A New World

by Whitley Strieber

  Fortunately, it’s not clear that our making more scientific progress is the only thing that holds them back. I think that what I might call psychospiritual progress is at least as important, and probably more so.

  This would be why they have lavished so much more attention on this non-scientist spiritual seeker than they have on any scientist I am aware of. I learned, first through my Gurdjieff work and then by working directly with them, a grammar of communication that is both efficient, in the sense that progress is steady, and fruitful, in that the richness of communication is rapidly increasing.

  The sensing exercise not only opens us to them and enables communication, it sends out a signal that communicates a good deal more than a laser pointer. When we place our attention on the nervous system, it glows in their level of reality like a little ember. Our dead can see this, too.

  I came to understand this while I was at a conference hosted by William and Clare Henry in Nashville in September of 2015, just after Anne died. During a break in the conference, a woman came up to me, wanting to speak. She told me that she’d heard Anne say in her ear: “Tell Whitley that I can see him when he’s sitting in the chair.”

  I understood at once what she meant. She had to be referring to the chair I sit in when I do the sensing exercise. My mind flashed back to something the visitors said back in about 1987 or 1988, when I asked them why they’d come: “We saw a glow.” At the time, I thought that this meant the glow of cities, but in this moment, I understood that they’d been talking about the light emitted by the nervous system—light that I’ve known for a long time that they can see. And not only them. In the past, we could see it, too, as will become clear in Chapter Ten, when we discuss the oldest religious document in the world, the Pyramid Text in the Pyramid of Unas in Egypt, and what its extraordinary contents have to do with the modern experience of contact.

  When I got home, I sat down and started doing it at once. A few days of this and my teachers soon arrived to assist, and soon I was in an almost miraculous relationship with Anne. It wasn’t what’s called channeling but rather a communication based on preparation that, unbeknownst to me, Anne had been making since she had a stroke in January of 2015.

  It was at that point that she began insisting that I memorize W.B. Yeats’ poem “Song of the Wandering Aengus.” In that poem occurs the line, “When white moths were on the wing, and the moth-like stars were flickering out…” This proved to be the axis of all my future communication with her. I also remembered, after her death, that her favorite of my short stories is called “The White Moths,” which is about a woman discovering that she has died.

  What started to happen was that, when I was away from home and the surveillance system was running, when I talked about Anne, it would send me a text and I would see a white moth pass in front of the living room camera. This happened again and again, sometimes when I was lecturing about her at conferences, other times when I was talking about her. Each time, the moth passed in front of the camera and disappeared. No moth was ever found in the house, and no such moth ever appeared while I was there. It even appeared while I was at a banquet at the end of a conference about the afterlife and landed on one of the conferees’ heads! It then flew off, and before the eyes of a room full of people who were watching it in amazement, simply disappeared into thin air.

  It must be understood that contact with the visitors in all their strangeness and power is also contact with the part of humanity that is in a nonphysical form—that is to say, the dead. But this isn’t only about a psychospiritual level of relationship. As we shall see, physical materials are involved and are being studied with astonishing results.

  The deeper you penetrate into the experience, the harder to understand it becomes. It involves human and nonhuman beings in both physical and nonphysical states. It exists both inside and outside of time and space as we understand them and is larger than physical space and deeper than time. It is highly energetic and energizing. It is also challenging, difficult and can be dangerous.

  It is hard. For example, when I talk about the sensing exercise, people usually want to know how long it takes to get some response. I can only relate what happened to me, which is that I started the exercise in 1970 and was initiated by the Communion experience fifteen years later, in 1985.

  Because we are so focused on the material world and hardwired to see only what we understand of it, they have to fight their way into our lives. I think that they started trying to make me aware of their presence as soon as we moved into the cabin and they could see me doing my meditation in an isolated area, but one that was also near where they were engaged in some sort of enormous operation that was giving rise to hundreds of UFO sightings along the Hudson River. I had no idea that this was happening not thirty miles from the cabin, where I was spending inexplicably uneasy nights. The story has been ably covered by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Philip Imbrogno and Bob Pratt in their book Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings.

  From the time we bought the cabin, I was terrified that there was somebody lurking around outside at night. I installed alarm systems, bought guns and so forth—all of which is documented in Communion and other books. What is not documented is that in the summer of 1985, I began having terrible headaches, I think now because I was suppressing my awareness of the visitors. I say this not so much because of any specific scientific evidence that suppression like this causes headache but rather because I observed it happen at the cabin. Dr. John Gliedman, a dear friend and scientist who was there, along with a number of other witnesses, saw a very dramatic shaft of golden light come down from above. Alone among the ten people present, he could not make it out, even though it was right in front of him. Seeing it would have destroyed his world view, which he could not face. The result was that he soon found himself incapacitated with a migraine. Mine the previous summer had been so bad that I’d sought medical help.

