A New World

by Whitley Strieber

  It was the first time people other than ourselves and some of our son’s playmates had witnessed the visitors at the cabin. It was also another indication of a connection between these entities and the human dead. I say “another” because, during the Communion experience, as I said in Super Natural and elsewhere, a dead friend was present during the initial phase of my abduction. I didn’t put it in the book because I didn’t realize its significance. I still didn’t, and that would not change until Anne pointed it out.

  About a year later, filmmaker Drew Cummings was there making a documentary about the Communion movie. Raven Dana and Lorie Barnes were once again present. A third woman was also in the group that night, as were Ed Conroy and Dora Ruffner. Drew had brought a low-light video camera and planned to set it up in the house, so we were very hopeful that an event would take place.

  Late in the afternoon, Lorie came in from a walk looking bemused. She said that she had just encountered her brother on the road. What made this so amazing to her was that he had been missing for twenty years and declared dead by the FBI. He had appeared in a brown robe and hood, much like some of the visitors do, standing in the woods just beside the road. Lorie asked him to come down to the cabin to meet her friends, but he said only that she was in the right place, then drifted back among the trees and was gone.

  Knowing by this time that the appearance of the dead was often associated with the coming of the visitors, Anne and I began to think that the visitors might show up later that night. We said nothing to the others about this, of course.

  We knew by then that dancing and chanting would sometimes bring them, so we went out to a cave where I often meditated in those days. It was about a mile from the cabin, in a cliff above a little stream. It was a challenge to get to it, and once you were inside, you could not be heard if you cried out and you could not easily leave.

  Except for Cummings and his crew, we all went to the cave, where we chanted in a way that I had been using for some years. This is called overtone chanting and requires a powerful use of attention, concentrating and letting go at the same time, in such a way that the vocal chords vibrate differently and the voice can produce harmonics. It’s a Tibetan Buddhist discipline and I had found that concentration like this could sometimes get the attention of the visitors.

  When we got back, we talked for a while, then Anne went upstairs. Lorie and the other woman went into one downstairs bedroom and Raven into the other. The Cummingses bedded down on the convertible couch in the living room so that he could attend to the camera, which was to be left running all night. I camped out in the woods with our son because Lorie had his room. Ed and Dora did the same.

  Sometime later, Raven was awakened by movement. The first thing she saw was an Eye of Horus on the wall. It was not a hanging. It had not been there earlier. Then she noticed that what she at first took to be a raccoon had come in the window. An instant later, she remembered that the window screens were all screwed closed, so it couldn’t be anything normal. She realized that it was one of the visitors. When she did, it reached out its hand, and they touched. This was a rare incident of physical contact with a person in normal consciousness, and it sent delicious yet powerful energy pulsing through her. She heard it ask, in her head, what it could do for her. She replied, “You could go down that hall.” (Where the low light camera was now in operation.) It then disappeared.

  A moment later, Lorie was woken up by being punched on the shoulder. She saw the entity staring down at her, but a moment later it was gone.

  In the living room, Drew then woke up to find a small man with a large head peering down at him from beside the bed. He was startled, of course, and when he reacted with surprise and fear, the man’s head turned into that of a falcon. Then it disappeared.

  Superficially, this would seem to have been nothing more than another bizarre event in a cabin that was at that time really a sort of haunted funhouse.

  Let’s look a little deeper.

  The first sentence had been uttered about a year before this when a carpenter who was working on a house up the road from our place decided to spend the night there because the house wasn’t yet sealed and all of his tools were inside. In the middle of the night, he woke up to movement and was appalled to see a strange little man, dark in color from head to foot, standing across the room staring at him. As he jumped up, the man changed into a bird of paradise and then disappeared before his eyes.

  In the next chapter we are going to dip into ancient texts, specifically into the Pyramid Text in the Pyramid of Unas, to learn more about visitor communications, like this one, that are pictographic and representational. Because we no longer use pictographic languages, it’s particularly difficult for us to pick up on this aspect of the way our visitors express themselves.

  Before seeking to uncover the meaning here, let me offer a thought about why hieroglyphs would be used at all. In this situation, the hoary old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” could not be more appropriate. Looked at as imagistic communication, these few brief appearances, each one lasting only a few seconds, left behind a treasure-trove of information. This quality of compression is a consistent characteristic of visitor communications. Even when words are used, multiple meanings are conveyed. For example, when the words “A new world, if you can take it,” were said to Col. Philip Corso, both meanings were important—if we can wrest it out of their hands and if we can bear what we find.

  First, we’re shown a bird of paradise, then the falcon god Horus. The connective tissue is that both visitors had the same general appearance and both transformations involved birds. The first sentence, the transformation into a bird of paradise, is straightforward: “I can fly like a bird, and I belong to paradise.” The next one, Horus, is more complex. First, the term in Egyptian mythology represents a number of avian deities, primarily Horus the Elder and Horus the Younger, two different gods with different attributes. But there were also many more granular manifestations of the deity. This suggests that we should think of the entity as being part of a larger group, perhaps an entire civilization, a whole species, a world. The pharaoh, during his lifetime, was identified with Horus, meaning that the entity belongs to life and to what we might think of as kingship or leadership, and a noble tradition. The falcon hieroglyph refers to the star Sirius. As well, the falcon is the fastest animal on Earth. It also ascends the sky in circles, just as energy does when it rises up the spine. The falcon is also the ascending soul.

