A New World

by Whitley Strieber

  There are many instances in literature of people encountering other realities. Matt and his mother saw a field from the Pleistocene at the end of his runway. In his book, Hunt for the Skinwalker, Dr. Colm Kelleher describes an event that took place on a mysterious ranch that had been bought for study because of all the paranormal activity taking place there. The purchase, made by the government, was managed through Robert Bigelow’s foundation. On the afternoon that the scientists who were to take it over arrived, a remarkable event took place. Just before they arrived, a huge wolf came up out of a marsh and attacked some goats in a corral. The ranchers drove it off by shooting it, although the bullets did not seem to penetrate or draw blood. It leaped out of the corral and ran back into the marsh.

  When the scientists arrived, they found its footprints, which led to the center of the marsh and then disappeared. Casts taken enabled them to estimate the weight of this ghost animal at 300 pounds. When I read this, I immediately realized that this was probably a dire wolf, another Pleistocene creature.

  So is the other world in the past? I have no way of knowing that, but I do suspect from all I saw and all I have learned about it that it does not have the level of population or development that our world does, meaning that, in it, those creatures might not have gone extinct.

  On the night I got home, I sat as I always do at 11 and took my attention to my physical sensation, letting my mind wander free. I asked to understand the place I had seen. I asked if it had a name. I never do more questioning than that. My experience is that I don’t need to beg, pray, do rituals or anything like that. What is important is to be prepared for a response that might happen very quickly and—above all—in some way that is liable to be quite asymmetric.

  Nothing happened for a few days, and then on August 3 rd, I had three dreams. They were what are known as lucid dreams. I’ve had a few of these in my life, but I don’t recall any that were as vivid as these.

  In the first one, I was standing outside the All Nations Center at Pine Ridge with my eyes closed, looking at a beautifully curved wooden fence that had been one of the most striking features I’d seen during my time observing the other world. Three Indians came up to this fence. I could tell from their clothing that they were probably from the ritual I’d heard taking place in the other world. They looked human but had differently shaped faces than we do, and their eyes were somehow different. Was this because they were structurally mirror images? I don’t know how to asses that. All I can do is report what I saw.

  They told me that, because this writing is going to help Pine Ridge in some way, I had been given my vision as a gift—which is all well and good, but I’d like to know who gave the gift and what had to be done to deliver it. And above all, what can we do to initiate contact from this direction?

  The next thing I knew, I had two more dreams in rapid succession. They involved two of the few people left alive who were indirect witnesses to the Roswell event and know details of the bodies.

  One of them said “Strieber-Greek” and warned me to be careful.

  When I woke up, I wondered what in the world that might mean. I have nothing to do with Greece. Greeks play no role in my books. I am not Greek, speak no Greek and only know one or two Greeks, and them not very well. So I Googled the phrase—and got quite a surprise. There was a “Professor Strieber” mentioned in a science fiction novel called Uncle Ovid’s Exercise Book by Don Webb that was published in 1988. The passage in which my name appears contains the sentence, “The Greeks placed the coins in the mouths of their dead that they might pay Charon to ferry them over the Styx into the gray fields of Asphodel in the interior of the Earth.”

  Asphodel in Homer’s Odyssey is the abode of the dead, twilit and leached of color. This is why the familiar little gray meadow flower one sees in some parts of Europe is called the asphodel. At first, I thought, “Oh, dear, perhaps I was being warned that I’m destined for some dreary land of the dead.” Then I was glad that the sensing exercise hadn’t worked to get passage!

  However, Homer doesn’t only condemn Asphodel as the land of the unwanted dead. A less known passage in the Iliad describes it as a place fragrant with lovely flowers.

  And indeed, in my third dream on that night, I saw the most gorgeous field of blue flowers I have ever beheld. In fact, it was the most enchanting shade of blue I can imagine—and, given that it was my dream, I mean that literally!

  I made the decision to go with the Asphodel of the Iliad. I cannot imagine that those three marvelous men would be anywhere except in some sort of heaven. As for the two Roswell witnesses, they are lovely people, in my estimation sacred people. (Although they would laugh at that designation!)

  I don’t have the impression that the other world is imaginary. Nobody’s imagination can function like that for days, not producing an endless supply of detail that rich. Not to mention the fact that, when I examined something along the roadside—a flower, a tumble of stones—it was still there the next day, exactly as I remembered it. No, I think that I really was seeing into another reality, and I would suppose that others have, too, and its twilit appearance is what probably led them to conclude that it was inside Earth. But just as we have left the gods, sylphs, ghosts, fairy folk and our other interpretations of the visitors behind, perhaps it’s time to rethink other folklores and legends and consider instead that some of them at least might be attempts to explain phenomena that were really observed but could not be understood. I saw another version of the world. It was oddly like this one but not quite. The observation was protracted, lasting days. There isn’t anything in the literature of hallucination to explain it. So I have to classify it as an observation of an unknown phenomenon that appeared to be another reality similar to this one and apparently occupying the same space.

