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February 14, 2016 — Whitley Strieber

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I think Gene should get Strieber on to discuss this!
Attacks Against the Key

Here's an answer to Strieber from the author of the paper 'attacking' Strieber:


A message from 'Heinrich Moltke':

An Answer to Whitley Strieber
by the author of "Problems with Strieber and The Key"

Recently, I completed an in-depth study of "The Key". At over three hundred pages, it is a scholarly, comprehensive, and detailed analysis of the book together with the issues surrounding it.

The paper is not a piece of debunking. I am not a debunker. I am someone who followed Strieber's work for more than two decades, bought his books, and even wrote pieces defending him. I am of the opinion that many people who claim to have had 'contact' are neither lying nor hallucinating, and that therefore we have a duty to assist them though we may have no idea what is happening.

I feel I should point out that I'm also not a UFO partisan. I don't buy the Steven Greer space brothers interpretation. But nor do I think that UFO phenomena are best understood as faerie lore come to life. I suspect that like everything else, UFO phenomena represent something more and different than we realize.

I am not a member of MUFON. I am also not an anti-Semite.

Yesterday, in response to my paper, Whitley Strieber left the following comment on his website:

***
Moltke is not meant as an anagram. It is a reference to a Nazi diplomat who worked in Poland in WWII, and is used by this man, in my opinion, because of sympathies for the Nazi movement. Understand that I know the actual identity of "Heinrich Moltke." We looked him up because of some of the disturbing comments he left on Unknowncountry in the 6 years he was there. After Jeremy had him blocked, he reappeared under another name for a while, but left on his own.

I believe that this person may suffer from paranoia, among other things. He has been under treatment for mental illness in the past as he admits on the internet under other of his aliases. I also believe him to be a virulent anti-Semite. If I am right, then these two things together--the anti-Semitism and the paranoia--explain the poor creature's obsession with the Key. I say "poor creature" because of other things I know about him.

Posted by Whitley on 08 Jun 2017 at 09:16
***

Despite the conviction we often hear expressed by Whitley Strieber that he "knows", nothing in the above comment is true other than that my subscription to unknowncountry.com was canceled after I left sarcastic comments on The Clueless One's show page. One of the comments, though it was directed at Vaeni, was re-interpreted as an attack on Anne Strieber. The leaving 'disturbing' comments, re-appearing under another name, and so on - all untrue.

It should also go without saying that I have not been "under treatment for mental illness". If I were (or ever had been) I wouldn't go bragging about it on the internet. I am also not an anti-Semite. I think the world would be far for the worse if we didn't have Heifetz or Menuhin, Einstein and Bohr. 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' is my favorite comedy show. (Little known fact: William Shatner is Jewish. How could anyone hate Captain Kirk?)

I would like to stress that the above accusations against me and from Strieber come simply in the context of my writing a paper that patiently, painstakingly, and fairly examines his work. It's notable that Strieber's first reaction to this study of his work is to call the author a mentally-ill anti-Semite.

One might conclude that Strieber does not want his fans or paying subscribers reading the paper. This is why in his latest Journal, he both fails to mention the paper directly, instead writing of "attacks", and confuses the issue completely by mixing in Jeff Rense's anti-semitic attacks on 'The Key' from almost twenty years ago, as well as the completely unrelated issue of a MUFON member who recently posted bigoted remarks on Facebook.

More important, though, in the same Journal is the bigger confusion that Strieber creates as he walks back his claims about the reality of the 'true encounter'. No, the issue is not that there is a book whose authorship "nobody can ever prove one way or the other, not even me". The issue is that Strieber has for years been talking about a Master of the Key who looked a certain way, talked a certain way. An event. He also said the text was a "transcription" that was "ninety percent accurate".

On that score, one can in fact prove that the conversation in "The Key" comes from Strieber. I did it. It took over 300 pages to do. No academically-trained person, especially in literature, can read the analysis done and not conclude that the content of "The Key" comes from Strieber. There is no reason to think any of it came from anybody else. Not only is it demonstrable, it is almost incredible how clearly this can be demonstrated.

Strieber in his Journal falls back on the pithy 'sin is the denial of the right to thrive' as proof the Master of the Key wasn't him. But this fits perfectly into Strieber's own unique brand of naturalism. Defining sin - one of Strieber's enduring preoccupations - in terms of life, its impact or cost on life is perfectly consistent with his work. Strieber also cites another point in his Journal - the speculation about the Holocaust and the loss of intelligent genes. Ironically, this is a point I'd accept as quite possibly true. I think probably a good portion of our intelligent numbers were killed off during the Holocaust. Is this something Strieber would never have thought of? For a man who is constantly talking about evolution, physics, populations, Nazis and the Holocaust, it seems like it would come easily.

