Communion (book)

1987 book by Whitley Strieber

Communion: A True Story is American author Whitley Strieber's 1987 memoir of an alleged encounter with non-human entities at his cabin in upstate New York on the night of December 26, 1985, and of further contact episodes recovered under hypnotic regression. Published by William Morrow in February 1987, it became the first first-person alien abduction account to reach number one on the New York Times Best Seller list, selling over 300,000 hardcover copies and millions of paperbacks after the 1988 Avon release; its cover portrait — a thin-faced being with enormous black eyes painted by Ted Seth Jacobs — became the dominant visual archetype of the "grey alien" in popular culture. Strieber — a novelist previously known for horror fiction including The Wolfen and The Hunger — presents the encounter neither as certainly extraterrestrial nor as fiction, preferring the neutral term "visitors."

Publication and reception

Communion debuted at number one on the New York Times Best Seller list and remained on the nonfiction list for six months in 1987; combined hardcover and paperback sales of the book and its 1988 follow-up Transformation have been reported at over two million copies. A 2008 trade paperback edition presented a new preface by the author. The 1988 follow-up Transformation generated separate controversy when the Los Angeles Times' book editor reclassified it from non-fiction to fiction and removed it from the non-fiction bestseller list, prompting Strieber to publicly object: "Placing this book on the fiction list is an ugly example of exactly the kind of blind prejudice that has hurt human progress."

Content

Main article:

Whitley Strieber abduction

Strieber recounts waking in the early hours of December 26, 1985, at his cabin in upstate New York to find small beings in his bedroom; he was taken from the cabin and subjected to medical procedures including examination with a triangular probe and the apparent insertion of a small object into his head. The beings appear in several forms — small dark-blue child-like entities, larger beings with wrap-around eyes, and a single prominent female-presenting being whom Strieber compares to the Sumerian goddess Ishtar. Strieber submitted to hypnotic regression with psychiatrist Donald Klein to recover additional memories. A central element is Strieber's struggle with the reality of the experience — he is clear throughout that he is not asserting an extraterrestrial explanation but documenting an encounter that he cannot dismiss, that his wife Anne and son independently corroborated, and that purportedly left physical and psychological traces. The book distinguishes itself from earlier abduction accounts (such as those collected by Budd Hopkins in Missing Time and Intruders) by its literary self-awareness and refusal to settle into a single explanatory framework.

Cover art

The cover painting was rendered by Ted Seth Jacobs working from Strieber's direct guidance in a process Jacobs compared to police sketch work; "every last detail was corrected according to his instructions" until Strieber said the image was exact. Strieber asked Jacobs to give the image "a certain fragility, a vulnerability"; Jacobs noted he did not know whether the "greys" had gender as humans understand it. The painting effectively defined the "grey alien" visual archetype in popular culture, and Joe Rogan and Jacques Vallée noted in 2020 that eyewitness descriptions of alien beings worldwide converge on "the Strieber image of an alien" — large head, large eyes, very thin body with no musculature, no genitals.

Strieber's subsequent works

Communion was the first in a series exploring Strieber's ongoing contact: Transformation: The Breakthrough (1988), Breakthrough: The Next Step (1995), The Secret School (1997), The Communion Letters (1997, with Anne Strieber, compiling correspondence from thousands of readers reporting parallel experiences), Solving the Communion Enigma (2011), and The Super Natural (2016, co-authored with Jeffrey Kripal).

Main article:

Whitley Strieber

Skeptical and academic reception

The 1989 Australian Skeptics handbook Skeptical — a Handbook of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal treated Communion as a paradigm example of false memory and hypnosis-contamination problems in the abduction genre, noting Strieber's prior familiarity with UFO material before the December 1985 episode. Psychologist Susan Clancy, in her 2005 Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, described Communion as "probably the most famous" abductee memoir and pointed to passages in which Strieber acknowledged having "read thousands of pages of material about the whole ET and UFO phenomenon" — including a Look magazine article on the Betty and Barney Hill — before his encounter, presenting Communion as the inflection point at which abduction narratives began to feed visibly on one another.

John Mack — the Harvard psychiatrist whose 1994 Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens drew on regression work with abductees — counted Strieber's work as foundational and recorded Strieber's theoretical position in Passport to the Cosmos (1999): "Strieber posits that the fundamental indeterminacy of perception makes it challenging to accurately observe phenomena for which we lack cognitive reference points." Religious-studies scholar Diana Walsh Pasulka, in her 2019 American Cosmic, grouped Strieber alongside Jeffrey Kripal and others as figures whose work had crossed from experiencer testimony into sustained conceptual argument.

Strieber participated in Art Bell's 1998 Coast to Coast AM interview with Jonathan Reed as a co-questioner, with Bell introducing him as "himself a long-time contact and author of many many books on the subject" — a marker of how Communion had established Strieber as the central public reference point for the abduction phenomenon.

1989 film adaptation

Communion was adapted as a feature film in 1989, directed by Philippe Mora and starring Christopher Walken as Whitley Strieber and Lindsay Crouse as his wife Anne, with a budget of approximately $7 million and Strieber and Phyllis Carlyle as producers. The film preserved the book's ambivalent tone and received mixed reviews but became a cult item within UFO and abduction-interest communities.

Cultural impact and influence on researchers

Beyond the film, the cover became the most reproduced alien image in popular culture, appearing in advertising, art, tattoos, and shorthand for extraterrestrial contact. The book drove a surge of abduction literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s — Budd Hopkins's expanded research, John Mack's academic engagement, MUFON's abduction study group — and Strieber founded Unknown Country (unknowncountry.com), one of the central online experiencer-community venues. The consistency of the visual type the cover popularized — reported independently by contactees in Zimbabwe, Belgium, the UK, and across the United States — was noted by Joe Rogan and Jacques Vallée as evidence the image may be phenomenologically real rather than culturally contaminated. Diana Walsh Pasulka separately reported Vallée's observation that the cover's dominance had created an unintended filter — investigators discounting non-matching encounters as illegitimate.

Anthropologist Dr. Michael P. Masters has described encountering the cover at age eight or nine as the originating moment of his "extra-temporal hypothesis" research programme, in which he treats the entities described by Strieber as future-human time travelers visiting their own past.

Popular culture references

• The X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" parodied the book cover.
• Virginia screamo band Pg. 99 included an audio recording of an excerpt on Document #5.
• Swedish progressive metal band Evergrey's In Search of Truth is a concept album based on the book.
• Sahar reads a well-worn copy in "Love Language" (S1, Ep5) of the SyFy series Resident Alien.
• Strieber appears in the 2009 film Race to Witch Mountain.

Bibliography

• Communion: A True Story by Whitley Strieber, Avon Books, paperback, 1995. ISBN 0-380-70388-2

See also

• Whitley Strieber abduction
• Whitley Strieber

References

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External links

Communion at IMDb

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Communion (book)", as of 2024-11-06, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.