  By October, I think that the visitors were being compelled by my reticence to become more aggressive. If our relationship was going to grow, my refusal to admit to myself that they even existed had to be overcome. On the night of October 4 th, we had our friends Annie Gottlieb and Jacques Sandulescu up for a visit. We dined at a restaurant and then returned to the cabin. We all went to bed almost immediately. Then, as I reported in Communion, “I was startled awake and saw, to my horror, that there was a distinct blue light being cast on the living room ceiling.” (Our bedroom overlooked the living room, which had a cathedral ceiling.) I watched the light seem to creep down from above, then decided that the chimney of our wood stove must be on fire. “Then,” I continued, “I fell into a deep sleep!” They didn’t cause me to fall asleep. I did. I had to, or I would have had to face them. They must have waited for some time to see if I would rouse myself. When I didn’t, they woke me up with a loud crack like a firecracker going off in my face. When I opened my eyes, I was “stunned to see that the entire house was surrounded by a glow that extended into the fog.” (It was a very foggy night.)

  The explosion caused Anne to cry out and our son, aged six at that time, to shout from his bedroom downstairs. Annie Gottlieb later reported that she heard feet “scurrying” across the floor of our bedroom upstairs, and Jacques observed light around the house so bright that he thought he’d overslept and that it was full morning.

  I was then heard outside their door telling them that it was nothing, just go back to sleep. What had happened was that the light had gone out, meaning to me that there was no fire. At the time, I thought I was reassuring everybody that all was well, but what I was really doing was suppressing what I knew perfectly well: that the visitors had come down from above and I had woken up to find the room full of them. When I leaped out of bed, probably right at them, they ran away. This had caused the scurrying that Annie Gottlieb heard.

  In retrospect, I think that it was my noticing them even slightly that night which encouraged them to keep on trying to rouse me from the fixation the body causes on life in the time st
ream. Facing them means rising out of it, which forces the ego to face its mortality, which it is designed by nature to avoid at all costs.

  On December 26 th, my resistance was finally broken.

  They are not our enemies. They are not our friends. I am all but sure that their purpose here is to become our teachers and in return to be rewarded with the sharing that they seek.

  I find them challenging and demanding, but also exquisitely responsive to my needs as their student. They know the paths I need to travel but will never simply put me on them. Their skill as teachers comes in their ability to enable me to find my own way rather than show me what they think I should do. I know that I frustrate them. I’ve felt it and seen it. But no matter how poorly I do, I am rather sure that they will not give up on me unless I give up on myself. More than once in my life, I have rejected them and steered clear of them. But when I wanted to come back, they have always been there.

  Each night during the first meditation, I bring to mind the children of the world. I live in a young neighborhood and see children every day. I see the wonder in their eyes, the joy, the hope. During the three o’clock meditation, I open myself to the visitors and in return receive knowledge and am exposed to their teaching. I think that I can feel, sometimes, that they are glad that this is happening between us. I know that they’ve staked a lot on it, because this is the only testament of its kind ever written down.

  Communion is not just about contact between us and the visitors. It is also about the veil between the worlds falling, and we who are in bodies coming into real relationship with mankind unbound, that great, soaring wonder that we call “the dead.”

  When that happens, our understanding of life is going to refocus on how to live in such a way that we die with strong souls, which means without regret and not burdened by the memory of deeds that hurt others.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but as 1989 rolled around, I was about to enter a new stage of relationship with the visitors, which would open for me a door into the most enigmatic imaginable experiences and a whole new way of experiencing both life and afterlife.

  In May of 1989, I was given a gift that at the time seemed like the most awful invasion of my body, my soul and my life that I could imagine. I was given my implant.

  4

  The Implant Mystery

  The spiritual experience of communicating with the visitors has such a powerful and pervasive physical component that I could as easily say that it is a physical experience that has a powerful spiritual component. The physical side of it—the technology—has left me with the most wonderful spiritual gift I can imagine possessing. While the implant in my left ear was put there in 1989, not until September of 2015 did I begin to learn how to use it.

  What it does not do: It does not provide voice communication.

  What it does: A slit opens up in my right eye’s field of vision where I see words racing past. Also, it enhances research in a very unusual way.

  On a warm May night in 1989, a man and a woman entered our cabin, bypassing the armed alarm system. They overpowered me and put a small disk-shaped object in the pinna, or upper part, of my left ear. I have described this experience in detail in Confirmation. After inserting the object, they left. A moment later, a flash of light filled the room, visible behind my closed eyes. There was crashing in the woods behind the house. The pressure released, and I immediately leapt up. I ran off in search of the intruders but found nobody and no sign of forced entry. As the alarm system had remained armed throughout, I decided that it must have been a vivid nightmare.

  However, the next morning it became clear that the system had been tampered with, and later that day, my ear began to hurt, and we noticed that a lump had appeared in it. (In Confirmation, this event is dated as 1994. May of 1989 is the correct date.)

  At some point over the next few days, the thing turned on, making a growling-whining noise in my head and causing the ear to turn bright red. I was absolutely terrified. Frantic. I wanted to cut my ear off. Anne tried to calm me down. She thought it was a gift. I felt like I was being tracked. She said, “The visitors don’t care if you go down to the store to get some beans.” I had to admit that she had a point. I treasure my privacy, but I don’t do or think anything that I fear being known by others. Still, I wanted the thing out.

