February 14, 2016 — Whitley Strieber

[SheaOlmsford]

Well wow, how superior you are. When's the last time you wrote a best seller? Please explain to us idiots how u find Whitley streiber so mediochre.

I see this fallacious argument to shut down people from time to time. I will use analogies to refute it. Do I have to be a plumber to know when my plumber screws up a repair job? Do I have to be a master chef before I am allowed to review a meal at a restaurant? Must I be the Pope before I can criticize Catholocism? You do not have to be an expert in a field to know when someone is doing it wrong.

If merely impacting the world's meme is what qualifies as success, then I guess Justin Bieber is a truly great human being. His songs play constantly somewhere on the globe right now. So must I also be a pop music star before I have the right to say I loath his music?

 

[SheaOlmsford]

After listening again, my first listen was segmented so i didn't really get the flow of conversation, I'm utterly convinced that streiber is full of it.

His assertion that this book would be seen as a starting point for serious scientific and intellectual study is ridiculous and reminds me of the exopolitics lot who imagine themselves to be the future official galactic ambassadors in a brave new world come 'disclosure'.

Yes, youre gonna be the government/scientific/academic agency's go to guys for the most important project ever.


Just ridiculous delusions of grandeur.

Whitley always uses hyperbole to describe everything he is involved in. Each week on DREAMLAND is "extraordinary", "shocking revelation", "ground shaker", "Unparalleled revelations", blah, blah, blah. It is just his way of speaking.Some have called him a classic narcissist.

 

[SheaOlmsford]

I felt no time nor spirit change as a result of streibers writing.

He made a splash with communion sure but for me has been chasing that high ever since with an ever evolving saga of visitation and revelation.

Some interesting thoughts he has no doubt, but a genius he is not.

What he experienced, if anything, is anybody's guess.

The COMMUNION ENIGMA was advertized before release as the culmination of decades of alien interaction, promising to bring final answers to the phenomena from a man intimately involved with it. I read the book. No answers, just more Whitley Strieber anecdotes.

I have to tell you that one anecdote upset me greatly. Whitley claimed that he and Anne saw a man being chased inside a store front by little blue men! Evidently, they calmly just walked past the store front and did nothing. Maybe I would have naively called the police and reported that a man was being attacked at that address. Or perhaps (if I had experiences with these 3 darlings), I would have intervened. But Whitley and Anne just sauntered past without becoming involved. Maybe this is just my problem because I am not a New Yorker.

 

[wowarning]

Nothing to do with anything, but every time he said hwat, hwen, hwy, hwere, or hwo it drove me insane. Family Guy did an awesome bit on that with Stewie and Brian.

 

[SheaOlmsford]

Everyone can agree I think that spitting on the car of a person who just gave you his time in conversation is just unbelievably low and about the most pathetic act. What an a-hole that guy was. If he doesn't like Whitley he does not need to listen to him or watch him. It's doubly insane that the person had just been talking to him. I'd love to know what crap life that person has to make him think spitting on a car is acceptable behaviour.

How would anyone know which car in the parking lot belonged to Whitley? Whitley has a well documented persecution complex which he wraps around himself like a shroud. Yes, he was abused on SOUTH PARK and mad a very momentary laughing stock for a small subset of Americans. But until recently, his books were always published in hard cover. I do not think the problem of "no sales" is again part of an ongoing persecution.

I have read all of Whitley's books. The post-Communion series fictional books were simply not very good, as you can tell by reading the Amazon reviews. Rather than a victim of persecution, his sales dropped because he always seemed to have problems carrying off his initial clever thesis for each novel. Each novel (to me) fell flat about half way through. I would hurriedly finish so I could move on to a better author. As I said in a previous post, some professional people have publicly stated that Whitley displays all the symptoms of a narcissistic personality, which includes a sense of persecution. He carries his extreme anger and hate very thinly veiled. I would have hoped that by his 70s, he would have reached a point where he wouldn't care what people thought about him, that he would let go of all this hurt and rancor.

Perhaps as a gay man, I have a relatively unique viewpoint here. During my life, I have been called repeatedly a sinner going to hell, mentally ill, and even viewed as a criminal. This does quite a number on your self-esteem and mental health, having an entire society against you for something you were simply born as this time around. But to survive, I have had to let go of the trenendous bitterness and anger towards "middle america" and its love relationship with GOP blowhards who always scapegoat "the gays". I wish Whitley could do that. He would be a much happier man.

 

[SheaOlmsford]

(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).

BRAVO! Thank you for sharing this. I also read the "Through the Glass Darkly Part 1 & 2" articles and downloaded them to my STRIEBER folder several years ago. Thanks for the updated versions in PDF.

I was with Whitley from the publication of Communion in 1987. Yet I have found him to be a "camp follower" in ufology. If there is a new trend in ufology, suddenly Whitley appears on Coast to Coast to revel us with HIS experiences within this trend. One of the more embarrassing examples was when he insisted that the ORIGINAL alien drones were real, long after every other researcher had shown that all the YOUTUBE videos were faked and the stories were simply not true. He also recently defended Jamie Mausan (sp?), claiming that the Roswell slides were REAL. Whitley supported the view that nefarious CIA or FBI agents had snuck the incriminating placard (identifying the "alien" as a mummy) into the photos to destroy Jamie's reputation.

Decades before this, I became a "disbeliever" after the publication of SECRET SCHOOL. Prior to the publication, Whitley had reportedly been involved in one of the primitive early chat groups involving alien experiences. A young woman had shared her experiences with a "secret school" where she was taken at night as a child by alien beings. When Strieber's SECRET SCHOOL was published, she shared that she vomited and cried since it appeared that HER LIFE was being apropriated by the author of SECRET SCHOOL as his own. Now, I cannot prove this and it is mere hearsay. Perhaps the woman was lying.

