A New World

by Whitley Strieber

  The lesson here could not be more clear: If you get curious about this and seek to bring the entities into your life, know that they are not like us and do not have the same connection to reality that we do. Reacting toward them violently without understanding anything about them, even what they are, is foolhardy.

  Unlike us, when they are killed, they don’t lose contact with the physical world. They can keep acting in it from the nonphysical level. Matt took the body of one of them, but not his access to the physical world. What happened as a result was essentially an act of anger. This individual had lost what they view as a gateway—a body—much more than they see it as a “self.” We live by the illusion that we are our bodies. They do not. We assume that the death of the body ends an individual’s access to physical life. It doesn’t, and if they are attacked and hurt and angered, they are likely to continue to act in the physical world against their attackers, and this is going to look to the attacker like the sort of bizarre haunting that Matt experienced.

  This has also happened to thousands of military people over the years, individuals who have acted aggressively toward the visitors. They carry out their aggression under orders that are given by authorities who have little understanding of what they are doing and the consequences of their actions. These military people are being asked to “defend” against them, which is not possible if you have no access to the nonphysical. They are not told that they and their families may experience things similar to what happened to Matt, and certainly not told that their souls will also have to confront those they have attacked after they die, because this is not understood on an official level at all.

  Billionaire Robert Bigelow, who has worked with elements of the US government who present a hostile face to the visitors, commented on 60 Minutes on May 28, 2017 that he had experienced a face-to-face confrontation with them. It was not a pleasant experience for him. Similarly, two members of the board of directors of the To The Stars Academy, an organization devoted in substantial part to aggression against the visitors, have had terrifying direct experiences in their lives. One of these led to a family tragedy. The other, fortunately, was only frightening. This organization, which has a rock-and-roll personality as its public facing presence in order to gain easy access to the media, is dedicated to moving the struggle to create weapons that might be effective against the visitors into a more open context in the scientific community, in the hope that some sort of breakthrough can be achieved. Over all the generations of effort that have been expended behind the wall of classification, this has not been a successful effort.

  It has failed because defense on a physical level is as meaningless, quite frankly, as it is for a dog to bite the boot of the man who is kicking it. Early on in my adult relationship with the visitors, I had a conversation with one of the blond people who are not of this world and who have also advised our official level. He explained to me that “if you start a war with the grays, they will never let you stop fighting and they will never let you win.” This is what is happening on our hidden official level, but it is certainly not what our leaders are told in a briefing that they receive if they ask intelligence and military officials what is being held secret about this subject. They are told stories of what has happened to our military personnel, but not that we ourselves instigated the conflict. Some of these stories are truly horrific. It is then explained that, while we are working on weapons, we have not yet achieved control and the whole thing must be kept secret until we do. It never occurs to anybody given the briefing to ask why it is that the visitors keep matters secret, too.

  From where I sit, the official reaction, as inept as it is, is entirely understandable. The visitors are fantastically frightening. There simply isn’t any other way to put it. During the summer and fall of 1985, when I knew, but not consciously, that they were there, I also armed myself and might well have done the same thing that Matt did and the military does, had one of them appeared in my gunsights. I would assume that the results would have been similar. Fortunately for me, I was never face to face with them while carrying a weapon, and before I began to understand why they were here and what they want.

  Once I realized that they were real, my curiosity overcame my fear, and the guns were no longer a factor. After the initial period of friction, we found common ground in spiritual search. They reacted to my nightly meditations and shared in them. Over time, this has created a fruitful relationship that has enriched my life, and I hope also offered them the reward they seek.

  At this point, my relationship with them is as coherent and organized as it would be with anybody I might get to know in the normal course of my life. There are differences, though, chief among them the fact that companionship and communication are so different from what they are among us. They are frightening to me and to some extent always will be. This is because they can control souls, and my soul knows this and in the face of such awesome power, feels the fear of the helpless and the vulnerable in the presence of the aggressive.

  I am in my relationship with them to learn and report what I have learned. They are in it to teach. Their aim is very clear: They want the relationship to work, and not just for me. They want it to work, period. They also know how hard it is going to be for us—and for them—to achieve this goal. We are like two brilliant animals of different genius species confronting each other. They are large, we are small. Both are fierce, both are wary.

  So what’s next? Do we continue circling one another or do we find common ground? Given that we humans are helplessly using up our planet’s resources, we are essentially back against the wall. Either we succeed in this or we go where nature and the failure of our environment are liable to take us, which will be into a state where our planet is largely uninhabitable and we no longer have access to physical bodies and all the opportunity that they offer evolving souls.

  I believe that my own relationship is in part related to the fact that older members of my family were involved in military operations connected with the visitors. While I don’t have any statistical evidence to point to, I do have reason to believe that this can be a factor. Once one member of a family becomes involved with them in some military context, whether confrontational or not, they seem to have a tendency to follow that family line.