  I have suspected for years that just such a place might be involved in the close encounter and UFO experiences—not just a distant star or galaxy in our universe but another actual, physical universe that is part of the same creation as ours is and might, thus, be connected with it. It seems possible that, if this other universe exists, that both should be thought of as a single unit, with the two halves functioning together, but in ways that we have not yet detected—or rather, only just begun to detect.

  But a companion universe? Really? This would not be part of what is known as the multiverse, which is conceived of as an endlessness of universes outside of our own but not sharing the same space. There have even been a few indications that such universes may exist. In December of 2015, cosmologist Ranga Ram Chary published a paper concerning anomalies in the cosmic background radiation in which he says, “A plausible explanation is the collision of our Universe with an alternate universe.” He also states, however, that “deeper observations are necessary to confirm this unusual hypothesis.”

  But could there be another universe immediately present, right here, sharing the same space as ours?

  There is some very interesting evidence that such a thing might be real and, not only that, a method of testing for its presence has been devised.

  If another universe is entwined with ours and it is possible to cross back and forth, it would not only explain a lot about the behavior of some of our visitors and the craft they seem to be using but also reconcile some serious anomalies of physics.

  Physics calls such a universe a mirror universe. And even the idea that everything in it would be the opposite of what is present here might be the case, at least to some degree. The landscape didn’t look to me like the exact opposite of this one, but I cannot be sure of that. It was very similar, but I am not so sure that I would have been able to perceive it as a mirror image, even if it is one. Having no experience of such a thing, I also have no idea what it would look like.

  When the two universes were created, physics tells us that the mirror must have been cooler than ours, otherwise some of its matter would have leaked across the barrier between the two, and gravity in our universe would be stronger than it is. The greater c
oolness of the companion universe would mean that it would have lower luminosity—just as did Homer’s Asphodel, and just as I observed at Pine Ridge.

  A charming hint that it may at times be possible to cross between them comes from an obscure 12 th century source. It is the story of the Green Children of Woolpit. One day around the year 1130, the villagers of Woolpit discovered two children, a brother and a sister, standing beside one of the wolf pits. (These were intended to trap wolves, who abounded in Britain at the time.) The children were green in color, wore strange clothing and spoke an unknown language. They gradually adapted, lost their green color and learned English. The boy died but the girl survived and said that they came from a land where there was no sunshine and the light was like twilight. The girl was given the name Agnes and married a royal official called Richard Barre.

  I’ve been vaguely aware of this story for years, but now the perpetual twilight described in it brought it very much to mind. Did these children come from our companion universe? If so, how? There is no record of them explaining why they happened to end up in the English countryside.

  They also said that the sun never shone in their world and thought of it as being underground. But they presumably knew nothing about what might actually be causing the difference in luminosity.

  This may just be an old story, completely unrelated, but there are a number of quite compelling reasons, even beyond the lower luminosity observed by me and Homer and reported by Agnes and her brother, that a companion universe might be real.

  First, the Big Bang should have left more of the isotope lithium-7 in our universe. According to Alain Coc of the Centre for Nuclear Science and the Science of Matter in France, mirror neutrons coming into our universe from the other would destabilize beryllium-7, the isotope whose decay leads to lithium-7. If this is happening, it would explain why there is less lithium-7 in our universe than there should be. Additionally, we frequently measure ultra-high-energy cosmic rays coming from outside our galaxy, but they carry more energy than should be possible given the distance they are traveling. Zurab Berezhiani of the University of L’Aquila in Italy has shown that, because of the lower temperature of the mirror universe, they can travel farther without expending as much energy as they would if they remained in our universe across their whole journey. If they do oscillate between universes, that would explain their anomalous energy. In addition, and perhaps most tellingly, the most developed mirror models indicate that there must be five mirror particles for every particle in our universe. This is precisely the same ratio given by our measurements of how much dark matter must exist. It would seem possible, then, that dark matter, which we know must exist but cannot seem to find despite years of trying, might actually be this mirror universe.

  So do the visitors come, then, from it? If so, then they seem to have somehow devised or evolved a means of crossing the bar, as it were, between the two.

  I am reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “Land of Counterpane,” where as a boy he “Watched my leaden soldiers go/ With different uniforms and drills/ Among the bedclothes and through the hills…” But I do not think that this real land of counterpane is necessarily so pleasant as he imagines. I think that our visitors are much more like the fairies in William Allingham’s poem “The Fairies” for “Up the airy mountain or down the rushy glen/ We dare not go a-hunting/ For fear of little men;/ Wee folk, good folk/ Trooping all together/ Green jacket, red cap/ And white owl’s feather!”

  We don’t see them any more in the rushy glen, not now that it’s lined with condos. Indeed not, but they do come right into the condos and take us on the same sort of journeys that they always have, leaving us disoriented, confused, and as often as not with a badly deranged sense of time and space. We probably see them also in the night, slipping past overhead in their great, black triangular craft marked by lights at the three angles, generally green, red and white.