In terms of being a camp follower, this same book shared how Whitley had been taught as a child by a giant moth creature/alien to view Mars through a telescope. Perhaps Whitney was the FIRST human to see the then famous "Face on Mars". Of course, since then the Richard Hoagland face on Mars has been seen as an anomoly of the early satellite photographs and NOT real. Yet Whitley had appropriated it into his book. Whitley also reported the current scientific theory of the time that the moon had been created from a portion of the planet Earth. He had a great VISION of this happening. Yet now scientists are claiming that the moon is OLDER than planet Earth! So how could it have been created from a portion of planet Earth>?

I could go on and on regarding how Whitley's supposedly NON fiction books about his life reflect current understandings, which have become dated and left behind since then.

Ironically, I truly ENJOY Whitley Strieber interviews and actually collect them. I purchased his latest (and last?) book SUPER NATURAL. I confess that now I do so from an entertainment standpoint (to see what Whitley will claim next in his personal cornocopia of alien experiences) rather than from the stance of an adoring fan. I was once on the DREAMLAND forum but was very quickly banned for questioning Whitley's claims. That is just not done! Nonetheless, I remain devoted to watching the ongoing story of Whitley Strieber. Will the cruel persecution drive him into seclusion like Howard Hughs? Will Whitley appear on Coast to Coast when he is ready to reveal HIS involvement in the next ufo related fad? If experiencers began sharing that the little Greys were wearing chiffon prom dresses from the 1950s, will Whitley appear to say "me too", and claim he took a Grey (in a pink chiffon prom dress) to his highschool prom?

Thanks again for your insightful approach to the phenomena known as Whitley Strieber.

 

[Liminalist]

Nice to see this thread coming to life.

I haven't commented about any other specific cases except to say that hypnosis and repetitive regression can not be relied upon to find the truth, when, in fact, there is plenty of scientific evidence that false memories can overlay, replace, alter, and change the original memories when doing hypnosis or repetitive regression. Knowing this to be a serious problem that can confound and potentially destroy or replace the original memories it would be common sense and very wise to eliminate any cases that rely on such potentially false evidence to prove some event such as ET Abductions. This becomes even more of a serious problem, since there is a common widespread cultural mythology and understanding about such events that have saturated the movies, television [i.e. X-Files], online accounts, C2C type radio/podcasts, Strieber's books, etc. etc.

Regarding the “false memory implantation” issue, I am definitely on the fence about this, as the False Memory Syndrome is almost certainly a CIA-created cover to discredit any of the probably millions of MKULTRA victims who start to remember their experiences. (The FMS Foundation was created by two people being accused by their children of sexual abuse; interestingly enough FMS and the old “satanic panic” meme is being regularly, and all but exclusively, promoted by the revamped Process Church at their website: THE PROCESS…) At the same time, it seems more than likely that unethical practitioners of hypnotic regression would be able to implant false memories if the subject is trained and employed (or simply inclined by personal obsession) to do so. I think this becomes a lot more relevant when the subject in question, such as Strieber and possibly all “alien abductees,” has already been subjected to some sort of hypnotic treatments, behavioral modifications, etc., that primed him for the experiences. Strieber claimed to have found a psychiatrist to hypnotize him (Donald Klein) who was untainted by familiarity or association with UFO abduction lore; but that doesn’t leave out the possibility he was working with (or one of) Strieber’s CIA handlers.

My own "Abduction" experiences occurred as a small child. I had no knowledge of Aliens and thought my abductors to be evil goblins.Only as I read UFO articles as a teen did I become aware of the Grey aliens that resembled my childhood visitors.Our perceptions are guided by our experience and what was once faery folk is now E.T.I believe the experiences I had as a child were a form of sleep paralysis.If I had them now I'm sure I'd recognise my protagonists as being "Aliens".I'm not saying E.T doesn't visit,I just don't think they abduct us.

I think this is a really good line to draw, that of the demonstrably physical abductions. I am not inclined to try and argue that faerylore and all the other ancient folklore and myths about human interactions with a nonhuman presence were part of an ancient military mind control program. I think these experiences and the beliefs they generated may well have been exploited, even co-opted, for sociopolitical ends by elites, way back in those days; but the possibility of surrogate experiences being simulated, whole cloth, as physical events is probably fairly new. It’s here that what has generally been a highly subjective, psychic sort of experience blurs into an objective, physical one, and that I think it’s possible to propose an exclusively human-group-generated event.

Ron Away,

Some case have physical /vibrations that effect the structures outside the home in some abduction/encounters case with odd sounds and lights. Also electronic devices in the home are activated in some case such as radios, lights, T.Vs going off while the powers been turned off or furniture cabinet's doors opening and shutting. How about folks abduction/encounters while driving cars being taken over while passengers are helpless to stop the events happening which the force is able to turn off and on, slow and increase speed of car and able to impact on weather around the car. Police cars seen chasing UFOs while eyewitness stopped by the road in 1960s and unknown officials in black uniforms warning to be quite, . The abduction ( would include encounters) cases are odd and terrifying for those caught in these physical events and don't think we can put all in one basket such as sleep paralysis.

It may appear as if we are discussing one larger, multicultural and age-long phenomenon, but that is exactly what the human-engineered simulation depends on achieving, this seeming consistency with genuine “visitations.” It may seem like it is still a blurry line if we allow that psychic trauma combined with occult ritual, etc., etc., can bring about a materialized psychism. But a) this doesn’t actually imply autonomous beings, much less ETs; b) we don’t necessarily need to posit this as yet, if we allow a combination of psychic (nonphysical) manifestation with human deviance creating physical traces to accompany those psychic experiences being generated. I would guess this is the case with Strieber, that he is triggered/manipulated to have a psychic vision – go into trance state - while being manipulated by humans, who can then leave the physical traces, such as via REE, to support and “reify” the visions.