I won't re-litigate the issues of the paper here. I will note that there is a kind of depressing irony reading Strieber writing in his Journal about conscience and facing "inner selves". Because what we see in Strieber in relation to his book "The Key" is a frantic, panicked denial and a willingness to try any argument to avoid having to face what is painfully obvious to everyone else. In just this one Journal, Strieber holds simultaneous positions (the 'true encounter' happened/maybe it didn't but the text still has "moral force") as he often does with the effect that if you criticize one, he can fall back and say he was advocating the other. He also invokes racism and anti-Semitism as a way of trying to avoid the plain conclusion that "The Key" is a product of his imagination.

People have been having anomalous experiences since the beginning. It's a sad fact that in our culture, these people don't get support when as result of them they suffer. But just because these experiences happen doesn't mean Whitley Strieber doesn't have a unique and pervasive problem with imagination and confabulation. If he had any intellectual self-respect, he would face the problem squarely instead of blaming "sinister forces", anti-Semitism, and so on. I think the emotional support system of his website, his fans, should help him.

Heinrich Moltke
www.strieberthekey.com
 
Thanks, Mike. I was pretty sure of most of those, but this topic isn't something I'm likely to put a lot energy into. Strieber has wobbled off into his dotage on a fairly predictable arc. The details, while fascinating to some, don't matter to me. Mostly it's just sad at this point.

I'm in no position to criticize an internet poster for operating under multiple "identities" but it's also true I've never pushed any of my "work" as scholarly or of any real importance. Using sock puppets can be fun, but the intent is important. I've never used them to deceive in any way. Only for laughs. Mostly for my own amusement.

That site where "Moltke's" paper is posted has some odd things about it. I suppose it's thought by its owner to be awfully clever in some of the obscure references there. Whatever. It could be interpreted as being designed, consciously or not, to incite in Strieber some of the unfortunate behavior detailed in the analysis of The Key. Leaves an unpleasant taste. The paper is well done. The rest is overcooked.
 
mike said:
Just to cut through the confusion though can i confirm you are:

Heinrich Moltke aka Jason Horsley aka Srava aka Linda Moulton Doty.

These are all you Yes ?
Click to expand...

Be careful! I may be Whitley Strieber.

There's a small group of people who were once fans of Strieber's work but who are now disgruntled. Some audio conversations may go online in the next week featuring them, if it's even worth it. If so, I'll post a link here for anyone who is interested. It's been an ongoing discussion for almost five years now, and some of these conversations were even posted online a few years back. Site's gone now. But this is all by the by.

The Clueless One, that meathead, has tried to distract away from legitimate questions in the paper by making it all about the mysterious identity of the author. That's par for the course. It would be fair if somebody wrote an anonymous blog post with a lot of name-calling to say, hey, you're a dick for hiding behind a fake name and acting this way. But in this case, you don't have an 'attack' - whatever Strieber and his lieutenant, Vaeni, might say. The name that may or may not be a pseudonym at the top of the paper shouldn't matter as the paper speaks for itself.

BTW: little known fact. Strieber's real name is: Louis Strieber. Whitley is his middle name. So arguably, Strieber's been writing under a pseudonym all these years.
 
Double Nought Spy said:
Thanks, Mike. I was pretty sure of most of those, but this topic isn't something I'm likely to put a lot energy into. Strieber has wobbled off into his dotage on a fairly predictable arc. The details, while fascinating to some, don't matter to me. Mostly it's just sad at this point.

I'm in no position to criticize an internet poster for operating under multiple "identities" but it's also true I've never pushed any of my "work" as scholarly or of any real importance. Using sock puppets can be fun, but the intent is important. I've never used them to deceive in any way. Only for laughs. Mostly for my own amusement.

That site where "Moltke's" paper is posted has some odd things about it. I suppose it's thought by its owner to be awfully clever in some of the obscure references there. Whatever. It could be interpreted as being designed, consciously or not, to incite in Strieber some of the unfortunate behavior detailed in the analysis of The Key. Leaves an unpleasant taste. The paper is well done. The rest is overcooked.
Click to expand...

I appreciate that you understand that false names can be chosen for laughs. For example, Linda Moulton Doty. Further, unless you're a senior citizen comfortably into retirement, using a real name online these days can lead to problems. As a general rule when dealing with sites that are UFO- or conspiracy-related and where you can find some genuine crazies, I find it's better not to put your real name online. Same with address, place of birth, social security number, etc.

