I try to read and understand the Jason Hoursley (s.p.) material, but I'm nowhere near as smart as that guy.
(correct sp: Jasun Horsley.)
I'd be happy to clarify anything that seems unclear. For those who don't know I've been serializing a book-length investigation into Strieber and an analysis of his work called
Prisoner of Infinity, at my
blog. I have been into Strieber since 1992 when I first heard about
Communion. I believed it utterly on reading and also believed it made sense of some of my own childhood experiences. I went on to have experiences that I believed were of a similar nature, albeit mostly in a dream state. You might say I became obsessed with the idea of the visitors and with establishing contact with them. I wrote a book,
Lucid View, published in 2003, that began my written exploration of Strieber, in the context of the occult and paranoid awareness. A follow-up,
Homo Serpiens, went even further, and was indebted to Strieber for many of the ideas it put forth.
The Key especially impressed me for years as a sacred text, just as Strieber claimed it was.
My process of dis-illusionment (I would say waking up) began in 2008 when I wrote a piece on Strieber called "Through a Looking Glass, Darkly," which first appeared at
Rigorous Intuition and then in
Paranoid magazine and
Alien Worlds. Mac Tonnies wrote about it at the time, shortly before he died, but Strieber never really responded to it (tho at one point I believe he did suggest the author was an operative!). In the process of looking more closely at WS's output for that piece, I began to notice more and more inconsistencies. In 2011, after the furore Strieber generated around the two versions of
The Key, and following a thread I began at Rig Int called "
Is Strieber Advocating Implants?", I expanded and updated the piece and explored the ways in which Strieber seemed, wittingly or not, to have created a cultlike following around the ideas he put forth. (You can read the pull
PDF here.) Once again, Strieber did not comment. (I emailed him many times over the years, rarely got more than a one line response.)
Then in 2013, partially as a result of an essay Jeffrey Kripal sent me on "the traumatic secret," I began what became
Prisoner of Infinity, which first appeared (part one) at a sort of art installation site called
Crucial Fictions. Kripal asked to see the completed text (part one) but never commented on it. Last year, I completed the second part and then sat on it. I got something like an offer to publish from a publisher in the UFO field but decided to wait, as this material doesn't seem to me to be primarily for UFO afficonadoes, who one way or another have their beliefs to defend. The focus of POI is much wider and deeper, being a psychological analysis of Strieber via his many writings, and a look at how social, cultural, and religious engineering works. I now consider Strieber to be a very rare and important case study of how MKULTRA-style psychic fragmentation is being used to create public spokespeople who will, Prophet-like, spread cultural and/or religious memes in order to implement a larger agenda that is all-but invisible to most people. Here is evident the strange and persistent overlap between UFO experiences and pop culture, which one of the interviewers mentions more than once.
For the record, by approaching this issue psychologically, I do not claim that Strieber's experiences are "all in his head," but rather, insofar as they cannot all be explained via military-intelligence manipulations (which I don't think they can be), in his psyche and his body, which is something else entirely. They are real enough, at a psychic level anyway, and Strieber's affiliations with MKULTRA and the CIA (which he has occasionally, perhaps unwittingly, admitted to) are also real. I don't think Strieber is inventing whole-cloth; I think he has been manipulated and conditioned to believe what he reports. He
is capable of lying, however, and I have pointed out occasions where he has done so, most recently in a review of
The Super Natural which I will publish soon.
One last thing: the real truth around Strieber, tho I can't claim to have got to it yet, is, as truth always must be, a lot more interesting, meaningful, and, in its own rather disturbing way, more astonishing than the many tales which he loves to spin from his ongoing trauma. And it does not require belief in "super natural" presences (tho I have no problem acknowledging the existence of these).
It's double and triple sad he sees himself as a punching bag for abduction jokes and people spitting on his car. If there is a tragic figure in ufology it has to be him. I'm glad you guys went easy on him. 