If there are several different phenomena all being grouped together under the UFO banner, then of course it is not possible to submit them all to a single interpretation, unless that interpretation is wide enough. IMO, the area being mostly left out of the discussion is also the most central and fundamental to understanding it: that of social engineering based on a knowledge and appliance of psychic fragmentation.

To turn what I've said on it's head a little to further illustrate, are the skeptics saying that every single piece of 'recovered' memory from a H.R must be fantasy? I would have thought it a little easier for the brain to relay real memories than it is to totally create them from scratch all the time?

The sceptics may be saying this, but as I mentioned above, they probably have their own agendas. But memory is a notoriously tricky thing to begin with, and when we add trance states that, if deep enough, resemble waking dreams, then clearly any testimony that includes fantastical elements becomes highly questionable.

But with such variables in play it really does leave the scene wide open to paint whatever satanic tale you want.

I am not sure if I agree with that. Maybe if we are not being honest with the material or our readers, it does. But coherence can’t be imposed on material, it has to be discovered, and when it begins to show itself, it really shines through, for me at least. Obviously I may be mistaken/deluded, but it’s up to others to find their own ground in this quagmire, not for me to give it to them. For me, this exploration has been one long Ah ha! moment with no end yet in sight. (Or rather every time I think I see it, I am wrong.) Yet the ground becomes ever more tangible to me.

I have a couple of questions for you Jasun, specifically regarding option d) and the involvement of other human agencies that has shaped Whitley's tales of sex magick and drugs. His stories are highly hallucinatory, and the parallels and bits of clues you posted in your recent article about the "Pain" story and his Process Church connection are still all emmanting from the mind of the writer. How can we know if any of it has any basis in reality? So why bother complicating it further with alien abductions turning into MILAB experiments? Isn't this just replacing one impossible set of events with another?

There seem to be too many testimonies of abduction occurring to dismiss it all as fabrication/fantasy. Since I am sure you don’t consider military experimentation to be an impossible narrative, I presume the impossible element for you is that of creating full body hallucinations via external manipulations? Whether this is done via drugs, hypnosis, technology, staged events or, as would be my guess, a combination of all three, I can agree that it is hard to imagine, but so what? I suspect that even all of this wouldn’t be enough to create such a compelling and (for millions of people) persuasive narrative, where it not for the factor of psychic fragmentation via childhood trauma that places the subjects into a permanently dissociated state, and means that essentially they do a large part of the “fabrication” themselves—and maybe even the manifestation?

Impossible isn’t personally a word I use too much. There’s nothing impossible about ETs coming down to experiment on us, it’s just that a) the evidence doesn’t support this hypothesis and b) there is a lot of evidence that supports a very different one, including evidence to suggest that the ET/alien/interdimensional hypothesis has been manufactured, and exactly (or roughly) to what ends.

The really weird part for me was reading one quote where WS talks about he and his brother being brought to a university for secret tests, as highly intelligent children, and then having no memory of the specifics of it all, and I thought hold up, I remember listening to a familiar podcast radio cohost who also told the exact same story about he and his brother going for "tests". He also had foggy childhood memories and an abduction styled/contact event in his own life. I'm not trying to draw any parallels here but it's quite interesting nonetheless.

[CTRL] Whitley Strieber, "Mind Control" and the CIA

Yeah good stuff, here’s a quote in case that link goes down:

At this session, Strieber spoke extensively of the Secret
Government within our government.

He began by chronicling his personal experience of the CIA.

It was an organization that he hated. "I know a lot about the

CIA," he declared. "I know a lot of people in the CIA and I've

been very close to the CIA at certain times in my life."

But, he went on, "I don't like the CIA. I think it's a

disaster, a national catastrophe of the first order, a SATANIC

monstrosity ..."

Continuing: Then Strieber made the startling statement that,

for some at the conference, seemed to undermine the authenticity

of the 'Secret School' and open the discussion out to very

different vistas.

"In my childhood," he said quietly, " I was tested at a

university in San Antonio, in about 1954-55, for a long time,

with a lot of tests - this was the same time I was having my

encounters as a child. Intelligence tests, I guess they were; I

don't remember them very clearly. My brother was subjected when

he was the same age to the same tests at the same place by the

same doctor. We were never told what these tests were about.

We were never told by our parents why it was done."

"One of the things that I have been quietly researching over

the past few years is CIA mind control activities that took

place back in the 50s, using drugs, hypnosis, and involving

children especially bright kids. Because I fear that I may have

been part of that ... I want to find out all about it. I want to

understand it more."

Re: putting your abduction experience on the table.

That does seem to be more of a matter of personal choice, no?

I don't really see any strong evidence of proven alien abduction, but there are some strange stories told by people whose circumstances merit further contemplation. Pascagoula is one of them with the excellent non-hypnotized interviews in the police station, and the Polish case, Emilcin, is the other whose full story and secondary witness, along with who the experiencer was, makes for the most compelling of all alien abduction tales IMHO. Michalak is also very curious as is the Dechmont Woods case for their uniqe bits of physical evidence. These all speak to more than just stories and they do not fit in any way with humans as instigators.

How not?

Of course it’s a personal choice for Mike or anyone to share their own experiences; but if someone wants to argue for a nonhuman presence, specific evidence or at least testimony needs to be presented, otherwise the argument is ephemeral and goes nowhere except into personal belief and opinion. Since this thread is about Strieber, I’d suggest sticking to him. If it can be established beyond reasonable doubt that the most famous and influential case of alleged alien abduction was a socially engineered hoax, on however many levels (including psychic), I’d say that would be a significant contribution to the field.

