A New World

by Whitley Strieber

  Even though they’re answerable enough in the output world, go inside and all is ambiguity. But that’s ok. We’re in the output world. An apple is an apple here, no mistaking that.

  Except…well, I’ve been warning you.

  The great Pauli, still being driven crazy by the why of the fine-structure constant, died on December 15, 1958…in room 137 of the hospital where he had been admitted with an advanced case of pancreatic cancer. Not only did he die with his question, he did it while entangled in one of the mysterious synchronicities that his friend Carl Jung writes so much about. (Unless it was a setup and he had himself moved to that room on purpose. Could be, he was a tricky guy…)

  My nonexistent implant uses synchronicities, as I have said. In fact, it used one to draw me to this very mystery. But don’t forget: it’s not there. There’s no there there anymore. Except, of course, Schrodinger’s cat is still alive, too…

  How ironic that the one constant on which deliverance from ambiguity most depends seems to have come out of nowhere.

  In fact, just like the input strategy, the truth is that our precious, stable, coherent output strategy also produces outcomes that are real and illusory at the same time. The input strategy starts there, because it must start with indeterminacy.

  But our strategy starts out very definite. As I said, an apple is an apple.

  And now let me introduce another prankster. In fact, a philosopher. (No, please, don’t go into a coma. This is one terrific philosopher. In just a few words, he’s going to change everything you know about everything and you’re going to have loads of fun into the bargain. Unless, of course, you go insane…)

  In 1963, Edmund Gettier published a short paper called “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” In so doing, he gave birth to what is now known as the Gettier Paradox, which offers a challenge to the idea that something that is demonstrably true is also final and absolute knowledge. He showed that what is known among philosophers as a justified true belief cannot exist. In other words, he met the demand of an earlier philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, that there must evolve a “philosophy of the dangerous perhaps.” What Gettier demonstrated is that, even if you are certain from observation that something is true, it cannot, in a final sense, be knowledge.

  Enter the cow problem. A farmer has a Holstein who is showing signs that she might be ill. He decides to isolate her so he can watch over her, so he takes her into a field that he can see from his barn while he works. The field has only two features in it, a tree and a small hollow. Only if the cow wanders into the hollow will he be unable to see her. This is so unlikely that he’s not concerned about it.

  He goes about his work, from time to time glancing into the field and observing the cow, who appears to be all right. While he’s oiling his tractor, she wanders into the hollow. At the same time, a random puff of wind blows a piece of black and white paper into the field, which gets caught under the tree.

  So this is now the situation: The cow is in the hollow invisible to the farmer. She is all right. There is a piece of black and white paper caught under the tree.

  He looks into the field and sees the paper. From this distance, he can’t see detail, so he assumes that it’s his black and white Holstein and concludes that she’s all right.

  He is now both right and wrong at the same time. He thinks he saw his cow, but he didn’t. So he’s wrong. But she is indeed fine. So he’s right.

  As we observe the world around us, and even though our output strategy works time and time again, we can never know, in an absolute and final sense, if we are right about anything we observe.

  And yet, we’re surrounded by a world that seems to be completely true. But this truth cannot, in fact, be knowledge. Add to this the problem that we don’t actually see it.

  It would seem that reality is not fixed at all, but more like an ocean that never stops moving. But it is also a sea of wonder. We even have a name for it. Many names, in fact. But the most important one for us is the one closest to home. We call this one “the human mind.” It is also the universe, for everything we see is of necessity inside our heads. For us, there is no outside. The whole world and all experience is and must always be inside us, in the singing, sputtering neurons that cradle our minds. We see only what our detector—our brain and its various input devices such as eyes, nose, skin, ears and so forth—delivers to us. This is never what is really there, but rather what our brain is able to see. We never observe the shimmering ultraviolet world that the bee does.

  The brain is our detector. As we are curious sorts, we have for a long time been extending its reach with prosthetic devices. And what an extraordinary story they tell us. The optical prosthetics we know as telescopes reveal wonders in the sky…and the mysteries that they reveal, again and again, confirm that the one thing we must believe in without question is question itself.

  Ambiguity rules, yes, but is that true everywhere? Maybe there’s some little corner of the universe where constants produce absolutes like it would seem that they should, not all the darned questions we have to cope with.

  We recently used one of our prosthetics to find out. It’s really two of them being operated together, the William Herschel Telescope and the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, both located on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. Using the two scopes, a team of scientists led by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger from the Austrian Academy of Sciences looked at quasars located at opposite ends of the universe. They collected photons from these quasars then entangled them by bringing them together in yet a third machine, a mobile laboratory located at the nearby Nordic Optical Telescope. (There are six telescopes on La Palma.) They were then sent to receiving stations near the other two scopes, and their entangled state was determined.

  It was found that light gathered from the opposite ends of the universe can be entangled just like light from two different lamps in a lab, meaning that the laws of quantum physics are consistent in one important way: they are true from one end of the universe to the other.