  The close encounter experience is full of tales of implants, and my interest in them was obviously intense. In the early 1990s, I met Dr. Roger Leir, who was organizing implant removals in California. Anne absolutely forbade me to let him remove mine. Hoping to soften her attitude, I made sure she attended one of his very professionally conducted removal surgeries with me. It was an awesome and moving experience to see the object come out of a woman’s calf muscle. It wasn’t much larger than a pumpkin seed and gleamed because, as I later learned, it was encased in epidermis. I have discussed the early implant work extensively in Confirmation, published in 1999, but it was not until 2015—almost immediately after Anne died—that I began to be able to understand how to use mine. Just recently, in September of 2019, I have had a CAT scan done of it and have had a visit from two people who explained more about it to me, as I will relate shortly.

  But don’t expect anything straightforward.

  Dr. Leir offered to arrange an extraction, but Anne felt strongly that I should try to understand it first. So I delayed. By that time, I had learned to have the greatest respect for the extraordinary role she was playing in our relationship with the visitors. The implant really troubled me, though. I felt watched. There was a distressing sense of being trapped in my own body with the thing. It was claustrophobic.

  When we moved to San Antonio in the mid-nineties, Catherine Cooke, then president of the Mind-Science Foundation, introduced me to the head of materials science at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Dr. William Mallow. When I told him about what Dr. Leir was doing, he was eager to learn more about the objects. I called Dr. Leir and arranged to obtain a group of samples, which he brought personally from Los Angeles.

  While we were not allowed to conduct any work with the official blessing of the institute, we had free use of its equipment. Under the scanning electron microscope, we found the objects to almost all be meteoric nickel-iron and, except in one case, to be unremarkable except for the fact that, when in situ, they were usually encased in a capsule made from the host’s epidermis. As the body does not have the genetic encoding to generate epidermis inside muscle, the encapsulations had to have been created artificially. In many cases, a small scoop-mark scar could be found on the body of the host individual. This scar would have removed a bit of epidermis from beneath the layer of tissue on the surface, the stratum corneum.

  One of the objects we received was quite unusual. It had been emitting a low-level FM signal when it was still sited in the host. Under the scanning electron microscope, it appeared to be another fragment of nickel-iron. As it had been broadcasting, we decided to see if we could detect any crystalline structures using an X-ray diffraction machine that was available at the nearby University of Texas at San Antonio campus. The first pass returned a typical response for nickel-iron, but subsequent passes showed no return at all. A check back on the SEM indicated that the fragment’s composition was still the same: nickel-iron. We returned it to X-ray diffraction, only to find that it never again returned a signal. Upon first being touched by X-rays, it had become X-ray invisible.

  So obviously, at least in that one case, we were looking at something with unknown characteristics.

  Working on the implants, I was constantly aware of the one in my ear. Bill knew about it, of course. He was itching to get his hands on it, and I was just as eager to get rid of it. And yet, some of the people who’d had theirs removed in Dr. Leir’s program told me that they felt a real sense of loss afterward, almost as if a friend had died. Others were glad to get rid of them. And I had Anne advocating for it, of course.

  Then we met Dr. John Lerma through mutual friends. As he wasn’t invol
ved in the UFO world, Anne was more comfortable having him at least take a look at it, so I made an appointment. As he examined it, he said that it looked like a small cyst and that he could easily remove it. All that would be involved would be a brief office procedure.

  I was excited, frankly. Anne was not. In fact, she insisted that I promise to try only the one time, and if it didn’t work, to leave it in. I could see in her eyes something rather fierce. I knew how intense my brilliant wife could be when she thought I was making a mistake. I offered to cancel the surgery, but she said, “No, you have to do it. It’s been bothering you for years.”

  So, on October 9, 1997, we appeared at Dr. Lerma’s office, camera in hand. I wanted to videotape the whole procedure, and I’m glad we did. Anne was extremely nervous and laughing all the way through, very typical of her when she was uneasy about something.

  Dr. Lerma anesthetized the ear and, as Anne taped, made his incision. He said, “It’s a white disk.” Then he touched it with his scalpel…and it moved away. He was shocked, because it had been fixed tightly under the skin. And yet it had now moved. All he had were two small fragments on the edge of his scalpel, which he deposited in a specimen container. He then withdrew. I took the fragments to Dr. Mallow, who examined them under the scanning electron microscope. One of the samples was just cartilage, but the other one contained crystals of either calcium carbonate or calcium phosphate.

  A lab technician, who had part of the fragment that Dr. Lerma had removed, called him and asked if it was a practical joke. Under the microscope, he was seeing proteinaceous material that was adhered to a metallic base. He told Dr. Lerma that, as far as he was concerned, it was a piece of technology. Dr. Mallow then called me and confirmed that this was also his thought.