TBH I've heard Listened to Kripal in interviews and he is highly engaging and thoughtful. Hearing that he teamed with Whitley confused me, but then he is also on about transformative human experiences and the sexual experience so that's an interesting connection & suggestion. What other affiliations does he have?

Esalen is the main one & I know that the evidence for Esalen as an intelligence front is still fairly scant (Jan Irvin is the biggest proponent, and he tends to race to his conclusions and have no patience for those who question them, which is unfortunate, because I don’t think he is necessarily wrong about his conclusions.) Certainly, Esalen’s history is jam-packed with the usual suspects of social engineering, see here: The Biological and the Silicon: Modifying Humans for Space Travel

More substantially, Kripal has been a participant at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, created by Strieber’s late buddy Edgar Mitchell. Mitchell deserves a thread of his own, but the IOS was presided by Willis Harman (Changing Images of Man author), and according to Stargate Conspiracy, fronted for the CIA during their early experiments into remote viewing (see above link also). Kripal has been asked about Esalen’s affiliations with the CIA (on Sync Book radio) and all he replied was that he doesn’t buy into conspiracy theories. He seems too intelligent a guy to be that dumb, or to be undiscerning enough to hitch his wagon to the Strieber horse unless he was being assigned the job. Or maybe COB is right, and it’s the smell of money that drew him in.

After listening again, my first listen was segmented so i didn't really get the flow of conversation, I'm utterly convinced that streiber is full of it.

His assertion that this book would be seen as a starting point for serious scientific and intellectual study is ridiculous and reminds me of the exopolitics lot who imagine themselves to be the future official galactic ambassadors in a brave new world come 'disclosure'.

Yes, youre gonna be the government/scientific/academic agency's go to guys for the most important project ever.

Just ridiculous delusions of grandeur.

Agreed. But I think it is also part of the strategy behind Super Natural, to pose as one thing (as you outline above) in order to increase appeal to its real intended audience, as more New Age mystification snake oil for the spiritually greedy, politically gullible, and psychologically lazy. Sorry to be blunt. But for intellectual “giants” like Levenda and Kripal to be buying stocks in Strieber smacks of a well worked out strategy to me.

 

[SheaOlmsford]

Nothing to do with anything, but every time he said hwat, hwen, hwy, hwere, or hwo it drove me insane. Family Guy did an awesome bit on that with Stewie and Brian.

At least for the most part he has gone beyond going "uh, uh, uh" between every sentence. LOL

 

[Vimana]

I enjoyed the episode. I agree with most of the commenters here on the pros n cons of Whitley.
I grew up with Whitley being a favored horror author. The book The Wolfen blew my young mind. It was very unique at that time and had a great premise. I still like Whitley and I continue to buy some, but not all, of his books. His recent fictional works dont trip my trigger. His experiences do not seem to have influenced his narrative style in a positive way.
I do enjoy listening to him on other shows than his own. They are less hyperbole.

I'll go back to reading now, since the comments are so enlightening. But getting WS on the paracast is a big plus for both parties.

Now back to my quiet enjoyment

 

[mike]

The legal cases you cite have a major flaw. There is no cultural mythology that the media has saturated and supported to pre-define such unique crimes with a common cultural set of beliefs and outcomes vs what the UFO Abduction stories have had in common within our media and UFO community to expose

The fact remains Forensic hypnosis can and does retrieve information such as license plates makes and models and colours etc

Forensic Hypnosis & its Use in Recovering Memory
QUESTION:
I witnessed a car accident a few months ago and saw a car speed by me. Thinking that the car caused the accident, I followed it and tried to memorize the license number. Now, I'm accused of causing the accident and I would like to try to get that license number of the car passing on my left. Is it possible to extract the license number from memory by hypnosis?

ANSWER:
Yes, if you actually saw the license plate, you should be able to get the numbers back. I’ve done this with two people before who were involved as witnesses in crimes. In one case it was trying to recover the full license plate number. The client recalled not only the number, but the color and make of the car. In the other, it was witnessing a murder scene. The hypnosis allowed the client to recall many details helpful to the police.
Forensic work using hypnosis is designed to give more information to the investigators and/or confirm data they have on a crime or other incident. It is not generally accepted in the courts as testimony, because people can lie, if they wish to. Remember, hypnosis isn’t making someone do something. It is guiding someone into their own memory. So the receiver of hypnosis is actually in charge of what he or she will say or not say, divulge or not divulge.

Forensic Hypnosis & its Use in Recovering Memory

IMO, Mike is creating a set of arguments that are based in a position of belief and then disguising it as remaining open to not-knowing, i.e., a liminal position. But it is not really a liminal position because he is dogmatic about it (hence sees dogma and denial everywhere he looks, like Whitley)! I find it useful, if frustrating, to watch him inundate the thread with vapid arguments almost devoid of actual data and then pile on supposed methodologies required to participate in the argument. He seems to have taken a leaf out of the disinformationalist's handbook, dissemble, obfuscate, and add as much as noise as possible to drown out the signal. (Sorry to talk about you like you're not here Mike, just wishful thinking! )

What is more productive, IMO, is to scrutinize the information of any particular case and find the inconsistencies, failures of logic, and hidden or de-emphasized elements which suggest an alternate reading to the "super natural" (or ET) one. At the risk of tooting my own horn, I have now spent seven years doing this with Strieber's body of work (not counting almost twenty before that, drinking his Kosmic Kool-Aid), and assembled my findings into some sort of coherent order. At this point, whatever Mike and the self-proclaimed agnostics may say, I have proven to myself beyond reasonable doubt:

a) that Strieber is lying about certain things and concealing others;
b) that he is or has been in the past affiliated with groups and agencies with a history of mind control;
c) that his own memory and ability to determine what is real is seriously in question;
d) that his experiences are at least partially orchestrated and shaped by human agencies, as part of a larger agenda.

