Book Review: Communion

by Whitley Strieber, Arrow Books, $12.99.

A true story? That's what it says on the cover. When I first heard that horror story author Whitley Strieber (The Hunger, The Wolfen, among others) had written of being abducted by extraterrestrials, my first thought was that this was yet another flying saucer hoax. From Adamsky to von Daniken, there have been plenty over the years, after all. After reading Communion, though, I would say that if it is a hoax it is a very strange one.

Strieber himself seems unsure of what's happened to him. He considers a range of possible explanations for his visitors, including his own imagination. However he eventually discounts this.

His repeated visitations seem senseless, following no particular pattern. Things go bump in the night, or wake him by poking him in the chest before running off. A thing like a giant mantis hits him on the head with a silver nail. He is floated away to a UFO where he is examined medically and has a needle fired into his brain. There are too many loose ends, too many possible interpretations. Hoaxes are generally much more coherent than this.

So what are we to make of this book? We have to rely almost entirely on Strieber's own memories of events. These memories first started to come into focus on January 3rd, 1986, after a period of psychological instability apparently arising from incidents on October 4th and December 26th, 1985. Only after undergoing hypnosis did he begin remembering other bizarre incidents in his life, going right back to childhood.

The only independent witnesses are two house guests who were present the night of October 4th. They reported (on February 6th) hearing a bang, seeing a bright light, and hearing the scuffling of small feet. On October 5th, they made only a casual remark about being 'bothered by the light', Later, they added further confused and conflicting details. Or at least Strieber says they do—there is no documentation. Nor is there any independent corroboration of the minor physical injuries Strieber says he suffered at the hands of the extraterrestrial visitors. His wife, Anne, to whom he is very close, has had almost no contact with the visitors that she recalls. This is probably so that she can be a stable psychological anchor for him, Strieber believes. Others claim to have had similar abduction experiences. Many, if not most, have come to light through the work of Budd Hopkins, whose books Intruders and Missing Time tell stories similar to Strieber's. Hopkins was present at Strieber's hypnosis sessions, asking questions and keeping records.

The general pattern is for the abductees who suffer from nightmares or have had a 'missing time' experience, or both, to approach Hopkins. He encourages them to believe their dreams are actual memories, hypnotises them and gets them to recall further 'forgotten' details of their experience. The danger of using hypnosis in this way is well-known to

14 psychologists (Hopkins has no formal psychological training), for hypnotic subjects are highly suggestible. Not only are they likely to recall things that never happened, but they often tailor their accounts to the expectations of the hypnotist. Moreover, once these stories are generated under hypnosis, they can become pseudo-memories, as real to the subjects as actual events in their own past.

While Strieber emphasises the similarities between the abductees' stories, there are significant differences. Generally, the aliens are pretty much like the ones in Close Encounters—pale and hairless with big eyes, either small and plump, or tall and very slender. Some abductees describe them as grey, others as white. Strieber's small forms are about three and a half feet tall, in other cases they are five feet tall. Some tell of humans collaborating with the visitors, others describe apparent hybrids between us and them. In many cases, there is sexual interaction between the two species, and one of Hopkins' chief subjects believes she was impregnated by them, then had her foetus removed before term to be incubated elsewhere. The sheer impossibility of viable hybrids between superficially similar but unrelated species should be obvious to anyone with the most basic knowledge of genetics—more implausible, say, than birds mating with bats, or dolphins with sharks. In fact, with all the forms a creature can take, why should these aliens look so human at all? The details of the abductees' stories would indicate that they do not represent actual encounters with physical beings but originate in the minds of their tellers, taking their form from the science fiction films and books we have all grown up with.

Strieber has made a successful career out of his fantasies. This time, though, I think his imagination has run away with him. Anne Strieber seems to have some inkling of this. When the hypnotist asks her if she looked for the giant crystal in the sky Whitley had told her he'd seen, she replied, "Oh, no. Because I knew it wasn't real."

"How did you know it wasn't real? Whitley's a fairly down-to-earth guy."

"No, he isn't...he has a very unique head."