  Telescopes were used to gather light—classical physics at work, which we understand perfectly well…sort of. But the light was then used to induce quantum entanglement—which makes no sense whatsoever.

  The problem is that both physics work, albeit at different levels. But the comfortable assumption that things make certain sense at the classical level is probably wrong, as the Gettier paradox so eloquently illustrates.

  I love it! In fact, just for fun, I paused for a moment and went into the john where there’s a white wall, at this time of the morning brightly lit by the sun. I said to my implant’s ghost, “Whatever is right is right, yes? Or no? Or yes and no?” Sure enough, after a few seconds I saw words racing past in the slit that opens in my eye. After concentrating for a few moments, I managed to follow a phrase, “city may emulate Apophis,” and then I saw the word “concentration” before the stream sped up once again.

  When Apophis flew past, I laughed out loud. This is because, in the Egyptian pantheon, he is Chaos, the opposite of Truth! So what am I to think? Has my implant perhaps just told me that the city where the truth is known is abandoned, perhaps even in ruins? If so, that could be a problem. Because, as you may have realized, it’s not what I thought when I was writing Transformation, a marvelous city on some distant planet. It’s here. We live in it. It’s there, too, of course. The city where the truth is known is the universe itself.

  We have explored many of its dangers over the course of this book, but its greatest danger is ignoring the fact that the truth has no resting place.

  If we come into communion with the visitors, we are going to start sharing the rigors of their input strategy just as they are the delights of our output strategy, at the same time, living in the deeper reality that the truth that is known is that there is no final truth, not anywhere in this vast cradle that we all call home. But there is a certain potential for balance, and that is where the most intimate and richest opportunity for communion is to be found.<
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  What about this balance, though? What would balance between us and the visitors actually be? How would it work and feel in our lives?

  Before Anne and I were married, she crocheted a sampler which hangs on our bedroom wall to this day: “Two are better than one, and a cord of three strands is not quickly snapped.” These lines from Ecclesiastes, sewn to the sampler when we were just getting started together, turn out to be the foundation not only of married life, but also of relationship with the visitors, and the final theme of this book. We are one strand, they are the other, and the communion that is seeking to occur between us is the third.

  It’s worth seeing this in terms of Gurdjieff’s three forces. We are the passive force, trying to understand how to open ourselves to them. They are the active force, trying to find a way to enter us. The third force is the whole mystery that lies between us, the fear, the longing, the curiosity, the wonder, the danger, the joy, all of it. In reconciling these many different states and finding the balance that underlies them all, we will find communion. In the end, simply this: the love that underlies life, which Anne calls “the yearning,” is as much a mystery as the fine-structure constant, something on which our hearts depend, and maybe, like the fine-structure constant, also all that is.

  Right now, both sides are making a choice. They are deciding to keep us or let us go. We are deciding whether or not we can bear them inside us. If my own experience with them has any validity at all, it is that my journey from the terror of a wild animal to the excitement of discovery that is my life now is well worth the risks and the struggle.

  Standing in the way of our drawing closer, there is the matter of unsureness. Are they parasitic, here to take without giving, or symbiotic, here to share? If they are parasites, then they are the greatest danger we have ever known. If they are here to share, though, then they are literally the pearl of great price, worth giving everything we have to acquire.

  There is enough dark material to justify hiding from them or trying to fight them. There is enough outlandish testimony to justify rejecting it all and calling the whole thing ridiculous. There is enough ambiguity about the state of the earth to decide that the climate emergency isn’t going to lead to anything close to an extinction event and, therefore, that there’s no urgency here.

  But the greater preponderance of evidence is that they are real and here and that our situation is indeed urgent and that we can find a new way and a new world together.

  If they—and we—both draw a little closer, more opportunities for communication will follow, and there will be a more general offering of communion. I know the visitors too well to predict exactly how—or if—it will all unfold. But if I have done my job correctly, they will move the bar a little bit.

  I wonder what it will mean. Are we standing in the jaws of a trap that is waiting to be sprung or on the edge of glory? Or is the truth that such a place in history must always be both?

  I hope that this chapter has made it clear: Just as Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive at the same time, this entire experience is both a trap and the key to unlocking it.

  Accept the question, accept the truth. Live the question, and you are living in the new world.

  13

  It is Time

  Throughout this book, I have made what I suppose is rather annoying reference to “the visitors” with very little effort made to differentiate between forms. This has been quite purposeful. The reason is that I don’t know what the forms mean. I have seen the kobolds, the goblin-like grays, the tall blonds, some human-like creatures who could read minds and seemed very disturbed, another form that I would describe as being like brilliant little primates. These are the ones who swarmed into our apartment in 2007, whom I mistook for dogs, and who seem to have been with me since. I have also seen a dead man come into physical form, and I have seen normal-looking human beings who appeared to be somehow part of this whole enigmatic web.

  The ones that I have seen while in a normal psychological state and while they were entirely physical in appearance are a child of the tall blonds, the various humans, the kobolds Anne and I saw in Manhattan, the people who entered my house and placed the implant in my ear, the short disturbed person and his two ghoulish companions and the Master of the Key.