Mike can say this is opinion posing as fact, but then he would have to look over the evidence I've amassed to know this, and he clearly has no intention of doing so. Even then, I doubt anyone so heavily invested in their beliefs would be able to discern evidence from opinion. But anyway; of course none of this proves that ETs or other nonhuman presences are not involved, much less that they do not exist; but as Mike, with his doctorate in logic, knows, it is impossible to prove a negative so only a fool or a sophist would try.

I extended a friendly challenge for him to show that all the evidence and claims of so-called alien abductees (specifically Strieber) cannot be explained without resorting to a nonhuman element; this was ignored in favor of amorphous but dogmatic statements of belief disguised as agnosticism, and repeated charges of "denialism" (new to me, and despite my having admitted to believing in faeries & the paranormal!).

Simply put, my relative certainty that Strieber and other abductees are prematurely positing the presence of something nonhuman is based on discovering a mountain of evidence for human manipulations, as well as direct correlations between Strieber's experiences and his own psychological issues, patterns, and so forth (consistent with waking phantasy), all of which was so overwhelming to me that I had to relinquish my once firm persuasion that a magical, faerylike nonhuman element was indeed involved. This is the sort of evidence that is relevant here, and which Mike has shown zero interest in inquiring about. To me that suggests he is not genuinely exploring the question, much less leaving it open, but only trying to keep this conversation away from such inquiries, by announcing that, since "I don't know" is apparently the only honest answer, there is no reason to look at any evidence that suggests it might be possible to know, or at least recognize certain errors and delusions, and so get a little closer to the truth.

To be blunt, I have rarely met a firm believer/defender of the nonhuman (much less ET) hypothesis (and make no mistake, Mike is that) who was capable of much by way critical thinking, because every believer is also a denialist, just as Mike is denying my own observations by dismissing them as belief and opinion (and so on). I think it's the nature of the material that, once one takes it to heart, there is a certain loss of critical faculties required to maintain that belief. Maybe this is the "apocalypse of thought" which Strieber & Kripal promise in The Super Natural?

It is astonishing to me how much work has gone, over the past six or seven decades, into creating this widespread belief in nonhuman beings among us, and how the belief does seem to be powerful to generate experiences, experiences that then act as evidence for the beliefs. What interests me, then, are the ways in which the beliefs have been generated, and shaped, and the reasons for it, more even than the perceptual experiences themselves. Logically, isn't it more useful to explore causes than effects if possible? This is even found in UFO literature: how elements of the UFO experience that become standard first appear in works of fiction.

The other thing I'd say, to Mike and anyone else leaning towards the "just say I don't know" position, is that, what is most reliable in any investigation is always direct experience. If Mike has had direct experience with nonhuman beings (as I once believed I had, and I continue to have the sort that I used to account to nonhuman presence, but which I now leave open), he should put them on the table for examination. Otherwise, all that is being discussed here are fables.

If "no you are" is all youve got as a rebuttal then i dont see a need to waste anymore of my time on you, Although the obvious "transference" in the post did give me a chuckle

 

[Honey-Pot]

The fact remains Forensic hypnosis can and does retrieve information such as license plates makes and models and colours etc

It can work very well for getting specific pieces of information, but when it comes to recounting an entire series of SyFy events, Alien Abduction, then this process is already pre-loaded by the mass media and mythological hysteria surrounding such matters.

What's worse, Mike, seriously, is that such memory modification doesn't even require hypnosis or repetitive regression to change the original memory to alter the story completely from its original understanding. I'm certain you can download/torrent or watch online that Nova PBS program called Memory Hackers that I referenced in one of my first few posts to this thread. You really need to watch that to understand just how susceptible people are to having their memories changed by subtle and simple suggestion techniques using key words. IIRC, the researcher found that up to 80% of subjects could have their memories altered without even using hypnosis or regression.

I looked into your Cahill example, but there are no on camera support witnesses to back-up her claims. The UFO investigators seemed to be unaccounted for with no way to follow-up to see the original data gathered, and the UFO organization had disappeared too. This is a classic example of having no supporting evidence to back-up her claims, which are admittedly not matching significant parts of what her husband also witnessed.

It's also totally possible this could be a Human Abduction meant to fool the targeted people. Human tricksters and black ops by unknowns exist. The nighttime offers the fantastic cover of darkness to pull-off such bizarre encounters.

I find it hard to believe that after all these years none of the original reports or the other witnesses, including her husband, do not come forward to at least verify her story to some extent. There are ways these people could still remain anonymous by obscuring their face and altering their voice if that was an issue. Also, the UFO group is nonexistent with no way to interview the investigators and see the original reports. It can easily be some kind of elaborate hoax or black op that even targeted these people.

This is a perfect example of having to jump to fantastic conclusions based on the cultural understanding of how these stories play out in the media over and over again. All of it hinges on one person's account with no visible means of supporting evidence beyond her story alone. Something certainly happened to her, and I'm not saying she is willfully lying about what happened.

 

[ALPHA ROMEO UNIFORM]

It may appear as if we are discussing one larger, multicultural and age-long phenomenon, but that is exactly what the human-engineered simulation depends on achieving, this seeming consistency with genuine “visitations.” It may seem like it is still a blurry line if we allow that psychic trauma combined with occult ritual, etc., etc., can bring about a materialized psychism. But a) this doesn’t actually imply autonomous beings, much less ETs; b) we don’t necessarily need to posit this as yet, if we allow a combination of psychic (nonphysical) manifestation with human deviance creating physical traces to accompany those psychic experiences being generated. I would guess this is the case with Strieber, that he is triggered/manipulated to have a psychic vision – go into trance state - while being manipulated by humans, who can then leave the physical traces, such as via REE, to support and “reify” the visions.