As for the site, I'm not sure what obscure references you are referring to. The name Linda Moulton Doty is a joke. So is 544 Camp St. Those are the only references on the site, and they're far from "awfully clever". But you'd be surprised how many people who eat up conspiracies and UFOs for a living can't even keep track of basic facts and details. It's a joke for those who get it.
 
Gene Steinberg said:
Vaeni is not worth anyone's attention.

But using one's real middle name doesn't make it a pseudonym.
Click to expand...

On the first point, I'd agree.

On the second point - as I said, arguably. A broader point could be made that we're all using names that are not our 'real' names. A person's 'real' name is technically the full first, middle, and last that appears on a birth certificate. Few of us use it with any regularity. But this again is by the by. Cheers.
 
marduk said:
Who cares? He's discredited himself enough.

Why do you have this vendetta?
Click to expand...

You talking to me?

There's no vendetta. My impression is that for most people, Strieber's work is too much of a mess to spend a lot of time on. They think he's probably full of it, but he's also highly intelligent and can sound very sincere. So they leave it alone. But it is possible to say things about his work that go beyond gut impressions. Some people have followed him pretty closely over the years, listened to all the podcasts, and now that Strieber's in his seventies, they're coming to grips with his work.

I've never met the man. As far as I know, he's never slept with my wife or shot my dog. So no 'vendetta' there.
 
Linda Moulton Doty said:
You talking to me?

There's no vendetta. My impression is that for most people, Strieber's work is too much of a mess to spend a lot of time on. They think he's probably full of it, but he's also highly intelligent and can sound very sincere. So they leave it alone. But it is possible to say things about his work that go beyond gut impressions. Some people have followed him pretty closely over the years, listened to all the podcasts, and now that Strieber's in his seventies, they're coming to grips with his work.

I've never met the man. As far as I know, he's never slept with my wife or shot my dog. So no 'vendetta' there.
Click to expand...
Why is it that it has taken so long to come to grips with his work?

Was there something that recently tipped the scales as all the work makes claims that are highly extraordinary. What shifted?
 
Burnt State said:
Why is it that it has taken so long to come to grips with his work?

Was there something that recently tipped the scales as all the work makes claims that are highly extraordinary. What shifted?
Click to expand...

I'm happy to answer. Hopefully people won't get irritated by the explanation.

In 2001, Strieber self-published a book called "The Key". The book featured a conversation in dialogue form Strieber claimed he'd had in 1998 in Toronto while on a book tour. A man supposedly showed up at his hotel room door in the middle of the night who told him incredible things. There were 'Journal' articles from his website in 1998 in the months following where he discussed the meeting. He also did interviews in 1998 including at least one Art Bell interview where he discussed it. This was long before he wrote the book.

So in late 2000, he finally put down on paper the entirety of this conversation that supposedly happened. The conversation was like a Grand Unified Theory of the Paranormal. Had explanations for everything including crop circles, ghosts, the afterlife, UFOs, psychics - plus all sorts of exotic concepts like putting human souls in machines, all sorts of stuff. (The book was out January 1, 2001.)

Now if you didn't rule this sort of thing out from the start - as 90% of people would - what a lot of people thought was that the conversation in the book was actually a little too good for Strieber. It wasn't like anything he'd written before. It was a dialogue, and this person he referred to as the Master of the Key seemed, if anything, smarter than Strieber was. His politics were also a bit different. The so-called Master was down on the US, blamed Truman for nuking Japan just to scare Russia, talked about exploitation of the Third World, etc. Strieber's own politics were sort of pro-America, Texas Democrat stuff. So people who were already sipping the Kool-Aid and giving Strieber the benefit of the doubt thought that this conversation may well have taken place. I should mention - it's also very well written. A lot of compelling, even poetic language. Again, better than Strieber's usual stuff.

That was how matters stood. Until 2011. Strieber managed to find a mainstream publisher for "The Key". It came out in a new expanded edition with everything that had been in the old book plus a couple new sections.

Problem was, the discovery was quickly made that there were some fairly evident differences between the new 2011 version of the conversation that took place and the old 2001 self-published version. The differences were sometimes pretty significant - whole passages either added or lost. And there were a few real howlers: in one place in the new 2011 book, the so-called Master of the Key tells Strieber his implant is to protect him from mind control.