  I have observed a complex and nuanced range of approaches from all of them. What’s more, there is no such thing as a reliable narrator in this experience. As we are now—and as they are—that cannot happen. Perhaps somebody in the future, with more facts to draw on, can provide a more accurate assessment than this. Right now, all I can do is tell my stories without any more attribution than the memories themselves provide.

  Anne always warned me, “Don’t connect the dots” until I had provable reason to do so. I don’t, so I won’t.

  All of that said, I have amassed, over the years, a considerable amount of information about what our visitors think of us and our world, and much of it is quite different from how we think of ourselves.

  First, they do not see the fantastic human bloodletting, which started in 1914 and has now taken something close to half a billion lives, in terms of political and ideological clashes.

  Insofar as I understand what I have learned from them, all of this killing has more to do with population pressure than politics. Like many other animals, we can become violent when we feel crowded. As with many other species, in our case, we start killing each other. Hitler wants more living space and creates an elaborate ideological justification for killing others in order to obtain it. Stalin’s paranoia causes him to see millions of people as supernumerary, and he starves whole populations to death. Mao does the same. Meanwhile, the United States, not under the population pressure of Europe or Asia, remains peaceful.

  So far, to the visitors, this all seems quite natural. But then the atomic bomb appears, and they realize that we could go too far. We could commit species suicide and die out entirely. They therefore begin a process that is intended to lead to contact, at which time, they hope to intervene technologically in order to, in effect, expand the effective size of the planet with innovation, thus making each of us feel a greater sense of space around us and stopping the instinctive self-destructive impulse that is threatening to destroy us.

  But because of the complex gulf between us, which I have endeavored to make a little clearer in this book, they do not emerge immediately. Instead, they begin a process of social engineering based on contacts with some governments and the formation of human social organizations with specialized connection to them that are intended to eventually bridge the gap.

  Then the 21 st century arrives, and the American population, having exploded from 78 million in 1900 to 230 million in 2000, begins to feel the same sort of instinct toward self-destruction that caused the bloodlettings in Europe. But we are different and so are the times. We have the ability to destroy life on Earth with the push of a button. We also hold a world leadership position when it comes to climate change. Between 1970 and the present, American society becomes more and more involved with the death wish until, in November of 2018, a devastating climate report called the Fourth National Climate Assessment is released by government scientists, and the US president responds, “I don’t believe it.”

  In my own life, the response from the visitors is immediate. They increase their engagement with me, becoming more and more strident that I provide what they regard as something I volunteered to do and led them to believe that I could do, which is to write a book that will describe enough about the experience of communicating with them to enable them to usefully widen their contact with us.

  I end up in the unpleasant position of being an author without any hope of finding a publisher, who is under extraordinary pressure to get a book published in a matter of months that he doubts it is even possible to write.

  So here we are.

  But that’s not quite the end, for there is another level of this that requires exploration before this is finished. It has to do with what
we are and what our place is in the much larger world in which we find ourselves.

  We may not be what we seem. In fact, the form we are in just now might not even be the only human form. One of the most familiar alien types may actually be…us.

  You think not? Read on.

  A psychologist I knew told me a story of driving along the Grand Central Parkway in Queens, just passing LaGuardia Airport. To his horror, he saw a jet descending onto the highway. At first he was terrified, but as it passed over at low altitude, he realized that it was not a plane at all. As it sailed over his head, he thought that it was some sort of gigantic cardboard cutout. Of course, he was extremely puzzled but also in traffic and so couldn’t keep watching it. As he looked away from it, he noticed a signboard on the roadside flashing letters that appeared to him like hieroglyphics. Then he realized that there were cars parked along the shoulder and that a number of people were standing in a circle just off in the shadows. Naturally, he wanted to know more, so he worked his way over, parked, got out and approached them. As he did, a small, dark figure came up to him and snarled, “Get out of here.”

  He obeyed. But what was happening? Was he seeing aliens gathering a certain group of people on the roadside for some inscrutable reason? And what about those hieroglyphics. We can’t read them.

  Or can we?

  When I heard that story, I realized that it and two others had combined to give me a clue not about us but about the kobolds, and it is a surprising one indeed. I remembered both the time Anne and I had seen similar creatures in a little storefront in Manhattan in the process of kidnapping the frantic man in the suit and a remarkable story from Lorie. She had been lying in bed one night about 11 in 1954. Her husband was working, and she was home alone. She was pregnant. She noticed movement and glanced up. To her horror, a line of short, dark blue men with wide faces were standing beside the bed. As she recoiled in horror, the one in the lead said, “Do not be afraid. We’re not here for you. We’re interested in the girl child you’re carrying.” Of course, this absolutely terrified her. It then laid its hand on hers and asked, “Why do you fear us?” She blurted out, “Because you’re so ugly!” When I heard his response, many puzzle pieces came a little closer together for me. He said, “One day, my dear, you will look just like us.”