If there are several different phenomena all being grouped together under the UFO banner, then of course it is not possible to submit them all to a single interpretation, unless that interpretation is wide enough. IMO, the area being mostly left out of the discussion is also the most central and fundamental to understanding it: that of social engineering based on a knowledge and appliance of psychic fragmentation.

Yes the psychic ability ???? which I am is still on the fence and manipulation of events during the Cold War years and regarding brainwashing of the Abduction/ Encounters by some apparatus by defence/corporate/ authority instead a superior force which seemed to targets children to adults by 'deviance ', horror, 'peace and love',' find religion' as some whistle-blowers suggest. This phenomena is more complex and yes the UFO /ET??? / No idea what it / is a element part of this abduction phenomena which even the authority seem to find it difficult to understand /fear its branding/ridicule . If it was a standard operational procedure to hoax abductions/encounters many folks within the apparatus of the state would come forward over the years stating a state run operation from top to bottom! Also to focus on just the so called CIA,NSA etc as culprit is wrong as many states might have similar higly advance tools of operations (if they exist ) around the World if true and hypnosis as a tool to control and manipulate the mass in electronic form is very plausible especially during the Cold War today. However, the manipulator could of be manipulated by higher force outside the human brain spectrum who funk knows in this crazy field.

 

[Liminalist]

If it was a standard operational procedure to hoax abductions/encounters many folks within the apparatus of the state would come forward over the years stating a state run operation from top to bottom! .

I have no idea why would you think that. Because of all the so-called government "whistleblowers" who show up on Coast to Coast? Funny how none of them are being prosecuted for disclosing state secrets. . .

 

[Honey-Pot]

Regarding the “false memory implantation” issue, I am definitely on the fence about this, as the False Memory Syndrome is almost certainly a CIA-created cover to discredit any of the probably millions of MKULTRA victims who start to remember their experiences.

Please download/torrent or watch online that Nova PBS program called Memory Hackers. I linked to it in one of my first few posts to this thread.

Do you seriously believe the MKU mind control experiments were conducted on millions of people? I'm talking about targeted subjects under controlled conditions, and then x-amount of tests done in the field to verify it can work for those applications outside of controlled conditions.

 

[Liminalist]

Please download/torrent or watch online that Nova PBS program called Memory Hackers. I linked to it in my first post to this thread.

Do you seriously believe the MKU mind control experiments were conducted on millions of people? I'm talking about targeted subjects under controlled conditions, and then x-amount of tests done in the field to verify it can work for those applications outside of controlled conditions.

Absolutely. Start with • View topic - CKLN Mind Control Radio Series Audios. to get an idea of how widespread this has been, and has been acknowledged even by the US government when it was raised before a presidential hearing on radiation under Clinton. MKULTRA is a program that began at least as far back as 1953 and that has almost certainly continued to the present day, in the US, Canada (under Ewen Cameron), Britain, & I would guess Australia too, under countless different guises (such as reservation schools in Canada, and possibly much of the Catholic child abuse is related). That's over sixty years. Most remarkable of all is perhaps the fact that it's still considered paranoid conspiracy theory (while being a stock part of Hollywood entertainment) despite being fully in the realm of documented fact (as evidently is satanic ritual abuse, at least if you consider that they have psychological textbooks on how to treat victims of it, and a box to tick on British police forms for "ritual abuse").

I'll look into the doc, but I doubt anything that came via PBS will provide much reliable info. There is a new drive to push the false memory syndrome idea now, what with the ongoing revelations in Britain about child sexual abuse at an institutional level, implicating high levels of government, intelligence, police, psychiatry, medicine, and the entertainment industry that has been rife for who knows how long (at least since the 1920s). For those interested (in what is really also deep background to the UFO question), I did a series on it based on my own family history and experiences: Occult Yorkshire: Fabian Family Secrets and Cultural Engineering in the UK (Intro) It is pretty mind-blowing stuff.

 

[Honey-Pot]

I'm extremely skeptical about ET Aliens conducting Human abductions, but I'm far less so skeptical, at the other extreme, about Humans posing as ET Aliens doing this. Humans can certainly fit a number of scenarios of why this is very likely being done in some cases.

Though Cahill has no supporting witnesses willing to come forward on camera, there is a high probability the other witnesses do exist IF the UFO investigators did not fabricate that part of the story. The fact a university got involved in documenting some of the evidence does lend strong support that there was at the very least some kind of Human staged event that occurred. Cahill is likely an innocent target along with the other witnesses.

IMO, she has definitely suffered from PTSD. She lost her marriage over this event. I don't think she is a BS artist, so I definitely believe her case should be followed-up to try and find-out WHY and HOW these mind fracking Humans are doing this.

I seriously believe this could be a genuine but faked ET Abduction case that targeted innocent people that was done by organized Humans possessing mind altering weapons for some bizarre purposes.

For whatever reasons the other three witnesses [and her x-husband] won't go on camera, and there were some legal claims used by these people to prevent public exposure about them through any media publishing.

Does someone have a copy of her book? It would be interesting to follow-up on any information she provided there. This case is screwed-up totally, because she is the only one talking out of 4 other identified and known witnesses.

It seems to be a Dead End to get any real results without knowing what is on record from the other 4 identified witnesses.

 

[Strategic Deception]

Whitley Strieber is a zero-content con-artist, pure & simple----probably just a step above Stan Romanek, only due to the fact that Whitley's better with words. The story about driving through the strange ("Twilight Zone") neighborhood was a hoot---these charlatans are such narcissists & egotists, constantly coming up with stupid, implausible stories that highlight how "special" and "chosen" they are......No real theories, no real assertions, just leaving it all as vague & open as possible to attract as many different sects of nut-job as they can muster.

Wasn't it a Paracast episode where Don Ecker (I think) said that he always doubted Whitley's stories, due to the fact that he ran into Whitley and his wife at a convention, and Whitley's wife made some laughing, dismissive comment like, "Oh, that's all in Whitley's head!"?