When this was all brought to Strieber's attention, he became hysterical - even for Strieber. He alleged on his website that the new book was the real one. And that his old 2001 book - already in print for 10 years - had been altered by "sinister forces". In a variety of interviews, Strieber sounding panicked and overwrought told people that somehow his manuscript had been changed. He said that it was done by an e-mail hijack. He also said somebody must have gone into his house and changed things on the proof pages.

Certain of Strieber's fans realized that just a few years prior, Strieber had read aloud from some of the supposedly censored passages in some online audio he did. In fact, Strieber read from the 'altered' text at least three different times, went into whole interpretations of these passages, and never noticed a damn thing.

It was a bit much even for Strieber fans. At least some.

So some people started digging a bit deeper. And instead of looking at Strieber's books as just entertainment you read and then forget, they started comparing stories from one book to the next. And anecdotes given in books with those in interviews and in his Journals.

After a certain point of actual detail work, it became obvious that Strieber was a confabulator. Not like debunkers say, the same people who claims UFOs aren't real or abductions don't happen, etc. Rather, Strieber had likely had real traumatic experiences - the man is clearly shaken and emotional half the time - but had also invented a whole mythos about himself. He'd inserted himself into every paranormal or conspiracy story du jour, whether JFK, Roswell, the drones, booms from the sky, 9/11 - you name it. But worse than that, he was filling his books with scientific predictions and prophecies that were being unconsciously plagiarized from the science news.

I'll give you just one example and try and wrap this up.

In Strieber's book 'The Secret School' - a book about his secret childhood experiences going to other worlds and having visions - Strieber says he has a memory of a past life in an antediluvial civilization. And they knew a cataclysm was coming. Because the core of the earth was a giant single molten crystal whose vibrations could be measured by delicate instruments. Strieber says in The Secret School (paraphrasing) that it isn't understood by today's science in our current civilization that when the earth is hit by a meteor, for example, it vibrates like a plastic.

Well, the author of the recent Strieber paper found that in a New York Times article written the same year Strieber was writing The Secret School, there's an article about a scientist who thinks the core of the earth is a giant single molten crystal, and that when the earth is struck by a meteor it vibrates like wood.

Bear in mind, Strieber's always quoting the New York Times and science news and scientific journals in his many books. So he's always reading them. But then, it seems, he convinces himself he didn't read something and it comes out as a prophecy. This is just one example that's been uncovered from actually doing the work.

Naturally, people have had plenty of valid suspicions about Strieber for a long time. The point of the paper was to make a case that was so solid that even Strieber, as slippery as he is, wouldn't be able to refute it.

Hope that answers it. Cheers.
 
Linda Moulton Doty said:
On the second point - as I said, arguably. A broader point could be made that we're all using names that are not our 'real' names. A person's 'real' name is technically the full first, middle, and last that appears on a birth certificate. Few of us use it with any regularity. But this again is by the by. Cheers.
Click to expand...

That's just silly. Many, many people go by their middle names, and as in Strieber's case, are not generally known by any other. The point is, there is no question about who Whitley Strieber is.

Not that he hasn't used sock puppets himself. A friend of mine caught him on a now long-defunct forum defending himself under a false name, not just a funny screen name. It was just the kind of slip one might expect after reading your paper. It was pretty surprising at the time. When called out, he got all nasty, edited his post, and promptly vanished. Some basic web searching found someone by that very name (I've long forgotten what it was) posting on Strieber's own forum. Heh. He didn't post a lot, but was generally more skeptical in his "opinions" than one might expect. Interesting creature, old Whitley.

Authors and researchers don't have any choice, really, but to post under their own names. Hard to do business, if nothing else. For nobodies like me, posting under our real names carries real risks, with no potential benefit that I can see. Oh, I'm occasionally referred to as "not a real person" or some such nonsense. That's usually pretty amusing. It usually comes from someone who posts under their real name because they have to. I guess they get some recompense by going all holier-than-thou when they aren't doing so well in a disagreement. My name would mean absolutely nothing to anyone in this field, and with all the kooks, nutbags, psychos and flakes in the realm, I want to keep it that way. I know a couple of people who have suffered real harm from jackasses they've encountered on paranormal forums, so it's not some imaginary threat. Even those people weren't posting under their real names; they just didn't make their identities hard enough to ferret out by creeps in lucid moments.
 
Double Nought Spy said:
That's just silly. Many, many people go by their middle names, and as in Strieber's case, are not generally known by any other. The point is, there is no question about who Whitley Strieber is.