  So we have in these two brief images what amounts to a self-portrait. A remarkable being is telling us about himself in a language of transformations and images from our own ancient memory and from nature. His first sentence, spoken to the carpenter, told us where he was from and how he could navigate. His second is “I am a king and also very fast.” Then, “I am from Sirius, and I am returning.” Then, “I am a living soul.” All of that said without a word spoken or written down, but eloquently clear if one accepts that there could be a language based on signs and imagery that work like hieroglyphics and that somebody could make the words not by writing but by changing their own appearance.

  This is another example of why, in exploring life with the visitors, it is so important to step out of our accustomed ways. Maybe we will talk to them one day on our own terms. But we can never have a conversation with them—or, for that matter, among ourselves—like the one described here because linear language simply isn’t rich enough to communicate on that level. If we are attentive to this method of conveying information, we can learn a great deal from even brief exchanges.

  But who was he, really, and is this paradise actually in another star system? Could it be that simple?

  Actually, it might be even simpler. He was announcing himself as part of enlightenment, a universal possibility that is shared by every one of us. In this sense, he was expressing continuity with us, because we are on parallel journeys. We both seek paradise but not on a distant star. We seek it here and now where the kingdom of heaven, o
r enlightenment, lies, as some religious texts assert, within us.

  Looking at the world around us, full of hatreds and violence and in the process of failing in fundamental ways, it seems impossible that such a path could even exist, let alone that we could travel on it, let alone that we could ever find the kingdom, the paradise within to which his example may seek to guide us.

  But if it isn’t possible, why demonstrate it? I doubt that he would even be here if it wasn’t. What would be the point? This is why I consider these rough, frightening beings to be midwives to a new birth of mankind and a new world. On the way down the birth canal, both mother and baby struggle mightily. Baby experiences terror and pain. Then he is laid on mother’s breast and begins to feed in a new way. Everything that has previously been received through the umbilical cord must now be taken in through the mouth, and all of life follows. “A new world, if you can take it.” Baby experiences for the first time the flavors, sensations and comfort of the ordinary world, and mother and child bond in a new way. Mother is no longer an abstraction but a person with a voice that baby loves to hear and a face that amazes, and baby begins to grow up and does grow up, and mother grows also into the fullness of her womanhood and then fades, as baby will, too, in the great river of time and the flow of life.

  So it is with mother and child, and so it will be with us and Earth, whom our midwives are trying to help us discover in a new way. It is when we are born and she is exhausted from her effort that our true relationship will begin…unless, of course, we are born dead.

  That is why they are here to make sure that doesn’t happen. As part of that effort, this book is being written. But one little book is only a small part of such a large task.

  Once they are finished with their work, we will all say, just as do the subjects of the best emperor in the eighth verse of the Tao Te Ching, “It happened to us naturally.” We also, free at last from the helplessness of life in the womb, will have gained the right to climb to the star of the man from paradise, and our own truth.

  But does that mean he’s from Sirius? Literally?

  We have explored the probability that our planet has a companion in a mirror universe, but how likely is it that there might also be aliens here from other planets in this universe?

  The arguments against this have been many. The first is that nobody is likely to be able to cross the unimaginable distances between stars. The second is that, even if they have that theoretical capability, the practical benefits would be so small that nobody would go to the expense. The first I call the “lack of vision” argument, the second the “lack of imagination.”

  The evidence that the visitors are from other planets is not as strong as the evidence that they have some more enigmatic origin. Given all the testimony about them walking through walls, appearing and disappearing, levitating and so forth, at least some of them are functional on many different levels of reality and enter and leave the world as easily as we might a swimming pool. Maybe this is all just technological legerdemain, but it could also be that they are passing back and forth between this and the other universe.

  In the predawn after the experiences of Raven, Lorie and the Cummingses, I was walking up to the cabin with my son when we saw a translucent, hooded figure come out the front door, race down the deck, across the back yard and into the woods. As it disappeared, it flashed back and forth among the trees, carefully avoiding them. At the same time, the Cummingses experienced a burst of heat so intense that, when we entered the house, they were both on their feet. They thought that the bed had caught fire. Whatever happened, these things must be true: The being had solidity in this world or would not have needed to dodge the trees. It must also have been doing something to bend light around itself while in the house, thus, rendering it invisible. We know this because of the release of heat, which would have been retained while gravity was being controlled in its immediate area, which would have been necessary to bend the light. We also know, from observing the behavior of the devices recorded by the Nimitz pilots, that devices that can control gravity are in use by somebody.