  Perhaps across all our history, they have been moving between the two universes and, for all I know, coming at the same time out of the distances between the stars in the mirror universe. In that sense, they might be doubly alien, and to make matters even more complex, if creatures with the same morphology exist in our universe and have also mastered interstellar travel, then we might be dealing with alien entities from both universes at the same time, in addition to human beings from the companion universe like the men I encountered in my dream or the people who came out of the night and slipped an implant into my ear without leaving a scar, or the two whom I recently met in my living room.

  Interestingly, if a so-called warp drive that opened a door between interwoven parallel universes could be created, it would involve the use of a high-energy electrical field. Just such a field was present in my garage on the morning after my implant was inserted and is a characteristic of the military implant operations as documented by Helmut and Marion Lammer in their book, MILABS: Military Mind Control and Alien Abductions.

  And then there is the matter of metal believed to be from UFO crashes that has been found to have isotopic ratios that cannot be from this universe. Analysis of such materials was presented by Dr. Jacques Vallee and Dr. Garry Nolan in Paris in June of 2017. Their data showed that some samples taken from material gathered after a UFO apparently exploded over Ubatuba, Brazil on September 13, 1957, displayed isotopic ratios that indicated that it could not have been formed in this universe and only created artificially by the expenditure of unimaginable amounts of energy. The Ubatuba story has been called a hoax, but so have many UFO cases, and now this finding that some of the material is indeed unusual suggests that the case was real. But as Drs. Vallee and Nolan pointed out in their presentation, and Dr. Vallee reiterated in a subsequent presentation held in California in June of 2018, unusual isotopic ratios do not mean that the materials were manufactured by aliens. They only mean what they mean: at present, they are unexplained.

  I think that this collection of observations, physics that demands a mirror universe and empirical evidence of material that could have come from it all add up to serious reason to consider that it might actually exist and that at least some of our visitors, and humans with strangely advanced skills, come from it.

  What I can offer in conclusion is that I had a lovely and mysterious experience at Pine Ridge, and if the existence of the mirror universe is ever confirmed, then I think that I might have identified at least one origination point for our visitors.

  This new phase of my life, which I would describe as a period of intensified seeing, began long before I went to Pine Ridge. I did not know it at the time, but it was on December 7, 2007, at 4:53 in the morning that I began to become aware that life can be lived in an entirely new way, and that there is, emerging from where it has long been hidden along the byways of human experience, a new vision and a new world.

  6

  The Night Dogs

  It was windy and rainy during the early morning hours of December 7, 2007. Little did I know, not until long after the event that was about to take place, the change of life that it represented. But communication with the visitors is a multilayered and subtle business, and I have found that it is common for years to pass before all the pieces fall into place. Therefore, in my blog entry, “A Most Complex Encounter” posted on Unknowncountry.com on December 11 th of that year, I had no idea that the events from the 7th that I described had likely taken place because of the contents of the previous blog entry, posted on November 27 th, “A Second Universe is Discovered” or that they represented a fundamental change in my entire relationship with the whole visitor phenomenon.

  The first time that astronomers announced that they had discovered a “tear” in the fabric of the universe was in 2007. Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina offered the opinion that it was the “unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own.” A controversial idea in 2007, and still in 2015 when Ranga Ram Chary discussed it. In my 2007 blog, I wrote, “This morning I opened the New Scientist a
nd found myself reading that a second universe is apparently out there beyond our own. I have to admit that I was, quite simply, knocked speechless. This is because, when I was talking to the Master of the Key in a hotel in Toronto in 1998, he said that there were universes beyond our own. However, at the time, I rejected his statement as obviously incorrect and changed the subject. There was, in 1998, not the slightest indication anywhere in physics or cosmology that there could be other physical universes. So when he said, ‘There are more galaxies in your universe than there are stars in your galaxy, and more universes in the firmament than there are galaxies in your universe,’ I listened politely and changed the subject.

  Ten days after posting that blog, my world was turned upside down. It began on the evening of the 6 th with what I described in my blog on December 7 th as “one of the most interesting perceptual experiences I have ever had.” In those days, I was still waking up in a state of fear most nights between 3 and 4, as I had been since being abducted during those hours in 1985. Now, of course, all that has changed. The fearful awakenings have been completely transformed into my beloved 3 AM meditation, which has enriched my life immeasurably. In the next chapter, I’ll detail how the change came about.

  On the night of the 6 th, we went to bed about 11:30. While I meditate now at 11 and 3, at that time I generally did it earlier, often in the afternoon, and never in the wee hours. On that night, though, I was up again shortly after going to bed, “struck with a powerful need to meditate.” I could not hear the call then, not clearly, but I was responding to it. I did the sensing exercise for about fifteen minutes then returned to bed. I then report that “at 2:17 I was writing business emails.” After that, in my blog I write that I “slept fitfully.” The reason was that I sensed that somebody was in the apartment. Now, when I sense this, a thrill of anticipation goes through me, and I rush to sit in meditation and get into the inner stance that opens me to communication. Then, I went prowling through the rooms, halfway ready to grab my pistol.