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Report on Communion: An Independent Investigation of and Commentary on Whitley Strieber's Communion

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Whitley Strieber's 1987 book Communion: A True Story was a blockbuster, but was greeted with skepticism (including some from the UFO community, who disliked Strieber's "standoffishness" from them).

Freelance writer Ed Conroy says in this book "I had decided to interview Strieber. My decision to do so was motivated by seeing just too many similarities between qualities Strieber ascribed to the 'visitors' and the characters of his own novels." Conroy provides abundant examples of parallels with Strieber's novels such as Black Magic, The Night Church, The Hunger, and Cat Magic (Apple Paperbacks).

He answers some objections that skeptics have made about Strieber's character, such as, "Strieber has told me in an interview that he was a member of the Gurdjieff Foundation during his early years in New York, a group that has been suspected of being a cult by some anticult activists, but which Strieber has maintained to me is by no means a cult."

Concerning Strieber's conflicting stories about whether or not he was present during the 1966 attack by sniper Charles Whitman, Conroy writes, "From a strict, evidential point of view, the most that can actually be said about the conflicting stories that Strieber has given regarding the incident is that actually retrieving information from memory is a very difficult proposition, even under the best of circumstances. To infer from the record that Strieber's confusion about the incident is a sign of his untrustworthiness seems to imply an extraordinary---if not paranormal---ability to objectively ascertain the man's intentions."

Conroy's ultimate take is, "Am I proposing that we try to analyze Strieber's experiences as though they were a dream or a fairy tale? I am. Yet in doing so, I by no means intend to give the definitive interpretation of Whitley Strieber's visitor experiences before attempting to understand 'the whole net of associations' in which his archetypal images (i.e., the visitors) are enmeshed."

This book has some very helpful analysis of Strieber's books, and will be of interest to those interested in Whitley Strieber, purported alien abductions, or UFOs in general.