And I recall an episode of a show (_Weird Or What_) where one segment highlighted the idea of people vanishing into thin air, and whaddaya know, Whitely Strieber's wife popped up on there with the tale of how she and a friend were in a restaurant bathroom, and there was a third woman in there with them who simply vanished! Ooooh, *spoooooky*! Boy, what are the odds that so much high strangeness would focus so consistently on just a few "special" people who keep making book & TV deals?

Obviously these people themselves are the 'tricksters'----as Whitley himself said in this episode, including the telling phrase that his being a trickster goes deeper than we even know! Hmm! Now what's that supposed to mean, Whitley?!

 

[DaveM]

Whitley Strieber is an author I tended to give the benefit of doubt to. No longer. The last four or five books I read of his were major disappointments. Whitley tries to pass his fiction off as fact. It doesn't work.

Someone criticized Strieber for showing up on the Paracast to shill his projects. He must be desperate to get the word out as he has his own website for promotion. He isn't any different than actors and authors who show up on talk shows promoting movies, tv shows and books. You can bet those people wouldn't waste their time if they weren't selling something.

 

[Liminalist]

watch online that Nova PBS program called Memory Hackers that I referenced in one of my first few posts to this thread. You really need to watch that to understand just how susceptible people are to having their memories changed by subtle and simple suggestion techniques using key words. IIRC, the researcher found that up to 80% of subjects could have their memories altered without even using hypnosis or regression.

I watched the doc last night & found it very interesting. The first part, using data gathered via scientific research was plausible enough (tho based in the materialist scientific paradigm that considers what's essentially torturing animals a valid way to discover how we function). What was even more interesting about this material, however, was how it did a leap mid-way and became a treatise on how false memories can be implanted. As I expected, this is where the testimony became more compromised. One of the main witnesses was Elizabeth Loftus, author of The Myth of Suppressed Memory and spokesperson for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, who plugged this documentary at their site: False Memory Syndrome Foundation

Loftus did a TED Talk in 2013 on FMS entitled "The Fiction of Memory" in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The New Scientist magazine also used her research to plug the idea of FMS in Why resurgence of therapy that unearths ‘lost’ memories is risky

"It may seem incredible that anyone can be mistaken about being abused, but there have been countless cases where claims were proven to be false. In the 1980s and 1990s there was a global epidemic of false satanic abuse claims from children, typically thanks to leading questioning from misguided social workers. A 1994 UK government report into 84 satanic abuse claims found that none was supported by physical evidence, such as scars left on alleged torture victims or forensic evidence from rooms that were supposedly the sites of multiple murders."


So let's take a look at the history of FMS. The following from a good resource thread at rigorousintuition.ca • View topic - What's Going On At The False Memory Syndrome Foundation?

Quote:

Who coined the term 'False Memory Syndrome'?

Ralph Underwager,one of the founders of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, is credited with having coined the term. In 1993, he gave an interview with the Dutch paedophile magazine, Paedika, in which he was reported as saying that paedophilia could be a responsible choice and that having sex with children could be seen as 'part of God's will'.

The other co-founders of the FMSF were Pamela and Peter Freyd, whose adult daughter made accusations of childhood sexual abuse. The American media gave them almost unquestioning support until their daughter, psychology Professor Jennifer Freyd, felt obliged to speak out publicly, to stop the damage that she felt her parents and their organisation were doing to abuse survivors.

Other early promoters of false memory syndrome in the US were Paul and Shirley Erberle. In the 1970s, when child pornography laws were less rigid, they edited a magazine called Finger in which there were explicit illustrations of children involved in sexual acts with adults, with features entitled 'Sexpot at Five', 'My First Rape, She Was Only Thirteen' and 'Toilet Training'.

Another key figure is Felicity Goodyear-Smith, author of First Do No Harm(1993). Felicity Goodyear-Smith admits to a personal as well as professional involvement in the issue. Her husband and parents-in-law were imprisoned for sexual abuse offences, having been members of the New Zealand community, CentrePoint, that encouraged sexual intimacy amongst its members, including the children. Although the adults involved were prosecuted for these acts, including public sex with children, Goodyear-Smith claims that this was simply 'childhood sexual experimentation' and quotes studies that claim to show that adult-child sex can be harmless.

Is there any evidence that amnesia occurs as a result of trauma?

Research has demonstrated that a significant proportion of adults with documented evidence of being sexually abused in childhood 'forget' or block out the abuse - even when they have been treated in hospital as a result of it, or have been through a successful prosecution of the perpetrator in court. The clinical term for this kind of 'forgetting' is 'dissociation' - which is, unlike 'false memory syndrome', a medically recognised diagnosis. Dissociation occurs after trauma, as a result of the brain's mechanisms for storing overwhelming emotional and physiological experience. Dissociation as a response to trauma has been found in soldiers who have survived combat and accident victims who have 'blocked out' the event.

Scheflin and Brown (1996) conducted a meta-analysis of scientific literature on amnesia or repressed memory of child sexual abuse. They found that amnesia as a result of child sexual abuse is a robust finding across studies using very different samples and measures of assessment. Linda Williams (1995) followed up 129 women who, 17 years earlier as children, had been admitted into a hospital emergency room for sexual assault. As adults, 38% did not recall the abuse. The 62% who did recall the abuse did so with accounts that were 'remarkably consistent with the evidence' from the hospital. The accounts of the women who had always remembered were no more or less consistent than those of the women who had 'forgotten' and then recovered the memories. Both types of remembering were found to be reliable.