  Is this somebody from Earth, from the mirror universe, or from another world…or, once again, is it a combination of these?

  The main argument against the alien hypothesis has always been the distance issue, but that has recently been called into question. A paper submitted by Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback and colleagues to the Astrophysical Journal in February of 2019 suggests that “the Milky Way can readily be ‘filled-in’ with settled stellar systems under conservative assumptions about interstellar spacecraft velocities and launch rates.” While they assume that there are no interstellar visitors on Earth at the present time, they show how adding the effect of stellar motion to speed calculations would enable the spread of life possible on time scales much shorter than previously assumed. In the past, when things like the Drake Equation, which measures the likelihood of somebody from another planet finding us, were conceived, the fact that stars move was not taken into consideration. The Nellenback paper corrects that misapprehension, and shows that crossing interstellar distances, while still very slow by human standards, is probably far from impossible.

  Given all this, it is time to stop being so certain that somebody from this universe cannot be here—and, in fact, both from this and the mirror universe, given that there is evidence for that, also, as a point of origin.

  This gets me back to Sirius. According to Susan Brind Morrow in her book on hieroglyphics, The Dawning Moon of the Mind, the falcon glyph is associated with both Horus and Sirius. As the brightest star in the sky, Sirius is also among the most frequently mentioned in mythology. Among the Greeks, it was known as the Dog Star because of its position in the constellation Canis Major, the Great Dog. This same designation is repeated in many cultures around the world that have no obvious connection to Greece. In Chinese and Japanese myth, it’s known as the Wolf Star, and among many different Native American tribes, it is designated also as the Dog Star.

  Among the Dogon people of Mali, who are believed to have had some connection to ancient Egypt, there is a story that entities called Nommos that lived in water came to Earth from Sirius, bringing knowledge, and Horus, while the opposite of a water deity, is also thought of as a bringer of knowledge. Additionally, one of the forms of the Apkallus, mythological knowledge-bringers of the Sumerians and other related cultures, is that of a man wearing a cloak made of the skin of a fish.

  In my own recent experience, the dog has played a powerful symbolic role. I perceived the entities who appeared in the apartment in 2007 as dogs. In September of 2019, I had a long interaction with one that appeared as a black dog. This was not a physical experience, but it was powerful. I felt as if I was being watched by a careful and penetrating mind—hardly that of what we would call a dog. I was being supervised.

  I have already been warned that time is short, and the book must be gotten out so quickly that I can’t seek a publisher. There is no time. I must self-publish instead and as soon as I can. The warnings have been truly fierce, but not threatening. Urgent.

  So the man from paradise, it would seem, opened a door with his brief visit to a vast amount of myth and one of the great mysteries of the past, as well as, in the end, to my own experience. Sirius is so important in so many cultures and so often associated with the bringing of knowledge and ascension to the stars, and of all the visitors I have met, the ones who use the symbol of the dog to address me have brought the most knowledge.

  I know that this all sounds very strange, but in communicating with the visitors, it is essential to be prepared for asymmetric methods, especially the use of imagery in ways that are not common among us. This also goes for sound.

  Another example of this is the incident of the nine knocks that I describe in Transformation. I was sitting in the living room at our cabin when there came, in three groups of three, nine distinct knocks on the roof. These sounds were, like the three cries that I would hear above the woods, absolutely startlin
g in their perfection. In fact, until you have heard something like that, I don’t think it’s possible to fully understand what it’s like. This is because it’s not something we ever hear. When you do hear it, though, you know immediately that you are having a new experience. My cats certainly did. Their fur puffed up, and they began creeping along the back of the couch yowling.

  I cannot know if this was intended, but the knocks reflected a tradition in Masonry, where when someone is elevated to the 33 rd Degree, they knock in this way on the door of the hall before being admitted. Gurdjieff’s law of three and the riddle of the Sphinx are also referred to, as is the alchemical notion of salt and sulfur being balanced by mercury. The principle is expressed in the riddle of the Sphinx as courage (the lion) and strength (the bull) being brought into balance by the mind (the human head).

  When the three are in harmony, then the Sphinx, as did the man from paradise, spreads its wings and soars aloft, looking down on the cares of the world with balanced and objective vision.

  Close encounter witnesses, when they look, are likely to find similar communications in their own lives—richly visual, referential to the life of the soul and the increase of consciousness, suggesting that travel along our ancient spiritual paths remains a journey worth taking.

  9

  Shared Lives

  Throughout this book, I have been talking about a number of different forms of nonhuman and/or nonphysical beings. There are visitors who appear at times physically and at times nonphysically and which do not resemble us when they are in a physical form. There are the human dead, one of whom in my experience once briefly generated a physical version of himself. Then there is the conscious field, which I have also called the “presence” and which seems to me to be the great ground of reality, which Anne once described as the “yearning” that underlies all that is. It is this presence that generated the incidents of light that I sought in the past to identify as God and that I now see as a sort of field of conscious energy that is at the basis of all that is.