  My uncle was involved in the Roswell Incident and my father may have had something to do with the presence of Col. Guy Hicks living a block away from us. Col. Hicks was the commanding officer at Goodman Field in Kansas when Capt. Thomas Mantell, stationed there, crashed in his plane in 1947 while pursuing a UFO. This was all debunked, but I think that my father and an FBI agent who lived down the block from us were watching Col. Hicks and some other men on the same street. I cannot say that my father was in the intelligence community, but I have always sensed that he was somehow involved. He was, if anything, even more secretive than my uncle.

  Another reason for involvement is childhood trauma. As Dr. Kenneth Ring showed in a study of close encounter witnesses published in his book The Omega Project, psychologically stressful experiences in childhood, such as child abuse, also increase the chances of close encounters happening. I think that this is because the abuse shatters the child’s expectations, increasing the chance that things that are not supposed to be there, but are, will be seen.

  Between August and October of 1952, I was involved in a special education project at Randolph Air Force Base that utilized something called a Skinner Box in enhanced learning experiments. This device, developed by psychologist B.F. Skinner, was intended to isolate subjects and induce rapid and enhanced learning.

  The process was extremely stressful to me, as a result of which I also began having trouble in my regular school, becoming terrified of my teacher for reasons that I could not explain. I began to experience one bout of sickness after another. My pediatrician discovered that I had almost no white blood cells, and my sister and I were removed from the program in October. I was isolated at Brooke General Hospital and given injections of gamma g
lobulin, then kept at home until January of 1953, when I returned to second grade.

  My direct memories of this experience are quite confused, and my sister in her lifetime did not remember it at all, but a close friend does remember the Air Force couple who did the recruiting visiting their house. In fact, his parents socialized with them a good bit but refused to allow him to enter the program on the basis that it involved the use of a Skinner Box.

  I remember dreadful close confinement, darkness and awful screaming that went on and on. In fact, if my friend didn’t recall the recruitment pitch he listened to with his parents, I might think that it had all been a nightmare and that my whole problem was my fear of the nun.

  So I had two factors that can lead to abduction: unusual stress in childhood and being part of a family that includes older members who have been involved in some way.

  As I described in my book about my childhood, The Secret School, it appears to me that the visitors showed up in my life sometime after I was removed from the program at Randolph and remained until I reached puberty, when they withdrew, or I stopped being aware of their presence. By the time I met them in late 1985, I had no memory at all of my childhood encounters.

  It is my belief that the depth and extent of my relationship has been enabled not only by my serving notice in those night woods that I was interested in taking matters further but also by something that I have been doing since 1969–1970 called the sensing exercise.

  In the fall of 1969, I began working as a Director’s Guild Trainee on a movie that was being shot in New York. One of the other production assistants was something new to me, a spiritual seeker. He introduced me to P.D. Ouspensky’s book about G.I. Gurdjieff and the Gurdjieff Work called In Search of the Miraculous. Anne and I both bought copies and read it with growing interest, and then hungrily. It made the argument that the human attention is mostly drawn automatically to experiences and sensations, but that it can actually be controlled by the individual, who can intentionally split it between what is coming in from the outside and his inner being. This is called the double arrow, looking out and in at the same time. When we experimented with this, we discovered that it did indeed cause a definite expansion, not exactly of consciousness but of what I would call sensitivity. Those early experiments were the first small notes of what has since become a resounding chorus in our lives that crosses the bridge between the worlds and opens the mind to mysterious new levels of reality.

  Early on, we found one immediate change that was really very engaging to us. We began to see the world and our place in it in a new way, as both participants and observers. Life became more vivid and poignant. The experience of noticing in this new way transformed ordinary life into an extraordinary art form, and being alive came to appear as a continually unfolding miracle enclosed in the familiar world of our ordinary reality.

  We joined the Gurdjieff Foundation’s New York City branch. It was in group meetings there that we began doing the sensing exercise regularly. It seeks to split the attention by anchoring part of it in physical sensation while letting part of it take in outer impressions.

  Now, fifty years later, I am still doing it, and it is the center of my relationship with the visitors. I am no longer actively attending group meetings in the Foundation, and I don’t hold group meetings myself. The Gurdjieff Foundation is the inheritor of the teaching, and I regard work within it as essential to gaining useful understanding and establishing a strong personal practice. I must add, though, that the Foundation doesn’t have anything to do with contact or facilitating contact. In fact, the members I’ve kept up with regard my stories as pretty quixotic. It is a resource designed to awaken us to reality in a new way. The fact that the sensing exercise facilitates contact is entirely coincidental to the Foundation’s aim.