Feldman-Summers and Pope (1994) surveyed 500 psychologists. 25% of women and 6% of men reported an experience of sexual abuse in childhood. 40% had 'forgotten' some or all of the experience, and for only a quarter of this group was therapy the only factor in remembering. Forgetting was more common where abuse began in early childhood, took place over a longer period; was perpetrated by a relative and involved more forms of violation. Half of those reporting abuse had found corroboration from other relatives; court or medical records; journals and diaries or a confession by the abuser.

Two further studies have asked if survivors had forgotten for any length of time: in Briere and Conte's (1993) sample of 450 adult survivors over half (59%) said that they had 'forgotten' for a considerable period of time; in Herman and Schatzow's (1987) smaller sample of women almost two-thirds (63%) also said that they had 'forgotten' for some time. Only 6% of the latter group could find no corroboration of their abuse.

In Children Who Don't Speak Out Radda Barnen (Swedish Save the Children) reports on a study of children who were identified through seizures of child pornography. None of them had told anyone about their abuse. The researchers compared the children's statements, the contents of the seized pornography and the statements of the abusers. All of the children resisted remembering the abuse. They spoke only about incidents which were recorded on the pornography when prompted and some even denied that the recorded abuse had happened. The abusers were as, if not more, reticent in their statements, admitting only to what there was forensic evidence about.

What about therapists who have been found guilty of planting 'false memories'?

There has been no malpractice suit in which a case against a practitioner on this issue has been upheld. A much more significant problem is the number of therapists who have sexual relationships with vulnerable clients who are seeking help following sexual assault. [Like, urm David Jacobs?] A number of malpractice suits have been upheld involving this form of abuse.

Can FMS be a result of hypnotherapy?

None of the named cases publicised by the UK FMSS have involved adults recovering memories through hypnotherapy. An examination of FMSS files by an independent organisation found that adults who FMSS claimed have had 'false memories' belonged to one of the following categories:

> they had always believed that they were sexually abused;

> they began to remember in adulthood as a result of some external trigger in their lives, outside the context of therapy. In one famous case an adult (Jennifer Freyd) did some short-term work with a clinical psychologist, and another (Scotford's daughter) with a homeopath. Neither had hypnotherapy or so-called 'regression' therapy at any point.

Given all of this evidence the basic question must be why so many people are more comfortable believing in false memories than the accounts of adults and children.

end quote.

Bottom line, the PBS doc looks to me like another case of how an apparent investigation into one thing can be used as a delivery device for disinformation about another. The FMS BS is nested inside a compelling narrative to give it plausibility, nuance, and relevance that it simply doesn't have, creating the necessary context that will allow us to swallow bogus information uncritically. The same is true, as happens, of The Super Natural, IMO. But that's another story (tho related). The presence of these hidden agendas is of course highly devious, but I think it's how the media generally works, as a disinfo delivery device.

 

[Liminalist]

Whitley has a well documented persecution complex which he wraps around himself like a shroud. Yes, he was abused on SOUTH PARK and mad a very momentary laughing stock for a small subset of Americans. But until recently, his books were always published in hard cover. I do not think the problem of "no sales" is again part of an ongoing persecution.

...

some professional people have publicly stated that Whitley displays all the symptoms of a narcissistic personality, which includes a sense of persecution. He carries his extreme anger and hate very thinly veiled. .

Strieber appears to suffer from dissociative identity disorder due to his traumatization at the "secret MKULTRA school" as a child. The narcissism seems to relate to the controlling "superego" aspect of that, or more simply put, his way of not facing and healing that trauma by taking refuge in power-fantasies of being the Chosen One of God, etc, etc. Fantasies which Kripal, IMO, is being highly irresponsible in feeding, by comparing him to St Paul, and by validating his persecution complex repeatedly through the book. In order to generate better book sales, no less.

BRAVO! Thank you for sharing this. I also read the "Through the Glass Darkly Part 1 & 2" articles and downloaded them to my STRIEBER folder several years ago. Thanks for the updated versions in PDF.

You're welcome, and thanks. I skimmed that piece when I posted the link here and I feel a bit embarrassed by it now. Specifically by how much I gave Whitley the benefit of the doubt back then, and more generally, by how much the piece is padded with theoretical/philosophical observations and what one commenter called "navel-gazing." With Prisoner of Infinity, I try to boil it down to reporting and analyzing the data (as well as presenting autobiographical experiences as occasional counterpoints) and minimize the extrapolation. So much of this data really does speak for itself.

I was with Whitley from the publication of Communion in 1987. Yet I have found him to be a "camp follower" in ufology. If there is a new trend in ufology, suddenly Whitley appears on Coast to Coast to revel us with HIS experiences within this trend. One of the more embarrassing examples was when he insisted that the ORIGINAL alien drones were real, long after every other researcher had shown that all the YOUTUBE videos were faked and the stories were simply not true. He also recently defended Jamie Mausan (sp?), claiming that the Roswell slides were REAL. Whitley supported the view that nefarious CIA or FBI agents had snuck the incriminating placard (identifying the "alien" as a mummy) into the photos to destroy Jamie's reputation.

Decades before this, I became a "disbeliever" after the publication of SECRET SCHOOL. Prior to the publication, Whitley had reportedly been involved in one of the primitive early chat groups involving alien experiences. A young woman had shared her experiences with a "secret school" where she was taken at night as a child by alien beings. When Strieber's SECRET SCHOOL was published, she shared that she vomited and cried since it appeared that HER LIFE was being apropriated by the author of SECRET SCHOOL as his own. Now, I cannot prove this and it is mere hearsay. Perhaps the woman was lying.

Strieber as a camp follower is an interesting analogy. He is going wherever the Disinfo War Wagon goes to peddle his wares. He may also be selling small-pox blankets to natives.

I would be interested to speak to this young woman. Has she written about her experience since, or is that material still online (I think most or all of the Strieber forum stuff is archived)?

I know someone else who was bullied and then banned from there for questioning Whitley.