As Whitley wrestled with his inexplicable inner turmoil, he decided the only moral, decent thing to do was to free Anne from the burden of having to care for a nutcase. He decided he had to push her away, dump her. Although it would completely break his heart.
It was only when in March 1986 he finally made an appointment with Dr Donald Klein, then head of the New York State Department of Psychiatry and an experienced forensic hypnotherapist, that Whitley’s memories of his now famous encounters with otherworldly beings in October and December of the previous year started to surface. He started to come to terms with the fact that something truly weird and unfathomable, had, in fact, actually happened to him, he wasn’t just losing his marbles for no apparent reason.
So where did this leave his relationship with Anne? Whitley, from his revised Introduction to the 2022 edition of Communion, reflects:
“I’d been trying to drive her away because I thought I was going to become psychotic. When I sat down with her to explain what I thought had happened, I was afraid that, instead of me pushing for divorce, it would be her.”
Can you imagine how he felt? We’ve all had that tight, shakey feeling in our bodies when we know it’s time to have ‘the talk’ when a relationship feels like it’s finished.
“But the moment I said “I think I was taken aboard a flying saucer by little men” she burst out with “Oh thank God, I thought you were going crazy!.” She has also remembered herself as saying “Oh thank God, now I don’t have to get a divorce”, but the first sentence is the one I heard – and I was so very, very glad to hear it.”
Whitley and Anne remained a devoted couple until Anne died in 2015. But even then, according to Whitley and their circle of friends, their soul connection continued as movingly documented in his 2017 book The Afterlife Revolution, to which he credits Anne as a co-author.
I love that story. The elevator pitch for a movie version could be: “A romantic bond rescued from a potential dumpster fate by love, trust and willingness to countenance the reality of so-called paranormal experiences.” Of course, Communion did get made into a film starring Christopher Walken in 1989, billed as ‘sci-fi horror’, but that was only after the global reaction to Whitley’s 1987 book was far, far in excess of what he or Anne were expecting. Whitley thought that maybe a 100 people at most might have had a similar experience to his, but a torrent of letters started to come in, describing all kinds of bizarre encounters with ‘the visitors’ (as Whitley calls them), including drawings of faces that looked the same, or very similar, as the one depicted on the now iconic cover of his book. Over the years, the Striebers received over 200,000 letters from close encounter experiencers, keeping in mind this was way before the internet was part of everyday life or ‘alien abductions’ were a cultural meme. Whitley has now donated these letters to Professor Jeffrey Kripal’s newly established Archives of the Impossible at Rice University, so that they can be studied by future generations of scholars and other researchers.
Off to Blighty again
On more terrestrial matters, I’m heading back to the UK next week and will be there until September. I have a lot of adventures and events planned for the Northern summer, including one involving UFOs and another involving physical mediumship, which will be the subject of future posts. On the creative front, there are a couple of exciting vinyl re-releases of some of my back catalogue and a launch party in Berlin (will post about these at the right time too) as well as a London screening of the DIY film myself and Bill Garrett put together for Canary Wharf: the Rock Opera, at Canary Wharf itself on 10 July – tix here.
More soon!