  On the surface, the sensing exercise is quite simple. It is, however, a uniquely powerful form of meditation, as I now understand. To do it, one sits and places the attention on physical sensation. I follow the method I learned in the Foundation, which involves being attentive to first one foot, then the lower leg, then the whole leg, then working up the other leg, the arms and torso, opening my attention to the sensation of each part of my body until I finally spread it over the whole body.

  When Anne was alive, we often did it together. It can also be a powerful experience in a group setting, which the Foundation excels in providing.

  When our son was born, I stopped doing it for a time. I was too busy and tired, being the father of a baby. But as he grew up, I returned to the practice, doing it nightly at eleven. I now do it at eleven and three, and there is an interesting story behind the addition of the wee-hours session.

  Little did we know in the early days that we were not alone—that doing the exercise made me and Anne visible to very different eyes. I have recounted in other books (Super Natural, The Afterlife Revolution) how strange things began to happen to us as soon as we came together, long before we had any inkling that such a thing as a close encounter of the third kind was even possible. I will mention here that the first of those events probably took place about six months after we started with the exercise. They involved ghostly events in our apartment in Manhattan and a notable experience of seeing kobolds apparently kidnap a man who had gone into a disused storefront where prostitutes sometimes sat. We called the place the “whore store” and used to laugh about it. We were astonished by the sight of what looked to us like blue dwarfs pulling a wildly struggling man behind a curtain. It was terrifying, and we ran home. We didn’t call the police because we couldn’t figure out what to say. We never passed that storefront again.

  Another event from those early days that was important seemed at the time like a dream. This involved being in another world. I was with kobolds. We walked along a path under a great arch. Ahead on a ridge, I could see tall trees that looked like cedars of Lebanon. To my left, the land fell off into a vast view of a trackless desert. Perched on the bluff overlooking this desert was a round, dark blue building that was very tumbledown. I was told that it was a university but in bad repair because “the scholars are no good at maintenance.” I went toward it at once, eager to matriculate. I wanted to study at a million-year-old university, for sure!

  As I approached, I was stopped by peculiar creatures with large black eyes, whom I would later understand as grays, and who I would meet again in December of 1985. I was terribly disappointed when they denied me entry. I have later come to understand that this was actually my matriculation, and that the disappointment I experienced was meant to test me, either spurring me on or causing me to give up.

  Creating this type of friction is central to the way the visitors teach, and as a matter of fact, its use is also important in the Gurdjieff Work. Mr. Gurdjieff would create situations that would challenge his students’ egos and force them to face themselves, either driving them away or spurring them on. Gurdjieff called it puncturing the “hot air pie” of ego. My hot air pie has been leaped up and down on for many years by rude little men, and I am much the better for it. As I will discuss later when explaining how building a strong soul enables one to render moot the fear of them, the first lesson they ever gave me was about the danger of arrogance and the importance of humility.

  I think that I’ve been in their school ever since that dream. When it happened, the two forms involved were nowhere in the news and not in my life. But there they were, kicking me out of the university that I have been studying in ever since!

  Just as maintaining the double arrow enriches one’s life experience, doing the sensing exercise enables the sharing of self. While you are doing it, they can enter the silence of your mind and join you in your life experience. For them, this is more than a pleasure. I suspect that, when they are in their normal state, it is an utter delight for them, and I would think that they want to experience it with as many of us as possible. I suspect that Anne intuited this early on, which is why she insisted that our book be called Communion. Contact is not just about our
learning new science and making new social and cultural discoveries. It is, more importantly, about this sharing of self. And incidentally, this has nothing to do with what is called possession. That’s exactly what the visitors don’t want to do.

  For them, I don’t think that anything is ever new. For us, everything is always new. They may know reality outside of time. We don’t really know what the next second will bring. They hunger to share our sense of newness.

  I think that the reason for this is explained by an insight that was published in the April 1977 issue of the magazine Science. D.B.H. Kuiper and Mark Morris made the observation that any intelligent entity appearing here from another world would have essentially nothing to gain from us except the results of our own independent thought. They would be after newness, and they would therefore be concerned about our state of preparedness to engage with them. As Kuiper and Morris speculate, “We believe that there is a critical phase in this. Before a certain threshold is reached, complete contact with a superior civilization (in which their store of knowledge is made available to us) would abort further development through a ‘culture shock’ effect. If we were contacted before we reached this threshold, instead of enriching the galactic store of knowledge we would merely absorb it.” They continue, “By intervening in our natural progress now, members of an extraterrestrial society could easily extinguish the only resource on this planet that could be of any value to them.”

  Having been involved with them now for so many years—for much of my life, really—I feel that this is indeed the reason for their secrecy. But they now find themselves in a quandary: Our planet is failing so rapidly that if they continue to hide and wait for us to catch up, we might go extinct first, or enter into a period of chaos that will destroy what progress we have made, causing them even further delay.