Not that he hasn't used sock puppets himself. A friend of mine caught him on a now long-defunct forum defending himself under a false name, not just a funny screen name. It was just the kind of slip one might expect after reading your paper. It was pretty surprising at the time. When called out, he got all nasty, edited his post, and promptly vanished. Some basic web searching found someone by that very name (I've long forgotten what it was) posting on Strieber's own forum. Heh. He didn't post a lot, but was generally more skeptical in his "opinions" than one might expect. Interesting creature, old Whitley.

Authors and researchers don't have any choice, really, but to post under their own names. Hard to do business, if nothing else. For nobodies like me, posting under our real names carries real risks, with no potential benefit that I can see. Oh, I'm occasionally referred to as "not a real person" or some such nonsense. That's usually pretty amusing. It usually comes from someone who posts under their real name because they have to. I guess they get some recompense by going all holier-than-thou when they aren't doing so well in a disagreement. My name would mean absolutely nothing to anyone in this field, and with all the kooks, nutbags, psychos and flakes in the realm, I want to keep it that way. I know a couple of people who have suffered real harm from jackasses they've encountered on paranormal forums, so it's not some imaginary threat. Even those people weren't posting under their real names; they just didn't make their identities hard enough to ferret out by creeps in lucid moments.
Click to expand...

Not silly. Just a certain way of looking at it. My point is the same as what you wrote: what's in a name? If you posted online under a 'fake' name, then came out with a real name, would a group of complete strangers know you any better? How would it be anything other than words on a page? In almost every case, making a big issue of what so-and-so's real name is, is a distraction.

Otherwise, I actually agree with everything you've written. The internet is already a madhouse, and when you get into UFOs and conspiracy theory sites, it can get even crazier. If someone wants to use his/her real name online, fine. If not, I don't see the big issue. People treat it like you're some sort of whistleblower.

As for Strieber, one thing that was discovered similar to what you mentioned - and I wish I knew the forum and the fake name you're talking about - is that not long ago, Strieber got on Wikipedia and tried to edit his own bio to say his son's name wasn't really Andrew; that Andrew was a name he just used for his books and his son's name was something else. Strieber did it anonymously. But from a Santa Monica, CA, IP address where he lives. Then the "poor creature" logged on from his real Wiki account to make other innocuous unrelated changes.

This doesn't mean anything more than it does. Not a big deal. Very human, very human foibles.
 
Whitley was on Coast to Coast last night. The topics discussed:

"In the latter half, he addressed the latest on the UFO cover-up, as well as revelations about the afterlife and communications with his deceased wife, Anne. He also talked about how his "visitations" with an alien or other presence have continued-- most recently he experienced almost two hours of missing time just after deboarding a plane at LAX. Strieber believes the implant in his earlobe, an artificial object installed by two humans who intruded into his home without tripping an alarm, actually can function as a research tool when he's writing, with words becoming visible through his left eye.

"The British government is getting ready to release some declassified UFO files, which Strieber suggested may offer a new perspective on the Rendlesham 1980 UFO incident. The lights seen by military personnel in the Rendlesham Forest may have contained a technology that could cause confusion and hallucinations, he said. Whitley is working on a new book titled "Across the Bridge," with his late wife, who is communicating with him from the Other Side. "One of the things that makes us different from the 'Visitors' is they live between these worlds, whereas we lived walled off from our own dead," he commented, adding that humanity will never be whole until we're able to freely walk back and forth between the living and dead."
 
wwkirk said:
"One of the things that makes us different from the 'Visitors' is they live between these worlds, whereas we lived walled off from our own dead," he commented, adding that humanity will never be whole until we're able to freely walk back and forth between the living and dead."
Click to expand...

Ive speculated in my post biological hypothesis that some of the visitors may actually be the dead.

The scenario being at some stage in the future the technology to transfer the human experience set, your mind your memories to a synthetic substrate becomes possible.
Add time travel to that and you have the ability to step outside of linear time and use this technology on all humanity, even us.

A society in that scenario would fit Striebers prediction very well. Although at that point some of the lexicon hes using would be obsolete.
 
Hello, folks. A postscriptum to this long-dead thread.

The 'Mother' conversations are now online. These were conversations that dealt with UFOs, the paranormal, and a variety of other topics including the great Whitley Strieber. Strieber's talked about in depth. Any episode with a title 'Whitley Strieber series' focuses on Strieber.

Of particular interest - that is, if you want a few chuckles - was the last episode where the topics of Strieber and The Clueless One were dealt with - containing colorful language:

Jun 09 2017 – Whitley Strieber series: Reaction to “Problems with Strieber and The Key” – Mother

The audio is also available on the iTunes/Podcasts app. Should also be available on YouTube:

Cheers.
 
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